Response to Calvin Thomsen
Red Dynamite Presentation, Chapter 2
Stepping Out of Adventist Myopia
Bill Shull
June 19, 2024
This short essay was written in response to Calvin Thomsen’s presentation 6/8/24 on the subject of George McCready Price as presented by Red Dynamite chapter 2. The presentation can be viewed here)
I empathize with Thomsen‘s normal teaching duties in the Adventist college classroom for several reasons. First, Thomsen carried a big teaching load, and he agreed to present on chapter 2 (Price) which was scheduled right at the end of the academic year. So he prepared and presented under the duress of time.
Also, because most of his students will generally have a position similar to fundamentalism in regard to creationism, his job isn’t to create an apple cart upset.
Sabbath Seminars is an entirely different group of people; we have a long history of study of science and religion, with a wide range of study of evolution and its Christian variants. Sabbath Seminars has had influential class members who were well known for their views opposing the traditional Adventist creationist position. One such person was Erv Taylor. A memoriam to Taylor by his colleague is worth the read, as members of our class shared his faith journey.
In spite of an introductory reference to his college teacher Ron Numbers, who taught him to look at all sides of a position, Thomsen seemed to assume that Sabbath Seminars class members were more like his own college students. It was kind of fascinating to be put in that place, where the assumption is that I’m one of those people and that our class is like those students, and that we all just accept the presuppositions of George McCready Price, Cornelius van Til and Leonard Brand: the entirely un-scientific assumption that the Genesis story establishes a scientific presupposition on which all origins science rests, and we just assume that we can somehow conduct science and call it science with those thoroughly unscientific presuppositions. Thomsen didn’t come right out and say this, but the content of his presentation made this conclusion inescapable.
Below are summaries of Thomsen’s key points:
- Thomsen disagrees with much of Weinberg’s characterization of Price as sharing fundamental sympathies with the fundamentalists. Price’s concerns are less about “establishment support of business”(1) than eschatology and Sabbatarianism. On these and other grounds Thomsen says Weinberg is wrong about lumping Price with the fundamentalists. I think Thomsen is wrong, and will try to argue this.
- Thomsen frames the Adventist (and Price) mindset within an Abolitionist context. I disagree entirely with his, and other Adventist efforts to interpret the historical data this way. This is a kind of contemporary mantra in current Adventist thought, which has been made to be much larger than it was.
- Thomsen also discusses the work of “good science” (his words) in Adventism which, to date, has not achieved the goal of proving Price’s (and “Adventist science”) claims. He may have assumed that fellow class members share the presuppositions of the Adventist science teachers, and not those of Weinberg or modern science. That is, Adventists pre-suppose alleged Biblical claims of a short age Creationism, and so does Thomsen’s audience. But the long history of Sabbath Seminars includes a rich study of origins, and most class members reject the traditional Adventist short-age creationism and its “presupposition” that the Bible is a book of science.
I believe that as Adventists we have a myopia problem. Our special unique nesses are more important to us than to outside observers. It is hard for us to have any perspective in our bubble. However, the more objective view might be that of the non-Adventist; it is a good idea to step outside of ourselves now and then and have a look.
Let’s compare fundamentalism with Price’s Adventism. Both hold to a biblical literalism which was essential to their world view. Both (mostly) held to an eschatology that was more similar than different – an imminent second coming of Christ which transcended concern for the present world. Both saw the Bible as threatened by theological and critical scholarship (“German higher criticism”) and saw their work as pushing back on modernism, basing their teachings on a “plain reading of the text.”
Both saw Darwin in overwhelmingly negative terms, and when Price connected the dots to Marxism the response of fundamentalism was immediate and embraced the connections, opposing any form of socialism. Price may have briefly written sympathetically about victims of industrialization but he never agreed with a socialist solution, and wrote extensively about the twin evils of evolution and Marxism.
Framing Price’s context as having an Abolition ethos is deeply wrong. Adventism’s earliest roots (and for this we must go back to Millerism too) included individuals who had been activist abolitionists, some of whom continued to be as Adventists, but many who didn’t; antebellum Adventism was not primarily Abolitionist, just as it had several leaders who had been, and might have continued to be abolitionists; post-reconstruction Adventism was far more concerned with furthering “the work” at even the cost of going along with the rapid loss of the rights of blacks in America; even at the cost of agreeing with, and participating in segregation; even at the cost of supporting new structures of black oppression.(2) It is here that the emphasis on eschatology and Sabbatarianism is relevant, for these things were far more important to the movement than effecting change in this world. Adventism couldn’t see that their proto-fundamentalist biblicism as reflected in its eschatology and its Sabbatarianism was essentially the same approach as the emerging fundamentalists; the difference for Adventists was that they had the right doctrine, and because the fundamentalists shared the same biblical literalism, they would, if they could just see it, become Sabbatarians and Adventist believers too.
And in actuality, Price’s influence DID have an Adventist impact, for until Price there was little or no interest in the worldwide flood; Price argued from a literalist, biblicist narrative and persuaded the fundamentalists. But most fundamentalists(3) were Darbyists, a special premillennialist variety that taught a dispensationalist theology that included a “rapture” after the Jews returned to Jerusalem. Both believed their teachings were biblical, and neither could support their eschatology from biblical scholarship (see the Ray Cottrell report on the Committee on Problems in the Book of Daniel) (4). But Price’s diluvian influence was huge and lasting, as was his view that evolution and Marxism were intertwined and twin evils. Price’s writings of his first 25 years were seminal and resulted in an influence that didn’t stop until his death, due to his continued correspondence with fundamentalist leaders.
Further, rather than abolitionism having an influence, Price and the fundamentalists were deeply racists. They were not merely passive racists, but they thoroughly rejected the implications of socialism as it related to social justice. Racial and gender oppression increased dramatically after the abandonment of Reconstruction, and a full return to the suppression of the rights of Black Americans coincided with the burgeoning of Price’s career and the fundamentalist movement. These men embraced this racism. Any influence of abolitionism was far in the rear-view mirror as all of American society embraced the new Jim Crow era; fundamentalists, Adventists and Price especially.
Yes, Adventism’s Sabbatarianism provided an additional basis for opposing labor union participation. But actually there isn’t such an obvious connection; Adventist obsession with Sabbath observance as the basis for church-state separation and employer/employee relationships didn’t prevent them from opposing labor for the same reasons that other conservative Christians did. Price, early on, framed the conversation as one of socialist evil; labor was more than a threat to business; strikes and labor activism always involved a degree of civil unrest and violence; Adventism’s view of this was as un-nuanced as its opposition to bearing arms; “Thou shalt not kill.” Keep the commandments. The logic reflected the same degree of biblicism as later fundamentalism. To Price, Marxist/Socialist ideology was a great evil due to its willingness to foment violence, regardless of the lofty reasons, and indeed, those lofty reasons were not really important anyway, because Jesus was coming soon and we had no business trying to fix what he was going to fix after His return. Price and the fundamentalists agreed on this.
Adventist Sabbatarianism and Eschatology – including differences regarding views of America and Israel - were far more similar to the fundamentalists than they were different.. Our shared foundations of literalist biblical interpretation and opposition to higher criticism and modernism provided the basis for this. The fundamentalists wanted to distance themselves from us over our Sabbath and Sanctuary-driven remnant theology and eschatology, but Price was too irresistible, and they kept coming back to him, even as they were embarrassed that he was an Adventist. He was too useful; Price’s clear and forceful writing establishing an a priori basis for modern “scientific Creationism.”
Some of the later consequences of this shared, racist-tinged fundamentalism include a fascination with eugenics, support for fascism and opposition to labor rights, and the development of boarding schools which anticipated the “segregation academies.” While no Adventist would be comfortable with the description applied to Adventist schools, the development of the Adventist boarding academy was more than a way to teach Adventist values to Adventist youth; it protected them from black Americans. Yes, they met other needs too, especially providing an alternative environment for youth with imploding families. But a compelling reason for their development was to provide a white school for Adventist high school students. Not only was Adventist racism against Blacks; Adventism and its institutional policies and practices reflected racism against Asians and Mexican-Americans well into the 1970s.
This is especially important because Adventism provided lower class converts an opportunity for upward mobility within the Adventist sub-culture due to its rapidly developing medical institutions. Segregation in these schools was de-facto and did not end until the 1970s, with continued implementation of racist values as the result of an unreformed educational system within Adventist education. That is, teachers and administrators could implement harmful, racially prejudicial decisions under other guises, and did. Economic opportunities for Adventist minorities were far less than for white Adventists.
Adventist support for Fascism and for the institution of the Klan also illustrate this. There was little opposition to Fascism and anti-Semitism because Hitler was seen as having a fighting chance to rid the world of Communism. Beyond passive acceptance, Adventists often embraced the direction of American society. There was a lack of conscience, an uncritical acceptance of the Jim Crow era, the growth of fascism, and the eugenics movement. The typical universal Adventist support for social and political movements which Adventists shared with fundamentalists is a damning evidence. From the creationist/racist William Jennings Bryan - to Lindbergh’s racism and near-Trumpian threat to democracy - to Trump himself, White nationalism is irresistible to Adventism, like its modern fundamentalist friends (5).
That we could let a presentation go by without criticizing the assumption that we shared these so-called scientific “presuppositions” about Genesis is a testament to the deep socialization of us all. Better late than never. The Bible is NOT a book of science; it is an ancient literature which was shaped and formed by groups of religious leaders for their own purposes at their time, and all of it is pre-scientific and had nothing to say about science and the earth’s age. Adventists must do their science without reference to “Biblical presuppositions,” but sadly, within Adventism that is a long way off. However, in this class it’s OK!
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Footnotes:
1. This is a straw man which I don’t see claimed by Weinberg, it’s an assumption of Thomsen’s which was not developed. Only much later in fundamentalism did themes emerge similar to empathy with business or capitalism.
2. See Tuwan Ussery White, “Adventism’s White Supremacy: When the Seventh-day Aventist Church Adopted an Official Policy of Racial Segregation” in Adventist Today Online, September 23, 2022
3. The primary exception to a shared pre-millenialist eschatology is the post-millenialism of Rushdoony and his Orthodox Presbyterian colleagues who sought to build a just and righteous world prior to Christ’s return. This divergence, however, allows us to find a different comparison; it actually reminds of Adventism’s belief in “becoming perfect” and proclaiming the message to all the world before the end time.
4. The committee appointed by president R.R. Figuhr was deeply divided, with Ray Cottrell and his SDA Bible Commentary colleagues agreeing that, after 5 years of study, they could find no biblical support for the unique Adventist Sanctuary/Investigative Judgment teaching based on Daniel 8:14. See Spectrum, Vol. 10, No. 4, and Lainey S. Cronk, “The Untold Story of the SDA Bible Commentary, “ "The Untold Story of the Bible Commentary" - Spectrum Magazine
5. This is especially poignant today, on Juneteenth.
Sabbath Seminars
Room 3208
Centennial Complex of Loma Linda University Sabbath Morning 10:30-12:30