GLACIER VIEW AND ITS OUTCOME

It was generally believed that the Glacier View meetings of 1980 would provide answers to the questions that Desmond Ford had raised about the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of the Investigative Judgement.

They didn’t. Instead, more questions were created. Before Glacier View there were doubts about the soundness of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) teaching on the Investigative Judgement; after Glacier View there were added doubts about the integrity of the SDA Church.

Following the Glacier View meetings, the President of the then Australasian Division of the SDA Church, Pr. Keith Parmenter, visited Papua New Guinea for the Union Session. There, in a special meeting with pastors, he invited questions about the Investigative Judgement. Because he was unable to answer some of these questions, he offered to send a scholar up from Australia to conduct meetings for the ordained ministers, at which their questions would be dealt with.

At that time I was the Secretary for the Papua New Guinea Union Mission of the SDA Church. Together with the Union Ministerial Secretary, the Head of the Department of Theology at Sonoma College, and a lecturer in theology at the same college, we prepared a list of questions that we felt needed to be answered, if we were to continue to have faith in the Church’s traditional teaching on the Investigative Judgement. This list was submitted to the Union Executive Committee and on receiving its approval, I posted it off to Parmenter so the presenter would have time to prepare answers before coming to the meetings.

The day Parmenter received my letter I was absent from the office. I was told on my return that his reactive phone call was blistering. He let it be known that as the Division was paying for this three-day Conference, they would decide which questions would be asked and which would be answered. In a more conciliatory follow-up letter, he informed us that the Division had decided to send Pr. Arthur Duffy up with Dr. Arthur Ferch and outlined procedures that effectively closed the door to a free and frank discussion of the major issues. The object of their visit was to present ‘positive Bible answers where possible to support the fundamental beliefs of this Church.’ In other words, the two men from Australia weren’t coming to aid us in a search for the truth on Daniel 8:14, but to reinforce the Church’s traditional teachings.

Duffy, a Division officer with the portfolio of Spirit of Prophecy, came to P.N.G. as the authority on Ellen White, but when questions were asked, which he couldn’t answer, he invited Ferch to respond. However, when Ferch failed to answer these difficult questions according to Duffy’s liking, Duffy kept him behind after the meeting and gave him a good talking to. I heard about this from Ferch himself, who was staying at our home. When this same scenario was repeated the next day, Ferch came home quite depressed and expressed fears that he might be dismissed from his post in the Theology Department at Avondale College. I shared his concern with the expatriate pastors who were in Lae for these meetings, and we reluctantly agreed, for Ferch’s sake, that we would let the two men from Australia run the meetings without any further challenges from us.

At the conclusion of the meetings Ferch and Duffy returned to Sydney, but the void inside some of us ached more than it would have had they not come. We not only still had our doubts about the Investigative Judgement doctrine; we now had the added burden of growing doubts about the theological integrity of some of our leaders.

There was, however, one bright light on the horizon: We were told that the General Conference was setting up a Daniel and Revelation Committee which would publish a series of papers under the editorship of Frank B. Holbrook. It was intended that these books of articles would once-and-for-all, lay to rest the questions raised at, and beyond, Glacier View. While these books answered a lot of questions that had not been asked, more importantly, they failed to answer several of the crucial questions that had been raised. The general impression received, after all these years, is that the SDA Church has no real answers to these fundamental questions.

THE PAYOFF

If these Daniel and Revelation Committee Series represent the best response of the SDA Church to Desmond Ford’s challenge1, who can blame the majority of the Church’s ministers for their lack of enthusiasm for preaching this so-called ‘distinctive truth,’ or for failing to promote Week of Prayer readings and the Church’s papers with articles and inserts on the Investigative Judgement, or for avoiding the use of the Church’s Sabbath School Lessons, Bible Study Guides or Seminar materials on this subject. Does the Church want men in the pulpit ‘who will stand for the right though the heavens fall, or glove puppets, animated from within by leaders who either don’t understand this issue, or who don’t want to rock the boat? While every Church Leader is required to support this doctrine—even if they do not believe in it—the terrible consequence of doing so, is a numbing of the conscience and a growing separation from Christ.

After the Glacier View meetings, SDA ministers were asked to exercise ‘pastoral responsibility’ by not disturbing the faith of their members on this controversial issue. While the ministers who remained in Church employ did not, for the most part, stir up the mud, their faith in the Church was so shaken, that they found it difficult to be enthusiastic about bringing anyone into a denomination which had not only sacked many fine Pastors for their honesty and integrity, but which continues to uphold a doctrine that, like the Tower of Pisa, requires massive ongoing efforts to keep it from toppling over under its own weight.

A direct outcome of this ambivalence has been a decline in public evangelism. How can an SDA preacher, who fully understands these issues, proclaim this teaching from the pulpit and baptise people into the Seventh-day Adventist Church, using the current baptismal certificate which presents this questionable doctrine as one of the twenty-seven Fundamental Beliefs, unless he is willing to compromise himself? It is a real concern. Understandably, there is little enthusiasm among many preachers for indoctrinating people in this belief.

In hindsight, the Presidents who, immediately after Glacier View required their pastors to support the twenty-third Fundamental Belief, were the ones who show-ed no ‘pastoral responsibility.’ The long-term result of their action has been to weaken the Church in the West. The leaders of the SDA Church should not, however, comfort themselves with the thought that the Church in the developing world will escape this problem. As soon as its educated members become aware of this unresolved issue—and they will—it will result in turmoil and massive defections and split-offs in their countries as well, unless the denomination resolves this matter quickly, openly and honestly.2

The only solution that I can see, is for the Seventh-day Adventist Church to turn away from its current anti-Adventist credalism and return to the pioneers’ fundamental paradigm: ‘The Bible, and the Bible alone, is to be our creed, the sole bond of union …’3 They should confess their back-sliding on this matter and acknowledge that there can be no authentic growth in their understanding of truth, without continual re-evaluation and development of their doctrines using God’s Word and God’s Word alone.4 SDA beliefs must be built solidly on the Word of Christ, because such truths are the only ones that they can proclaim to the world with confidence. Without truth, there is no confidence in the message and without confidence in the message, there is no power in the proclamation.

It all boils down to what SDA’s really want: A Church that continues to be weak because it holds to traditional teachings that have little or no foundation in God’s Word, or a Church that gathers new strength as it comes to know, believe, live and proclaim the truth as it is in Jesus. Whichever way the Church chooses for its path, members will be lost, but there is only one way to move that will have God’s blessing and that will justify Seventh-day Adventists referring to themselves as ‘God’s people.’

ENDNOTES:
1. Desmond Ford, Daniel 8:14, The Day of Atonement and The Investigative Judgment. Casselberry, Florida: Euangelion Press, 1980.
2. The doctrine of the Investigative Judgement has been challenged seriously, on the average, about every fifteen years since the SDA Church began. And this wound will continue to fester until genuine confession and repentance removes the thorn of error.
3. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages Vol. 1, p. 416.
4. Many believe that Ellen White’s statement on page 35 of Counsels to Writers and Editors, applies to everything except their fundamental beliefs. Note, however, that she is writing about doctrines that the Church has ‘held as truth for many years,’ (a statement which encompasses fundamental beliefs. ‘The fact that certain doctrines have been held as truth for many years by our people, is not proof that our ideas are infallible. Age will not make error into truth and truth can afford to be fair.’