Conservative Catholic James Kalb has written a piece in Chronicles Magazine about the current state of the Roman Catholic Church. Much of what he writes is also applicable to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
“By and large, though, [the RCC] doesn’t seem well. Since the Second Vatican Council belief and practice have plummeted in most of the Catholic world. Visible advances have been chiefly in Africa, where the Church like other faiths has benefited from population growth and local rejection of traditional tribal religions.
The same is true in the Adventist Church: she is languishing in the country of her birth, but growing rapidly in Africa and other “third world” nations.
“In the once-Christian West—including Latin America—people leave the Church much faster than they enter her. Priests and religious die, retire, or abandon their vocations and are not replaced. Lay people stop attending Mass, going to confession, marrying in the Church, and bringing their children in for baptism. And those who remain abandon basic Catholic beliefs. At least in America, most of the laity follow secular trends rather than Church teaching on moral issues, and reject the foundational Catholic view of the Mass, that it effects Christ’s true presence in the bread and wine.”
The Adventist Church is making gains from Catholic losses in Latin America, so we cannot join that complaint. But much of the second half of that paragraph does apply to Adventists. In North America, many of those who remain in the church cluster around large institutions, and have abandoned basic Adventist beliefs. A gospel of cheap grace is embraced; sanctification and overcoming sin, so central to the Adventism of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, are seldom mentioned.
We are also following secular trends, rather than Bible doctrine, on moral issues such as homosexuality and divorce. Although we do not have a medieval doctrine such as transubstantiation to defend, we increasingly do not want to defend the 2,300-days, the sanctuary, the investigative judgment, and related doctrine, which were near the heart of the Adventist movement.
“A basic question raised by the failure of the post-Vatican II opening to the modern world is whether aspects of that world, for example the emphasis on technological ways of thinking, are fundamentally at odds with Catholicism. The concrete issue coming out of that question is whether the Church should become basically a component of the all-embracing technocratic order that now seems to be emerging globally as the end-point of modernity, or insist instead on her independence, authority, and vision, as she did in antiquity and the Middle Ages.”
Adventism does not have a history reaching back into antiquity and the Middle Ages, but perhaps for that reason we are even more vulnerable to the “all-embracing technocratic order” now emerging. And what is an “all-embracing technocratic order” other than technology in service of totalitarianism? Yet so few in our church are raising an alarm.
Even as we have recently learned about regulatory capture and the astonishing corruption in what has aptly been called the “pharmaceutical industrial complex,” some at Silver Spring are suggesting that “peer-reviewed scientific literature” is now a source of truth for Adventists. Big Pharma and one government agency (Anthony Fauci’s NIH) control most of the medical research in America; Big Pharma buys “peer-reviewed scientific literature” by the truckload, yet some at the GC would make it equal to the Bible and Ellen White!
Ted Wilson and the ADCOM (which began its life as an “administrative committee,” not a magisterium for issuing doctrine between GC sessions) were far too quick to jump onto the vaccine bandwagon, and ought now to be very embarrassed, although I doubt they are.
The Catholic Church in America, per Kalb, includes progressive, conservative (by which he means everyone not a progressive or a traditionalist), and traditionalist (Latin Mass, etc.) factions. Much the same could be said of the Adventist Church, but I would divide Adventism into (1) progressives, (2) a broad, uninterested mainstream (which Kalb calls “conservative” mixing two senses of the term) and (3) conservatives, who tend to coalesce around independent ministries such as Amazing Facts, Secrets Unsealed, White Horse ministries, Amazing Discoveries, etc. (this group corresponds to Kalb’s “traditionalists”).
“Progressives include many academics and functionaries. They emphasize what they consider the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and downplay the Church’s distinctive traditional teaching and practice in favor of the contemporary secular version of social justice. Whatever the intentions of its adherents, the latter corresponds to the idealized self-presentation of a global ruling order that claims inspiration from a vision of comprehensive social rationality.”
Although Adventist progressives have no Vatican II to point back to, we are also embracing “the contemporary secular version of social justice.” Kalb’s descriptions are too careful, I would argue. The “global ruling order” he is trying to describe is utopian Leftist totalitarianism, it is in firm control of all the institutions of not only American but Western society, and its appeal is at least as strong in the Seventh-day Adventist Church as in the Roman Catholic.
“As elsewhere, the specific disputes in the American church relate to fundamental choices regarding her future direction. Should she emphasize “horizontal” concerns like social welfare or “vertical” concerns like right worship—as modeled, for example, by the traditional Latin Mass? Should she emphasize “solidarity” (centralized, bureaucratic management of social life) or “subsidiarity” (local, informal, and private management of social life)? Should she promote diversity of thought and acceptance of modern lifestyles, or should she promote traditional morality, nuclear families, and the restoration of the culture of the past? And most topically, should she downplay—effectively drop—or reaffirm her currently unpopular teachings on divorce, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality?
The same issues currently roil Adventism. The German church in both Adventism and Catholicism seems to be determined on a course of rejecting biblical teaching on sexuality, and “acceptance of modern lifestyles,” although at the very top of both organizations, there is pushback.
What is Kalb’s bottom line?
“The Church, with her doctrine and traditional practices, has shown astounding durability, coming back again and again from conditions that often seemed hopeless. Anything so enduring must be well-founded, so it seems likely that after current adversities she will once again return to type. . . . But time will tell. Catholics cannot go off on their own, and there is a limit to what laymen can do in a hierarchical Church.”
That certainly coincides with Adventist prophetic interpretation, which predicts that the papacy will eventually throw off this current pope’s fascination with communism and sexual deviancy, and “once again return to type.”
We Seventh-day Adventists cannot successfully go off on our own, either; offshoot groups almost invariably dry up and blow away (or end in a Waco of fire and bullets). And, indeed, there is a limit to what we Adventist lay-people can do in our own very hierarchical church, which seems, like the Catholic Church, to be governed by, and for the benefit of, its clergy.