Greetings Hobie,
I clearly state that I believe that there is One God, Yahweh, God the Father and that our Lord Jesus Christ is a human, now exalted to sit at the right hand of God the Father, in God the Father's Throne, and he is the Son of God by birth, character and resurrection. So yes, I deny your claim. Psalm 110:1, Matthew 1:20-21. Luke 1:34-35, John 1:14 clearly deny the Trinity. Jesus is the Son of God, not God the Son. There have been many threads on this topic.
It was interesting with my last visit to my doctor we briefly discussed this topic. He is a SDA and states that he believes in the Trinity. What he did state is that many or some of the early SDAs did not believe in the Trinity (founding fathers? Did EGW believe in the Trinity?). Also one of my mates discussed with some of the SDAs at Coorangbong NSW Australia, and he said that he encountered some of the older SDAs who do not accept the Trinity, but most of the younger SDAs from the College accept the Trinity.
Kind regards
Trevor
Happy Sabbath my brother,
Yes, it is a mystery and we shall fully understand it till when we get to heaven and see how it all plays out, but till then I would say tread carefully on what is not revealed fully to us as of now. Now as for Adventist, many of the first leaders came out of a semi-arian church so it took a while for them to grasp the fullness of the GodHead, and Ellen White unveiled many of the truths on this, I have the history of it and posting...
The Doctrine of the Trinity among Adventists
Introduction
While the Seventh-day Adventist Church today espouses the doctrine of the Trinity, this has not always been so. The evidence from a study of Adventist history indicates that from the earliest years of our church to the 1890s a whole stream of writers took an Arian or semi-Arian position. The view of Christ presented in those years by Adventist authors was that there was a time when Christ did not exist, that His divinity is a delegated divinity, and that therefore He is inferior to the Father. In regard to the Holy Spirit, their position was that He was not the third member of the Godhead but the power of God.
A number of Adventist authors today, who are opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity, are trying to resurrect the views of our early pioneers on these issues. They are urging the church to forsake the Roman doctrine of the Trinity and to accept again the semi-Arian position of our pioneers.
Definition and Terms
1. Arianism
A teaching which arose in the fourth century AD in Alexandria. Named after its most prominent representative Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria. It denied that Jesus Christ was of the same substance (Gk. homoousios) as the Father and reduced the Son to the rank of a creature, though pre-existent before the world. Arianism was condemned at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325).
2. Semi-Arianism
Semi-Arians attempted a compromise between the orthodox and Arian position on the nature of Christ. They rejected the Arian view that Christ was created and had a different nature from God (anomoios - dissimilar), but neither did they accept the Nicene Creed which stated that Christ was of one substance (homoousios) with the Father. Semi-Arians taught that Christ was similar (homoios) to the Father, or of like substance (homoiousios), but still subordinate.
3. Trinitarianism
Trinitarianism is the orthodox belief that there is but one living and true God. Nevertheless this one God is a unity of three persons, who are of one substance, power and eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
4. Anti-Trinitarians
Anti-Trinitarians are people who oppose the doctrine of the Trinity for various reasons. They may
be Arians, semi-Arians, or hold other views that deny the Trinity.
The Early Pioneers were Arian and anti-Trinitarian
Two of the principal founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Joseph Bates and James White, were originally members of the Christian Connection Church which rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. James White was an ordained minister of that church. When he and Bates joined the Advent Movement, they continued to hold the anti-Trinitarian view which they had learned in the Christian Connection Church.
In 1855 J. White published an article in the Review and Herald entitled 'Preach the Word.' In dealing with Pauls statement in
2 Timothy 4:4 'they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables' he wrote, 'Here we might mention the Trinity, which does away the personality of God and His Son Jesus Christ, ....' 1 Joseph Bates wrote in 1868, 'Respecting the trinity, I concluded that it was impossible for me to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, was also the Almighty God, the Father, one and the same being.'2
Other prominent Adventists who spoke out against the Trinity were J. N. Loughborough, R. F. Cottrell, J. N. Andrews, and Uriah Smith:
1 Review and Herald, Dec. 11, 1855, p. 85.
2 Autobiography (Battle Creek, 1868), 205.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. . .
J. N. Loughborough In response to the question 'What serious objection is there to the doctrine of the Trinity?'
Loughborough wrote, 'There are many objections which we might urge, but on account of our limited space we shall reduce them to the three following:
1. It is contrary to common sense. 2. It is contrary to scripture [sic]. Its origin is Pagan and fabulous.3
R. F. Cottrell
In an article on the Trinity, Cottrell wrote, To hold the doctrine of the trinity is not so much an evidence of evil intention as of intoxication from that wine of which all the nations have drunk. The fact that this was one of the leading doctrines, if not the very chief, upon which the bishop of Rome was exalted to the popedom, does not say much in its favor.4
J. N. Andrews
In an article concerning the identity of Melchizedek in
Hebrews 7:3, Andrews argued that the words 'having neither beginning of days' cannot be taken literally since every being in the universe except God the Father has a beginning. It is in this context that he wrote, 'And as to the Son of God, he would be excluded also, for he had God for his Father, and did, at some point in the eternity of the past, have a beginning of days.'5
Uriah Smith
In the 1865 edition of the book Thoughts, Critical and Practical, on the Book of Revelation, Smith called Christ the first created being.6 However, by the time the 1881 edition was published he had modified his view. Concerning the phrase the Beginning of the creation of God in
Revelation 3:14 he wrote, Some understand by this language that Christ was the first created being ... But the language does not necessarily imply that he was created ... he himself came into existence in a different manner, as he is called the only begotten of the Father.7
Our pioneers clearly held Arian or Semi-Arian views in regard to the person of Christ. They understood firstborn over all creation (
Col 1:15) and 'only begotten Son' (
John 3:16) in a literal sense. The Father, therefore, was first and superior, and the Son, who had a beginning sometime in eternity, was subordinate to the Father. A corollary of this view was the belief that the Holy Spirit is an influence or the power of God, but not a person.
3 Review and Herald, Nov. 5, 1861.
4 Ibid., July 6, 1869.
5 Ibid., Sept. 7, 1869.
6 Thoughts, Critical and Practical, on the Book of Revelation (Battle Creek, 1865), 59.
7 Ibid., 74. Smith, however, never abandoned his semi-Arian views. In 1898, five years before his death he published the book Looking Unto
Jesus (Review and Herald, 1898). In the chapter on 'Christ as Creator,' he wrote, 'With the Son, the evolution of deity, as deity, ceased.
All else, of things animate or inanimate, has come in by the creation of the Father and the Son ...' (page, 13).
http://www.adventistbiblicalresearch.org/documents/trinitydoc among sda.pdf
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