Biblical Research Institute article on the Godhead/Trinity

The article was written by the associate director Gerhard Pfandl in June of 1999.

Introduction

While the Seventh-day Adventist Church today espouses the doctrine of the Trinity, this has not always been so. The evidence from a study of Adventist history indicates that from the earliest years of our church to the 1890s a whole stream of writers took an Arian or semi-Arian position. The view of Christ presented in those years by Adventist authors was that there was a time when Christ did not exist, that His divinity is a delegated divinity, and that therefore He is inferior to the Father. In regard to the Holy Spirit, their position was that He was not the third member of the Godhead but the power of God. A number of Adventist authors today, who are opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity, are trying to resurrect the views of our early pioneers on these issues. They are urging the church to forsake the “Roman doctrine” of the Trinity and to accept again the semi-Arian position of our pioneers.

The Early Pioneers

Two of the principal founders of the Seventh day Adventist Church, Joseph Bates and James White, were originally members of the Christian Connection Church which rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. James White was an ordained minister of that church. When he and Bates joined the Advent Movement, they continued to hold the anti-Trinitarian view which they had learned in the Christian Connection Church. In 1855 J. White published an article in the Review and Herald entitled “Preach the Word.” In dealing with Paul’s statement in 2 Timothy 4:4 “they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables” he wrote, “Here we might mention the Trinity, which does away the personality of God and His Son Jesus Christ, ....” 1 Joseph Bates wrote in 1868, “Respecting the trinity, I concluded that it was impossible for me to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, was also the Almighty God, the Father, one and the same being.”2 Other prominent Adventists who spoke out against the Trinity were J. N. Loughborough, R. F. Cottrell, J. N. Andrews, and Uriah Smith:

Seventh-Day Adventist Anti-Trinitarians

In recent years a number of anti-Trinitarian publications have appeared in our church, for example, Fred Allaback, No new leaders ... No new Gods!; Lynnford Beachy, Did They Believe in the Trinity; Rachel Cory-Kuehl, The Persons of God; Allen Stump, The Foundation of Our Faith; and others. The tenor of all these publications is that “the church as a whole rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and it was not until many years after the death of Ellen G. White that the Adventist church changed their [sic] position in regards to the Trinity.”33 The doctrine of the Trinity is seen as “the ‘omega’ of doctrinal apostasy within the Seventh-day Adventist denomination.” 34 Therefore, to remain true to God, they claim, we need to return to the faith of our pioneers and reject the Trinity. Apart from a few biblical arguments, most of the arguments advanced to promote this idea are historical; with the focus on our pioneers and Ellen White:

1. All our pioneers, including Ellen White were anti-Trinitarians.35

Answer: It is true that at the beginning our pioneers expressed their understanding of the Godhead in anti-Trinitarian terms. Anti-Trinitarianism at that time was based on three leading ideas: (1) There once was a time when Christ did not exist. (2) Christ received divinity from the Father and was therefore inferior to him. (3) The Holy Spirit is not the third person of the Godhead but only the power or influence of God and Christ. All of these ideas were originally held by our pioneers. However, it is also a historical fact that the understanding of our pioneers changed over time. For example, (1) In 1846 James White referred to “the old unscriptural Trinitarian creed, viz., that Jesus is the eternal God.”36 But in 1876 he wrote that “S. D. Adventists hold the divinity of Christ so nearly with the Trinitarians, that we apprehend no trial here.”37 And a year later he declared his belief in the equality of the Son with the Father and condemned any view as erroneous that “makes Christ inferior to the Father.”38 (2) Originally Uriah Smith and others taught that Christ was the first created being. Later he adopted the position that Christ was begotten not created (see p. 3 above).............................