There is not a lot of reading material available outside the Grady Memorial Hospital McDonald’s in Atlanta, A row of empty racks for free literature stands by the door. Publishers seem to have washed their hands of the transient and largely destitute patrons of this restaurant. As I walked by these forsaken racks the other day, I noticed that one was freshly stocked with brochures. I grabbed one, unfolding it to it’s 8 1/2″ x 14″ extent. One side was printed with a Biblical prophecy time-line that is also visible at the website mentioned in the brochure: www.7thmonth10thday.org.

This big chart was familiar to me from viewing Adventist prophecy lectures. The threads spun by Leviticus, Hosea, Jeremiah, and, primarily, the Book of Daniel get knit together in the year 1844. The chart even displayed the name of William Miller. The cover of the brochure bore the title “Israel’s Scattering, Gathering,” along with four Hebrew letters: yod, hey, vav, and hey (I forgot I had to read it backwards when I first Googled it). This is a respectfully oblique way of referring to “God.” I immediately observed that the pamphlet spelled “God” as “G-d,” a warning to me that something might be a bit off about the message. Ninety percent of the pamphlet covered prophecy and fulfillment. The last 10% was reserved for what I assumed would be the “pitch” from the producers of the document. It read as follows:

“We are now in the 2nd GATHERING TIME. There is hope for you and me, brothers and sisters. We, too will be tested. Will we worship the One True God of Heaven and receive His seal, or will worship a false god and receive the mark of the Beast. Saturday or Sunday is the test. In 1888 Senator Blair introduced a law that would cause all buying, selling, and business to cease on Sunday. A.T. Jones, a 7th day Adventist man, refuted it. Because of his efforts, we still have the right to worship according to our conscience.”

The last thing on page was the website address. Folks without the internet may have just learned a bit about prophecy, but would remain stymied as to how to follow up on this lead. I have the internet, so I accessed the address offered. But it took 10 or 15 minutes of research at the site to partially clear up my confusion. The content was simultaneously familiar and strange. Everything looked and quacked like an Adventist duck, but it did not seem very polished or professional. Another 10 minutes of digging revealed the name of Talking Rock Sabbath Chapel , located in Talking Rock, Georgia. Another link to this church is right here. I then looked on the Seventh-day Adventist Georgia-Cumberland Conference directory to find out more.

This church, whose primary web presence appears kosher in every regard, was not listed a an Adventist operation. Links from the church site took me to a site much more organized than the scrappy and inscrutable “www.7thmonth10thday.org.” It is Maranatha Media, a production of former Adventist pastor Adrian Ebens, a person who was “disfellowshipped” from the mainstream Adventist Church in 2012. He joined a small contingent of former Adventists who share his divergent viewpoint, including the members of Talking Rock Sabbath Church. Maranatha Media offers it’s content in four languages, although this fact does not necessarily indicate the scope of his operation. His lectures garner a small, but respectable, number of viewers on YouTube. Several other anti-trinitarian YouTube videos exist. One of these, by Bill Stringfellow, has been viewed 11,556 times. As a fairly new Adventist, I had no idea that this contentious flap existed. I drug along my preconceptions about the Trinity when I joined up. Like my pre-existing notions regarding prophecy, it looks like my belief in the Trinity can meld with Adventism. A vocal minority seems to dispute this, however.

Another 10 minutes of scratching around Maranatha Media revealed that Adrian Ebens does not believe in the Trinity. He was disciplined for this attitude while still an Adventist pastor. This link is to commentary generated by his 2010 retraction of this view. But, by 2012, he was no longer penitent, and a schism was the result. I glanced at some of his writings as a preliminary to viewing some of his YouTube lectures. An anemic defense of his standpoint, written in one of his articles, states that “nowhere in the Bible is the word ‘Trinity’ used.” The Bible doesn’t use the word “rapture” either, but the phenomenon will take place nevertheless, and is described in Adventist Belief 25. Seventh-day Adventist Fundamental Belief 2, entitled “Trinity,” is reproduced below. I will foreshadow a later discovery by stating now that Mr. Ebers considers Belief 2 to be corrupted addenda to a much purer original Adventist foundation.

“There is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a unity of three coeternal Persons. God is immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing, above all, and ever present. He is inﬁnite and beyond human comprehension, yet known through His self-revelation. God, who is love, is forever worthy of worship, adoration, and service by the whole creation.”

At this point in my researches, I could not help but jump to a premature conclusion. It would appear that Adrian Ebens’s faction is trying hard to out-Adventist the Adventists themselves, claiming to be the real deal, but compromised by their anti-trinitarian stance. The Adventist message is so attractive and cohesive, I fear the group has co-opted it, with only apparently slight modifications, to use as a lure for their own evangelistic effort. The neophyte could be easily blown away by the prima fascie evidence, becoming attracted by the insights this splinter group offers without initially being made aware of the existence of a more theologically correct mainstream church. The pool of potential converts that is being targeted (disenfranchised folk, such as I am) may have never heard of Seventh-day Adventism before being exposed to Adrian Ebens’s variation on the theme. Mr. Ebens could be sincerely dedicated to his views, and considers himself as following in the footsteps of reformers like Luther.

Here is a much less charitable theory: he wants to become the “one-eyed king” of the blind. He cannot be singled out for criticism, for many share his notions. He does possess, however, the distinction of having put himself on record, at length, and has thus presented himself as open for rebuttal.

I had always associated the denial of the Trinity with Unitarians and Jehovah’s Witnesses. I would not be playing true to form if I did not immediately digress in order to mention that Frank Lloyd Wright’s ancestors were all Unitarians. This probably gave him the inside track in securing the commission for Unity Temple (link to congregation), and, in a different vein, Unity Temple (the work of architecture). Wright was a native of Wisconsin, but Unitarians are predominately a New England phenomenon.

“The History of Christianity” by Paul Johnson prefaces a short passage about Unitarianism with a sentence about the rise and fall of denominations in America. The early dominance of Congregationalism and Presbyterianism yielded (at least numerically) to Baptists and Wesleyans (Methodists). I had learned from a different source that one of the barriers to the spread of Presbyterianism was the denomination’s insistence on a college education for it’s ministers.

The rise of Unitarianism was an elitist affair. They were all collegians, the principal hotbed of the movement being Harvard. A police line-up of suspects would include Emersons, Everettes, Danas, Adams, Lowells, and Hales; a veritable “Mayflower Mafia.” It represented the unusual synthesis of Puritanism with the humanist attitudes best exemplified by Erasmus (Martin Luther’s contemporary). Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain champions the Erasmus viewpoint over the Lutheran viewpoint by way of a protracted debate between two representative characters. The Enlightenment (personified by the winning “Erasmus” character) made a god of “progress,” but Mann’s novel ends, ironically (a Mann specialty) with the insane debacle of WWI.

Here is a link to a short article that traces the genesis of the American Unitarian movement, entitled The Unitarian Controversy and It’s Puritan Roots. It is very interesting, but probably does not bear directly upon “Adventist” cases of Trinity denial ” A long footnote: Paul Johnson’s history book cites Arminianism as an influence on Unitarianism. This link to Wikipedia tells us that Arminius’s notions about freewill and grace were an influence on Seventh-day Adventism, but claims that Paul Johnson’s connection of it with Unitarianism is poppycock. My less complicated notions about grace all come from scripture: “by grace ye are saved by faith, and that not of yourselves.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses are like the polar opposite of New England transcendentalists, but they also deny the Trinity. Here in Atlanta they are fixtures in all of the MARTA Stations. You may question their theology, but not their zeal. Go to the ant, thou sluggard!

The majority of the material presented by Adrian Ebens on YouTube is orthodox Adventism. I was in search of differences, and not similarities, so I selected a speech entitled “The Cornerstone of Seventh-day Adventism by Adrian Ebens” (from July 4, 2013). The talk began with many non-controversial scriptural citations that may be summarized by Paul’s hope for the church, Ephesians 5:27: that Christ might “present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; that it should be holy and without blemish.” “How true!” I thought to myself. But Mr. Ebens was not extolling the purity of my church, but of his. He now came to the point.

Adventism did not originally embrace the Trinity, Adrian Ebens stated. He spent several minutes repeating a comment made by Ellen G. White in 1858, one partially described as follows in this Ellen White Estate link, “The three angels’ messages were to her a ‘perfect chain of truth,’ The messages she designated as a ‘firm platform,’ or a ‘solid, immovable platform.'” The Seventh-day Adventist church had reached a state of permanent perfection in the year 1858. This was Mr. Ebens interpretation of Ellen G. White’s statement. Mr. Ebens said that the cornerstone of the true church is Jesus (whose relationship to the Father soon raised an additional controversy), and that the church’s fidelity to “truth” lasted only from 1872 until 1914.

This “truth” was described, for all eternity, by Fundamental Principles promulgated in 1872. The Spirit does not get mentioned until we get to Principle XVI, but it is mentioned. I am no scholar, but I do recall that the Bible itself mentions the Holy Spirit, more than a few times. Some theologians refer to Matthew 28:19 as the only unambiguous description of the Spirit as a divine person: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Doug Batchelor would add (among others citations) First John 5:7: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.”





Adrian Ebens’s Adventist history lesson included both good characters ( Ellen G. White), and bad guys (those awful Kelloggs of Battle Creek). Mr. Ebens blames Ella Eaton Kellogg, wife of famous Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, for contaminating the atmosphere of early 20th century Adventism with her “Seventh Day Baptist” predilections. I scratched around the internet for a half hour trying to verify this. I learned a lot about the eccentricities and religious fervor of Dr. Kellogg, but (even though she wrote a book) I could find out nothing about the spiritual influences his wife may have exerted. The story sounds apocryphal to me. My favorite Dr. Kellogg trivia is that he helped preserve the life of the Dionne quintuplets, a feat commemorated in this link. He had a stormy, but loving, association with Ellen G. White.

Adrian Ebens also expressed some objections to what he described as a theological transformation of Jesus from “Son” into just a “metaphorical Son” by the Adventists. Debate about the nature of Jesus (God? Man? God-Man? Man-God?) has plagued Christianity for nearly 2,000 years now. Mr. Ebens cites Fundamental Principle #2 from 1872 to prove his claim. This Principle commences, “That there is one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Eternal Father…” and goes on to describe Christ’s continuing ministry in the sanctuary (a topic not germane to His nature, and one I continue to struggle with, although I am sure that Jesus is not resting on His laurels just yet. His early retirement would place us in the kind of clockwork reality Descartes described).

“Modern” Adventist Fundamental Belief #4 starts like this: “God the eternal Son became incarnate in Jesus Christ…” Just what the word “Son” means is hotly debated by the speaker. Mainstream attitudes about the eternal nature of Jesus are perceived by Adrian Ebens to be yet another defection by Adventists from the “golden age” (1855-1905) values that he calls the “cornerstone” of the faith. Here is a link to a Jehovah’s Witness page: https://www.lds.org/scriptures/tg/jesus-christ-divine-sonship?lang=eng. concerning the second-fiddle position many seek to place Jesus into.

They, too, would like to convince you that Jesus falls short of those attributes His Father possesses. The whole crazy Arian Heresy was (and it looks as if it still is) about this issue. My limited scriptural knowledge about this imbroglio impels me toward a single verse, First Corinthians 15:24: “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” When Jesus eventually subordinates Himself to God the Father, it will be a voluntary act, and not just the continuation of some pre-existing relationship. Ellen G. White will have the last word on this exasperating topic, the following extract from the linked Adventist Review article on the topic:



Against the theory that Christ was “the first created being” and “proceeded forth” from God back “in the days of eternity,” White stated that “in Christ is life, original, unborrowed, underived,” and that “from all eternity Christ was united with the Father.” Ellen G. White, Selected Messages (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1958, 1980), book 1, p. 228.)

Getting back to the main topic, I now began to watch a popular YouTube video called “Adventist Pastor Learns Truth About Trinity!!! By Bill Stringfellow.” It began with a cute preamble that was a retelling of the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Disarming images from a cartoon appeared onscreen. I’m sure the lecture would have been rhetorically competent, but to continue to view the intro would have been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. We all are looking for porridge that is “just right.” I was no longer in the mood to listen to lectures by heretics. I had pretty much found out all I cared to know by now: the Arian Heresy is alive, and well, and has even staked out a claim in Adventist land.

In order to cleanse my palate after such a rich, but unsavory, repast, I thought I would watch “The Mystery of the Trinity- Doug Batchelor,” which had thoughtfully queued up behind the preceding videos. I had seen it before. I knew it would expound only tested theology, and, in addition, would not profess knowledge that can only be known by God Himself. This kind of exegesis will not satisfy critics who demand that all of the questions they ask be answered promptly. Even though the Book of Job ends well enough, Job’s persistent question throughout, “why me?” never really gets an answer.

But my faith in the existence of the Trinity does not leave any room for doubt, and is unshakable enough that I may expose it to onslaughts of balderdash without it suffering the slightest dent.

All of our questions will be answered in Heaven. The final quotation in this lengthy post is from Charles A. Tindley, a great turn-of-the-century preacher, and a songwriter as well. His gospel number “We Will Understand It Better By and By” is a Berean favorite. It is a pleasant way of saying, :”don’t become mired in esoterica.”

By and by, when the morning comes,

All the saints of God are gathered home,

We’ll tell the story of how we’ve overcome,

For we’ll understand it better by and by.