Is the “Daily” Christ’s Continual Ministry in the Heavenly Sanctuary?
In part three, we discussed the “daily as pagan Rome” interpretation. In this installment, we will discuss what is often called the “new view” of the daily, which is that the term “daily” (Heb. tamid) refers to the mediation of Christ on our behalf in the heavenly sanctuary.
The New View: Christ’s Continual Ministry in the Heavenly Sanctuary
A. Early Proponents of the New View
The “new view” is not really that new, as it was briefly entertained in the aftermath of the Great Disappointment of 1844. The first to argue that the “daily” referred to Jesus’ daily mediation on our behalf in the heavenly sanctuary was O.R.L. Crosier, in articles in the “Day Star” on February 7, 1846, and March 19, 1847. Crosier noted that the earthly sanctuary was a copy or type of the sanctuary in heaven. (Acts 7:44; Heb. 8:5). He noted that in the Bible, tamid, the “daily” or “continual” usually modifies sacrifice (or some other sanctuary “continual,” such as the continual burnt offering, the continual burning of incense, the continual offering of the showbread, etc.), but after Christ died His sacrificial death on our behalf, He entered the sanctuary in heaven, which is the anti-type, the reality the earthly temple had pointed to. (Heb. 9:24; Heb. 4:14; 8:1-2). Hence, any sanctuary that the Bible refers to after Christ’s death must be the heavenly sanctuary, and the “daily” must now refer to Christ’s continual mediation on our behalf in that sanctuary.
Today, the origin of the “new view” is most often attributed to Ludwig Richard Conradi (1856-1939), a German who came to America as a young man and attended Battle Creek College. Conradi met Ellen White and became an Adventist minister, pastoring German-speaking congregations in the Midwest. Returning to Europe, Conradi organized the work there, establishing the headquarters of German Adventism in Hamburg. After 1901, he was made president of the European Division and a vice-president of the General Conference. Conradi was intensely interested in prophecy and wrote his own commentary on Daniel and Revelation, which was translated into several languages. Conradi ended his career as a minister in the Seventh-day Baptist denomination.
Arthur Grosvenor Daniells (1858-1935), the longest serving General Conference president in Adventists history (he served for 21 years, from 1901 to 1922), was a man of extraordinary ability and consecration, and a notable exponent of the “new view.” At the 1919 Bible Conference, Daniells insisted that the “daily” not be discussed unless he was in the room. After retiring from the General Conference in 1922, Daniells founded “Ministry Magazine” to minister to the ministers, a publication still going strong today.
William Warren Prescott (1855–1944), a Dartmouth graduate, was an Adventist academic who had a hand in founding several Adventist colleges. Prescott became president of Battle Creek College in 1885 and served there until 1892. In 1891, he helped found Union College and, in 1892, assumed the presidency of Walla Walla College. In 1897, Prescott helped found Australasian Mission College (now Avondale College) in Australia. In 1901, Prescott became a vice-president of the General Conference and chairman of the board of the Review and Herald, which he also edited from 1901 to 1909. He was a field secretary of the General Conference from 1915 until his retirement in 1937, serving during this time at Avondale and later as chairman of the Bible department at Union College (1924–1928). Prescott was one of the strongest partisans of the “new view.”
More recent proponents of the new view include George McCready Price in his 1955 volume, “The Greatest of the Prophets”, Roy Allan Anderson, in his 1975 book, “Unfolding Daniel’s Prophecies”, C. Mervyn Maxwell, in his 1981 book “God Cares”, which was long used as a textbook in SDA colleges and universities, William Shea in, e.g., his paper “The Unity of Daniel,” included in the 1986 “Symposium on Daniel”, Jacques Doukhan in his 1987 book “Daniel: A Vision of the End,” and Heidi Heiks in his 2011 book, “508 Source Book.”
Obviously, the new view is currently the dominant view within Seventh-day Adventism, although the “paganism” view still has a following among a certain type of conservative Adventist, including those who are distrustful of anything that happened after, say, 1856.
B. Daniel Eight Interpreted Pursuant to the “New View”
How do proponents of the new view interpret Daniel 8:10-12? As follows:
Dan. 8:10: “And it [the little horn, being the Papacy], waxed great, even to the host of heaven [the people of God]; and some of the host [the people of God], and of the stars [their leaders] it [the papacy] cast down to the ground, and trampled upon them.”
We saw in part 1 that Rome in its pagan phase began as a “little horn,” a small kingdom, but grew greater and greater until it reached and eventually controlled “the beautiful land.” But without doing great violence to the text, we can skip ahead to Rome in its papal phase, which also grew greater and greater over time. The papacy also persecuted the people of God as described in verse 10.
Dan. 8:11: “Yea, it [the papacy] magnified itself, even to the prince of the host [Christ]; and it [the papacy] took away from him [Christ] the continual [mediation in heaven], and the place of his [Christ’s] sanctuary [the heavenly sanctuary] was cast down.”
All schools of thought agree that Christ is the “prince of the host.” The papacy has made claims to being on a level of equality with the Son of God, for example, the titles “Lord God the Pope” and vicarious filii dei, which means being, on earth, in the place of the Son of God. The papacy also claims infallibility for statements made ex cathedra, meaning with the full authority of the office of pope.
The heart of the new view is that the papacy “took away” the heavenly mediation of Christ by obscuring it with Rome’s own inventions, such as the mass. First, the papacy replaces the heavenly mediation of Christ (Heb. 8:6; 9:15; 1 Tim. 2:5) with the mediation of an earthly priest. This takes the focus away from our sinless Substitute and places it on a sinful man, to whom we are supposed to confess our sins and seek absolution. Ellen White had this to say about confession to an earthly priest:
“He who kneels before fallen man, and opens in confession the secret thoughts and imaginations of his heart, is debasing his manhood and degrading every noble instinct of his soul. In unfolding the sins of his life to a priest,—an erring, sinful mortal, and too often corrupted with wine and licentiousness,—his standard of character is lowered, and he is defiled in consequence. His [conception] of God is degraded to the likeness of fallen humanity, for the priest stands as a representative of God. This degrading confession of man to man is the secret spring from which has flowed much of the evil that is defiling the world and fitting it for the final destruction.” Great Controversy, p. 567.3
Second, the papacy teaches that, through a miracle called “transubstantiation,” Christ is really present in the eucharist—hoc est corpus (“here is the body”), meaning that here in the wafer is the real, physical body of Christ. Christ is thus sacrificed anew each time the mass is performed. One Catholic writer puts it this way:
“When the priest pronounces the tremendous words of consecration, he reaches up into the heavens, brings Christ down from His throne, and places Him upon our altar to be offered up again as the victim for the sins of man. It is a greater power than that of monarchs and potentates. . . . the priest brings Christ down from heaven, and renders Him incarnate on our altar as the eternal Victim for the sins of man—not once but a thousand times! The priest speaks, and lo! Christ, the eternal and omnipotent God, bows His head in humble obedience to the priest’s command.”—Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 1936, quoted in Price, “The Greatest of the Prophets,” p. 176.
It is difficult to conceive of the ecclesiastical self-aggrandizement necessary to produce such a statement. Indeed, this “little horn” speaks “boastful,” “pompous” words, “boasting arrogantly”! (Dan. 7:8, 11)
And Scripture could not be any clearer that Christ was sacrificed only once (Heb. 9:12), and ever afterward we have only to claim that sacrifice by faith:
“For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Otherwise Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.” Heb. 9:24-28.
That Christ was to be sacrificed only once and ever after accessed by faith was symbolized when Moses was first to strike the rock (Ex. 17:6), and subsequently to speak to it (Num. 20:8). (See, 1 Cor. 10:1-4). Moses’ disobedience in that one seemingly minor point is why he was not allowed to lead Israel into Canaan. (Num. 20:8-12). By its doctrine of the mass, the Papacy has obscured the truth that Christ was sacrificed only once for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2), and there is no need for a repeated or continuing sacrifice.
The obscuring of Christ’s work of mediation in the heavenly sanctuary is so complete that it can be said (or so argue proponents of the “new view”) that the heavenly sanctuary was cast down during the long ages of papal supremacy.
Daniel 8:12: “And the host [the people of God] was given over to it [the papacy] together with the continual [mediation in heaven] through transgression; and it [the papacy] cast down truth to the ground, and it [the papacy] did its pleasure and prospered.”
There is no question that the papacy persecuted and killed an untold, but huge, number of genuine Christian believers during the middle-ages, that it cast truth to the ground through its myriad false doctrines, and that despite all of this, the papacy prospered immensely and grew very rich.
C. Important Points in Favor of the “New View”
Daniel 8:13: “Then I heard a holy one speaking; and another holy one said unto that certain one who spake, How long shall be the vision concerning the continual [mediation in heaven], and the transgression that maketh desolate [the papacy’s transgression, as in verse 12], to give both the [heavenly] sanctuary and the host [the people of God] to be trodden under foot?
Daniel 8:14: “And he said unto me, ‘Unto two thousand three hundred evenings and mornings; then shall the sanctuary [the heavenly sanctuary] be cleansed’.”
This is perhaps the most probative, persuasive point in favor of the “new view”: The sanctuary in verse 11 is the same sanctuary as in verse 14, which we know is the heavenly sanctuary.
The cleansing of the sanctuary refers to the day of atonement (Lev. 16), on which the sins that had accumulated in the sanctuary throughout the year were transferred to the scapegoat, who was then led out into the wilderness, away from the Israelite camp. The 2,300-day prophecy refers to the beginning of the anti-typical Day of Atonement, which the earthly Day of Atonement had symbolized: the investigative judgment in heaven, during which the case of each person who has ever claimed Christ as Savior (either prospectively, through the sacrificial system, or retrospectively, by faith) is reviewed; the sins of those covered by the blood of the Lamb are transferred to the account of Satan, the arch-deceiver.
It makes sense that the same sanctuary should be discussed in both Daniel 8:11 and Dan. 8:14, and this is not true in the “paganism” theory, which posits that the temple or sanctuary in verse 11 is the Pantheon in Rome, or perhaps Rome itself. Nor is it true of my theory, in which the sanctuary in verse 11 is the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
A second persuasive point in favor of the “new view” is that the “new view” acknowledges that the word tamid often modifies temple activity such as the daily sacrifice of animals, the continual burnt offering, the continual burning of incense, the continual offering of the showbread, etc. But the temple in question is the heavenly temple, and the high priest is Christ Himself the “mediator of a new covenant.” (Heb. 9:15)
Both these strengths of the “new view” are based upon the discovery, after the Great Disappointment, of the truth about the heavenly sanctuary. It was this truth that allowed the bereft Adventists—who had so hoped to see their Redeemer return to this Earth on that autumn day in 1844—to understand the 2,300-day prophecy and realize that it was not the earth that was to be cleansed in 1844, but rather the heavenly sanctuary. Obviously, William Miller did not know about the heavenly sanctuary when he formed the “paganism” view of the “daily” in Daniel 8. We have no such excuse.
Problems With the “New View”
Although I agree with the majority of Adventists that the new view of the “daily” in Daniel 8 is a substantial improvement over the old “paganism” view, there are problems with the new view that must not be overlooked.
A. Christ’s Heavenly Ministry was Never Interrupted or Halted
. . . and never will be until everyone’s eternal destiny is sealed. The papacy never actually “took away” the ministry of Christ in the heavenly sanctuary.
Christ is always living to intercede for us: “[B]ut because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. Therefore, he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” Heb. 7:24-25. We always have an advocate with the Father: “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate before the Father--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.” 1 John 2:1. Nothing is going to separate our heavenly advocate from us, until we are sealed in salvation and Christ leaves the heavenly sanctuary to come get us and take us to heaven to live and reign with Him:
“Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” Rom. 8:33-35.
Note that “trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and sword”—the very things Christians suffered under the papacy during the 1,260 years of papal supremacy—can never separate us from our heavenly advocate, nor stop his mediation on our behalf. The false teachings of the papacy do not alter the reality that Christ is our heavenly mediator, interceding for us, pleading His blood to the Father on our behalf. By contrast, the daily rituals in the Second Temple really were violently and permanently “taken away” in 70 AD, never to be restored or re-instituted.
Likewise, the heavenly sanctuary was never literally “cast down” (v. 11) or “trodden under foot” (v. 13) by the papacy. To suggest that the papacy was able to reach into heaven and cast down and trample the heavenly sanctuary is almost blasphemous—the same type of bold, boastful claim that the Papacy makes for its priesthood and the mass. Satan is the “prince of this world” (John 12:31; 16:11) and “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4) but he was cast out of heaven (Luke 10:18); his writ does not run there. By contrast, the Second Temple and its place, Jerusalem, really was cast down and destroyed by Titus and his legions.
Hence, the “new view” of Daniel 8:10-12 represents, at best, a spiritual application, a teaching parable, not an actual historical event.
B. The “New View” is Not Conceptually Related to the Cleansing of the Sanctuary in Dan. 8:14
Although it is a point in favor of the “new view” that, in that view, the sanctuary in v. 14 is the same sanctuary as the sanctuary in verse 11, that being the heavenly sanctuary, very different concepts are contemplated. In the case of sanctuary in verse 14, what pollutes the sanctuary and creates the need for cleansing is the accumulated sins confessed by those who believe in Jesus. Those sins must be transferred to the account of Satan, the arch-deceiver, or put back on the sinner if it is determined that he did not have saving faith. This is the concept, in verse 14, of the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary.
The “taking away” of the “daily” and the casting down of the sanctuary in verse 11 is something different. Under the new view, what takes away Christ's high priestly ministry in heaven is the papacy covering it up or obscuring it. The “taking away” of Christ’s mediatorial ministry and “casting down” and “trampling upon” Christ’s heavenly temple is a very different concept from the cleansing of the sanctuary in verse 14, even though both concepts posit a heavenly sanctuary. There is no conceptual connection between what is happening to the heavenly sanctuary in verse 11 and verse 14.
Moreover, the “new view” does not fit with any time prophecies, because the mass began to be developed in the 4th Century and has been under development ever since, having recently been tweaked at Vatican II in the 1960s, when they decided to conduct it in the vernacular rather than solely in Latin. If the mass obscured the truth of Christ’s ministry in the heavenly sanctuary, it began to do so long before 508 or 538 and continues to do so to this day. The mass did not end in 1798, when the papacy received its deadly wound and lost the power to persecute, nor did the mass end in 1844, at the beginning of the investigative judgment in heaven.
Hence, there is only so much mileage to be gained from the fact that the “new view” of the “daily” in Daniel 8 relates to the heavenly sanctuary. The new view does not provide a firm connection between Daniel 8:10-12 and verses 13 and 14.
C. The “Little Horn” is Not Always the Papacy
Proponents of both the “paganism as the daily” view and the “new view” take for granted that the power in view in Daniel 8:10-12 is the Papacy, because the Papacy is described as a “little horn” in Daniel 7:8 and again in Daniel 8:11. Although we Adventists have grown accustomed to acting as though “little horn” is a proper name—in fact, we’ve treated it as an alternate proper name for the Papacy—that is not true. “Little” is just a description, not a name.
The phrase “little horn” in Daniel 7:8 is clearly describing the Papacy, but what is being described as a “little horn” in Daniel 8:9 is just as clearly pagan Rome, the Roman Empire:
And out of one of them [the four winds or the four successors of Alexander] came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land.
As we discussed in Part 1, this can only be pagan Rome, because only pagan Rome expanded in this geographic direction during the prophetically indicated period. Pagan Rome also answers the description in Daniel 8:10 as well as papal Rome, and still fits in verse 11: “Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host,” because all concede that the “prince of the host” is Christ and that pagan Rome, through the person of its governor, Pontius Pilate, condemned Christ to death and then executed that sentence in the cruelest possible way.
When, exactly, is it necessary to switch from pagan Rome to papal Rome? The answer is that it is never necessary. Pagan Rome fits the prophecy in Daniel 8:10-12 at least as well as Papal Rome all the way through.
Conclusion
George McCready Price possessed an intellect of the first order. Basing his research on Ellen White’s description of the Flood in Patriarchs and Prophets, Price almost single-handedly invented modern Flood geology. His work was picked up and built upon by Whitcomb and Morris in their book, “The Genesis Flood,” from whence it spread into evangelical Christianity and formed the basis for Ken Ham’s dynamic creationist ministry, “Answers in Genesis,” and many others.
Price wrote his own commentary on the Daniel, entitled, “The Greatest of the Prophets.” Of Daniel 8:11, he wrote:
“This term, ‘the place of His sanctuary,’ never had any other meaning in the time of Daniel than the city of Jerusalem and the temple which it contained . . . Of course, it was the power of imperial Rome which in AD 70 took away once and for all that Jewish ‘continual burnt offering,’ and cast down ‘the place of His sanctuary.’ This would be its obvious and only meaning for any intelligent Christian living during the first three or four centuries of the Christian Era. If the prophecy dealt only with events connected with the Jewish nation, this would be all that we have any right to read from this prediction.” The Greatest of the Prophets, p. 175.
Yes, exactly! The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD “would be the obvious and only meaning [of Dan. 8:9-12] for any intelligent Christian living during the first three or four centuries of the Christian Era.” Price then goes on to assert that the prophecy deals with more than the Jewish era, so we are therefore justified in plugging in our concerns about the papacy, in the form of the new view of Dan. 8:9-12.
But this is making an axiom of a disputed point. How do we know that Dan. 8:10-12 deals with more than Rome’s violent overthrow of the Jewish nation? We do not know that. Here is what we know: Daniel 2 deals with all the time from Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon to the Second Coming. Daniel 7 clearly deals with the papacy and the investigative judgment. Daniel 9 clearly deals only with the Jewish nation, its 490 years of probationary time, the appearance, ministry, and death of the Messiah, and the destruction of Jerusalem. Daniel 11 deals with world history from the Medo-Persian Empire almost to the Second Coming of Christ. What we do not know is whether Daniel 8 is more like Daniel 9, or more like Daniel 2, 7, and 11.
While there is much to admire about the “new view,” I am still convinced that Daniel 8:10-12 covers much the same territory as Daniel 9:20-27. The Jews were God’s chosen people for over 1,500 years, and the Hebrew Scriptures—their law, their history, their prophets—take up well over three-quarters of the Bible. Why would anyone be surprised that Daniel was given two visions about the cataclysmic destruction of his nation?