Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call
featuring T.A. McMahon. I'm Gary Carmichael; we're glad you could tune
in. In today's program, Tom begins a two-part series with guest Dale Ratzlaff as they address the question: Are Seventh-day Adventists Christians? And now, here's Tom.
Tom: Thanks, Gary.
Today and next week, we'll be discussing the theology of Seventh-day
Adventism, and my guest for our subject is Dale Ratzlaff.
He's a former SDA pastor trained in Seventh-day Adventist schools and
seminary. He's the author of numerous articles and books addressing
Adventist doctrines, including
Cultic Doctrine of Seventh-day Adventism and Sabb
Dale, welcome back to Search the Scriptures 24/7.
Dale: Good to
be with you today, and let me just say this: I really appreciate your
ministry to educate evangelicals, and others as well, to the cultic
nature of historic Adventism. So many pastors we meet, they tell us
something like this: "Well, don't you know that Seventh-day Adventists
are evangelicals who worship on Saturday?"
as if that's the only difference, and that is not true at all. There's
all kinds of differences once you get into Seventh-day Adventist
theology.
Tom: And the Lord willing, we're going to point out some of these that evangelicals are naïve, certainly ignorant, about. So...
But,
Dale, as you know, we're living in incredibly confusing times. I mean,
decades ago, you were delivered from the false teachings of Adventism,
and I was delivered from the bondage and false gospel of Roman
Catholicism 40 years ago. Yet today, more and more of those who claim to
be Bible-believing Christians consider SDAs and Catholics to be their
brothers and sisters in Christ. Now, if that's the case, and it could be
for some, what's the criterion for a Seventh-day Adventist to be a
brother or sister in Christ? In other words, what must he or she believe
in order to be saved according to SDA doctrine?
Dale: Well,
let me just say this: the Adventist Church right now is divided into
many different subgroups. There are some who actually believe the true
Pauline gospel of justification by faith alone. I have several friends
in the Adventist Church who hold the gospel true. However, even these
people have tremendous ethical problems in that they support the Church,
which has cultic teachings right in their fundamental beliefs, and when
they support the Church, I might say that many of the members of the
churches don't realize that they don't support the total teachings of
Adventism.
But
anyway, my conclusion is that historic Adventism is a cult in that the
gospel is absent there or either totally compromised. But I believe that
evangelical Adventists ought to renounce three things as error if they
claim to believe the true gospel: 1) The whole 1844 closing of the
heavenly sanctuary in the Investigative Judgment. Now, that's a big
thing in itself. It is not only unbiblical, but it compromises the
gospel in many, many ways.
2)
They should make it clear that they reject the prophetic claims and
ministry of Ellen G. White as a teacher of truth. Now granted, she said
many good things, but they're intertwined and mixed in with terribly
anti-gospel error.
And 3) They should openly reject the idea that Seventh-day Sabbath is the seal of God and Sunday
worship is the mark of the beast. These three things, however, are the
foundational pillars upon which the Seventh-day Adventist Church was
founded, and they are dead wrong and should be openly renounced by
anyone who claims to be a believer in the Pauline gospel of
justification by faith.
Tom: Wow, that's stated as clear and plain as it could be, Dale. That's terrific insight that you've given us.
But, Dale, you and I believe in good works. Ephesians 2:10
says that believers are "created in Christ Jesus unto good works which
God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." So why aren't
good works sufficient for salvation?
Dale: Well,
for those of us who - and I'm assuming you as well - who came from a
works-oriented path and then discovered the gospel, it's fairly easy to
answer in this respect: there are three main reasons that works are not
sufficient for salvation. First, one never knows when he's done enough
good works to be accepted, and that's the underlying problem of no
assurance in the Adventist Church or in the Catholic Church.
Second,
even though we have been born again, we still live in bodies with a
sinful nature that must be disciplined, and Scripture makes it clear
that we will continue to fall short of God's perfect ideal - that's in
Romans 3.
And
third, Paul makes very clear in Romans and Galatians and elsewhere that
if we try to add to our...by adding to our good works for the salvation
of God and the right standing with God, we only frustrate the Gospel of
Christ. For example, Galatians 2:20,
Paul says this: "I do not nullify the grace of God, for if
righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly." Now,
good works should be manifested in the life of a Christian, but they are
never, never the ground of our assurance of eternal life with Christ.
That is found only in the Person of Jesus Christ alone who rose from the
dead.
Tom: Yeah, amen, and amen to that.
Dale
you grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist. Now, was there anything in
particular that troubled you about the Church's teachings or practices
that caused you to question it early on?
Dale: Well, I
often had conflicts when I would read Ellen White, but I thought it was
my lack of understanding. But when I had a call to the ministry and I
was studying Greek... I remember the day that I tried to translate
Ephesians 2:8, and we know what that says: "For by grace you have been
saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God."
Well,
Ellen White, the prophetess of Adventism, wrote that we should never,
never say that we are saved, and she said that because once we believe
we're saved, she said, then we don't have a motivation for good works,
which is exactly the opposite of what it really is.
Anyway,
this text in Ephesians says we have been saved, and in my Greek class I
found out this statement is in a perfect tense in Greek, which means it
happened in the past and has an ongoing result. So we live in the
ongoing state of having been saved, and that is really good news. That
was the first little information I had that the Seventh-day Adventist
Church was wrong. Now, it sounds crazy to live all those many years and
not realize it, but I began...I went up to my Greek teacher, and I said,
"Now, this must be wrong. Is there some other manuscript evidence that
we could use to show that this is true?"
And
I'm glad for his response. He said, "Dale, we need to get our theology
from Scripture and not try to make the Bible say what we think it says."
Tom: Wow.
That's great. So then - but you mentioned earlier that you had a calling
to the ministry. What finally caused you then to leave Seventh-day
Adventism?
Dale: Well,
there's quite a bit, but I'll try to summarize it. I've written a whole
book on that, but again, I left the Church in the early '80s when there
was a lot of discussion regarding 1844, the opening of the heavenly
sanctuary and investigative judgment doctrines. And I had an opportunity
to study this for a thousand-page manuscript that he wrote on the
errors of this teaching, and when I read that, I said, "Wow, I can never
teach this again."
And
about that time the conference president said, "Well, you have to
promise to teach all 27 fundamental beliefs of the SDA Church." There's
28 now, but at that time there were 27.
And I said, "I'm going to refuse to do this unless you can show me how to do it from Scripture."
And,
well, I met with a number of people including the chair of the
Department of Theology at Loma Linda University, and after hours of
discussion, they all basically said in private, "You can't get this from
the Bible." I was forced to resign for not teaching what the leaders
knew was not true, or [was actually] error! In private they admitted it
was error, and I was fired for not teaching the error that they knew it
was.
Tom: You know,
that's amazing, and it just shows you the heart of man, because we're
talking about Seventh-day Adventism, but I could give you the similar
examples within Mormonism, within Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on. It's
like they become a part of a club, and they just want to make
adjustments to keep the club rolling. I don't think that's an unfair
statement about what we're seeing.
Dale: Exactly.
In fact, my ministerial secretary (I won't give you his name over the
air, but he's now deceased), he asked me to go for a little walk because
he knew I was struggling, and he said, "Dale," he said, "we both know
the doctrine is wrong." He was speaking about the Investigative Judgment
doctrine. But he said, "We're too old to do anything about it, and too
old to get a job outside the church, and just do what you can with a
clear conscience and try not to make any waves. You'll be fine."
And I told him, "Harold, God called me to preach the gospel, not to cover up error."
I'm so glad that I left that Church.
Tom: Yeah. But
it's amazing, like...I think you said your Greek professor, we do find
people within. Now, they're accountable to the Lord staying in whatever
it might be, but I've seen within Roman Catholicism priests - they know
they're in error. You just...a reading of the Scriptures, and whether it
be the homilies or whether it be the gospel or whatever, they're going
through this. But one of the things that keeps them from it is, "Well,
what do I do now? Well, I've committed my life to this priesthood, and
where do I go from here?" So...but truth has to win out.
But
anyway, Dale, you've given us some terrific information. But could you
give us, for listeners who are not familiar with the history of
Seventh-day Adventism, could you give us kind of a brief overview of how
it started, and maybe right up to Ellen G. White? I don't know...
Dale: Okay,
Adventism started with William Miller, who was a Baptist preacher in the
1880s, and - I should say, 1820s and '30s-and he came up with 15
proofs, supposedly, that Christ was coming in 1843. And he had a large
following - this is in the Eastern part, Northeastern part, of the
United States. (By the way, he was also a 33rd degree
Mason, if that made any difference.) Anyway, 1843 came and Christ
didn't, and a small group of Adventists - and at that time it wasn't
Seventh-day Adventists, just Adventists - they, by proof-texting, took
the cleansing mentioned in Daniel 8:14,
which referred to the cleansing of the Temple from Antiochus Epiphanes,
but they forgot about that, or never learned it, and tried to associate
it with the Day of Atonement, the cleansing of the sanctuary in
Leviticus 16. And one of their members by the name of Snow said he
checked with the Jews, and they said that the Day of Atonement was going
to be October 22, 1844, and that was wrong in itself. But that set off a
huge - you might say, erratic bunch of people just in fanaticism
saying, "Christ is coming October 22."
Well,
he didn't obviously. But the next day, a couple of people who stayed up
all night worrying and wondering, one of them claimed to have a vision
in the cornfield - who had never had a vision before or after, didn't
have any prophetic credentials, and he said that he thought he saw
Christ going from one apartment in the heavenly sanctuary to the other
to start a work of judgment. Well, Adventists picked up on that, because
it gave them an excuse so that they weren't really wrong; they just had
prophesied a wrong event at the right time. And the Jehovah's Witnesses
did a very similar thing.
Anyway,
that started the Seventh Day Adventist Church - wasn't named that yet,
and about that time Ellen White had her first vision, and she said that
God showed her that this whole teaching about the heavenly sanctuary and
all was of God. At first they believed that anybody who didn't accept
their view, the door of mercy was shut - called the "shut-door-of-mercy
teaching." Later, they tried to say that they gave it up, and then Ellen
White had a vision that said, "No, we still believe in the shut door."
And they went like that from 1844 to about 1851, and finally they gave
it up because they had to get their children in, and some of their
children were born after 1844.
And
then a few years later, they morphed that shut-door teaching into the
Investigative Judgment, and that, again, Ellen White kept having
visions, and they believed that she was a true messenger of God, and
they also added the seventh-day Sabbath. And one time she said that "our
message is the shut door and the seventh-day Sabbath." That was their
main message. In fact, a person can read the early writings of Ellen
White and you will find almost no gospel at all until 1888, which is
really interesting. It was founded based on works, keeping the Sabbath,
keeping the Ten Commandments, and so on.
Tom: Right.
Dale: Well,
they have reinterpreted that several different times, and Ellen White,
they have rewritten some of her things: they have left out passages of
Scripture, they have suppressed some of her early visions, Walter Ray
has shown - and he is now deceased - shown that she copied, plagiarized,
huge amounts of material.
Now,
there's a lot more to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but they still
hold to the 1844 Investigative Judgment, and in their evangelistic
series they still teach that Sabbath is the seal of God and Sunday is the mark of the beast, especially in third-world countries. I could give more, but maybe that's enough?
Tom: Yeah,
well, it's fascinating. I mean, it's sad, but to know these things, and
then to see it continue, there's almost an irony, because a movement
that began with false prophecies, which they had to keep adjusting and
so on... Let's bring it right up to today: These incredible fliers come
to you in the mail, and they direct you to a meeting that's going to
talk about prophecy in a big way, and rarely - and I don't remember...it
[usually] ends up being in a Seventh-day Adventist Church, but you
never see that in all of the promotional material. Yet starting with
false prophecy, and now they're trying to major in prophecy with regard
to that, there's an irony there I think.
Dale: Yes, and
often the Revelation Seminars (they have different names), they
usually...the first few meetings are in a neutral place so people don't
realize it's Seventh-day Adventist. But now, and we've given them so
much hassle about that, they're beginning now to list in the programs
that it is Seventh-day Adventist.
Tom: Oh, okay.
Dale: It's fairly new. But in other countries, they don't do that. So...
Tom: Yeah. As I
said, I know about much of this just because of my involvement in
ministry dealing with cults and false teachings, aberrational teachings,
and so on, but I'm still edified by what you're presenting here.
Now, but there is one thing a little bit shocking, especially - not
for me, but for most people out there who regard Seventh-day Adventism:
"Oh, it's just another Christian denomination." But your book Cultic Doctrine of Seventh Day Adventism, using the term "cult," why - I'm sure you took a lot of heat for that, but why did you decide to use the term "cult?"
Dale: Well,
let me give you a little idea how the cultic doctrines started, and it's
not in my notes, that I'm just going to give it to you. I was pastoring
in Sedona - it's an evangelical church [in] Sedona, Arizona - and one
of my members was asked to study with an Adventist doctor, MD, retired,
and they wanted me to go along. And so I said, "Sure, let's go along,
and let's let them lead."
Well,
it happened to be on the Investigative Judgment 1844, and I knew that
well. I'd read thousands of pages, and that was why I left the Church.
And he pulled out the Clear Word Bible and said, "This is the most
trustworthy Bible," and he read Daniel 8:14
in the Clear Word, and something swelled up in me. I said, "This must
stop. People are reading that Adventist Bible and thinking that all
their doctrines are biblical." And they have actually put Ellen White's
theology right in the text without any notes at all.
Tom: Wow!
Dale: And that started me writing Cultic Doctrine, and I wrote that in six months
while I was pastoring, and I have over 700 footnotes, and it shows
beyond any shadow of doubt that historic Adventism was a cult and it's
changed its view many, many times. And I encourage anybody who has a
question about Seventh-day Adventism to get that book, because very few
Adventists who are honest will be able to read that book and still
believe in the Adventist message.
Tom: Yeah,
I've never heard of the Clear Word Bible. Somebody says, "Well, you want
a Bible that's so far removed, that would be the Bible of the Jehovah's
Witnesses, the New World Translation." But honestly, Dale, this is new
to me, but I find it eye opening! Incredible!
Dale: Well,
[unintelligible] it's called the Clear Word, and my copy - I think it
was 1993, I think I bought mine - it said it's the Clear Word Bible.
Well, it was made - well, I could say "written" - by the chairman of the
Department of Theology at Seventh-day Adventist University. So he has a
Ph.D. and he has his Master of Theology, so he knows the original
languages, okay? And he has garbled any place where the Bible disagrees
with Adventism; he has rewritten the Bible.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Daniel 8:14
is the central pillar of Adventism - let me just read that one. That
was the one that lit me on fire to write this book. The New American
Standard says, "He said to me, 'For 2,300 evenings and mornings; then
the holy place will be properly restored.'"
Okay,
here's the Clear Word: "After two thousand, three hundred prophetic
days (or two thousand, three hundred years), God will step in, proclaim
the truth about Himself, and restore the ministry of the Sanctuary in
heaven to its rightful place. This is when the judgment will begin, of
which the cleansing of the earthly sanctuary was a type." Now how's that
for reading theology into the Bible?
Tom: There you
go. That's - we call that isogesis, right? You're not interested in
what God's Word says; you've got your own ideas, which you impose upon
the Scriptures.
Dale: Yeah, I
call it absolute deception. For example, I don't know if you have any
time for this, but [in] Revelation where it talks about John being in
the Spirit on the Lord's Day? Here's the way they put it: "One Sabbath
morning when I had gone to the rocky island shore to meditate and
worship, I suddenly heard a voice behind me that sounded as loud as a
trumpet."
Tom: Oh, brother.
Dale: So they
picked the Lord's Day, changed it to Sabbath morning; they've added
"meditate and worship," which is not in the Scripture, you know, in the
text in Greek, to make it appear that John was spending Sabbath up on
the shore meditating Sabbath, you know, on the Sabbath.
Tom: Yeah.
Well, you know, it's so flowery, I mean, the language, it almost rivals
The Message, which is another abomination. But wow, that's really
fascinating.
Dale: Just
part of Jude 9: "In contrast to these ungodly men is the Lord Jesus
Christ, also called Michael, the archangel in charge of the entire
angelic host."
Tom: Unbelievable. Well, you know, we've got about a minute left. My guest is Dale Ratzlaff.
We've been talking about Seventh-day Adventism. He was a pastor trained
in Seventh-day Adventism and has written a number of books, really
important books, because, you know, folks, in this day and age of the
apostasy, the Scripture says, "The time will come when they will not
endure sound doctrine." And when we are allowing these mixtures, whether
you call it friendship evangelism or whatever it might be, we need to
deal with the truth, and what Dale has been presenting to us today just
lays it out as clear as it can be.
So
we're out of time with this session, but I look forward for Dale to
continue with this next week, the Lord willing. So thank you for your
input, and look forward to next week.
Dale: Well, God bless you.
Gary: You've been listening to a special edition of Search the Scriptures 24/7 with T.A. McMahon, a radio ministry of The Berean Call.
We offer a wide variety of resources to help you in your study of God's
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at 800-937-6638, or visit our website at thebereancall.org. I'm Gary Carmichael. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you can join us again next week. Until then, we encourage you to Search the Scriptures 24/7.
