Historical Background
1. 1700s
1.1. John Wesley and Methodism: Holiness, experience, community
1.1.1. Wesley: The Holy Spirit’s "second work of grace" is called "entire sanctification."
1.1.2. It is character perfection: “purity of intention” and “love excluding sin.”
1.1.3. No more intentional sin, but mistakes and other kinds of growth are still possible.
1.2. American Methodism: Revivalism, corporate enthusiastic experience
1.3. Early Adventism was revivalistic: shouting, singing, and speaking in unknown tongues to receive the Holy Spirit.
2. 1800s
2.1. Oberlin College: Christian perfection by receiving the Holy Spirit through an act of the will
2.2. Phoebe Palmer: a "shorter way" to "higher life," immediate entire sanctification, which means one cannot be lost
2.3. Higher Life movement: The “second blessing” of the Holy Spirit can confer even sinless perfection, a state in which one cannot sin.
2.3.1. Quietist slogan: “Let go and let God.”
2.3.2. Keswick (KEZ-ick) Conventions influenced D.L. Moody (a Calvinist) such that higher life became the most popular view of perfection in non-confessional, American Protestantism
2.3.3. A.B. Simpson starts the Alliance Church out of this movement
2.4. In Adventism, Ellen G. White sticks closer to Wesley on this subject and ecstatic revivalism and immediate entire sanctification while interpreting perfection as a corporate, end-time experience (e.g., the Holy Flesh movement in Adventism influenced by Hannah Whitall Smith; see AA 560).
2.4.1. For Ellen White, the end-time remnant will experience Christian perfection but can never claim sinlessness (ST 23 Mar 1888; COL, 62–69; 2SM, 32–33).
3. 1900–1930
3.1. Victorious Life movement: Fundamentalist influence on Higher Life, opposes anything worldly, reduces sinlessness to following rules and regulations in order to eliminate ambiguity in the conflict with Modernists ("New Theology")
3.2. Pentecostalism arose from Higher Life’s emphasis on healings and miracles: The sign of the second blessing is speaking in unknown tongues.
3.3. Adventists influenced by Higher Life/Victorious Life literature—esp. E. J. Waggoner (1901 GC Sermon) and Meade McGuire (His Cross and Mine)—interpreted sinless perfection—never breaking God’s rules—as a condition we must meet for the end-times to commence.
4. 1930–1980
4.1. Neo-Evangelicals (now, simply Evangelicals) emerge from the Fundamentalist movement with an emphasis on engaging with the world and grace vs. works.
4.2. Fundamentalist Adventism, leveraging end-times anxiety to produce performance, slowly collapses under the weight of its expectations.
4.2.1. Adventist evangelistic ministries like Voice of Prophecy and It Is Written break with Fundamentalist strictures about the worldliness of mass media before the Neo-Evangelicals do.
4.2.2. Robert Brinsmead’s phases: perfectionist (1960s), evangelical (1970s), secular humanist (1980s–present)
4.2.3. Desmond Ford taps into a well of dissatisfaction in the church fed by a spring of spiritual anxiety.
4.3. Fundamentalist Adventism adopts a posture of fighting retreat.
4.3.1. Post-war period of Adventist missions: most active in our history
4.3.1.1. Those who viewed Adventism as a program for rule-following spread that vision of perfection around the world.
4.3.1.2. Robert J. Wieland and Donald K. Short return from the mission field and attempt to reinstate that vision in America, arguing that the Keswick Conventions and Victorious Life movement didn’t go far enough and that Adventists needed to corporately repent for rejecting Waggoner’s view of perfection, which they believed Ellen White endorsed as part of the 1888 message of righteousness by faith.
4.3.2. Fight for control of the General Conference: Robert H. Pierson’s 1978 farewell address
4.3.3. Independent ministries begin to advance Fundamentalist critiques of mainstream North American Adventism and the denomination (e.g, Creeping Compromise by Joe Crews), believing that a return to rigorous rule-following is necessary for Jesus to return according to Last Generation Theology.
Definition of Last Generation Theology
Last Generation Theology is the proposition that the sinless perfection of the end-time remnant will make the second coming possible because it will finally vindicate God’s character by demonstrating that human beings born into sin can live according to God’s law.
1. “Last Generation Theology” (LGT) is an exonym defined by a critic, the “dean of Adventist studies” George R. Knight (A Search for Identity, I Used to Be Perfect).
1.1. The endonym? Something like “Victorious Adventism” (coined by Adventist historian Michael Campbell in a 2023 presentation), but in its time it didn’t need to be named because it was the default Adventist view of perfection.
2. LGT explains two big questions for Adventists:
2.1. Why hasn’t Jesus come back yet?
2.2. Why does the last generation need to be perfectly holy?
3. LGT offers one simple answer: We have a climactic part to play in the Great Controversy by vindicating God’s character by following his rules down to the smallest detail so that humanity’s probation can close and Jesus can come back.
3.1. In other words, the second coming depends on you not wearing high heels, eating cheese, watching sports, etc.
Theological Evaluation
The only problem with LGT is that it implies heresy. Why? Protestantism broke with Catholicism because we should not put the church in a place that only Christ can occupy.
1. Professor M.L. Andreasen, who synthesized the early-twentieth-century Adventist view of perfection in a chapter on “The Last Generation” in his magnum opus on The Sanctuary Service (1937), considered the vindication of God’s character by the end-time remnant to be a stage of atonement.
1.1. This construes the end-time remnant as standing between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity, making it possible for God to save all humanity because of the sinless perfection God has accomplished in their human nature.
1.2. Therefore, LGT implies that humanity has another ‘mediator’ in the end-time atonement after Christ’s advocacy for us in the pre-Advent, investigative judgment is finished: the end-time remnant (contra 1 Tim 2:5).
1.3. That the perfection of the end-time remnant after the close of probation is necessary for all humanity to be saved makes it a sort of ‘co-redemptrix’ in LGT.
2. The cross was the sufficient demonstration that vindicated God’s character before the onlooking universe, so there is no need for a second such demonstration for God to close the Great Controversy (Rom 3:26; John 12:30–31).
2.1. Because of what Christ has done, God would still be seen as being in the right even if every human being were to reject his offer of salvation (Rom 3:4).
3. The pre-Advent, investigative judgment settles the questions Heaven’s residents might have about the fitness of the saved to join them there (Zech 3, esp. v7).
4. Ellen White used the word "vindicate" in three distinct ways that accord with the three detentions of "vindication" in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary.
4.1. To proclaim vindication—those who keep God's law during the final crisis "vindicate" his "honor" by "pronouncing it holy, just, and good" (4T, 593; RH, 16 April 1901; compare Eze 36:26).
4.2. To prove vindication—Jesus's life of obedience and sacrifice vindicated God's character by providing the necessary evidence (8T 207; PP 68; compare John 12:27–33).
4.2.1. This is where LGT inserts the end-time remnant alongside Christ.
4.3. To provide vindication—God will ultimately vindicate his character by destroying sin and sinners forever (DA, 764; compare Rev 19:1–4).
Theological Possibilities
How then can Adventists answer the end-time questions that LGT explains?
Question 1: Why hasn’t Jesus come back yet?
Answer:
1. God in his foreknowledge (and, arguably, middle knowledge) accounts for the future, free decisions of all his creatures in order to predestine a plan of salvation that gives everyone a good-faith opportunity to accept salvation (Rom 8:28–30).
2. There is a pattern in salvation history of God delaying his judgments, including the end-time judgment, to ensure that everyone will receive that opportunity (Matt 24:14; 2 Pet 3:9).
3. We can hasten Jesus’s coming by deciding to surrender to the Holy Spirit so that we will rightly represent his character to the world by overcoming sin and living loving lives that invite others to join God’s kingdom (2 Pet 3:10–12; Rom 2:19–24; 1 John 4:19; John 13:35).
3.1. But that being the case, the decisions of those who are ultimately lost also delay the second coming.
4. The end-time harvest must first mature as the final crisis (Rev 13:11–18) and three angels’ messages (Rev 14:6–11) bring everyone alive to the point of making their decision for or against God (Matt 13:24–30; Rev 14:14–20).
4.1. Therefore, we should not discourage people who are still maturing with criticism of their spiritual state as if this will hasten the Second Coming.
5. While we retroactively influence God’s plan by our present choices that he foreknew, God has already determined when Jesus will come back (Mark 13:32).
Question 2: Why does the last generation need Christian perfection?
Answer 1:
1. The mature (not sinless, 1 John 1:8) perfection of the remnant (and not individuals only, Eph 4:13–16) in loving character will call humanity to repentance in the final crisis by proclaiming the love of God in Christ (John 13:35).
2. Christian perfection cannot be reduced to a program of scrupulous rule-following because those who try to eliminate moral ambiguity as far as possible by identifying as many rules as possible are not attractive but rather the robotic slaves that Satan accuses God of trying to create through reward/punishment (Job 1:9–11).
2.1. In the first crisis, Satan tried to make God appear more restrictive than he truly is (Gen 3:1), so also in the final crisis (1 Tim 4:1–5).
2.2. From the beginning, God’s rule(s) bounded a much wider field of actions open to interpretation, which provides for sort of moral judgment calls necessary for character development (cf. Gen 2:16 and 2:17; Rom 14:12–13, 22–23).
2.3. The Bible defines perfection in terms of grand character qualities, not Pharisaic attention to ethical minutiae (cf. Matt 5:48 and Luke 6:36; Jas 1:4; Rev 14:4).
2.3.1. We follow God’s rules because we are developing his character, which also gives us the freedom to make good judgment-calls in non-rule-governed domains of morality (cf. Matt 23:23 and Luke 11:42).
Answer 2:
1. The last plagues that will harden the unrepentant in their rejection of God (Rev 16:9, 11) will also serve to sever our attachments to the passing things of this world and strengthen our attachment to God (Eph 5:27, cf. the maturation of the end-time harvest).
1.1. The plagues that fell on Egypt not only hardened Pharoah in his rejection of God but inspired other Egyptians to leave Egypt (Exod 12:38).
2. The intensity of God’s last judgments on sin before the second coming will call for him to give the faithful an equally intense experience of dependence on him (Rev 7:3, 14:1).
Conclusion
Therefore, providing a second round of evidence that vindicates God’s character is not necessary to explain the end-time significance of Christian perfection.
1. It is false to claim that rejecting LGT means rejecting the Christian perfection of the end-time remnant.
2. It is false to claim that believing in the Christian perfection of the end-time remnant means accepting LGT.
Recommended for further study:
- 1919: The Untold Story of Adventism's Struggle with Fundamentalism by Michael W. Campbell
- "Holiness Adventism: The Victorious Life Movement, Seventh-day Adventism, and Last Generation Theology" by Michael W. Campbell (paper presented at the 2022 Evangelical Theological Society National Meeting)
- "Pardoned and Perfect: A Comparative Study of the Soteriology of John Wesley and Ellen White" by Esther Louw (Andrews University MA Thesis)
- God's Character and the Last Generation edited by Jiří Moskala and John C. Peckham
- "Living Without an Intercessor" by Ángel Manuel Rodriguez in Adventist World
- The Judgment and Assurance: The Dynamics of Personal Salvation by Woodrow W. Whidden