To expect sheer uniformity of doctrine can only arise from self-deception; it can only result in complacency, fraud, and intimidation.

Properly, the energy a religious community puts into thinking about its beliefs is energy toward self-correction. The best religious thinkers see theology as the community examining itself. 

We cannot know Christ unless, like him, we do what we can to be co-sufferers with the suffering. And if the church fails to know Christ, it cannot flourish or even, in the long run, survive.

Two facts make any remaining Adventist self-satisfaction delusional. One concerns burgeoning disgust with religion, or at least indifference to it. The other concerns the collective Adventist...