SEEKING A SANCTUARY

Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventist and the American Dream

Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventist and the American Dream

Summary

When published in 1989, the first version of Seeking a Sanctuary established itself as the best accessible study of American Seventh-day Adventism. Now revised and enlarged, the capacity remains the foremost work on this denomination. Combining historical, sociological, and heritage studies methodologies, Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, respectively an educator at Oxford University and a London-based journalist, offer a readable and penetrating analysis that is indispensable to both scholars and general readers liking to understand Adventism. For Adventists themselves, it offers a sympathetic outsider's perspective that increases self-awareness.

The authors contend two intertwined theses. First, as demonstrated by their name and subtitle, they accept as factual that Adventism provides an alternate means of accomplishing the American illusion of spiritual fulfillment and material progress. Second, they dispute the understanding put ahead by scholars both inside and outside the denomination that Adventism is in the process of transforming from a sect into a denomination; in contrast, they accept as factual that it remains a sect. In presenting these arguments, the authors split up their publication into three parts. The first, "Adventist Theology," addresses administration, persona, eschatology, and the sanctuary doctrine. Although they manage not use the period, the authors see several dialectics at work in Adventist theology: the Bible as the source of Adventist conviction over against Ellen White as the last interpreter of the Bible, the wish for versus the hold up in Christ's second approaching, persona joined to specific beliefs in contrast with persona expressed through commitment to denominational structure, and the Arian tendencies embedded in the Sanctuary Doctrine in confrontation with the church's twentieth century Trinitarianism.

Viewing these issues historically, Seeking a Sanctuary incorporates them into an almost Hegelian pattern: the thesis of Adventist radicalism made the antithesis of fundamentalism out of which came the synthesis of evangelicalism. Interestingly, although, and in holding with the contention that Adventism is not progressing to denominational status, as this synthesis became the new thesis, the antithesis that it made was a come back to fundamentalism other than a step to a higher stage of development.

 

Critical Assessment

The Adventist Experience and the American Dream, here afresh we see some dialectics at work, starting with the notion that in opposition to a flawed Republic, Adventism has evolved an "alternative social system" (114). Although the place of adoration began ...