Growing out of Seventh-day Adventism
ONE OF the lasting benefits of growing up in Seventh-day Adventism is the confidence the Church gave me to go against the grain. Most Christians went to church on Sunday. We were Sabbathkeepers. The crowds of misguided Sunday worshippers were taking the broad road leading to destruction. We, the small band of faithful Adventists, were on the narrow path to eternal life. Sort of like Nigel Clarke’s highways made of carpet versus all of the byways full of potholes!
Unfortunately, the capacity to reject conformity did not generally extend to examining the doctrines of Seventh-day Adventism itself. As a young adult, I was constantly asking difficult questions and getting simplistic answers. At Sabbath school, there was always a mission story about some ‘benighted’ individual from a distant culture who was discontented with his or her religion.
He or she would go searching for a more satisfying explanation of the meaning of life. The result was always the same. The seeker would find Adventism and reject the old ways. My question was how come we celebrated the difficult decision to abandon one’s religion, but we were not encouraged to look carefully at our own beliefs.
The response I got was that we already had The Truth, so there was no need to go looking for it. You can just imagine how frustrating that answer was for a young adult who could clearly see the contradictions that the mission story barely concealed. The rational principle of investigating alternative paths to ‘truth’ clearly outweighed the naive conviction that there was a single truth conveniently encoded in the DNA of Seventh-day Adventists.
KNOWING GOD’S FOOTPRINTS
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is well known for its commitment to education at every level from preschool all to way to tertiary. But, ironically, I am convinced that the Church is fundamentally anti-intellectual. Education is essentially indoctrination. Even at university level, asking questions is not encouraged.
I’ve had some unsettling conversations with ordained ministers in Jamaica. Of course, they were all male. In a memorable sermon, we were told that we could be sure of God’s existence even when we could not see Him. Like his ministers, God was most definitely male. The analogy the pastor used was that an absent elephant’s footprints were clear signs of the animal’s existence.
I couldn’t resist making the point that we already knew what an elephant’s footprints looked like. So we could recognise them long after the elephant had gone. But how did we know God’s footprints? The minister quite sensibly conceded that my argument was convincing and he promised not to use that comparison again. If only it was so easy to get some diehard Adventists to examine their dearly held convictions!
ELLEN G. WHITE’S HEALTH MESSAGE
There are some aspects of Seventh-day Adventism that make perfectly good sense to me. And these I’ve held on to for all my life. One of them is what is called “the health message”. Which brings me to Ellen G. White, one of the founders of the church, who was known as the “prophetess of health”.
Ellen White had quite a colourful life. When she was nine years old, she was hit in the face with a stone. This is how she describes the impact: “This misfortune, which for a time seemed so bitter and was so hard to bear, has proved to be a blessing in disguise. The cruel blow, which blighted the joys of earth, was the means of turning my eyes to heaven. I might never had [sic] known Jesus Christ, had not the sorrow that clouded my early years led me to seek comfort in him.”
At 17, Ellen White started to have visions. I don’t know if the blow to her face was a contributing factor. Soon after the Great Disappointment of 1844, when Jesus did not return to Earth, she had her first vision. According to her biography, published by her estate, she had more than 2,000 visions and dreams from God. Even in her time, these visions were a controversial matter.
Nevertheless, her insights about health proved to be one of her enduring legacies. On June 5, 1863, Ellen White got a vision about “the great subject of health reform”. She was an advocate of vegetarianism, which became a cornerstone of Adventism in North America. In other parts of the world, like Jamaica, the appeal of meat remains very strong for many Adventists. It is very hard to give up familiar foods.
I became a vegetarian when I went to teach at an Adventist College. But for many years, curry goat was my besetting sin. One day, I had a revelation. It was the curry I liked, not the goat. I was liberated from meat! And in a most un-Adventist fashion, I would often declare that in my last life, I must have been born in South Asia.
These days, I consider myself to be a post-Adventist. Not a backslider! I carry the teachings of my childhood as baggage out of which I can sometimes pull useful truths. That’s good enough for me.