Chris Oberg, the senior pastor of the La Sierra University Church in Riverside, California, speaks for the Sabbath worship service during the university's Peace Week.

This is my seventh and final posting in our series wrestling with Genesis and the ideas of important Christian and Jewish thinkers throughout history. Over the course of the week, several readers have asked the question: Why not write about Ellen White? These same readers may have hoped that White would be the climax of the series.

Swiss theologian Karl Barth was famously described by Pope Pious XII as the greatest Christian thinker since Thomas Aquinas. The fact that it was a Catholic pope who said this should not distract Adventists from the fact that Barth’s theology was as deeply Protestant as any one might find. His life work was from first to last a theology of the Word, grounded in a sense of the absolute authority of the God disclosed in Scripture and accepted by faith. Sola scriptura. Sola fides. One could not point to a stronger champion of these principles among twentieth century Christian theologians.

January 2009 - Vol. 6, No. 1
www.adventistworld.org

Adventist World is free online. For that reason, I only review or comment on articles and editorials that I believe to be of special interest.

GENERAL COMMENT
This issue has some fascinating articles, two articles that left me scratching my head, and a surprise advertisement.

REVIEWS

On a bitterly cold day in November 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky together with several others was marched from his cell in the St. Petersburg prison known as the Peter-and-Paul Fortress to Semenovsky Square and prepared for execution.

OK, OK, I’ll admit it: The headline is rather sweeping and strident. I mean, I’m not going to argue that there could never be slightly more evil words spoken somewhere, sometime by someone.

Granted the plethora of inappropriate words that might be used, there’s room for debate as to whether these are categorically the “most evil words ever spoken.”

But before I actually share the most evil words themselves, I need to paint a picture of the context in which these evil words are used so evilly.

According to Jonathan Edwards—the great eighteenth century New England Puritan who worked as a missionary among the Native Americans and who played a central role in the First Great Awakening—all truth claims must be tested in the light of Scripture.

The Last Generation is a feature-length documentary directed by Adrian James and Albert Sabate, two university students from Southern California.

In recent years, the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America has witnessed the rise of fundamentalism among young Adventists. The Generation of Youth for Christ, née General Youth Conference (GYC) movement, which draws thousands of young people in different regions, is a manifestation of this phenomenon.

According to some Seventh-day Adventists, the only way to maintain a strong theology of the Sabbath is by way of an unbendingly literalistic account of the creation week in Genesis. Yet Orthodox Judaism has included non-literal readings of the creation, without controversy or schism, for more than a millennium.

The following poem was performed at La Sierra University Church’s Friday night worship service, First Service.

In Santa Monica where the sea slaps the sand
I met an old war vet with a sign in his hand
And it said
Power to the Peaceful
Power to the Peaceful

He said he served his country in the Vietnam War
He said he can’t support this country and its killing no more
And he said
Power to the Peaceful
Power to the Peaceful

I shook my head and said that most the people I know – will likely
Never put their boots on pick their guns up and go
He said

The great Protestant reformer John Calvin clearly held to a literal six-day creation in the recent past. In his commentary on Genesis published in 1554, he strenuously rejected the allegorical methods of the early church father Origen, which he said resulted in the meaning of Scripture being "indiscriminately interpreted" and "mangled." Calvin also sought to reverse the Augustinian view that the creation had occurred instantaneously and was only conveyed narratively in Genesis as filling six days in order to accommodate limited human minds.

More than 15 centuries before Darwin's Origin of Species, Augustine of Hippo warned in his Confessions of the dangers of woodenly literalistic readings of Genesis, which he rejected on theological grounds entirely apart from scientific concerns. He later wrote a treatise, however, entitled The Literal Meaning of Genesis in which he vigorously defended what he took to be the "literal" meaning of the creation narrative, while also offering some guidance for how believers should approach scientific and empirical matters.

At the 1866 General Conference Session on May 17 a series of resolutions passed by the Battle Creek Church were read. These resolutions included the following statement:

The earth trembled and quaked; the very foundations also of the hills shook, and were removed, because he was wroth (Ps. 18:7.)

Robert Nozick, who was a secular Jew, felt the implications of the Holocaust were devastating for Christian theology:

Haiti sits atop a potentially lethal convergence of tectonic plates. The last few weeks have uncovered the horrifying potential of Haiti's Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault. For televangelist Pat Robertson, that is irrelevant.

In video that went viral almost instantly, Robertson cited Haiti's alleged pact with the Devil as the reason the country "has been cursed by one thing after the other."

On January 12, as he heard about the Haiti earthquake, Tim Wolfer, a student at Pacific Union College, posted a message on Facebook: "Anyone want to help a poor documentary filmmaker get to Haiti?"

January 14, 2010 - Vol. 187, No. 1

GENERAL COMMENT
Kudos to editors and staff. This issue is a MUST READ!

REVIEWS
In A SHELTER IN THE TIME OF STORM, Bill Knott offers church members this succinct advice: “In this new year, your fellowship need not divide in order to become a place of safety and inclusion: it rarely helps when all the kindhearted ones swarm to some new storefront location.”

The Loma Linda University Church made a statement about Creation Friday evening: Adventist Christians (and others) have a moral duty to care for it.

Thanks to the folks are Wordle, here is a "word cloud" glimpse of the most recurring words on this site right now.

In this series of posts (which is a continuation of the series from this summer on the thought of Aquinas, Augustine, and Anselm), we’ll continue to consider the relationship between faith and reason by examining the thought of a figure from the history of philosophy and

"Pastor Jan Paulsen, world president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church president speaks on the topic of racism. 'Have we got it all right' in the church, he asks. 'I don't think so. We still have some distance to go,' he answers."

The USA Today writes:

Carrefour, once a crossroads for rice-planting villages near the sea, is now the site of a huge tent city at Adventist University Haiti with thousands of people.

The LLU in Haiti blog is reporting: "Just talked with [Dr.] Scott [Nelson]." See earlier report on Dr. Scott Nelson's departure to Port-au-Prince here.

As has been pointed out many times, too often we forget that Dr. King fought the very idea of war as a solution to conflict. Let us remember his prophetic words: this business. . .cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love."

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, I thought that I'd reprise some of Spectrum's MLK Day posts from the past.

Here is one in which I quote from a 2007 San Francisco Chronicle article, detailing how Dr. King employed the Bible in his work.

Text the word "ADRA" to 85944, reply "YES" and donate $10 to ADRA's Haiti Earthquake Response Fund.

TIME magazine reports on ADRA's arrival in Haiti:

Andrew, a physician at Loma Linda University, writes via email:

Larry R. Evans, Undersecretary of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, writes:

Reports from Haiti are sketchy at best but the picture we are getting is not good. Communication is very poor. The airport tower was destroyed.

The bill in the Ugandan Parliament that calls for the death penalty for gays who have more than one contact and those with HIV/AIDS, along with prison sentences for those who don't report incidents within 24 hours, goes way beyond what is acceptable in civilized societies in dealing with the issue of homosexuality.

It is both easy and incredibly difficult to imagine the devastation that has occurred in Haiti from the 7.0 earthquake and its aftershocks.