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New Issues-2
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August 7 - New Issues-2

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Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Matt. 16:16, NASB.

Yesterday we noted that the early Adventist preachers felt that they needed to focus on those points, such as seventh-day Sabbath, that made them distinctive rather than those doctrines that they shared with other Christians.

Their method of entering a community and challenging a prominent minister to a public debate seemed to work. After all, without television sets, the best show in a small town might be two preachers getting into an argument over how long people suffer in hell. At any rate, the Adventist evangelists seem to have had no difficulty getting a crowd to hear their message.

But 40 years of stressing the distinctive Adventist truths in a debating atmosphere, to the neglect of the general Christian doctirnes, had two detremental effects. For one, it developed some pretty combative Adventists, a personality trait that would trouble the denomination in events surrounding the 1888 meetings.

Beyond that, four decades of overemphasizing the distinctive teachings and neglecting the share doctrines led to a disjunction between Adventism and basic Christianity. By the mid-1880s the issue had grown to problematic proportions. The church had done an excellent job at preaching what was Adventist in Adventism, but had lost sight of the larger package that made Adventism Christian.

Adventism needed a course correction. Two relatively young men from the western part of the United States-A. T. Jones and E. J. Waggoner would begin that correction. At first, Jones and Waggoner seemd to be making a doctrinal adjustment by giving a larger place to Christ and faith in Adventist theology and a less prominent role to the law.

But the denominational leaders-G. I. Butler and Uriah Smith-viewed such a "correction" as a major theological earthquake. They saw the new teachings as an overthrow of historic Adventism with its emphasis on law adn works.

As a result, they fought it with all their might, which was not small, given the fact that they had a direct influence over the preachers of a denomination that still had only about 25,000 members worldwide.

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Lord, help us learn from our history the lessons of theological balance in our walk with You.
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