For my final month editing the Spectrum blog I'm reflecting on the 28 fundamental beliefs. In particular I'm asking, is there more to essential Adventist identity than giving mental assent to a belief? Where's the ethical action? Here's number two.

There is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a unity of three co-eternal Persons. God is immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing, above all, and ever present. He is infinite and beyond human comprehension, yet known through His self-revelation. He is forever worthy of worship, adoration, and service by the whole creation. (Deut. 6:4; Matt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14; Eph. 4:4-6; 1 Peter 1:2; 1 Tim. 1:17; Rev. 14:7.)

This is one of the few fundamental beliefs that includes an action element. Out of this understanding of the trinity Adventists should worship, adore, and serve God.

But whenever the Trinity is discussed our language tends to pick favorite Persons. When’s the last time you heard a sermon about adoring the Holy Spirit or even worshipping Jesus? God the Father gets most of the glory. This asymmetrical reciprocity is common to various forms of Protestant theology. Of course, many early Adventists would not be able to agree with this doctrine as written. I don’t want to get too hung up on the history of the Trinity as an orthodoxy signifier or its support in scripture. Richard Rice and Graham Maxwell, among others, have explored the meaning in helpful ways for the contemporary Adventist. In his Thinking Theologically, Fritz Guy called for an update in our language.

The fact is, our metaphors for God are still too rooted in the language of monarchy. Everytime I hear a song or homily praising the King of kings or about adoring our Lord, I have flashbacks to some weird medieval scene in Game of Thrones.

Our language around the Trinity sounds irrelevant and, honestly, not that spiritual. Much of the world has fought off kingly power. A person who needs constant praising and adoration has an ego problem. We make fun of North Koreans calling their dictators "Dear Leader," but then we’re fine with collectively calling out collectively “Dear Lord” or “Dear Heavenly Father” in church.

Given our current state of authoritarian power struggles by Adventist leaders, it’s clear that our language about God shapes our ecclesiology. How we talk about God is how we act. I just don’t see God revealed in the Gospels promoting monarchical or autocratic metaphors. In fact, Jesus repeatedly fought against the attempt by the disciples to force him into their kingly mental mold.

Instead, to Jesus, God was an important relative, a father. Calling God “dad” rather than a king in a culture of empire might be as radically meaningful as calling God a mother, grandfather, or friend today.

Much brokenness is caused these days by forceful efforts to fire Adventist science professors who don’t publicly believe/teach everything in another belief. But as one starts to look through each belief, singling out one doctrine or one academic discipline seems capricious and inconsistent. This Trinity doctrine clearly states that God is gendered and He is male. Should we also fire or disfellowship Adventists who use gender neutral or democratic words to describe God?

Many great theologians outside of Adventism have explored the implications of the doctrine of the triune God. Instead of an authoritarian model, some like Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf draw upon Eastern Orthodox understandings of the Social Trinity in which God is relationship or that the church is the image of the Trinity.

Moltmann writes in his The Trinity and the Kingdom of God:

If we search for a concept of unity corresponding to the biblical testimony of the triune God, the God who unites others with himself, then we must dispense with both the concept of the one substance and the concept of the identical subject. All that remains is: the unitedness, the at-oneness of the three Persons with one another, or: the unitedness, the at-oneness of the triune God. For the concept of unitedness is the concept of a unity that can be communicated and is open…(150).

If one believes in the fundamental belief of the triune God the evidence is not mere words. The proof lies in ones ability to prioritize divine commune through relationship. God cared so much about humanity that God self-sacrificed in order to reconcile humanity. That broken body of Christ is the church. Now by communing through the power of the Spirit, the believer participates in the divine commune. Thus, this fundamental belief calls Adventists to prioritize the social meaning of the church as the divine presence on earth. The active Adventist does not seek to divide and expel, but rather participates in atonement by understanding and reconciling through community.

The time has come for me to move on from the daily editing of the Spectrum blog. I will continue to write for Spectrum and stay connected to the community, but I need to free up some space in my schedule for other media and academic projects. Before I finish on June 30, we'll keep you informed about what's next for the blog.

I owe the Adventist Forum board and especially Bonnie Dwyer much gratitude. They supported my interest in starting this blog in June of 2006. It’s been a great seven years. Thanks to your contributions and commitment to conversation the blog has grown every year since. In the last four years, we’ve had 8.3 million pageviews. Of those, 2.6 million pageviews have come just in the last year. We’ve created a community!

Toward that end I’ve appreciated Chuck Scriven’s advocacy for short mission statements and have found Spectrum’s—“creating community through conversation”—to be a very useful guide as the blog evolved over the years.

In growing our conversing community, I am particularly proud of the original reporting that Spectrum has done about ADRA, a certain alleged, conservative sexual predator, LGBT rights, La Sierra University, and women’s ordination. Thanks to your support in reading and talking about these issues and many more, together we have actually made progress.

Telling the truth about these Adventist stories has, I hope, witnessed to a fact-based, historically aware and forward-looking progressive faith. One of the best tests for good or bad models of Adventism is how it fits with various cultures, identities, and generations. Through the last five years of teaching at Pacific Union College, I’ve periodically had young Adventists sit in my office and share their frustrations, beliefs and hopes about our church. Telling them that they are not alone, and pointing them to this online witness to a wider Adventist community has been very fulfilling. Thank you for being and becoming that with me.

One of the first things I edited on this blog was a series of articles on the 28 fundamental beliefs of Adventism. Since my last day will be June 30 I’m going to go out on a challenge to myself. Sure, “the 28” can sometimes seem far removed from day-to-day life in the 21st century, but they remain one of the frameworks for Adventist identity. If there is one thing that I’ve learned from my experience reading hundreds of thousands of Adventist thoughts, it is that belief matters. But I don’t think that belief is enough. We need more ethical action. As I close out my time editing the blog this month, I’d like to sketch out what our fundamental framework might actually call Adventists to do. What are 28 essential Adventist actions?

Pragmatism, an American Adventist inheritance, brings us too often to look for solutions before we have framed the problem. We are accustomed to speeches on different topics presented in self-affirmative ways, that include answers that anticipate doubts. I consider this to be a weakness. I believe we need, first of all, to identify the problem, or, at least, list some of its aspects and categories.

Definition

Pluralism is the result of an historical process generating a revival in our believes who are increasingly placed in the field of private choices. Pluralism requires the excercise of tolerance that often we interpret as indifference, in the live and let live attitude, that it's the failure of human solidariety and it weakens the conscience.

Preface

The problem between pluralism and solidariety can be extended to any type of social relationship: in the family, in friendship, in work settings, in our neighborhoods and in the church. It's evident the difficulty is in accepting the need for compromise. I think the reason lies in the complicating call to the absolute, which grounds our faith. This leads to a process, even partial, of identification with divine infallibility, causing relational conflicts. This loving, great God who became a man who loved even the dissenters, becomes an inflexible guardian of abstract principles. This is the problem.

The question of truth

In the last century we have witnessed a change in the methodology of the perception of truth whereby reason is no longer the only or major criterion, but individual and social experience are strongly enhanced. All of this has had a significant influence on theology.

Our religious tradition tends to conceive truth as a revelation which is perceived rationally; it is an attitude generally positive because it combines the divine with the human but tends to become absolute, rigid and very prescriptive precisely because of the nobility of the sources from which it draws. Christians are called to follow the “truth of gospel” (1 John 1:6; 2Co 13:8; 1 Co 7:17-24); but it does not come to us pure, but in different cultural contexts and traditions; it is not identified with any specific culture, but we do.

I believe that Christians possess only fragments of the truth and must connect to understand the infinite truth of God. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann[1]says: "I believe truth to be dialogical for us. Only in dialogue can we discover the truth, because only by being in relationship with others do we build our identity." The idea of owning the truth, sets up, instead, the foundations for a violent attitude, of a mastery exercised in the name of the owned truth. Even today, we can see it in the world which is populated by many crusaders, each one blessing his own flags in the name of the same God. The church, each church, is not escaping this peril. A Christian reflection on the  concept of truth I think should  consider some elements:

·       The idea of truth as horizon, which conceives eternity as the only place of truth, means that no appraoch, neither any path, can assume to identify itself with the truth. Hans Kung says, “ … we, here, now, today, cannot say where, in the last analysis, may be the truth. We are all walking… We are walking only toward the conception of the truth, as it is really, and that will reveal itself only in the end”.[2]

·       The duty of the pastor is to put the believers on the path toward that direction, recognizing that it is not a goal to reach, but a life-long pursuit.

·       Truth is never ending and it can never be possessed by what is finite. Bruno Forte writes, “… If I would be thinking to have the truth, than I'll think the others to be unecessary, altogether, to my research; if I know that the truth is always overcoming me and that I am only its servant, than anyone is coming toward me is, somehow, a messanger of the truth and my effort is to listen to him and to listen to the voice from the inside that, by him or her, is reaching out to me”[3].

·       Truth makes its way by iteself, never imponsing itself, it doesn't need to be aggressive. Behaviours impose themselves, and sometime need to do so, but not so with faith in Jesus--that is an experience of freedom.

·       Christians, in their attitudes towards other religions, have not always taken into account the fact that revelation is an act of God's love and have been disrespectful of others.  Adventists have done it as well against other Christian denominations. Within the church, too, often we are shocked by theological differences, much less for moral falls.

·       Fundamentalism, even inter-ecclesial, involves a withdrawal into oneself, a rejection of the history and rights of others.

·       We must keep alive the tension between truth and freedom. On one hand,freedom questions the truth of Christian revelation; on the other hand, the revealed truth questions critically the freedom of men.

The relevance of the doctrines with human existence

The value of a doctrine, the real truth of a statement, should not be abstractly assessed but based on its relevance to human existence. Human existence is subject to cultural conditioning, relational, social, making it always a little different, sometimes very different from others, even though geographically close. One aspect of pluralism is even this: I feel that a statement of faith is true because it touches my life.

Witnessing

In a society where the value of privacy and personal faith is increasing, I think that the pastor needs to move progressively from the category of outreach to the one of witnessing. The witness shares what he has seen and understood.

We must learn to come tiptoeing into the homes and lives of others and spend a long time to learn about their lives. Those who accept the truth quickly often need to escape from something else and they see the Gospel as an analgesic. We need to make listening more than a tactic. It seems to me, evangelism has tended to create generations of intolerant and superficial believers, a sort of Adventist pasdaran.

Sensationalism and fundamentalism

We should be watchful, because there is risk with authoritarian positions of developing intolerance, of ignorant fundamentalism, of uncontrolled and aggressive emotions dominating the conscience; with the explosion of personal needs at the expense of ethics and of the true prophetic passion for justice in society, which is appealing to human intelligence and sensitivity. The answer to legalism is not the sensationalism that seeks a miracle, but the recovery of the world of feelings, the intense and prudent look to the human existence, the reflection on the pain and concrete joys, a reading of the Bible, that might not be liturgical or literal or exegetical, but that might be existential and meaningful.

On Unity

Ellen White noted that "when the authentic spiritual life declines, people tend to become conservative, avoiding discussion and worshiping what they don't know"[4]. We should, perhaps, establish a framework of fundamental beliefs and observances, leaving the rest to be regulated by the several fields in which the church is divided all over the world. Enlarging upon that is the problem that comes from having the same Church Manual all over the world. I believe that the outline of this gap between an official regulatory framework and its practical application creates more problems than a clear recognition that certain differences do not threaten the unity of Christ.

Adventism is facing enormous challenges, to which its tradition seems to have not properly prepared it. What kind of Adventist church can we see in the future? My hope is for a church built on a foundation that's ideologically identified with the Adventist theological tradition connected by concentric conversations about new and diverse ways to share our values around the world.

—Giampiero Vassallo is the pastor of the Adventist Church in Lugano, Switzerland.