The Pillar Doctrines

April 4  The Pillar Doctrines

 


Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. 2Tim. 4:2, 3.

By early 1848 the Sabbatarian Adventist leaders, through extensive and intensive Bible study, had come to basic agreement on at least four points of doctrine:

1. The personal, visible, premillennial return of Jesus.
2. The cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary, with Christ's ministry in the second apartment having begun in October 1844-the beginning of the antitypical day of atonement.
3. The obligation to observe the seventh-day Sabbath and its role in the great end-time conflict prophesied in Revelation 12-14.
4. That immortality is not an inherent human quality but something people receive only through faith in Christ.

Sabbatarian Adventists, and later Seventh-day Adventists, came to see those teachings as "landmarks" or "pillar" doctrines. Together they set this branch of Adventism off from not only other Millerites, but from Christians in general. Those four distinctives stood at the heart of developing Sabbatarian Adventism and defined them as a distinctive people. The so-called landmark doctrines formed the nonnegotiable core of the movement's theology.

The careful reader may wonder how come I did not include the doctrine of spiritual gifts as it relates to Ellen White in the above list. While that is a unique Adventist perspective, it didn't really, as we shall see, receive attempts at doctrinal formation until the 1850s and 1860s. Beyond that, Ellen White herself did not see that teaching as one of the pillars.

The Sabbatarians, of course, shared many beliefs with other Christians, such as salvation by grace through faith in Jesus' sacrifice and the efficacy of prayer. But their teaching in the early years, like their hymnal, focused on where they differed from other Christians rather than on where they were like them.

That neglect would eventually bring about theological problems that they would have to deal with in the 1880s. But more on that topic later.

For now we can be thankful for the clarity with which the founders of Seventh-day Adventism did their theological homework. The good news is that their belief system make sense.

        

Take God's promises as your own, plead them before Him as His own words, and you will receive fullness of joy(TFMB, 134).