The issue in 1957 was the fatal attempt to meld (1) the limited understanding of the Adventist trio's understanding of what made Adventism work with (2) Augustinian/Calvinism's Sovereignty of God theme. What could have made all the difference would have been a biblical review of the Great Controversy Theme in contrast to Calvinism's limited understanding of the character of God and the gospel. The central question for both parties is: What does God plan to accomplish with His Salvation Plan?
Major Issues in the Great Controversy Theme
In a few words, on God's side, the purpose of the Great Controversy Theme is to prove Satan wrong in his charges against God's character and His government. The issue is always planted in God's created soil of Freedom. Before love, there had to be freedom. All created intelligences beginning with the angels, extending throughout the inhabited worlds were endowed with freedom—the freedom to even say No to God's plan for them. In other words, responsibility (ability to-response) was the actionable word—freedom to respond to their Creator, either positively or negatively. Love is an attribute found only in the larger embracing air of freedom. Throughout the biblical story, God was trying to make clear what He planned to accomplish with His salvation plan as He manifested His fairness, love, and trust-worthiness through His dealing with, first the Israelites and eventually in the person of Jesus Christ.
On the human side, the purpose of the Great Controversy Theme is to restore in willing men and women the image of Christ, their Maker. To do so, the Holy Spirit's task is to work out of a person's life all that sin has worked in. By God's grace, men and women, regardless of nationality and level of schooling, can be forgiven and transformed into overcomers who hate sin. People that God and the angels can trust with eternal life will inhabit the redeemed world. No rebels will be granted eternal life. The highest motivation for God's loyalist is to honor God, not to merely impress Him.
Therefore, the following principles do follow:
- The believer's character determines destiny, not merely one's profession of faith.
- Perfection is a matter of continual moral growth and not a concern for arbitrary goal posts.
- Christian growth rests on the profound linkage of human will and divine grace—the grace of pardon and the grace of power.
How does this all work out in theological talk?
Soteriology is the study of the plan of salvation. The life and work of Jesus should be one's chief consideration. How one thinks about Jesus directly affects all other biblical studies, especially Eschatology, the study of Last-day Events.
For Calvinists, their Five Points' yardstick controls all aspects of their soteriology. Their understanding of the utter depravity of mankind rests on their notion of original sin and, thus, the companion doctrine that all men and women are born sinners. Their only explanation for the sinfulness of mankind was to simply declare that we all are sinners because Adam sinned. Because of their controlling "sovereignty of God" principle, mankind could not possibly have free will and thus any responsibility. If anyone were to be "saved" it would have to be due to God's sovereign choice, not man's response.
Therefore, for the Calvinist, if Jesus is man's Savior, He would have to die for those that are already elected to be saved. Further, our Lord could not have inherited as we do the genetic stream of His ancestors because, if so, He too would have been born a sinner. The Calvinistic solution: Jesus had to be "exempt" from all inherited tendencies to sin—just as Roman Catholics had concluded. Thus, to make their major premise work, the elect would be those who were "given" faith and thus the "ability" to profess gratefulness for Christ's substitutionary atonement. Because they had been foreordained to be saved, the elect could not fall out of grace; they could never be "unsaved."
Adventist Template and Calvinist Template Incompatible
Obviously, Seventh-day Adventists should have great difficulty trying to harmonize their understanding of salvation with their Calvinist Friends, no matter how much linguistic gymnastics they could muster. The problem in 1955-1957 was that foggy thinking on the part of the Adventists led them, almost unknowingly, into capitulating to the Evangelicals. Here began fifty years of focus on some kind of objective atonement without equal weight on the subjective aspect of the atonement that would have highlighted our Lord's work as our High Priest.
The Adventist trio were untrained theologians. They had not seen that 1) the Scriptures embrace a complete system of truth and that every part in the Bible should sustain and not contradict any other part; 2) that any defective or imperfect concept of any one doctrine must inevitably lead to confusion and error throughout the whole system and 3) that two or more self-consistent systems of theology are possible but they cannot both be biblically correct. For instance, it is impossible to join the tectonic plates of Augustianism-Calvinism with either Pelagianism/SemiPelagianism or Arminian-Adventism. Unless one is prepared for a plethora of troubles.
This explains the volcanic eruptions that soon developed.
Obviously, Andreasen and Others Aroused
All this incompatibility aroused Andreasen and many others. The veteran an theologian knew from personal study and experience that only those who acknowledge the binding claim of the moral law can explain the nature and purpose, of the atonement—that when Jesus paid the indebtedness of the repentant sinner, He did not give him or her license to continue sinning but to now live responsibly in obedience to the law. Calvinists are not able to process this fundamental thought.
Because Andreasen started with the systematic principle of God's freedom and man's responsibility and not God's sovereignty and man's predestination, the veteran theologian saw immediately that the Adventist tectonic plate should be an unmovable theological mass.
Thus, the ruling principle of human responsibility led Andreasen toward a different understanding of the Atonement. He saw that the sanctuary doctrine (including the purpose of the Old Testament sanctuary service and its New Testament application as best described in the Book of Hebrews) painted a picture of the unbroken union between the objective and subjective aspects of the Atonement. From the moment Christ was "slain from the foundation of the world" (Revelation 13:8) to the end of the millennium when Satan and the consequences of sin will be no more, Andreasen could see what the Calvinists could not.
Biblical Sanctuary Doctrine
The sanctuary doctrine emphasizes how God forgives and justifies only penitent men or women, but more! The doctrine equally emphasizes that God promises to empower the penitent so that sins are eliminated by the inner graces of the Holy Spirit. The penitent men and women who continue to cooperate with God will truly find the peace, assurance, and divine empowerment that comes in completing the gospel plan in his or her life. This was never made clear to our Calvinist friends in 1957 and it has been one of the causes of Adventist theological muddle in the years since.