"Judgments of God?" in the 2024 United States Presidential Elections

Early in 2020, I published a 2017 paper in the Brazilian theological journal Kerygma arguing that the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency was a divine judgment that exposed the hypocrisy of the right, center, and left of American politics. I found that this judgment was not a national catastrophe but rather one that had sifted Americans by how we responded to the immorality that had resulted in our preferred factions acting as if God does not intervene in human history.

Then, four years ago to the day of this writing, I published an article in the now sadly defunct Compass Magazine assessing how well my providential interpretation had held up over the intervening years. I found that only the center seemed chastened, while the right and left had plunged even further into their hypocritical immorality.

In the sketch that follows, I will bring my thesis up to date without going into detail and without rehearsing arguments I made in my previous publications. So I suggest that you familiarize yourself with them if you've not done so already.

The Left

Musa Al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke came out this year, and he nails down my thesis about the hypocrisy of the left better than I ever could. I recommend this review in Front Porch Republic. It is also possible that we have passed so-called "peak woke," but all this means is that the left's agenda has become institutionalized to the extent that it is no longer noteworthy or cutting-edge.

The Center

The hypocrisy of the center was exposed in the first presidential debate when it became obvious that the faction of competence was attempting to foist a manifestly incompetent incumbent on the nation. At least the centrists in the press did not let the centrists in the Democratic White House get away with Jill Biden's turn as Edith Wilson. Then, the champions of democracy did not allow an open primary to select Joe Biden's replacement, selected by Mr. Biden himself, not for her competence, much less her character, but for her identity. The Hillary Clinton-esque ideological makeover Democratic party operatives have given Kamala Harris, leaves no doubt that the center is not so chastened after all.

The Right

The surprising events of January 6 came close to turning this sifting judgment into a national catastrophe, but America retained its form of government under constitutional procedure despite Donald Trump breaking with the US tradition of peaceful transfer of presidential power begun by George Washington. With prominent Republican figures endorsing his opponent and his former chief of staff calling him, in broad terms, "a fascist," the putative defenders of freedom continue to stand condemned of hypocrisy by their own side's admission.

Providence

Despite all his legal woes, including a felony conviction, and several attempts on his life, including a grazed ear, Mr. Trump is neck and neck in the polls with Mrs. Harris. Even unbelievers are astonished at how many close calls he has avoided. This surprise is consistent with the divine judgment thesis because God does not allow his judgments to be preempted by human efforts.

The Stakes

As I see it, regardless of who is elected, we will have a president who governs as if God doesn't intervene in human history and, therefore, our immoral hypocrisy is justified because it's all up to us. Mrs. Harris will continue to offer symbolic victories to minority groups while ensuring that the elites are secure in their positions of power regardless of the indignities that this requires everyone else to suffer, and she will be open to whatever pragmatic compromises are necessary to get her a second term. Under a Harris presidency, the sifting will likely continue. On the other hand, a second Trump term is unlikely to be like his first because the plans are in place to remove those who restrained his unconstitutional impulses. If he is elected, we may experience the national catastrophe of having our democratic republic replaced by the majoritarian White, Christian nationalism that many warned about eight years ago.

Conclusion

The purpose of a divine sifting judgment is not to cause us to pursue our preferred outcomes in the world but to test our characters to see whether our interpretation of our situation aligns with loyalty to God or has been compromised by other loyalties. How you choose to vote (or abstain from voting) will show whether your hope is in a political faction that represents your identity attaining worldly power for you and yours or whether your hope is the God who intervenes in human history and will eventually return to destroy America for its sins and set up his eternal kingdom.

The Modern State of Israel: An Adventist Interpretation

The modern, liberal-democratic Jewish nation-state of Israel does not resume the covenantal status God established with the ancient Davidic dynasty of the theocratic United Monarchy of Israel for three reasons:

1. Israel’s post-exilic, geopolitical mission of bringing about the messianic age was accomplished in the events surrounding the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth (Daniel 9:24–27).

2. There is no inspired revelation of God renewing his covenant with any modern nation, including Israel, nor would God need to because

3. Between the first and second comings of the Messiah, God’s kingdom is not geopolitical but spiritual-only (John 18:36), and his temple is not earthly but heavenly (Hebrews 9:11–12).

Yet because God continues and will continue to have a particular love for the people of Israel (Romans 11:2, 28–29), how much more has God providentially guided the subsequent history of the Jews given that he does so for every other nation (Acts 17:26)?

In the providential interpretation of human history, we recognize that God has accomplished his goals through past or current events based on patterns in the prophetic record of his previous interactions with groups of humans, his enduring characteristics, and his revealed plans. While discerning divine action in history is necessarily speculative, it is, I argue, necessary for us to align our approach to changing circumstances with divine action in history. The study and experience of history is one way God pushes back on our wrongly cherished views of reality, reforming our character. In the wake of recent events, let us briefly consider the history of Jews after the ascension of Jesus with an eye toward discerning God’s purposes for the State of Israel today.
 
A series of Jewish revolts against Roman imperium based on messianic expectation of a restored geopolitical kingdom resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple (AD 70) and the eventual complete expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem (AD 135). These disasters caused the Jews to turn away from messianic expectation altogether and allowed the politically ascendent Christians in the Roman Empire to distinguish themselves from the Jews via antisemitism. God then allowed the Jews to suffer persecution in Europe under the rule of the established churches and divided kingdoms that oppressed Jewish and Christian Sabbath-keepers in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. (The Jews who remained in Judea, Galilee, and elsewhere in the Middle East suffered dhimmitude under Muslim rule during roughly the same period.) After Martin Luther’s religious antisemitism was secularized in the philosophy of the German Enlightenment, this antisemitic strain in Christendom culminated in the Shoah under the Nazis. Then, in his mercy, God raised up and protected the State of Israel where persecuted Jews may seek shelter on their ancestral lands.

This does not imply that we ought to reflexively side with the Jewish State of Israel and in its conflicts any more than we ought to reflexively side with the United States just because we recognize that God raised it up to provide a bastion of religious liberty with separation of church and state for his church (more on that here). The interests of God cannot be wholly identified with one side of a human conflict (Joshua 5:13–14). For example, as Ellen White saw in a vision and Abraham Lincoln later understood, although the Union's war against the Confederacy was just, God was also judging the Union states for compromising too long with the sin of slavery. Thus, to seek a swift victory for the Union because it was on ‘God's side’ would have been to oppose another purpose of God in the US Civil War.

The rise and fall of nations and the shifting of their borders are determined by God so that we might seek him and be saved (Acts 17:27). It follows that according to God’s particular purpose of saving all Israel (Romans 11:26), God raised up the modern State of Israel. But Israel, like every other human polity, is on probation to determine what it will do with the blessings God has given it. Will it govern so that Jews, Muslims, and Christians can shelter in it together in peace (Daniel 4:21)? Will it be a nation of which it is said that Jews love Arabs as much they love themselves (Leviticus 19:34)? Will it be a nation where the stranger, the widow, and the orphan can find justice, or will it be cursed for unnecessarily making more and more of the strangers who dwell in its land widows and orphans (Deuteronomy 27:19)? If the State of Israel, or any other nation, does what is just, its prosperity may be prolonged (Daniel 4:27).

Along with the other kingdoms of this world, the State of Israel will eventually be judged for its sins and destroyed, if not before, then at the Second Advent of Israel’s Messiah, who alone can rescue Israel from its enemies and sins. Jesus will then set up God’s everlasting kingdom (Daniel 2:44), and, together with the saved and all creation, Israel will receive its ultimate geopolitical inheritance, its never-ending Promised Land and eternal dwelling place with God (Acts 13:32–39; Romans 8:21; Hebrews 11:13–16, 39–40; Revelation 21:3).

How to Use Digital Bibles

The Word of God has been recorded in a variety of media: tablets (Exodus 32:15–16), scrolls (Deuteronomy 17:18), papyrus sheets (2 John 12), and, last but not least, human memory (Psalm 119:11). The codex—pages made from sheets that have been bound together, in other words, the object we think of when we think of a book—was adopted soon after the last Bible books were written. More than a thousand years later, the printing press made it possible to mass-produce books, spurring the Protestant Reformation.

Likewise, in our time five-hundred years after the Reformation, the electronic digital medium (through which you are reading these words) has changed the way we record, study, and distribute God's Word.

By electronic, I mean Bibles that are recorded on a media device that requires a source of electric power to access. And by digital, I mean Bibles that are recorded in a numeric code that makes their words subject to computer manipulation, as opposed to, say, the popular Gospel According to Matthew film (though speech-to-text technology is changing that).

One advantage of studying the Bible digitally is that the code allows easy access to the original languages. Similar to how I have linked the following text to a website, Blue Letter Bible and similar websites link the original Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek words of the biblical text to the English words that are used to translate them. No more lugging around heavy interlinear Bibles and concordances!

This also means that there is no excuse for relying on English dictionaries for the meaning of Bible words when at the click of a mouse or tap of a finger we have free access to lexicons—dictionaries of the original languages of the Bible—along with all the occurrences of a given word in Scripture. My favorite website for this sort of study is the Bible Study Tools interlinear Bible search.

But beware: The meaning of a word is not determined by its dictionary definition but by the textual and historical settings in which it is used. Unless you have studied the grammar and syntax of the original languages and the historical backgrounds of the Bible, a list of lexical possibilities can take you only so far towards the meaning. So always consult translations and commentaries, which are only a click or tap away in many digital Bibles, to get a sense of which sector of a word's semantic range is being selected by the text in its context.

Also, beware that certain free Bible apps and websites are known to sell information about your searches and other activity to internet advertisers. Even publishers of digital Bibles have to pay the bills. And on the internet, as the saying goes, if you're not a paying customer, you're likely the product being sold.

There are many free Bible apps available for smartphones and tablets, but I prefer those that download the Bible to my device for offline use. Again, Blue Letter Bible has a quality app, and I have successfully used Olive Tree and e-Sword in the past, as well. Beware of apps that ask for unnecessary permissions like contacts or location (if you're not the customer, ...).

These days I use only paid Bible study platforms. They are more or less expensive depending on the resources you want to get with them but are only worth it if you are prepared to use their extra features. Prices range from just over a hundred to thousands of dollars for a full library of resources. Accordance has the fastest and most powerful searches, but they charge you for the software in addition to the resource packages. Logos is slower but free and has the most resources available. Both platforms have resources specifically for Seventh-day Adventists.

The great, irreplaceable advantage of digital Bibles is that you can quickly find what you are looking for along with lots of other information about it. The inevitable disadvantage that goes along with that: Easy come; easy go. The human mind, which is where God's Word ultimately needs to be written (Jeremiah 31:33, Hebrews 8:10, 10:16), is best activated by sustained bodily contact with physical objects. We remember best what we have a sensory experience with.

So how will we know what to search for in our digital Bibles in the first place? By regularly interacting with our good, old codex Bibles.

If you're wondering How to Read the Whole Bible for the First Time, click here. 

Wondering What Bible Should I Read? See my recommendations here.

What Bible Should I Read?

Short answer: Any Bible that you read is the right Bible for you to read.

All Bibles—regardless of which translation or what supplementary notes—convey the written Word of God. The Gospel is a translated message from its inception (Acts 2:6) and therefore always comes to us as an already interpreted message. This means that there is no one-and-only, given-for-all-time version of the Bible. To have a Bible that you regularly read is what matters most.

On the other hand, we are blessed with so wide a variety of English translations and study Bibles that many people don't know where to start or how to build a well-rounded collection for personal or family use.

The English Bible most first-time readers consider is the

King James Version (KJV or Authorized Version, AV): Authorized by King James in 1611, what set this Bible apart from previously published English translations was the fact that it did not come with interpretive notes in the margins. So, it was able to be used in churches of all doctrinal persuasions. The KJV is also an artistic achievement whose beautiful language, along with that of the works of Shakespeare, standardized Modern English.

A linguistic quirk of the KJV is its thee-s and thou-s. These second-person pronouns had already fallen out of ordinary use, but the translation committee brought them back from Middle English because they took a word-for-word approach to translation. Even if the point is lost on most readers, the KJV makes the same distinction between singular (thee/thou) and plural (ye/you) found in the original Hebrew and Aramaic of the Old Testament and New Testament Greek.

While the KJV's spelling has been revised many times, some words have changed in meaning over the last 400 years, which can result in misunderstandings. Over that time, our knowledge of the original languages has also significantly improved, so I do not recommend the KJV for in-depth Bible study.

New King James Version (NKJV): It retains the KJV's commitment to word-for-word translation and elegance of language, but uses words according to their current meanings and incorporates discoveries about the original languages made up to the early 1980s. This results in a formal-sounding translation that, while understandable, has some difficult turns of phrase that do not always clearly convey the intent of the original.

Because the NKJV sounds the way many English speakers feel that a Bible should, I like to use it for preaching.

Andrews Study Bible (NKJV/New International Version, NIV): For notes to help you understand difficult passages in the NKJV and clarify many points of interpretation from a Seventh-day Adventist perspective, I recommend the Andrews Study Bible.

It is also available in the NIV, another popular translation that attempts to balance word-for-word translation with a thought-for-thought approach, which affords an easier and often clearer reading experience. But thought-for-thought translations make it harder to understand how they translated English expressions from the original languages, and sometimes clarify things wrongly.

Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: (NIV/NKJV/New Revised Standard Version, NRSV): For a study Bible from a broader Christian perspective, I recommend the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. It has a wealth of notes and illustrations that will give you the latest scholarly understandings of the historical contexts of the biblical texts (not that I would endorse all of them). I recommend this Bible for in-depth study.

It is also available in the NRSV, which leans more toward a word-for-word approach than the NIV, but with less regard for harmonizing the texts of the Bible.

New English Translation: (NET): As its acronym suggests, this translation was meant to be presented on the internet as well as in hard copy.

The NET has a full complement of translation and study notes that explain almost every interpretive decision in detail. These notes can be clicked and expanded when reading online, so they don't take up too much space on the page. But they are also available in the thick, hardcopy Full Notes Edition of the NET.

The notes lean toward Reformed Evangelical interpretation but typically give both sides of the various arguments. I recommend this Bible for in-depth study.

ESV Reader's Bible (English Standard Version): The visual opposite of study Bibles, reader's editions remove even the chapter and verse numbers, leaving only the biblical text on the page just as you would find it in any other book. It is a liberating way to read the Bible, and I recommend it to other experienced readers.

One affordable reader's edition uses the ESV, a good word-for-word translation, but one that is controversial for translating certain passages as excluding women from church leadership in a time when it was well understood that the original pronouns could have referred to both men and women.

Bibliotheca (American Literary Version): This is a more expensive, but, in my opinion, better reader's edition. It began as a solo, passion project that received so much support on the crowd-investment platform, Kickstarter, that the founder was able to form a committee of scholars to revise the American Standard Version, resulting in an elegant, word-for-word translation that incorporates current insights into the original languages.

The Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter: While translation committees guard against individual idiosyncrasies, they also tend to make the biblical books all sound the same. But the biblical authors wrote with distinct voices. Individual translators have proven more willing to take risks in translation that allow the style of the different books to come through.

I don't endorse everything he says in his notes, but Robert Alter's literary sensitivity is second to none, and his translation of the Old Testament highlights the strange beauty of ancient expression without being impenetrable.

The Kingdom New Testament by N. T. Wright: The New Testament books were not written in the elevated Greek of the Homeric epics but in the simplified Greek spoken on the streets by people who had often learned it as their second language.

In his translation, which does reflect his theological interpretations, N. T. Wright moves away from elegant, formal-sounding English and instead uses plain-spoken, simple English to better give a sense of how accessible the original language of the New Testament was.

Common English Bible (CEB): For a translation that even young children can understand, I recommend the CEB. It will also challenge experienced readers to overcome clichés with its thought-for-thought translations of common biblical expressions (like "Human One" for "Son of Man"). Also, it is the only Bible I know of that had Seventh-day Adventist scholars working on its translation committee.

Final Thought: The farther I have gone in biblical studies—especially of the original languages—the less opinionated I have become about translations. Translation is really hard. And even where I disagree with a translation decision, I have learned not to criticize until I understand the case that can be made for it. Translators have their reasons, and they usually illuminate something in the text.

If you're wondering How to Read the Whole Bible for the First Time, click here.

If you want to know How to Use Digital Bibles, click here.

How to Read the Whole Bible for the First Time

 

The Bible can be intimidating if you've never read something like it before. It's very long, and some of its texts are more easily understood—or misunderstood!—than others.

It's become a cliché that many who attempt to read the Bible straight through crash out around Leviticus.

I recommend the following sequence of biblical books for your first read-through:

1. Mark. The shortest account of the life of Jesus (New Testament).

2. Genesis. The first book of instruction, which is the account of origins (Old Testament).

3. John and Matthew. The last of account of the life of Jesus and then another that is more similar to Mark (NT).

4. Luke and Acts. A two-part account, first of Jesus's life and then of how God founded his church (NT).

5. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The other books of instruction, which are the account of how God founded his nation, Israel (OT).

6. Hebrews. A letter to the church about how the instruction relates to Jesus (NT).

7. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. The history God's nation, Israel, and stories of people who played a part in it (OT).

8. Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. Letters to the church about how Jesus helps us (NT).

9. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. Wisdom about how to deal with evil and suffering (OT).

10. 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. Letters to the church about the end times and life together (NT).

11. Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations. A love poem and then longer writings warning and encouraging Israel along with some accounts of visions from God (OT).

12. James, 1 & 2 Peter, and Jude. Letters to the church about how to follow Jesus (NT).

13. Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Shorter writings warning and encouraging Israel along with some accounts of visions from God (OT).

14. 1, 2 & 3 John. Letters to the church about God's love (NT).

15. Ezekiel and Daniel. Accounts of visions about God's plans for history and the end times along with some stories about how to deal with powerful people (OT).

16. Revelation. A letter warning and encouraging the church along with accounts of visions about God's plans for history and the end times (NT).

Tips:

1. Set a consistent time for reading the Bible every day and set up reminders for yourself.

2. Plan to read for a minimum of five to ten minutes at a time and increase it as your attention span grows.

3. Pray before you start; ask God's Spirit to help you find something that lets you know Jesus better.

4. The Bible rewards a lifetime of reading, so don't try to understand everything the first time.

5. When you feel like you don't understand all of what you're reading, keep reading until you find something you do understand.

6. If you get bored with what you are reading, you can either pray and try again, skim ahead until you find something more interesting, or stop and come back to it tomorrow.

7. If you feel like you understood less than half of what you read or didn't understand anything at all, ask someone more experienced to help you with its meaning.
   

Wondering What Bible Should I Read? See my recommendations here.

If you want to know How to Use Digital Bibles, click here. 

Annual Observances for Seventh-day Adventists

In Seventh-day Adventism, some families and communities feel called to observe something like a festal or liturgical year to rehearse the story of salvation rather than enjoy merely secular holidays or take the extreme position of observing none at all. Ellen G. White also recognized that there are certain times of the year that, like Christmas Day, may be observed as a "sacred event" (Review and Herald, 17 Dec 1889), yet one on which, unlike Sabbath, "there is no divine sanctity resting" (Review and Herald, 9 Dec 1884). Therefore, we have the Christian liberty to observe them or not as is most meaningful to us. But Ellen White counseled us to not neglect the opportunity to make much of Christ on occasions when people, especially young people, expect a celebration (9 Dec 1884).

Introduction

What follows is a framework within which Seventh-day Adventists can develop a rhythm of annual observances for individual, familial, or communal devotional practice. I do not present it as a program to which nothing may be added and from which nothing may be subtracted; the Sabbath is the only day we are to keep holy without exception.

This annual cycle incorporates observances from Adventism's deep Jewish, broadly Christian, and specifically Protestant backgrounds:

• Three festivals that Gentiles can celebrate with Jews—the Feast of Lots (Esth 9:27), Passover (Exod 12:48, Num 9:14), and the Festival of Tabernacles (Deut 16:13–14, Zech 14:16) 
  
• The Five Evangelical Feasts recognized by Reformed Christian communions—Good Friday, Resurrection Day, Ascension Day, Pentecost, and Christmas—along with two Western Christian seasons included in the mainline Protestants' Revised Common Lectionary—Advent and Christmastide
• Reformation Day
• Three holidays recommended by Ellen White—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's

These combine to present the story of Jesus Christ and his church:

The Five Spring Observances tell the story of Christ's death, burial, resurrection (1 Cor 15:3–4), and ascension to Heaven (Acts 2:33–35) and heavenly sanctuary ministry (Eph 4:7–8) in the context of the great controversy.

The Five Autumn Observances tell the story of the end-time events in Revelation 13–14 in the context of Christ's Second Coming, concluding with the hope of Immanuel, God with us, at "the restoration of all things" (Acts 3:21) when the great controversy is resolved (Rev 21:1–22:5).

Spring Observances 

1. Feast of Lots
Old Testament feast day commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman's plot
Date: (movable) February 26–March 26
Salvation Story Theme: the great controversy between Christ and Satan
Suggested Activity and Scripture Reading: Put on an Esther play while reading the Book of Esther.
Suggested Scripture Reading: Job 1–2
Suggested Psalms: The Lord's My Shepherd, Send Out Your Light, Psalm 46, Psalm 121

2. Passover
Old Testament feast day commemorating Israel's exodus out of Egypt
Date: (movable) March 28–April 25
Salvation Story Theme: Christ's sacrificial death
Suggested Activity: Hold a Passover feast with traditions that Jesus followed.
Suggested Scripture Readings: Exodus 11–12; John 1:29; 1 Corinthians 5:6–8, 10:1–13
Suggested Psalms: God Be Merciful to Me, Psalm 51, Psalm 130, Psalm 136

3. Easter
Evangelical feast days, Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, commemorating Christ's death and resurrection
Date of Good Friday: (movable) March 25–April 25
Salvation Story Theme: Christ's burial and resurrection
Suggested Activities: Have a sundown worship service (Good Friday); have a sunrise worship service (Resurrection Day).
Suggested Scripture Readings: (Good Friday) Matthew 26–27, Mark 14–15, Luke 22-23, John 18–19; (Resurrection Day) Matthew 28, Luke 24, John 20
Suggested Hymns: (Good Friday) He Never Said a Mumblin' Word, Lead Me to Calvary, In Christ Alone, God Rested; (Resurrection Day) Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, Now the Green Blade Rises, Because He Lives, Easter Song

4. Ascension Day
Evangelical feast day commemorating Christ's ascension
Date: (movable) May 3–June 3
Salvation Story Theme: Christ's ascension to the right hand of the Father and the inauguration of the heavenly sanctuary
Suggested Activity: Feast on food that rises like fluffy pastries or (plant-based) poultry.
Suggested Scripture Readings: Acts 1; Ephesians 1:20–21, 4:7–8; Revelation 4–5
Suggested Hymns: A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing, Alleluia! Sing to Jesus, Arise, My Soul, Arise, Is He Worthy?

5. Pentecost
Evangelical feast day commemorating the beginning of the church
Date: (movable) May 13–June 9
Salvation Story Theme: Christ's heavenly sanctuary ministry and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit
Suggested Activity: Feast on first fruits and/or food that looks like or is cooked with fire.
Suggested Scripture Readings: Joel 2:28–29, John 14:15–31, Acts 2, Galatians 5:13–26
Suggested Hymns: O for That Flame of Living Fire, Baptize Us Anew, Come Holy Spirit, Build Your Kingdom Here

Autumn Observances

6. Festival of Tabernacles
Old Testament seven-day harvest festival
Date of the first day: (movable) September 21–October 19
Salvation Story Theme: Christ's Second Coming as the ingathering of God's harvest
Suggested Activity: Sleep in an outdoor shelter or as if you were in one.
Suggested Scripture Readings: Matthew 13, Matthew 24–25, Revelation 14.
Suggested Psalms: Psalm 34, All People That on Earth Do Dwell, Flourishing, Psalm 126

7. Reformation Day
Protestant commemoration celebrating Reformation heritage (Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on All Saints' Eve) and memorializing martyrs on All Saints' Eve and/or All Saints' Day
Date of All Saints' Eve: (fixed) October 31
Salvation Story Theme: the beast from the sea and the Protestant Reformation
Suggested Activities: Dress up like reformers; post the 95 Theses on a door; read the testimonies of martyrs.
Suggested Scripture Readings: Daniel 7; Revelation 6:9–11, chs. 12–13
Suggested Hymns: Faith of Our Fathers, For All the Saints, When the Saints Go Marchin' In, By Faith

8. Thanksgiving Day
American holiday instituted during the US Civil War and recommended by Ellen White
Date: (movable) third Thursday in November (USA) or second Monday in October (Canada)
Salvation Story Theme: the beast from the land and religious liberty
Suggested Activities: Share testimonies of gratitude and feast on locally harvested food.
Suggested Scripture Readings: Psalm 95, Psalm 100, John 18:36, Revelation 13:11–15
Suggested Hymns: Now Thank We All Our God, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, Thank You Lord, 10,000 Reasons

9. Advent
Christian season that anticipates the coming of Christ
Dates: (movable) November 27–December 3 to (fixed) December 24
Salvation Story Theme: preparation for the Second Coming and the Three Angels' Messages
Suggested Activities: Give Advent calendar treats; have an Advent theme for family or group worship every week: (week 1) the second coming, (week 2) the messianic prophecies, (week 3) John the Baptist, (week 4) Mary and Joseph.
Suggested Scripture Readings: (week 1) John 14:1–14, (week 2) Isaiah 52:13–53:12, (week 3) Luke 3:1–20, and (week 4) Luke 1
Suggested Hymns: (week 1) O Come, O Come Emmanuel, (week 2) Lo, How a Rose Ere Blooming, (week 3) On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry, (week 4) Magnificat

10. Christmastide
Christian season that includes (1) Christmas Day, an evangelical feast day commemorating the birth of Christ, which Ellen White recommended, and (2a) New Years Day, another holiday that Ellen White recommended as a time of reflection and re-commitment, and which coincides with (2b) the commemoration of Christ's circumcision eight days after his birth; and concludes at (3) the commemoration of the visit of the Magi (Epiphany)
Dates: (fixed) December 25 to January 6
Salvation Story Theme: God dwelling with us and the great controversy ended
Suggested Activities: Give gifts to those in need (Christmas); renew your covenant with God (New Year's); sing Christmas carols during the twelve days of Christmastide (December 25 to January 5); and give gifts to the needy (Epiphany).
Suggested Scripture Readings: (Christmas) Luke 2:1–21; (New Year's) Psalm 139, Luke 2:22–40; (Epiphany) Isaiah 60, Matthew 2, Romans 9:30–11:36, Revelation 21–22
Suggested Hymns: (Christmas) Once in Royal David's City, Go Tell It on the Mountain; (New Year's) Lord God, Now Let Your Servant Depart in Peace, Wake the Song; (Epiphany) We Three Kings

Application

Traditional elements for this cycle of annual observances may be found in the Scriptures and the other foundational texts of the background traditions, or in their popular interpreters. If unfamiliar, Google, Wikipedia, and your local library can resolve that.

"Tradition is an argument extended through time" (Alasdair MacIntyre), but enter into these arguments with due regard for the faith in God expressed by the contemporary practitioners of Adventism's background traditions. Jewish-Christian relations are fraught with a history of persecution by Christians aimed at erasing Jewish identity. Thus, many Jews take offense at Christians observing their traditions, including Shabbat rituals for keeping the seventh day.

Because we should use our Christian liberty to serve others (Gal 5:13) and not to cause them offense (1 Cor 8:9), I recommend the following limits for non-Jewish Adventists who choose to observe Old Testament festivals: Don't hold public-facing meetings involving extra-biblical Jewish traditions and make it clear to participants that you are observing such events only insofar as they build up faith in Jesus and not attempting to keep them for the sake of the covenant God made with Israel. People who convert to Christianity offer certain of their traditions to other Christians so that all believers can better express faith in Jesus, and so, out of respect for the integrity of Christian and Jewish identity, seek out resources that are offered by Jewish Christians to other Christians for the purpose of building up Christian faith. Just because it is something most Jews do does not necessarily mean it is beneficial for a Seventh-day Adventist to do it.

Regardless of the background tradition involved, these observances require Adventists to interpret or modify these elements of the contemporary expressions of the background traditions in ways that accord with our faith. Where expedient, we can also create new elements that make them more meaningful for our families or communities. This may include moving the dates of observances to coincide with Sabbath, achieve the desired order in the cycle, or align with a minority calendar, like that of the Karaite Jews or Eastern Orthodox Christians.

Even for those who had to keep feasts and festivals, God clarified making adjustments based on circumstances and limitations was preferable to not receiving the benefit of them at all (Num 9:10–11). These observances have benefited me spiritually whether I, my family, or my small group did a lot or a little. Do not let others judge which, if any, annual observances are beneficial to you, nor how maximally or minimally you observe them (Col 2:16).

My Associationalist Manifesto

People sometimes ask me how I identify politically. In recent years I haven't had a ready answer, but I think that now I am prepared to take on at least one political label. I am an associationalist.

What I mean by that is I think would be better off if Americans were to take the energy we expend on winning the culture wars and invest it in revitalizing civil society and empowering it to do in a pluralistic way what we currently rely on big business, big government, and big charity to do for us in a one-size-fits-all way. The latter approach is making it impossible to live and let live together with others who aspire to different visions of the good life.

Relying more on smaller free associations would get us something else we need to get along with material benefits but can't get from organizations to which we are numbers, not people: affirmation of our way of life from those we respect. The generation of wealth for a common pursuit of the good life makes people feel they are free to flourish; the provision of wealth for its own sake is meaningless to most people. So to attain that sense of meaning as things currently stand, we are offering empower and expand those governments, businesses, and charities that are supposed to benefit all kinds of people, on the condition that they embrace our discrete values and exclude those who don't share them.

Trying to sweep into the dustbin of history those whose ways of life we can't support yet ought to be able to tolerate, and who likewise can tolerate but can't support us, will result in insincere recognition for the victors at best (see Hegel's master-slave dialectic and Havel's greengrocer illustration) or the destruction of the nation at worst. The challenge of liberty for twentieth-century America was making the material benefits of the industrial revolution through big business, big charity, and big government available to all and not just the wealthy, white men who control them. The challenge of liberty for twenty-first-century America will be providing those same material benefits in ways that are meaningful to all and not just whichever group of populists or elites win the culture war for a given slice of the American pie.

Evade, resist, and escape zero-sum competitions that aren't games; in real life, seek the win-win.

A Different Kind of Beast: Evaluating America in View of the Kingdom of God

September 11 happened for me on September 12, 2001. I had taken a year off from college to serve as a volunteer youth pastor in Melbourne, Australia, so, in my time zone, the attacks occurred during the late-night hours of Tuesday, the 11th, and the early morning of Wednesday, the 12th. Instead of letting me sleep in (as youth pastors are wont to do), the father of my host family knocked on my door sometime before 6:00 a.m. As I opened my bedroom door, he told me, “They brought down the Twin Towers!”

All my sleep-deprived brain could muster was: “They finally did it.”

I was a relatively well-informed young adult, and my mind immediately went to the previous attempt on the Twin Towers and the ambitions of al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, the event shook me emotionally. I spent the day watching the replays of events resembling the fantastic climax to Tom Clancy’s thriller, Debt of Honor, which I had read as a teenager. I have never been so grateful to turn off the TV and go to a Wednesday evening prayer meeting.

A Mixed Record

Many of the youth I served were the children of Central and South Americans who were forced to relocate to Australia due to the political instability and human rights abuses of the Cold War. Some apparently had socialist associations and had to flee right-wing governments that would ‘disappear’ such people. Others may have had connections to rural land ownership that made them a target of communist guerillas.

As it became clear the United States would invade Afghanistan, the reactions of my Latin American co-religionists to me as a young Anglo-American abroad who shared their passion for discussing current events shifted from sympathy to concern bordering on outrage. To them, the United States was not the country I grew up in that had brought religious freedom to Eastern Europe without firing a shot and ousted Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait. It was the United States that trained the death squads of right-wing dictators but nevertheless was unable to end the communist insurgencies that terrorized the countryside.

It would be easy to attribute their skepticism of the ability of American power to remake Afghanistan to having observed failures of the same in its own hemisphere. The US military’s botched withdrawal from Kabul weeks before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 can be taken as a vindication of those predictions that my country’s valor was about to exceed its discretion. But that was not the only perspective informing their reluctance to welcome, in the words of President George W. Bush, “this crusade, this war on terrorism.”

A Prophetic Perspective

I remember one older gentleman, who had likely come to Australia when his country was ruled by a ruthless, CIA-installed dictator. He asked me how American Adventists could justify serving their country’s armed forces, given the Seventh-day Adventist historic teaching that the United States would become an eschatological enemy of God’s people. I told him about the conscientious cooperation of men like my grandfather and Desmond Doss. I explained that American Adventists had come to see that the US military could do some good in the world and had left the matter of killing in war to conscience. But he wasn’t convinced. To him, the United States was still the land beast of Revelation 13. “What communion has light with darkness?” (2 Cor 6:14).

Despite the rise of China, the United States of America remains the pre-eminent geopolitical power on earth. Like the Roman Empire (Greek: Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων; lit., “Kingdom of the Romans”) in the time of Christ, it competes for our affections and threatens to eclipse our quest for the kingdom of God (Matt 6:33; Greek: βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ; also, “empire of God”). And like the Roman Empire, it can distract us by seeming to be a powerful enemy we must overthrow to prepare the way for the kingdom of God (John 6:15, compare with 18:36 and 19:15).

I submit that the identification of the United States of America as the beast of Revelation 13:11 that “had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon” can give us a prophetic perspective that we need to arrive at an evaluation of America in the twenty-first century that is consistent with full commitment to the kingdom of God. I will do so by explaining how that interpretation allowed Ellen G. White, the spiritual founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, to arrive at such an evaluation in the nineteenth century. (I will not address the exegetical and historical basis for this interpretation.) For the political challenges of that time were not qualitatively different than those we face today.

Ellen G. White’s Evaluation of America

Ellen White believed that the United States is a blessed nation because God had raised it up to provide and protect religious liberty as expressed in the democratic-republican and dissenting Protestant ideals written into the US Constitution. The freedom of the believer’s conscience before God taught by (1) Protestantism and the protection of civil liberties afforded by the limited government of (2) republicanism were the two horns that constituted the lamb-like nature of the United States: the political upshot of the self-sacrificing lamb of God, whose kingdom is not of this world, who draws with love rather than coercing by force (John 18:36). Ellen White believed that God had granted the US its material advantages because it had realized more religious freedom than any other nation.

She also believed that the US had not been faithful to God's purposes from its inception when the Puritans, who came to America seeking religious freedom, enforced worship and doctrinal conformity in Plymouth colony. She believed that the Civil War was God's judgment on America for denying liberty to African-Americans. These are the dragon-speech: the legislative expressions that “give the lie to those liberal and peaceful principles which it has put forth as the foundation of its policy” (Great Controversy, 442)

This seems to me to be a clear-eyed view of the character of the United States that holds up in broad-strokes and even seems prescient today. America is a different kind of beast. No other power represented in Revelation combines the character of the lamb, Christ, with that of the dragon, Satan. As the largest of the world's wealthy, free nations and the guarantor of their security, it is a nation of extremes: at once extremely good and extremely bad. Its boosters and its critics are both generally correct, and many of the best and the worst things that people believe about the United States are true at the same time. But it takes a theological perspective that regards America in light of a broader divine purpose to see that one doesn't have to take a side on the question of American greatness to evaluate its contradictory character.


Evaluating America on September 12, 2021

On September 12, 2001, members of the US Congress stood on the Capitol steps and sang “God Bless America.” The following Sunday, the future President Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright recited a litany of American atrocities and declared that “America's chickens are coming home to roost. On April 13, 2003, he preached a sermon with a similar point in which he proclaimed, “Not God Bless America. God damn America.”

Ellen White's evaluation of the United States can be appealed to in half by both ‘God-bless-‘ and ‘God-damn-America’ Christians to support their views on how to maintain/attain God's blessing on the nation. This divide has been exacerbated by the first US president to practice the politics of demagoguery that the founders and framers feared would come and past presidents have sought to avoid because of what they read in the histories of the classical and medieval European republics. I have observed that this kind of politics drives Christians to seek shelter in their cultural identity group by sending increasingly extreme signals of ideological loyalty. For the God-bless-America Christians, this escalating loyalty signaling fosters hyper-patriotism—American traditions, in general, are necessary to achieve the highest human goods—and Christian nationalism—what is good for America brings about God's good purposes for the world. And among the God-damn-America Christians there are corresponding extremes of anti-Americanism—American traditions, in general, must be overturned to achieve the highest human goods—and cosmopolitan internationalism—an open-border federation of the nations is necessary to bring about economic justice.

Apart from more specific critiques, what Ellen White might have to teach both groups is that their contest over the meaning of America is not the quest for the kingdom of God. Contrary to prevailing opinion in nineteenth-century American Protestantism, Ellen White believed that the United States was not God's agent to usher in the millennium of worldwide peace and prosperity, according to their interpretation of Revelation. Rather, America would finally succumb to its hypocritical nature, revoke religious liberty in favor of an explicitly Christian national identity, and provoke an end-time crisis over the Sabbath that would result in a thousand years of worldwide desolation before the re-creation of the New Earth. In Ellen White's telling, America's continued probation as a recipient of God's blessings was dependent on a national willingness to humbly bracket questions of ultimate human destiny relative to human governance in favor of working for social reforms (abolition and later temperance) that would allow individuals and groups freedom to pursue those questions for themselves without being burdened by various forms of coercion, exploitation, sickness, and death.

Again, it seems to me that this is a prudent interpretation of prophecy and politics. The American experiment with liberty is not so exceptional that it will not fail, like all human attempts at government before it. Therefore, in the way we evaluate the United States, Christians should seek to center the meaning of the Kingdom of God as something qualitatively beyond what we achieve in this age.

God is not waiting for us to bring about the reign of America over the earth or the reformation America from all its sins before he can usher in everlasting righteousness. The United States is a different kind of beast, but it is still a beast, a man-made geopolitical power. It is a steward that will turn usurper and be put to death at the return of the King. In the meantime, we can be grateful for the blessings we receive through it while working to reform it where we can, for both point us and others to the realities that will be fully manifest in the eternal kingdom of God.
 

Objection and Cooperation: An Adventist Ethic for Responsible Religious Liberty

In his opening remarks of an episode on conscience and COVID-19 vaccination, one of the Quick to Listen podcast hosts talked about how during World War II "there were still obligations put on people who cited their conscience." While exempt from taking life in war, American conscientious objectors were expected to perform non-violent public service. He then went on to suggest, by comparison, that an obligation to do something like wearing a mask rests on those who claim a conscientious objection to COVID-19 vaccination (or, by the same reasoning, on those who don't want to wear a mask to get vaccinated). Claiming a problem isn't so bad or that we should do nothing about it because we object to all the proposed solutions is a kind of irresponsibility that makes freedom of conscience unworkable.

I agreed with that stance not only as a Christian but as a Seventh-day Adventist. During the world wars, instead of conscientious objection, Adventists taught their young men conscientious cooperation: Don't just have the courage to stand up for your convictions; also have the courage to heal in harshest conditions of war. As the story of Desmond Doss demonstrates, conscience is compelling when certified by service.

It seems to me that an ethic of conscientious cooperation would serve us well if applied to the full range of social issues where our convictions do not allow us to participate in something that our societies maintain as good and necessary. Speaking now for Adventists,

1. When we must object to working on Sabbath, we should also cooperate with employers to minimize inconvenience and not seek positions that require Sabbath work to sustain the enterprise.

2. When we must object to profiting from addictive substances and behaviors, we should also cooperate with ministries that treat addicts as victims instead of getting them incarcerated as criminals.

3. When we must object to policing that is disproportionate and discriminatory, we should also cooperate with the police to keep the peace.

4. When we must object to providing abortion as a form of birth control, we should also cooperate with programs to reduce unwanted pregnancies and place babies with adoptive parents.

5. When we must object to performing same-sex marriages, we should also cooperate with efforts to improve the health and well-being of gay people.

That list could be revised, expanded, and contextualized. But it should be sufficient to exemplify the rule of thumb that conscientious objections go along with opportunities to cooperate with unobjectionable attempts to address the common concern that made sense of the objectionable practice in the first place. Thus, conscientious cooperation is a way of obeying Jesus's command to "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:17).

Under post-war, American individualism (now running on the new and improved self-validation systems called social media), we have tended to focus on identity-based objections to either the status quo or social change (claims of conscience now being another source of group identity). Religious liberty, with its conscience protections, is perceived as an all-or-nothing legal shield or sword, depending on one's perspective on a given issue. Instead of a broadly attractive social witness to the good news of God's kingdom, we find ourselves either paralyzed by or leaning into mutual distrust between various groups asserting their rights in competition with others.

We have something to learn from the example set by our grandparents and great-grandparents. They understood that religious liberty is a source not merely of distinct protections for minority groups but also distinct responsibilities that such groups have because of their protected status. Our situation may be more complicated than theirs, but if God could give them the courage they needed, he can also give us the wisdom. When our conscience compels us to object, may it also compel us to cooperate.

Know Their Lane

Here's a fact most pastors won't tell you: We can be doing amazing things for God in one area of our ministry and wandering in the wilderness when it comes to another. That is true for all church leaders, including myself.

It was true of Peter when in one breath he made the first confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and with the next said that which was rebuked by Jesus as satanic (Matthew 16:16, 23). And if you study church history, you will see that pattern happening over and over again.

No church leader is the savior of the world; that is Jesus Christ alone. And by his Spirit, he has given the rest of us lanes that we need to stay in (1 Corinthians 12).

While that doesn't excuse defects of character and abusive systems, it does mean that a pastor can have profound insights about evangelism and also be out of their depth when it comes to conflict ministry, for example.

Pastors and church members alike need to learn to recognize when we, or someone else, has drifted out of their lane. Spiritual giftedness, expertise, and track records do not confer infallibility, but they indicate a divine calling to leadership in that area of ministry.

I suspect many Christians who have been in church for a while have figured out how to recognize leaders who think they are better at something than they actually are. But I am writing about this now because I need to say this: Choosing whom to listen to is also vital when it comes to hot-button issues like the ethics of vaccination. We all have limited time to study these issues, and socio-political controversy introduces identity-driven biases that distort our judgment.

If you respect and are inclined to agree with a Christian leader who is going to present on a contested question, first consider whether their life evidences a divine calling in that area. Then see if they have done the preparation necessary to understand the subject from all sides instead of selectively using the sources to bolster their preconceived opinions. Are they accountable to anyone for what they teach, and do they receive feedback from peers? Finally, consider whether their calling and preparation are commensurate with the size of the audience they reach, or if they have attracted a following by scratching itching ears (2 Timothy 4:3). If these criteria are not met, either proceed with caution or, better yet, find another teacher.

Pandemic Worship and Religious Liberty

The question of pandemic worship and religious liberty has arrived in my city—its exurbs, to be precise. GraceLife Church of Edmonton in Parkland County has been practising civil disobedience of Alberta's 15%-of-fire-code-occupancy cap on indoor public gatherings ever since the government announced stronger pandemic-related restrictions in December.

Public health officials quietly monitored the situation and attempted to bring the church into compliance over the intervening month. But the situation was brought into the open when police charged the pastor-teacher of the church with failure to abide by a closure order. James Coates turned himself into the police and, starting this week, is being held in remand custody for refusing to abide by conditions of bail, which apparently forbade him from doing certain activities that he deemed necessary for his calling.

Purpose

My goal in this essay is not to comment on the manner in which the authorities have enforced Alberta's regulations. That situation is developing, and, as of this writing, the church is holding another gathering from which they were apparently turning people away because they would have exceeded their fire code occupancy limit.

Rather, I will briefly evaluate the theological and philosophical arguments that the church and its pastor-teacher have given for their position and argue that they are unsound from a Seventh-day Adventist and liberal-democratic perspective. I will show how certain of their errors may originate in the distinctives of Calvinist Reformed theology. Pastor Coates is a graduate of John McArthur's Master's Seminary, which is a culturally and theologically conservative expression of the Reformed tradition. (For context, note that Pastor McArthur's megachurch has also been involved in longstanding legal disputes around its refusals to follow California's pandemic rules, some of which the US Supreme Court found to have unfairly singled-out churches.) However, I will also show why not everyone who holds to some kind of reformed political theology would subscribe to any or all of Pastor Coates's or GraceLife Church's views.

Also note that while it has become a trope among certain Adventists, who are interested in recovering our Arminian theological heritage on the doctrine of salvation, to rhetorically position themselves against anything Calvinist, that is not my intent here. Adventists also have theological roots in John Calvin and the Reformed traditions, including the roots of our seventh-day Sabbatarianism! But Adventist political theology, which remains to be systematically articulated, stands among the Dissenting traditions, some of which split from the Reformed traditions. That difference is what I am primarily addressing in what follows.

Sermon Evaluation

In a sermon preached last Sunday, Pastor Coates made a theological case for why churches should continue to operate at full capacity. It rested on the following propositions, which I summarize as theses and evaluate below.

1. The government has no jurisdiction over how the church conducts its worship.

Pastor Coates asserted, without biblical reference, that God has not given the government authority to set "terms of worship" for the church. I suspect that the roots of this claim lie in Augustinian two-cities theology, which informed the Medieval system of separate church and civil legal systems that was overturned by the Reformation and Enlightenment. Contrast this with another Reformed view of church-state relations, Kuyperian "sphere sovereignty," in with the state directs churches away from actions that are destructive to public interests (see p. 12).

Seventh-day Adventists, following the Calvinist Dissenter, Roger Williams, build their church-state view, in part, on the biblical distinction between the two great commandments: the law of love for God and the law of love for neighbour. We hold that governments may legislate in the areas covered by the second table of the law (last six commandments) when such actions harm others in this life. But governments should not legislate in the areas covered by the first table of the law (first four commandments), which are strictly matters of individual conscience to be guided by the church. A.T. Jones's made this argument in his testimony before a US Senate committee against the Blair Sunday observance bill (National Sunday Law, p. 18). According to the two-tables principle, governments cannot tell us what songs to sing in worship, but they can, as long as they aren't singling out faith communities, tell us to wear masks while singing them so as not to endanger public safety. They can tell us not to sing songs the incite violence, but they cannot tell us which god(s) to sing about.

2. The church should show the government how to conduct "its God-ordained duty."

This is true as far as the temporal, second-table goals of human governance go, with the provision that a single church or civil society organization does not have a privileged role in this regard. Otherwise, we get a soft-theocracy, which is characteristic of certain Calvinist approaches to political theology that try in some way to direct governments toward eternal, first-table ends. As I argue in this essay, the problem with privileging one church's voice to the state is that it can just as easily be turned against that church when it falls out of favour and is replaced by some other church or secularized version thereof. Regardless, I suspect that Pastor Coates and I are not in disagreement on this point.

3. The dominion God gave humanity in the Garden of Eden confers "unalienable" rights, such as a right to work and to be with your family when they are dying.

The "unalienable" rights enumerated in the US Declaration of Independence are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That succinct and general expression of a philosophical orientation toward the basis of American common life required specific expression in the US Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments to the US Constitution to be realized. The same is true of the dominion God gave humanity at creation. The general mandate given to humanity in a nutshell in the creation account is elaborated in the books of the law and the other canonical scriptures. Identifying unalienable rights to work or be with family at death in Genesis 1 is an exercise in reading a specific interpretation of contemporary liberal-democratic norms into the biblical text.

Furthermore, specific human rights, like the right to work or be with family at death, are not unalienable but are limited by the rights of others—in this case, their right to not be exposed to diseases. In light of Leviticus 13–14, the Edenic dominion decree plausibly implies a mandate to figure out what causes the spread of infectious diseases and stop it. The biblical quarantine laws accomplish this, as do economic shutdowns, by limiting the right to be with family in some cases.

As the aphorism goes: Your rights end where my nose begins. That metaphor, originally used to make the case for prohibition, became literal during the COVID-19 pandemic. A more sophisticated way of putting it is that when the second-order effects of the free actions of individuals have the cumulative effect of threatening the bodies or property of others, the government has a reason to restrict their liberty via the least restrictive means. (For an entertaining, if somewhat lengthy, illustration of why that is the case, read this.)

Understanding the second-order, rights-end-at-nose principle applied to the second table of the law, along with the freedom of conscience principle with regard to the first, is how American Adventists in the late nineteenth century could be intellectually consistent while publicly advocating against Sunday-closing laws and for prohibition.

4. "God is sovereign over the virus." The government didn't cause it, so they aren't responsible if someone dies from it. But if someone dies from pandemic restrictions, the government is responsible for that. So the government should not restrict liberties to deal with the virus.

God intended for the principles of Israel's law to be an example to the nations (see, for example, Deuteronomy 4:5–6) and held the nations surrounding Israel to account when they violated certain principles found in Israel's law (see the Old Testament prophets' oracles against the nations). This example extends down to our time through the influence of Judaism and Christianity on the liberal-democratic political tradition, which has recognized a principle of quarantine that justifies limited governmental restrictions on individual liberty to prevent the spread of infectious disease. By interpreting Old Testament quarantine laws as a source of "Progressive Moral Wisdom" (Matthew 5:17–19), Christians should be predisposed to support quarantines and adopt new customs when they judge they will preserve life.

Statement Evaluation

The thesis expressed in Pastor Coates's sermon, that the government should not restrict liberties to restrain viruses, is expanded in the following paragraph of the statement on the church's website. I will evaluate it in this section.

That said, living life comes with risks. Every time we get behind the wheel of a car, we are assuming a degree of risk. We accept that risk due to the benefits of driving. Yes, though vastly overblown, there are associated risks with COVID-19, as there are with other infections. Human life, though precious, is fragile. As such, death looms over all of us. That is why we need a message of hope. One that addresses our greatest need. That message is found in Jesus Christ. It is found in Him because all of us have sinned and have fallen short of God’s perfect standard of righteousness (Rom 3:23). To sin is to violate the holiness and righteousness of God. As our Creator, He is the one who will judge us according to our deeds and no one will stand on their own merit in that judgment. Therefore, we need a substitute. One who has both lived the life we could not and died the death we deserve.

This let's-take-our-chances philosophy is likely the political upshot of the view of providence behind Pastor Coates's reference to God's sovereignty. Calvinist views of free will (specifically, either our lack thereof or its compatibility with divine determinism) and predestination (those whom God chose choose him) can form the intuition that when a deadly disease surprises us with a novel form of risk, God in some sense sent it upon us to drive us to him for our eternal security. And if some people die from it, that should also be accepted as God's will. This can result in a quasi-fatalist quietism in the face of major social problems, like that which Cotton Mather confronted in eighteenth-century Boston when his Calvinist Puritan brothers declared that he was interfering with a divine judgment by experimenting with smallpox inoculation: We shouldn't try anything too novel in response to novel risks, because that would put us in rebellion against God's sovereignty.

 

Adventists differ from this political view because we believe that humans have been given free will. We believe that God acts in history in ways that we cannot stop, sometimes even executing, as I argue, judgment on contemporary nations. But Adventists also believe that Satan is ultimately the cause of sickness and death and that humans can and should choose to cooperate with God's laws of health to reduce our risk of sickness and death. And we believe that fighting sickness and death via health reform is the "right-arm" of our gospel proclamation because it is a token of eternal life.

 

To spread the benefits of health, Adventists have a tradition of fighting sickness and death through social reform—not just individual, family, or church reform, but legislation and social organization that restricts our liberties to the least extent necessary to prevent deadly second-order effects of individual actions. We find this tradition in the chapter on "Liquor Traffic and Prohibition" in The Ministry of Healing and in our denominational leadership organizing preventative quarantines during the 1918 Flu. (For the record, American prohibition was not the disaster that the popular historical narrative makes it out to be.) In liberal-democratic countries like Canada, where citizens have been given a say in how their society governs itself, Christians should continue to use that influence to support quarantines, including economic shutdowns, as means to fight sickness and death.

Cost-Benefit of the Shutdowns

Finally, the GraceLife Church's statement makes an extended case that the pandemic is not that bad and that the shutdowns intended to stop COVID-19 transmission have potentially done more harm than good. I don't believe that case holds up in view of the big numbers: year-over-year death certificates and confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

For example, the US, Canada, and Australia have similar cultures and share a common political tradition derived from English representative democracy and Common Law. They also have had stable death rates in the years leading up to 2020. In the US, where shutdowns were inconsistently applied, confirmed COVID-19 deaths account for about two-thirds of the high rate of excess mortality in the 2020 reporting period (source). In Canada, where shutdowns were more strictly applied than in the US, including some lockdown-type measures, confirmed COVID-19 deaths account for nearly all of the moderate rate of excess mortality in the 2020 reporting period (source 1, source 2). And in Australia, which applied strict, lockdown-style shutdowns, there was no excess mortality in the 2020 reporting period (source). Anyone who wants to persuade me that shutdowns don't save lives overall, or that they cause more people to die from other causes than would have died from COVID-19, etc. is going to have to get around those big, hard-to-distort numbers without appealing to some kind of conspiracy theory.

This is not to say that shutdowns don't have negative effects that lead to higher deaths for certain populations. So do other public health restrictions on individual liberty (such as narcotics laws). Nor is it to say that we should not attempt to ameliorate those negative second-order effects. Nor do I imply that governments should enact the strictest possible lockdowns as if extending life were the only earthly human good that matters. My point is simply that the big numbers bear out the view that a broadly pro-life response to the novel coronavirus requires of us some form of shutdown in the absence of widespread vaccination.

Conclusion

But the bigger point is that this argument about the cost-benefit of Alberta's shutdown is a matter of political judgment that is only tangential to a principled religious liberty argument. It seems to me that, in their statement, GraceLife Church is leveraging religious liberty to make a political point: Contrary to the majority of their neighbours and their elected officials, they believe that the shutdowns are doing more harm than good. But because they are a church, they want their beliefs about God to shield their political dissent.

In Pastor Coates's sermon, he argues for a view of religious liberty that I can't support either as an Adventist, because he doesn't understand the structure of God's law as it applies to government enforcement, or as a liberal-democrat, because he doesn't understand that our liberties can be limited when they are used in ways that have harmful second-order effects on other's bodies and/or property.

I believe Pastor Coates should have the opportunity to promote these views, practice civil-disobedience, attain good legal representation, and argue his case in court. But I also believe the government may to enforce its rules in the case of him and his church, including, if necessary, using incarceration. I further hope and anticipate that the courts will reject the view of religious liberty for which he has become a symbol.