Seventh Day Adventist Church
The Seventh Day Adventist movement is small in the UK. It claims it had 24,000 members as at end of 2004 with 229 churches and 154 ordained and licensed ministers (see http://www.adventiststatistics.org/view_Summary.asp?FieldID=D_TED; the figures include the Republic of Ireland). This is in contrast to the USA where it is a mid-ranking denomination with about 954,000 members (end of 2004). The movement in the UK is also understood to include a lot of black people. It has long been a significant denomination in the West Indies and nowadays has a substantial number of followers in Africa. The Adventists are best known for taking Saturday rather than Sunday as their day of rest.
The Seventh Day Adventist movement is not typical of right wing, evangelical fundamentalist churches in the USA. In some ways it is mildly liberal (using the American meaning of the term). Indeed, part of the denomination is considered to be strongly liberal and its adherents are known as Progressive Adventists. The Adventists are also strongly non-political and strongly oppose dominionist theology. Whilst it is evangelical, it is not really perceived as fundamentalist. It has a very strong pacifist streak (and a vegetarian streak as well) and is very strong on promoting religious freedom for all. There is quite a wide diversity of belief within the Adventist movement.
It owns several universities in the USA. Unlike some of the better known fundamentalist universities such as Regent, Liberty and Bob Jones, they have a high reputation for academic excellence in a number of disciplines – notably health care. The Adventist Loma Linda University used to be called the College of Medical Evangelist.
However, it is strongly creationist and has relatively recently reaffirmed its position on the matter - see http://www.adventist.org/beliefs/statements/main_stat54.html. It also has its own creation science organisation, the Geoscience Research Institute (http://www.grisda.org) based at Loma Linda University in California.
The Geoscience Research Institute accepts that the world may be billions of years old. It’s sometimes described as an Old Earth Creationist organisation. In practice, though, it is YEC in that it believes life has only been around since the time of Adam, 6,000-10,000 years ago. From our understanding the Adventists are relatively open about young earth creationism and a lot of members do not accept it despite the movement’s official position and long history of supporting it.
However the Seventh Day Adventist moreover is, arguably, the front running and leading denomination behind the growth of belief in young earth creationism from the 1950s. BCSE is concerned that at least two of its members, professorial academics, in the UK are actively involved in trying to get creationism/ID taught in science lessons in state schools. The Adventists in the UK, like their counterparts in the USA, have their own educational institutions as well. This includes two secondary schools and Newbold College in Bracknell, Berkshire.
Newbold does not offer degrees in pure science but two of its former senior staff, Dr Colin Mitchell and Dr Albert Waite are known YECers.
The two secondary schools are Stanborough Secondary School in Watford (this is a private school) and John Loughborough School in London (Tottenham). The latter is a smallish state funded (voluntary aided) school. It has come under criticism for teaching young earth creationism. (see http://education.independent.co.uk/schools/article485814.ece and http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,669846,00.html.)
Stanborough is, perhaps, significant in that it was once an Adventist missionary school where George McCready Price taught for a while.
The origins of belief in young earth creationism in the Seventh Day Adventist Church go back a long way.
In 1864 the founder of the Church, Ellen G White claimed she had had a vision from God who showed here how he created the universe, earth and life in six 24 hour days as stated in Genesis. The vision apparently explained how fossils were later created by Noah’s Flood.
One of the people who was to follow this up was George McCready Price. Price, also a Seventh Day Adventist, was an amateur armchair geologist and pseudo-scientist but that didn’t stop his book, The New Geology, being published in 1923. It was widely ridiculed and dismissed by professional geologists and scientists.
Unfortunately, though, some fundamentalists loved it. The book provided an simple explanation which was in accordance with a literal interpretation of the bible and, from a fundamentalist viewpoint, tidied up a load of lose ends. One of the people who took to it was Henry Morris who was later to re-establish the modern young earth creationist movement.
In essence Price was claiming that the world (indeed, universe) was only 6,000-10,000 years old (based on the work of Archbishop Ussher) and that 4,400 years or so ago (in 2,349 BC according to Ussher) there was a catastrophic flood (Noah’s Flood) which accounted for all of the fossil record. However, until the early 1960s this belief was largely limited to the Seventh Day Adventist movement.
Generally speaking until Morris came along and popularised “Flood Geology”, fundamentalists had three alternative opinions on creationism based on the Book of Genesis; Gap theory, Day Age Creationism and Flood Geology:
1. Gap “theory” argued that the first chapter of Genesis described two creations, the first "in the beginning," at some unspecified time in the distant past. The second was about 6,000 years ago, when God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This, roughly speaking, is the position that appears to be held by the Geoscience Research Institute (located at Loma Linda University, owned by the Seventh Day Adventists).
2. Day Age Creationism argued that the length of the seven days in the Genesis account were not 24 hours each but millions of years.
3. Flood Geology. Morris and Whitcomb basically rehashed McCready’s rubbish (and, in the process, producing more rubbish) and got it to largely over-ride the other two in acceptance by and amongst American fundamentalists.
Until Morris and Whitcomb came along, fundamentalists tended to go for either Gap “theory” or Day Age “theory”. It was no big deal because creationism had been blown out of the water anyway by the 1925 Scopes Trial.
All this was to change when Morris co-authored ‘The Genesis Flood’ with Whitcomb.
Published in 1961, this basically not only popularised Price’s “Flood Geology” crackpottery but was the foundation upon which the whole of today’s creationist movement is based. Morris went on to create what became the Institute for Creation Research which, in turn spawned Ken Ham’s presence in America and later Answers in Genesis.
The following is an edited and summarised version of an Associated Press report dated 4th November 2004. It explains the Adventist re-affirmation of its belief in creationism.
…..the top world authorities of the Seventh-day Adventist Church have reaffirmed the faith's insistence that fidelity to the Bible requires belief in "a literal, recent, six-day creation," no matter what conventional science says.
Recent means that life on Earth began over the relatively short time period suggested by a strictly literal reading of the Bible, "probably 7,000 to 10,000 years," though some Adventists think the planet itself could be billions of years old, explains Angel Rodriguez, director of the church's Biblical Research Institute. And six days means just that - "literal 24-hour days forming a week identical in time to what we now experience as a week," the Adventist decree says. The church's statement came last month, after three years of special conferences on the issue of creation. It was approved at a meeting of the Adventists' 293-member Executive Committee at the Silver Spring, Md., headquarters of the church.
The church's Geoscience Research Institute - which develops materials to support Genesis literalism - inaugurated the conferences, but no particular event sparked it, Rodriguez said. Rather, church leaders are aware that increasing numbers of Adventists worldwide face questions at college and "need to know how we deal with these complex issues." The statement is meant to stand as a definitive directive. It follows decades of debate over Darwin's evolution theory in American churches and schools - and certainly won't be the last word.
The Adventist church's very name proclaims its strict observance of Saturday as the Sabbath, which is fused with a literalism on creation. That, in turn, "interlocks with other doctrines" - as the new statement puts it - creating the foundation for Adventist belief. Editor Bonnie Dwyer of Spectrum, an independent Adventist magazine, calls it a doctrinal domino theory that hinges on creationism.
Why is this one belief so particularly strong for Adventists? The answer stems from the faith's special belief that founder Ellen G. White was a modern prophet who correctly interpreted the Bible. White (1827-1915) was a native of Maine and prolific writer who reported some 2,000 divinely given visions and dreams. In one, White wrote in 1864, she was "carried back to the creation and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week."
Yet at Adventist colleges, according to a 1994 survey of 121 science teachers, only 43 percent agreed with the church's view that "God created live organisms during six days less than 10,000 years ago." Nonetheless, the new policy states that the church expects "all boards and educators at Seventh-day Adventist institutions at all levels to continue upholding and advocating the Church's position on origins." Rodriguez says teachers might harbour private questions but "still support the church in the classroom." Adventism "is not beginning a witch hunt," he adds, and lets teachers decide on their own whether they're comfortable with church policy.
(Editorial comment: the claim that “only” 43% of science teachers at Adventist colleges were creationists is truly astonishing. Amongst working scientists in the USA only a very tiny percentage are creationists. The opposite appears to be the case in Adventist colleges – they have a staggeringly high percentage of creationist scientist.
