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Those who know me will know that I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and that from ages 18-21 I found my way out of the denomination. Like many people who disaffiliated from the church of my upbringing, I had a phase where I was nasty about Adventism―sometimes, but often without justification. I received some of my best and most formative theological education from Adventists, and to this day I count some Adventists among my closest friends and spiritual companions. For that reason, even though I’ve been out of the denomination for about half my life, I still like to drop by the Adventist playground and throw the ball around. Earlier this year, I was invited, as an outsider, to contribute an essay on the theme of the future of Seventh-day Adventism, to be published by Adventist Today. Kindly, they have given me permission to reprint the essay here. I hope you’ll read it.

I was 23 years old when I first believed that one day I would die.

By accident, or maybe by Providence, I found a copy of Michel Houellebecq’s 1998 novel The Elementary Particles while wandering the fiction section of a local bookstore. Both its title and cover artwork—human skin—roused my curiosity. I knew as I reached the end of the first page that I was about to begin a new chapter of my life, my “Houellebecq phase,” having had many other authorial phases. I would soon learn that this man is both celebrated and reviled, regularly charged with racism, islamophobia, misogyny, and a handful of other vices.

In this harrowing and sexually obscene novel, I met two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, with whom I reluctantly identified. They each in their own way exhibited every major symptom of life in Western society since the sexual revolution: individualism and social atomization, failed intimacy, involuntary celibacy, sex addiction, the commodification of human persons, and the quest for transhumanist technological interventions. Born into the limitations of their particular place and time, they were already victims of history by the time they saw that their experiences and attitudes were socially conditioned. They never stood a chance. As I reached the end of the book, I saw that I, too, had experiences, beliefs, and attitudes that were socially conditioned in ways I’d not yet understood. The story I thought I’d been living was not the real story at all. That was when I saw what lay at the end of my own story.

I mourned, but I didn’t fully understand what I had lost and what I was grieving. That summer I visited my parents in New Jersey, and they, unable to ignore my mysterious sorrow, pled with me to share what was wrong. Before I could stop myself, I was sobbing. All I could say was, “I’m going to die.”

My response confused them because, of course, my mortality was not news to me. But I had lost confidence in something that I was too ashamed to admit that I’d actually counted on: Advent hope, the uniquely Adventist hope that the Lord would return before my natural death. I felt silly. Who really believes that Jesus will appear in their lifetime? Well, apparently I did. And I wasn’t conscious of this hope until I’d lost it. The irony was overwhelming: I was grieving this loss of hope after I’d already broken with Adventism.

This late coming-of-age experience is what I remember when I hear Adventism’s future questioned. Adventists rightly celebrate that Seventh-day Adventism has successfully grown and taken root around the globe. And because the denomination can reasonably expect to make a positive impact on people’s lives for years to come, I wonder if those Adventists who ask about the future of the denomination have also had a disorienting experience like my own. I wonder if they have come to see Adventism’s situation in history differently enough to interpret its story anew—specifically, in a way that makes spiritual and theological sense of the delay of the Eschaton.

While Adventism was born out of a painful reminder that no one knows the day nor the hour of the Lord’s appearance, it nevertheless remains that Adventism is—dare I say the obvious?—an apocalyptic interpretation of the Christian faith, whose historical center of gravity is the Second Advent. An Adventism that wonders about its future is an Adventism that has already endured a second and more prolonged Great Disappointment.

Perhaps, like the first Great Disappointment, the promise of and for Adventism today lies after this second Great Disappointment—that God is evidently more patient than we’d like. Unsurprisingly, the promise of Adventism for the world and for Adventism in the years to come both have to do with its commitment to the Advent hope.

The Promise of Seventh-day Adventism

But first, I owe you a word about where I’m coming from. I left Adventism for the Episcopal Church, and my years in Anglicanism have taught me to appreciate Adventism more fully. Without being a theological relativist, I acknowledge that there is never an ecclesiastical ideal. Whenever we have choices, we always choose the problems we can tolerate. Even when there is a correct choice, that right choice will involve problems. My move to Anglicanism is no exception. The problems in both churches are real, many, undeniable, and irresolvable without God’s help.

The most significant problem I’ve observed in the Episcopal Church, which I am especially sensitive to because of my Adventist background, is the general inability of Episcopalians to differentiate themselves from the surrounding culture. A defining feature of liberal Protestantism is a porous boundary between itself and the society in which the church exists. At its best, liberalism instills in Christians the sensibility of the church’s responsibility for the world around it. The liberal church may think of itself as a collective court prophet, like a community of Nathans for the King Davids of its time, or as a sanctifying presence, as the Black church has been for the Black community in America.

But when liberal Protestantism is not at its best—and churches are rarely at their best—thinking of oneself as H. Richard Niebuhr’s “transformer of culture” easily becomes a self-deceptive avoidance of the fact that the church’s message is little more than an echo of the general culture’s ethical values with some added religious language. Liberal Protestantism has shown itself unable to maintain a clear church/world distinction. We’re well past the verdict and have moved onto sentencing; churches such as mine have given themselves the death penalty by communicating clearly, especially to children, that being a member is optional and demands little more than what The New York Times demands.

Why did the Episcopal Church, whose principal theological and liturgical document, The Book of Common Prayer—one of the most beautiful and robust articulations of the Christian faith that a church produced in the twentieth century and one of the same century’s most significant ecumenical achievements—betray itself so fatally?

While surely there are multiple causes, I suggest that one cause is closer to the root than the others. Like liberal society in general, liberal Protestants have been prone to replace the promise that one day God will establish his reign with the belief that human society can make moral progress, that by our good actions and smart policy we can “build” the kingdom of God. Observe: the shift from God’s activity to human activity is necessarily the shift from worship to works. And while I think it’s obvious that the church should do good works in the world, the worship of God remains its primary reason for existence.

But that orientation toward God demands the humility of waiting for God to act and of acknowledging the woeful limitations of what humanity can achieve. In turn, this humility and waiting make sense only if we believe that God will act, if we trust the promise that “he will come again to judge the living and the dead,” as the Apostle’s Creed says. Only a robust eschatological faith, which teaches that God will not simply meet me when I die, but personally will bring to completion this history that he alone has made, can sustain the church’s identity. Only an eschatological faith that God will judge can uphold the conviction to stand when the world says to kneel—and to suffer the furnace, because death is better than life if death means being in the company of the Son of God. This eschatological dimension of the Christian faith is precisely what my church has lost. But this dimension of the faith is what I received from Adventism.

Adventists, like all Christians, are prone to beating themselves up and feeling ashamed of the more peculiar habits of their community. Thoughtful Adventists often try to distance themselves from the hyper-apocalyptic wing of their church, and that’s understandable. But resisting the abuse of eschatology should never mean eliminating eschatology. The whole Christian faith stands or falls on the veracity of the promise that “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6, RSV). Christianity without eschatology is merely an ethical system with religious language and the hope that we’ll tithe. When those of us within my denomination have tried to sell it to our children, they have rightly said—let the reader understand—“No thanks.”

One of the challenges, therefore, that Adventism will face in the years ahead (should the Lord tarry, as they used to say) is how to sustain and nurture this eschatological dimension of the faith without handing over the denomination to what Jurgen Moltmann called “apocalyptic arm-twisters,” that is, those who keep promising that the Eschaton will be in our lifetimes, that this pope is the antichrist, and so on. Adventism must grow up without losing hope.

If Adventists can speak plainly and credibly about the hope all people have because of the gospel’s promises, then Adventism has much to promise this world. Our world is desperate for hope, and it has never been easier to preach the gospel than it is today. The state of our culture has reminded everyone of the limitations of what humanity can achieve. All Adventists have to do is pick up where the brutal realism of experience has left off: “Yes, we have failed to save ourselves, but our labor is not in vain! Jesus lives, and he will bring perfection to our miserable efforts.”

The world, including both Christians and Christian churches outside Adventism, needs the courage that only God’s promise imparts.

The Promise for Adventism

Just as God began in us a good work that he will bring to completion, we have the hope that the God who made this world has not abandoned it and will bring to completion this whole creation. In other words, the eschatological promise of the gospel is not only for those of us who believe, but it is a promise for all. Adventists have historically understood the universality of the gospel with regard to individuals but have tended not to think about what the promise of the gospel means for entire communities.

When I was attempting to find my place in Adventism, one of the stumbling blocks for me was precisely this problem: that Adventism tended not to have much interest in other Christians. I suspect that the Adventist aversion to ecumenism has to do with the particulars of its inherited apocalyptic eschatology, seeing the prospect of unity with other Christians as a threat of compromise. But perhaps after a second Great Disappointment, plus coming to terms with the reality that God is continuing to exercise patience for this world, Adventists may revisit the question of their relationship with other churches.

I once wrote for the online edition of Spectrum Magazine that the besetting sin of Adventism is that it sees its own distinctiveness as an end for its own sake, rather than a consequence of its own faithfulness. I confess that I regret the tone I used in that piece years ago—after I’d left the denomination for the Episcopal Church—and made an uncharitable judgment of motives that are far beyond what I could possibly know. Yet, the fact remains that Adventism has isolated itself institutionally in practice, to its own detriment. The commitment to faithfulness and to a realistic eschatology that motivated Adventists to remain set apart ought to be the same commitment that empowers Adventists to take meaningful relationships, personally and institutionally, with other Christians. As a person who left Adventism on good terms and who hangs around Adventists and still pokes and prods at the church (as I am doing at this moment), I say plainly: an ongoing relationship with Adventism has made me a better Episcopalian and a better Christian. More forcefully: in my relationships with Adventist Christians, I feel the pain of our separation, which I experience as a judgment of God against the division of Christ’s church. I invite you to feel this pain with me, trusting that only in this place of pain can we discover all that God has to offer us.

Adventists should trust that they have something to offer other Christians. And by this I do not mean an unreflective confidence that other Christians, with enough time, will abandon their denominations and become Adventists—although I expect that some will. Rather, I mean that a relationship with Adventism can prove to be the thing that revitalizes dead and dying churches, and that being introduced anew to the gospel’s eschatology will transform people whose faith is anemic because of its absence. Likewise, meaningful contact with other Christians will clarify for Adventists who they are and what their church is about, helping them to get past internal wars and learn to master the difference between what is central and what is peripheral to a living faith. That is the promise of Adventism: that its own Advent hope can lead it into unknown places, where God surely will not disappoint.

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