Said another way, the Seventh-day Adventist Church does not hold a modalism view of the Trinity and, therefore, does not hold the view Bates and the other pioneers were pushing back on.
Bates, like Loughborough, was in process as a Bible student. His core concern was the same as that expressed by Loughborough and, therefore, was a theological bridge to the current view of the church. We are indebted to Bates for driving us away from modalism toward a doctrine of God that is distinctly interpersonal. How else would it be possible to say that “God is love” with any coherent meaning.
R.F. Cottrell
A year later, Roswell Fenner Cottrell expressed, in a less articulate form, the same concern expressed by Loughborough and Bates. You will see that he also displays an effort to understand the Sonship of Christ, but is not biblically literate enough to work out its meaning. He seems to be aware of his deficiency in that he settles for accepting the fact that Christ is God and, yet, the Son of God, simply because the Bible says so: “If the Scriptures say” a thing, “I believe it,” he reasons. Cottrell recognizes the challenge entailed in affirming the two apparently contradictory declarations of Scripture, but all he can do is agree with the two propositions without understanding how both can be true. Track with his thinking here:
But if I am asked what I think of Jesus Christ, my reply is, I believe all that the Scriptures say of him. If the testimony represents him as being in glory with the Father before the world was, I believe it. If it is said that he was in the beginning with God, that he was God, that all things were made by him and for him, and that without him was not anything made that was made, I believe it. If the Scriptures say he is the Son of God, I believe it. If it is declared that the Father sent his Son into the world, I believe he had a Son to send. R.F. Cottrell, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 1, 1869
That one person is three persons, and that three persons are only one person, is the doctrine which we claim is contrary to reason and common sense. The being and attributes of God are above, beyond, out of reach of my sense and reason, yet I believe them: But the doctrine I object to is contrary, yes, that is the word, to the very sense and reason that God has himself implanted in us. Such a doctrine he does not ask us to believe. A miracle is beyond our comprehension, but we all believe in miracles who believe our own senses. What we see and hear convinces us that there is a power that effected the most wonderful miracle of creation. But our Creator has made it an absurdity to us that one person should be three persons, and three persons but one person; and in his revealed word he has never asked us to believe it. . . .
But to hold the doctrine of the Trinity is not so much an evidence of evil intention as of intoxication from that wine of which all the nations have drunk. The fact that this was one of the leading doctrines, if not the very chief, upon which the bishop of Rome was exalted to popedom, does not say much in its favor. . . .
Revelation goes beyond us; but in no instance does it go contrary to right reason and common sense. God has not claimed, as the popes have, that he could “make justice of injustice,” nor has he, after teaching us to count, told us that there is no difference between the singular and plural numbers. Let us believe all he has revealed, and add nothing to it. R.F. Cottrell, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 6, 1869
Cottrell seeks to protect the individual personhood of Christ, like Loughborough and Bates, which is a good thing. But he gets trapped in a theological cul-de-sac by committing to a simplistic approach that fails to consider what the Bible itself means by designating Jesus as the Son of God. He sees isolated verses without considering their larger narrative context. He believes “all that Scripture says” about Christ, but he clearly does not yet know all that Scripture says about Christ.
On the one hand, Cottrell affirms the divinity of Christ, since the Bible explicitly states that Christ is God. But then he leaps forward with, “If the Scriptures say he is the Son of God, I believe it. If it is declared that the Father sent his Son into the world, I believe he had a Son to send.” There is a glaring blind spot on display here, evident to those who have taken pains to understand what Scripture says about the Sonship of Christ. We cannot fault Cottrell for not knowing what he didn’t know, but what he didn’t know created significant problems for him.
Rather than panning out to ask Scripture what it means by calling Christ both “God” and the “Son of God,” Cottrell simply assumes that if Jesus is called “Son,” that must mean He was, in some sense, at some point, brought into existence by the Father as a divine son. This conclusion assumes that divinity is a quality of being that can be brought into existence, or conferred upon a created being, which is the premise of pantheism, as we will soon discover. Of course, Cottrell does not discern this implication. But by operating on this assumption, he misses the whole point of the Sonship of Christ as Scripture itself frames it. He sees individual trees (verses), but he does not see the forest (the story that informs the verses).
The Sonship of Christ
Let’s briefly review the sonship narrative of Scripture for our own sake, in order to highlight the big story that Cottrell and the other pioneers overlooked.
When the writers of the New Testament call Jesus “the Son of God,” they are consciously working out His Sonship identity from the Old Testament script, which runs like this:
God created the first man, Adam, in His own image, and that man was “the son of God” (Genesis 1:26; Luke 3:38).
Having fallen into sin, the son of God, Adam, transferred his rightful “dominion” over the earth to Satan (Genesis 1:28; Luke 4:5-6).
God then promised to redeem Adam’s fall by the birth of a child through the womb of a woman, a second Adam, a new son of God, and thus to save humanity from within our own genetic realm (Genesis 3:15).
The promise of a new son of God was then proclaimed to Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 12:1-3). The outworking of this promise is literally the entire point of the Old Testament story, and its fulfillment in Christ is literally the whole point of the New Testament (2 Corinthians 1:20).
The covenant couple—Abraham and Sarah—give birth to Isaac, who is identified in Scripture as the “son” of “promise” (Genesis 21:1-7; Galatians 4:23). The story clearly centers on a succession of sons. At this point, the concept of primogeniture emerges in the narrative—that is, the birthright of the “firstborn” son drives the story forward (Genesis 27:19, 32; 43:33; 48:14-18). The firstborn son is the channel through which the covenant promise is to be passed on from generation to generation.
Isaac and Rebekah have a son, in the succession of covenant sons, whom they name Jacob. Jacob’s twelve sons become a nation and are corporately called by God, “My son, My firstborn” (Exodus 4:22-23). God also tells them, I “begot you” to a covenant purpose distinct from all the other nations (Deuteronomy 32:18). And it is right here that we have the origin of the language and concept of God’s only begotten son. Understood in context, this phrase means God’s unique covenant son, not in some sort of mystical sense, as if God literally birthed Israel into existence, but rather that God brought forth Israel as a nation for His covenant purpose. Likewise, this language does not indicate that God literally birthed Christ into existence as a secondary deity sometime in eternity past, but rather that Christ was born to the world within the covenant lineage of the human procreation process.
Next in the narrative—through the lineage of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Israel—David is covenantally “begotten” as God’s “son” and thus is a type of the coming Messiah (Psalm 2:1-7; 89:19-29). Following David in the covenant lineage, Solomon is also designated by God as “My son” (1 Chronicles 22:10).
When we read the whole story, the point and meaning of Scripture’s sonship language could not be clearer.
Finally, just as promised, the long-awaited Messianic Son of God is born of a woman into the world. As the New Testament opens, we are told explicitly that He is the long-awaited “Son of David,” “Son of Abraham,” and, as such, “the Son of God” (Matthew 1:1; 2:15; 3:17; 4:3). We are also told, just as explicitly, that He is none other than God Himself in the flesh (Matthew 1:23; John 1:1-5; 1 Timothy 3:16). Jesus is the Son of God in the covenant sense, as the fulfillment of the