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 a few verses at the idea for support.
His key text, of course, is John 3:16, in which Jesus is called God’s “only begotten Son.” But as we have seen, the word “begotten” has a clear meaning within the scope of the Old Testament narrative, which reaches its fulfillment in Christ. He is the only begotten Son of God in the covenant sense, not in the ontological sense. He is the Son of God in the lineage of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Israel, David, and Solomon. Along with all the other early Adventist scholars, Waggoner overlooks this biblical material. None of them ever mention, let alone reckon with, the sonship narrative of the Old Testament. It simply never figures into their interpretations. It is as if they are trying to open a locked door without the provided key, which is in their hand while they are kicking the door with their feet.
Next, Waggoner employs Colossians 1:19. But he uses the text to convey something it does not say. Christ “is of the substance of the Father,” Waggoner explains, “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.”
Waggoner thinks this text is saying that the Father was pleased to fill Christ with the fullness of divinity sometime way back in eternity past, the idea being that the divinity of Christ was either conferred upon Him or actualized in Him by the Father, but not innate to Him. The text, however, is talking about the post-incarnate Christ being filled with all the fullness of God as a human being, in the same sense that all mankind was originally meant to be filled with the fullness of God’s indwelling presence. How do we know this is what Paul means? Well, because he explicitly tells us so in Colossians 2:
For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. Verses 9-10
Young’s Literal Translation offers an even clearer rendering:
In him doth tabernacle all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and ye are in him made full, who is the head of all principality and authority.
The point Paul is making is that Christ, as the new prototypical human, was full of God’s indwelling presence, so that we, too, may be “made full” of God through Christ. Paul is not telling us that Christ was made divine by an act of the Father. If that were Paul’s point, we would be obligated to believe that we, too, are made divine by the Father. Clearly, this is not what the passage is saying.
Lastly, Waggoner employs Micah 5:2 in an effort to prove that Christ was at some point brought into existence by God the Father. But Micah 5:2 is a prophecy regarding the incarnation of Christ, not His ontological origins. Micah is not telling us about the “goings forth” of Christ from non-existence to existence, but from the realm of eternity past into our world via His incarnation.
Waggoner builds an entire doctrine of a lesser God being brought into existence by a “greater” God, while none of the Scriptures he marshals to support the idea say anything of the sort. It is a teaching void of biblical backing. This highlights the danger entailed in proof-texting our way to the formulation of doctrinal teachings. Waggoner sees the word “begotten” and simply assumes that the word refers to the ancient origins of Jesus. Therefore, he feels obligated to believe that Christ, in some manner, must have been brought into existence by God and, therefore, is not God in the “greater” sense that the Father is God. He sees the phrase “in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” and leaps to the conclusion that this means the Father somehow made Jesus divine, conferred godhood upon Him, or put deity into Him by some kind of mysterious act. He sees the term “goings forth” in reference to Christ and extrapolates the massive notion of God bringing forth (causing to exist) a lesser God. All the while, none of those verses of Scripture mean any of that. To discover what they do mean, one needs to read the immediate context of each text, as well as the larger narrative context of the whole Bible.
But we shouldn’t be too hard on Waggoner. He simply brought to his reading of Scripture an idea he had been taught by the Advent pioneers. So he saw what he was told he would see. He had a blind spot. Waggoner, like the Advent pioneers, was high centered, wheels spinning, on the word “begotten.” But now we know the biblical meaning of the New Testament term, “only begotten Son.” There is simply no reason to continue applying ontological and chronological interpretations to the term. That was an interpretive leap made by the Advent pioneers, but it was a leap in the dark, which we can pardon. For us, it would be a leap into the dark from the light.
Uriah Smith
Uriah Smith is a unique case in Adventist history in a number of ways. Considering the copious corrective correspondence sent his way from Ellen White, it is evident that he was a stubborn fellow with a high opinion of his opinions. He was also a brilliant, systematic thinker who was sometimes inclined to overshoot the mark theologically, pushing some of his ideas to extreme formulations. The stubbornness in his makeup meant he was inclined to take his positions to his death, no matter what evidence to the contrary might be presented, even by Ellen White. This is what he did with his views regarding the Sonship of Christ.
Uriah Smith’s first commentary on the book of Revelation was published in 1865, titled, Thoughts Critical and Practical on the Book of Revelation. At this point in his thinking, he explicitly stated that Christ was a created being:
Moreover, he is “the beginning of the creation of God.” Not the beginner, but the beginning, of the creation, the first created being, dating his existence far back before any other created being or thing, next to the self-existent and eternal God. Uriah Smith, Thoughts Critical and Practical on the Book of Revelation, p. 59 (1865)
The 1881 version of the same book eliminates the explicit statement that Christ was a created being and makes a weak attempt to correct his own previous interpretation:
Moreover, he is “the beginning of the creation of God.” Some understand by this language that Christ was the first created being, dating his existence far back before any other created beings or thing, next to the self-existent and eternal God. But the language does not necessarily imply this; for the words, “the beginning of the creation of God,” may simply signify that the work of creation, strictly speaking, was begun by him. Thoughts Critical and Practical on the Book of Revelation, p. 73 (1881)
I say this was a weak attempt to correct himself, because, while removing the explicit idea that Jesus is a created being, Smith retains the idea that Christ had not existed at some point in eternity past and was then brought into existence by means of the Father begetting Him:
Others, however, take the word ἀρχή to mean the agent or efficient cause, which is one of the definitions of the word, understanding that Christ is the agent through whom God has created all things, but that he himself came into existence in a different manner, as he is called “the only begotten” of the Father. It would seem utterly inappropriate to apply this expression to any being created in the ordinary sense of the term. Uriah Smith, ibid., p. 73 (1881)
Smith simply replaced the word “created” with the word “begotten” with no real explanation as to how there was any essential difference between the two ideas. In both cases, Christ is set forth as a caused or actualized being. Altered nomenclature notwithstanding, in both cases the bottom line in Smith’s thinking was the same: Christ had not existed, and then at some point God brought Him into existence. This appears to be where Smith decided to settle. But he didn’t just settle, he developed the concepts further in a rather odd and speculative direction. In his 1898 book, Looking Unto Jesus, Smith wrote the following:
God alone is without beginning. At the earliest epoch when a beginning could be,—a period so remote that to finite minds it is essentially eternity,—appeared the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1. This uncreated Word was the Being, who, in the fulness of time, was made flesh, and dwelt among us. His beginning was not like that of any other being in the universe. It is set forth in the mysterious expressions, “his [God’s] only begotten Son” (John 3:16; 1 John 4:9), “the only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14), and, “I proceeded forth and came from God.” John 8:42. Thus it appears that by some divine impulse or process, not creation, known only to Omniscience, and possible only to Omnipotence, the Son of God appeared. And then the Holy Spirit (by an infirmity of translation called, “the Holy Ghost”), the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the divine afflatus and medium of their power, representative of them 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.
2 Ontology explores the nature of being, becoming, and existing. Within theology, anti-trinitarianism claims that the Bible’s usage of the word “begotten” in connection to Christ refers to His ontology, or how and when He began to exist.
3 Metaphysics explores abstract concepts related to the nature and substance of existing things, including the cause of things and their relation to time and space. Within theology, anti-trinitarianism claims that Christ is divine by the Father’s will, but not of the same or equal divine substance with the Father, in that the Father caused His existence.