both (Psalm 139:7), was in existence also. Uriah Smith, Looking Unto Jesus, p. 10 (1898)
With the Son, the evolution of deity, as deity, ceased. All else, of things animate or inanimate, has come in by creation of the Father and the Son—the Father the antecedent cause, the Son the acting agent through whom all has been wrought. Uriah Smith, ibid., p. 13 (1898)
Smith tries so hard to make sense of Jesus being God and yet begotten, that he gets himself into some deep trouble. The man was a prooftext machine. More than any other pioneer of the Advent movement, he perfected the art of assembling Bible verses to prove doctrinal points. To this day, many of the prooftext arguments he formulated more than a century ago are used by Adventist preachers. But for all its helpfulness, if we are not careful to remain theologically obedient to the narrative of Scripture, the prooftext method carries great liability.
Prooftexting as a primary method of Bible study can create myopic vision and easily lead to the manufacturing of false teachings. The truth of Scripture belongs to those who read the whole story and comprehend the big picture. Micromanaging verses to extract from them more than they actually say is the breeding ground of heresy. If I am not careful to take in the entire book, I can use the Bible to contradict the Bible. Scripture is saying something in its big picture, but I can use a few biblical texts to build an argument that defies that big picture. That’s what Smith is doing here, unwittingly, no doubt. And that’s what the current anti-trinitarian advocates are doing as they follow Smith’s legacy. I’m sure there is no ill intent, but the prooftext approach is notorious for getting people painted into theological corners they feel obligated to defend because “the Bible says” thus and such in this or that given verse.
Yes, the Bible says Jesus is God’s “only begotten Son.” But if we fail to pan out and see where this language comes from in the larger body of Scripture, we are liable to slide into philosophical efforts to make sense of the theological weirdness that arises from the notion that a greater God gave birth to a lesser God. In the word “God,” we hear eternal, while in the word “begotten” we hear a point of beginning. To resolve that tension, we can either allow the Bible to define what it means when speaking of Christ being “begotten” as God’s Son, or we can invent metaphysical explanations that turn God into an evolving being.
Smith chose the latter approach.
The Bible says nothing about the “evolution of deity,” whatever that might mean in Smith’s mind. Quite simply, it is a made-up idea that Smith feels obligated to manufacture in order to consistently maintain his premise that Jesus was both a divine being and a caused being. He is reaching for coherence, yet fails. If Jesus is God (there are verses that say He is), and if Jesus was begotten of God (there are verses that say that, too), well, then—and here comes the massive leap of logic—that must mean God underwent some kind of evolutionary development that somehow split the divine Son off from the divine Father. It sounds deep, but it’s not. It’s just unbiblical speculation that creates bigger problems than the one it attempts to solve. Of course, the “evolution of deity” is nowhere taught in the Bible, and, of course, it is not true. It is a blunt contradiction to speak of God evolving, on at least two counts:
1 The notion of an evolving God demands that we conceive of God as gradually becoming something more and more over time, eventually becoming what?
2 And the notion of an evolving God requires that we reason backwards to conceive of God as having been something less in the earlier evolutionary process, all the way back to having been what?
Smith was trying too hard to interpret the word “begotten” isolated from the Old Testament narrative, and his effort got him off into some strange philosophical weeds. If he had simply asked the question, What does the Bible itself mean when it speaks of Jesus as God’s only begotten Son?, he might have discovered that sonship is a big deal within the biblical narrative, initiated in the Old Testament and ultimately fulfilled in Christ. By looking at the Bible’s big picture and taking note of the sonship thread of the story, Smith might have realized, Hey, wait a minute, the Bible defines what it means by what it says. Jesus is God’s only begotten covenant Son, the one and only faithful offspring of humankind, in the lineage of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Israel, David, and Solomon. The title, “only begotten Son,” designates Christ as the Messiah who lived up to the sonship ideal within the human story, and it has nothing to do with the evolution of deity. With regard to His innate ontology, Christ is and always was God, just as Scripture repeatedly testifies. With regard to His covenantal mission for the human race, He is the Son of God.
But Smith never had that epiphany.
His theological gymnastics do pose a warning to us, however. Whenever a Bible student tries to prove that divinity is a quality of being that can be created, birthed, or, by whatever other means, brought into existence, pantheism lies right around the corner. That is what we discover in the next chapter.
Concluding Assessment
What, then, are we to make of the anti-trinitarianism of the Adventist pioneers?
While they offered some support toward an anti-trinitarian position, it is clear that they were on a trajectory of study that led the Seventh-day Adventist Church to become trinitarian, but without subscribing to a trinitarianism that reduces God to one being projecting three persons. They were attempting to reject modalism.
Because the Advent pioneers began with a concern for the divine personhood of Christ distinct from that of the Father, the church was able to formulate a genuinely relational doctrine of God, or what we might call a Covenantal Trinitarianism, as opposed to modalism. We can conclude, then, that the current position of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is true to the core concern of the early Advent pioneers and that we are indebted to them for pointing us in the right direction. The church followed through to work out the pioneer’s core concern by developing a trinitarianism that conceives of God as three distinct persons who are one in nature and character.
The Adventist pioneers were Bible students. They were in process. The farthest thing from their minds was that God’s people would take any of their early statements on theological subjects and canonize them as final authority. They were forward-thinking, studious individuals who expected the church to continue its development. It is simply not in keeping with the spirit of the pioneers to exalt their early statements as final authority on the Trinity.
It is evident from their writings that the Adventist pioneers had the same blind spot some still have today, to which we have given specific attention in my previous book, The Sonship of Christ: Exploring the Covenant Identity of God and Man. Because they were largely committed to the prooftext method of Bible study rather than engaging with Scripture as a cohesive narrative, they failed to see that the New Testament usage of the terms “only begotten” and “firstborn Son” are grounded in the Old Testament story. If they had seen the Old Testament source material for the Sonship of Christ, they would have no doubt dispensed with their sense of obligation to believe that Christ was a lesser God brought into existence by a greater God.
I conclude, then, that we owe a debt of gratitude to the Advent pioneers. There is a reason why the Seventh-day Adventist Church became solidly trinitarian while avoiding modalism: our pioneers pointed us in that direction, even as they themselves retained some significant blind spots. Because they rejected a trinitarianism that says God is one being projecting three forms, future Adventist scholars were able to think outside of the modalism box and formulate a richly interpersonal picture of God. And Ellen White played a major part in getting Adventism there, as we will now see.
1 A priest by the name of Arius (c. AD 250-336) held that the Father brought the Son into being through an act of creation, exalted Him to a unique position by giving Him the title “Son,” and the Son was inferior to the Father as He had a different substance/nature. That teaching is called “Arianism.” Modifying the view of Arius, semi-Arianism claims that the Son came into existence by emanating from the Father at some time prior to His incarnation and therefore He has the same divine nature as the Father. Whereas some proponents of semi-Arianism believe the Son to be inferior to the Father, other proponents of Semi-Arianism stress His equality with the Father.