persons, and yet but one person. S. D. Adventists hold that God and Christ are one in the sense that Christ prayed that his disciples might be one; i.e. one in spirit, purpose, and labor. The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 17, 1883
This statement was a helpful clarification for its time, but it was also deficient in its grasp of the issue and came far short of understanding where the theological solution lay. While it clarified the core concern of the Adventist pioneers, it also revealed the blind spot that existed at this stage of the church’s theological development.
On the one hand, the statement insisted that Adventists believed Christ to be God, which was a vitally needed clarification. The statement also made clear that it was precisely because of this belief that Adventists could not accept a “Trinitarianism which insists that God, and Christ, and the Holy Spirit are three persons, and yet but one person.” That is, they rightly rejected modalism. So far, so good. But then the statement mistakenly assumes that in order to be true to Scripture—a noble aspiration—they must hold that Christ, while fully God, must have been brought into existence by the Father. This, they felt compelled to believe, due to the fact that He is said to have been “begotten.”
What was going on here?
Well, the Advent pioneers were Bible students in process, part of a young movement that was finding its theological way forward in a world full of bad theology. At this point in their study, they saw the New Testament occurrence of the word “begotten,” but they saw it in isolation from the larger Old Testament narrative. As a result, they felt obligated to interpret “begotten” as a description of Christ’s ontological and chronological origins. The mistake is understandable, given the fact that they did not take into account what the word “begotten” means in the bigger story of the Bible. Due to their blind spot regarding the overall sonship narrative of Scripture, they did not know what to do with the fact that the New Testament designates Christ as the “Son of God.” So they felt, in their loyalty to Scripture, that they must believe that Christ was both fully divine and, yet, somehow had been brought into existence at some “point.” The early Advent pioneers were headed in the right direction, but they still had a ways to go in working out the implications of the divinity of Christ.
The only way to move forward would be to pan out far enough to see the larger biblical picture, which, within its own internal narrative logic, clearly defines what the story itself means by designating Christ as God’s “only begotten Son.” Failing to do so inevitably generates odd metaphysical, extra-biblical, even spiritualistic ideas. This becomes evident as we now consider the strained efforts of Ellet Joseph Waggoner and Uriah Smith.
Ellet Joseph Waggoner
Ellet Joseph Waggoner was a second-generation Adventist physician, preacher, and writer. He is best known for his efforts to introduce the good news of righteousness by faith into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Inheriting Arian leanings from his theological forebears, he also dabbled in trying to defend the idea that Christ, sometime in eternity past, began to exist by some kind of birthing action on the Father’s part. Here’s what he had to say on the matter:
In arguing the perfect equality of the Father and the Son, and the fact that Christ is in very nature God, we do not design to be understood as teaching that the Father was not before the Son. It should not be necessary to guard this point, lest some should think that the Son existed as soon as the Father; yet some go to that extreme, which adds nothing to the dignity of Christ, but rather detracts from the honor due him, since many throw the whole thing away rather than accept a theory so obviously out of harmony with the language of Scripture, that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. He was begotten, not created. He is of the substance of the Father, so that in his very nature he is God; and since this is so “it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell.” Col. 1:19. . . . While both are of the same nature, the Father is first in point of time. He is also greater in that he had no beginning, while Christ’s personality had a beginning. E.J. Waggoner, The Signs of the Times, April 8, 1889
All things proceed ultimately from God, the Father; even Christ Himself proceeded and came forth from the Father, but it has pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell, and that He should be the direct, immediate Agent in every act of creation. Our object in this investigation is to set forth Christ’s rightful position of equality with the Father, in order that His power to redeem may be the better appreciated. E.J. Waggoner, Christ and His Righteousness, p. 19 (1890)
The Scriptures declare that Christ is “the only begotten son of God.” He is begotten, not created. As to when He was begotten, it is not for us to inquire, nor could our minds grasp it if we were told. The prophet Micah tells us all that we can know about it in these words, “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall He come forth unto Me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from the days of eternity.” Micah 5:2, margin. There was a time when Christ proceeded forth and came from God, from the bosom of the Father (John 8:42; 1:18), but that time was so far back in the days of eternity that to finite comprehension it is practically without beginning. ibid., pp. 21-22 (1890)
He possesses immortality in His own right and can confer immortality upon others. Life inheres in Him, so that it cannot be taken from Him, but having voluntarily laid it down, He can take it again. ibid., p. 22 (1890)
Let no one, therefore, who honors Christ at all, give Him less honor than He gives the Father, for this would be to dishonor the Father by just so much, but let all, with the angels in heaven, worship the Son, having no fear that they are worshiping and serving the creature instead of the Creator. ibid., p. 24 (1890)
Waggoner is attempting an unnecessary balancing act, holding onto what he thinks is a biblical idea of God the Father giving birth to God the Son, while simultaneously advancing in his thinking to affirm the complete divinity of Christ. He is inching forward, but he’s stuck on the word “begotten.” Therefore, he misunderstands the Sonship of Christ. It is painful to watch him struggle. Right outside of his peripheral vision is the answer to the problem he is attempting to solve. All he has to do is look backward from the New Testament into the Old, but he never does. Nor did any of the Advent pioneers before him. They all got stuck on the word “begotten,” and so felt obligated to invest the word with a metaphysical meaning that Scripture never probes.
Failing to grasp the larger biblical narrative of the covenantal sonship lineage, Waggoner trips all over himself with embarrassing contradictions. We are not to understand, he insists, that “the Son existed as soon as the Father,” because, of course, “the Father was . . . before the Son,” in as much as there is an obvious chronology of existence in a Father-Son relationship.
But then, sensing that it makes no real sense for there to be a created God, Waggoner has to insist that “begotten” must mean something mysteriously different than the word “created,” although he can’t make sense of the notion. And why can’t he make sense of it? Well, because to not exist and then to be made to exist, whether you call the causal event “begetting” or “creating,” are one and the same thing conceptually. On some level, he knows this. So he has to pull an idea out of thin air—and it is very thin air, indeed. He says that the “time” at which God gave birth to Christ “was so far back in the days of eternity that to finite comprehension it is practically without beginning.” In laymen’s terms, that’s what is called, philosophical gobbledygook. It is basically an exercise in saying nothing meaningful while attempting to sound like you are offering an intelligent explanation. But it is not harmless philosophical gobbledygook. To hold the idea that a God can be made to exist after having not existed, is, as we will soon see, the precursor to the deification of human beings, known as pantheism. Waggoner is suggesting that deity is a quality of being that can be brought into existence, and that this is what God did with Christ. God gave birth to a previously non-existent God, according to Waggoner. Not surprisingly, then, pantheism, or at least panentheism, is exactly where Dr. Waggoner ended up.
There is no biblical warrant for Waggoner’s claim that the one we know as Christ had an ancient point of beginning. Even the few passages of Scripture he uses to support the idea do not say what he tries to make them say. He is clearly coming to the Bible with an idea and then throwing