hat was the basis for the early Seventh-day Adventist commitment to nonviolence? Why did they feel compelled to take such an unpopular stance?

The central rationale running through articles, petitions to governmental authorities, and General Conference resolutions was, quite simply, the obligation to obey the biblical mandate--both the Ten Commandments (particularly the fourth and sixth) and the teachings of Christ. Jesus declared that "'peacemakers will be called the children of God,'" and exhorted His followers, "'Do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also'" (NRSV).

Before the Civil War, the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald published occasional articles contending that the sixth commandment and Christ's teaching that His followers should love their enemies meant that Christians must not engage in killing or use of "carnal weapons."

While the debate within the church sparked by the pressures of war and the draft in the early 1860s revealed a diversity of perspectives, the assumption that biblical commands were meant to be obeyed framed the entire discussion. Even James White's controversial initial proposal--that Adventist draftees would not bear moral responsibility for what government compelled them to do--rested on the assumption that: (1) Adventists would not volunteer for service in the army; (2) if drafted, church members would do their best to obtain Sabbath privileges and recognition as noncombatants. Only if such efforts failed would moral culpability fall upon the government (see the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald [September 9, 1862], page 118).

In its first official step to obtain recognition as a peace church, the General Conference Committee in August 1864 approved a "Statement of Principles" for presentation to the governor of Michigan. This document cited the fourth and sixth commandments as imperatives of their faith to which they could not give allegiance in military combat.

The "Statement of Principles" contained no references to Christ or the New Testament, which indicates that adherence to the Ten Commandments was the basis for Adventist resistance to engaging in warfare. After all, keeping the fourth commandment--and indeed the entire Law--was central to their reason for existence.

However, when the church sought federal recognition from the provost marshal general James Fry in September 1864, it also cited "the teaching of the New Testament" in its rationale. Moreover, the resolution adopted by the General Conference the following year cited "the duties enjoined upon us by our divine Master toward our enemies and all mankind," without explicitly mentioning the Ten Commandments. The General Conference resolution of 1867, cited on page 16, included both "the teachings of our Saviour" and the "spirit and letter of the law of God" in its rationale.

The consistent theme was radical faithfulness to the whole biblical testimony. Early Adventists found imperatives for nonviolence in both in the Ten Commandments and in the teachings of Christ.

However, the early Adventists were not reading Scripture in a vacuum. The movement sprang up in the cultural climate of radical reform in the antebellum North, where the causes of temperance, abolitionism, and peace were bound together.

Millerite Adventist leader Joshua V. Himes had joined with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and others in forming the New England Non-Resistance Society in 1838. The society linked repudiation of force, including "militia service" with the millennial theme of bearing a peace testimony "until righteousness and peace shall reign in all the earth" (see Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, pages 250, 251). Other Adventists supported this movement, and William Miller himself, according to Garrison, was an "outspoken friend" of this and other reform causes (see Ronald Graybill, "The Abolitionist-Millerite Connection" in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds, The Disappointed: Millerism and Millennarianism in the 19th Century, pages 140-143).

While it does not appear that anyone in the Sabbatarian branch of the broader Adventist movement was also prominent in the peace movement, the Sabbatarian Adventist literature of the 1850s and 1860s breathes the spirit of Garrisonian abolitionism and nonresistance. That radical reform ethos in turn drew on the heritage of radical dissenting Protestantism--from the Anabaptists of the 16th century to the nonconformists of England and New England. A nonviolent orientation was thus an outgrowth of the line of dissenting, "always reforming" Protestantism with which Adventists identified.