Oct. 7-What About The Trinity-1

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Matt. 28:19, NASB.

It comes as a surprise to many present-day Seventh-day Adventists that most of I the founders of the denomination could not join the church today if they had to agree to the 28 fundamental beliefs. To be more specific, they would have rejected belief number 2, on the Trinity, because they were antitrinitarian; they would have spurned number 4, on the Son, because they held that the Son was not eternal; and they would have denied number 5, on the Holy Spirit, because to them the Spirit was a force rather than a person.

To a large extent the Christian Connection had shaped their understanding of these points. In 1835 Joshua V. Himes, a leading minister of the Connectionists, wrote that "at first they [the Connection believers] were generally Trinitarian," but they had moved away from that belief when they came to see it as "unscriptural." Himes noted that only the Father is "unoriginated, independent, and eternal." Thus of necessity Christ was originated, dependent, and brought into existence by the Father. The Connectionists also tended to view the Holy Spirit as the "power and energy of God, that holy influence of God."

Joseph Bates, James White, and other Connection adherents brought those views into Sabbatarian Adventism. White, for example, referred to the Trinity in 1846 as that "old unscriptural Trinitarian creed" and in 1852 as that "old Trinitarian absurdity."

J. N. Andrews shared White's views. In 1869 he penned that "the Son of God...had God for his Father, and did, at some point in the eternity of the past, have a beginning of days."

Uriah Smith also rejected the Trinity, arguing in 1865 that Christ was "the first created being" and in 1898 that God alone is without beginning.

Here we have kind of a Sabbatarian Adventist Who's Who on the Trinity. Only one name, you may have noted, is missing that of Ellen White. Its not that she didn't have anything to say on the topic. Rather, it is impossible to tell exactly what she believed from what she said, at least in the early decades of the movement.

How could most of the early Adventist leaders have been wrong on so important a subject?

Here is part of an answer. God leads His people step by step, and as they progress their vision becomes clearer and clearer. In the next few days we will see a transformation take place in Adventist thinking on the Trinity.