Michigan Virtual Camp Meeting 2020: Forward to the Finish

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

On the Unity of the Church

Fernando Canale

02 Our Adventist Journey: From Unity to Division

You know, points, turning points in our history that shows that we in reality throughout the years have not grown in unity, but sadly we are growing in disunity.

And I am afraid that sometimes when we are talking about unity in diversity, what we are actually emphasizing is not unity, but is diversity.

We must be more diverse, diverse, diverse, and I think that that's not the real goal.

The real goal is the unity of the church.

Okay, so we will, let me see if this is moving, Yes, going to the Adventist journey from unity to division.

So we have to go now to the beginning of our experience.

I just saw it today, but the slides were in, so it's not 1945, our beginnings, our beginnings are in 1844, 1845.

So now we are going to go back in time to 1844, 1845 to 1888.

There was what I call the discovering of the Adventist vision, which is centered in what the pioneers call the pillars of Adventism, which I suggest were the ground of the unity and the foundation of the Adventist church.

White that she is reflecting on the origin of Adventism from the perspective of about 44 years of experience in times of the well-known 1888 General Conference meetings.

And she said, as a people, we are to stand firm on the platform of eternal truth that has withstood test and trial.

We are to hold to the sure pillars of our faith.

The principles of truth that God has revealed to us are our only true foundation.

The lapse of time has not lessened their value." So clearly there was a time of upheaval in 1888, but going back to the origination of the church, she is calling attention to the pillars of the church.

Well, when you see Adventists talking about the pillars, there are a lot of different lists of pillars that we are given.

White's gift of prophecy, Others include justification by faith.

White made in 1889 reflecting on 1888 regarding the pillars because at that time many of the brethrens were saying that what was happening in 1888 was to remove the pillars.

And so she kind of went back in her memory to the pillars.

And she was able to recall only this as the pillars.

The pillars were, according to her, the sanctuary, the 3 angels' messages, the law, the Sabbath, and the known immortality of the soul.

So basically for us these days we call them doctrines, right?

But there is a major difference between doctors and pillars.

They are doctrines, but they are the pillars in the sense that they support an entire edifice that is coherent and prepared for the life and the mission of the church.

But there is something more that she had to say regarding the pillars.

And that has to do with the following statement that appears in the great controversy, page 423.

The subject of the sanctuary, and look at this, she is kind of focusing on 1 particular pillar there.

The key which unlocked the mystery of the disappointment of 1844.

It opened to view a complete system of truth, connected and harmonious, showing that God's hand had directed the great Advent movement and revealing present duty as it brought to light the position and work of his people.

So I suggest to you that this is the key of the unity, not only the key of the unity, this was the key of the formation of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

If this hadn't happened, this church would not have existed.

So There is another quotation that comes from the beginnings of their experience.

This is an actual quotation that Ellen G.

This is 5 years after the disappointment.

And there is a very short statement there.

She says, we know that we have the truth.

This complete system, they saw it in the broad strokes and impacted them.

And so she goes then to say, Brother Rhodes has now gone in company with brother John Andrews to the eastern part of the state to hand up the scattered ship.

God is at work and is bringing souls from the ravage to the clear light of truth.

Arthur White in his biography of Ellen G.

White kind of elaborates in this point and it says that they didn't have anything to do until they were able to put all this truth together.

Once they had this truth together, they initiated the mission of the church.

The disappointment brought them to reflection.

In the Bible, they discovered the hermeneutical principle, which was the sanctuary.

Then they apply this to all the truth that they had.

They discover a system, and then After they had this truth, they go into mission.

And only after they have gone into mission, in order to be able to articulate and to prosper the mission, they had to face the issue of organization, and then the church was grounded.

You see, our church is coming into existence because of a theological discovery of monumental proportions.

I think that they didn't even understood back then the richness and the importance of the theological discovery that they made, and certainly we are completely oblivious about that these days, according to the history that I am about to share with you.

So the disappointment on Sola Scriptura led to the first discovery establishing of the pillars of the Adventist, of Adventism, which in order for me to refer to them quickly, I call them division.

Division are all these pillars that I enumerated there that all together allow us to see the rest of the system, and so that is what I call division.

Now the pillars of the discovery, which is the point second, the discovery of an harmonious and complete system of theology and philosophy.

I submit to you that I, in my experience, did not have any understanding, even after studying theology, of the existence of a complete and harmonious system of theology and philosophy in Adventism.

I have been working on that and trying to discover it, and the more I go into applying these pillars to the work of the study of the Bible and Christian theology, the more that I discover this full and completely harmonious system of theology and also philosophy.

Remember that I had to study philosophy and I explained how I kind of stumbled into that without planning to go into it.

That allows me to see only also how in scripture There is a complete system of philosophy.

So, vision, hermeneutical principles, and system, the entire system of doctrines of the Adventist church led to the mission to share the pillars and the system with the world, the worldwide mission.

And the vision, the system, and the mission altogether led to the formation of a new church which require organization for the sake of her mission.

The global advancement of mission required the organization of institutions.

And they had some problems with that, but they were able to move.

If we were to present a visual diagram of that, at the bottom of the conviction of the pioneers was the sola, tota, prima, scriptura principle which they inherited from the protestant reformation, we are going to talk about that tomorrow.

Then on top of that, to build the edifice of the church, we have the pillars of Adventism.

Sabbath, laws, sanctuary, non-immortality of the soul, and the 3 angels' messages.

Then on top of that, we have the system of truth connected and harmonious.

And on top of that is the existence of the church and her mission.

And if the church and her mission works on these foundations, unity will come because there will be a unity of foundations, a unity of principles and vision, a unity and coherence in the system of truth, and then the church will go out united with the blessing of the Holy Spirit.

Now, another diagram, the disappointment and the sola scriptura experience of the Advent movement led to the discovery of the pillars of Adventism or the vision of the church, those pillars led to the, I mean, were the cause of.

The disappointment, sola scritoria, causes the pillars, the pillars causes the existence of the, and the discovery of the complete harmonious system of theology and philosophy that causes the mission of the church and the sharing of the pillars and the systems with the world, and that sharing causes, requires the origination, the organization of a new church.

So you see, our new church came as a result of the discovery of hermeneutical principles, a system of theology that put together all the doctrines of the Bible, and from the beauty and power of that understanding, mission developed.

The failure of our church today is that we want to do mission without this experience.

And without this experience, we cannot have the full power of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is trying for us to go back to the Bible and to discover that Because this is the road with the Spirit needs to be given in power to the church.

So it's not going to come only the Holy Spirit, the latter rain, by praying, but by studying the Bible and study the Bible by ourselves.

Okay, so now we move to another element, Minneapolis.

03 The Cause of Division: Macro-Hermeneutics

And the explanation I suggest to you, it is connected to your salvation.

What I want you to understand is what we are going to go through now, which is not a common thing to be presented in a camp meeting or in a church.

It's something that I presented for years and years and years to my students, the pastors in many classes at the seminary.

But it is necessary because your salvation is by faith, but faith is connected directly on your understanding of God.

And how do you develop this understanding of God?

OK, there may be many sources, either the Bible or the Bible plus other sources.

Yesterday we spoke that other Christians, they go to the Bible and other sources.

Basically, they call it tradition, but it could be kind of break down into many sources.

So, please, keep that in mind, because now what we are going to ask is how do we hear the Word of God?

And so now you have to focus on the process that you are actually doing now, because Now what are you doing?

Not the Word of God exactly, but you are listening to a fellow human being.

Now Jesus, the greatest revelation of God, taught us how.

He came here as a human being so that he could talk to us directly.

So basically what I am trying to say is that if we were to meet Jesus, Jesus will have the same tools that I have to communicate with you, basically.

Which means that in order for me to have faith, I need to be aware of the process of interpretation.

Because Not everyone understands the Bible in the same way, and why is it that they understand the Bible in different ways?

So, you see in this slide, there you have the slide, a Basic diagram of what happens when you know anything.

There is a microscope with something underneath that you can look at and develop a knowledge of, right?

It could be what I am talking now, or it could be these beautiful flowers that are there, or you try to know the carpet, or the piano, or music, or whatever.

There is always a capability that we have in our minds to receive information through our eyes or through our ears or through our sensory perception of things that are outside of ourselves, and then inside of us, through our brains, we process them into knowledge.

So what happens is that what is outside is now inside.

So the flowers are there, but they are also inside here, so that then you can close your eyes and you can remember.

And I am bringing the computer because we know, at least these days, we have more information about this thing that we had when I started using this analogy.

So in the next slide, we have this diagram.

Instead of having 1 individual, we have 2 individuals.

If I am trying to, or concentrated my knowledge on the organ and you are concentrated your knowledge on the flower and then we report what we know, is there going to be a difference?

Because I am thinking on this object and you are thinking of the other object and therefore the reports will be necessarily different.

But what happens if we take, as in this slide, 2 individuals, no, the previous slide, we have these 2 individuals that have different backgrounds.

1, the 1 on top, is a student of science.

The second 1 is a student of theology, probably from Notre Dame.

I didn't have another way of letting you know graphically that this was a religious individual, so from Notre Dame, but it could very well be a student from the seminary.

If we put these 2 students with different backgrounds, 1 doesn't know the background of the other, okay?

And they see the same thing, would the report be the same?

So the difference in the report, the difference of the perception, the difference of the knowledge come from inside.

Inside, which means the experience that they had before coming to that object.

So to that, in the next slide, we see the cause of diversity.

The object is the same, but each individual brings to the object of knowledge, under consideration, different life experiences.

The computer, you know, can process things, files, a PDF file there, but the computer can process the PDF file with different applications, correct?

And the applications will work in the same file producing different results.

So if you have a Kindle application you can apply to the PDF file and get an e-book, but you will not get a printed book.

To get a printed book, you have to go to some other place in Amazon, create space, and apply another application to the same file, and you will get a book, but not a picture.

See if you want a picture from the same file, you have to apply another application, and then you will have the picture.

The same brain can process the same issue with different applications.

In this case, the application will be different life experiences.

So the computer will be the human, the file will be the Bible, and the applications will be prior experiences that people bring to read the Bible.

An atheist will read the Bible and will consider that an old human book of fables.

A scientist, unless it is a Christian 1, will read the Bible and see in it the result of evolution.

The child has very little life experience, Right?

Jesus said that we should enter into the kingdom of heaven if you were as child.

So basically, I think that he was saying, you have to come to me and leave aside all your human and listen only to me.

But the child will go to the same Bible and find simple stories about God.

I hope that this is clear to you up to this point.

This is the process from which or through which we come to know.

By the way, what I am saying to you is a simplification of philosophy.

So what I am telling you is not something that I have invented.

I am just illustrating this thing to you.

Philosophers that study how do we know, they come up with this basic structure.

They come up with many other things that I do not take from them, because then they begin to interpret and take assumptions that are not coming from the Bible.

But this is just a description of what we actually do.

All these life experiences, now we are going to define under the category of presupposition, which is a supposition that I have pre, before I know.

Before I know, I have something in my mind.

When I was a child, everything that I had in my mind was the things that my mother taught me, right?

But then I began to read and read and read, and then, you know, this thing begins to fill.

Still it's not filled after 74 years, there is much more place, and in my case many things are deleted, but that's another story.

I came with some problems of hard drive there, and the memory's not working well, but my wife has a good hard drive.

Presuppositions are, what are a presupposition, a definition?

Presuppositions are all the contents of human experience that the human being brings with him or human beings brings with them to the task of interpreting the data or whatever comes to their attention.

All the contents of my life, so everything that is in your memory.

When you are listening to me, everything is there working.

04 The Christian Journey: From Division to Unity (Roman Catholic Ecumenism)

Welcome to the, this is the fourth presentation of the seminar.

We have had a good time so far, and Today we are going to talk about the Christian journey from division to unity.

Basically, we have been dealing with the issue of the unity of the church.

I began sharing with you my experience from my childhood, so very, very much into the middle of the last century, basically, so I have been a long time.

This is my time for me to write history directly as a witness.

But my share was that I experienced a unity on the church, real unity on the church.

Everybody thinking in the same way, everybody preaching the same thing.

I mean, when I say everybody, my father—no, my father was not an Adventist, but my mother, the pastor of my church, the visiting pastor, the youth pastor, the president of the association.

When somebody came from the States, everybody was on the same page.

The professors, the academy professors, professors at the college, everybody.

Clearly, they didn't actually say exactly the same words, but they believed the same things.

As the time passed in my experience, as you can see in my first presentation, I began to discover things that did not fit.

This person says another thing, contradicts with this thing, and then they do this and the other.

And finally, at the end of my experience, which is today, I am convinced that our church is not in the state of unity, but in a state of disunity.

And the disunity that exists in our church kind of mirrors the disunity that exists in Christianity.

And it's not a lack of unity like, well, I like to have a carpet that is brown and you want a gray carpet.

So, I interpret this text in this way or the other way.

The divisions that we have in our church are ground systemic divisions at the level of the teaching of the church, which has to do with our understanding of Christianity and the Bible.

And what I see is that everybody in our church, including all the leaders, they kind of think that everybody is on the same page, or at least it is assumed, when in reality that is not the case.

Then after doing that, we all together in the second presentation went through a history of Adventism, since the beginning of Adventism, and we saw that they had, when they began, the pioneers, a great unity.

After the disappointment, they went to study the Bible.

They came to understand not only the disappointment and the cause of the disappointment, but they discover a complete and coherent system of theology that propelled them into the mission to share it to the entire world.

And for that reason, this church was grounded.

White showed that this kind of discovery and the principles of that system that the pioneers called the principles or the pillars, the pillars of the church had been forgotten, And throughout the passing of time, that system, the pillars, were replaced by others, particularly the issue of justification by faith.

And at the end of our history, not even those things are rejected by the very much, but it is also the issue of the sola scriptura principle that is rejected.

And so tradition has come to our church, and you have different kinds of Adventisms or systems of Adventism, which would be the biblical Adventism, those that more or less do exegesis and preach from the Bible, you see.

Then there are the other ones that are the evangelical Adventists that basically they preach justification by faith, and that's the principle of everything, and salvation has been granted, and you are saved, and you are going to heaven, and you don't need actually to study the Bible and all those things, So let's have some celebration here, a little bit of fun, music, popular music, all these things coming into that.

And then there are the others which they are called the progressives.

The progressives are those that do not actually believe that the Bible is true.

They believe in evolution and they believe that we have to merge everything that is Christian with the contemporary postmodern culture, basically.

And then there are others that are called the historical Adventists that just built on LNG.

White and have developed a little system there that I am not going to enter into that.

Then yesterday we went to the issue of what is that caused these issues?

Why are these things happening in our church?

Well, they are happening in our church because we don't study the Bible.

We just go, we go, we baptize people, and the only ones really that come to our church kind of having a grasp of this initial system are those that come into the church through evangelistic meetings where they are taught the prophecies and the way of salvation, and it is in the Bible.

And there are not all the evangelists that do this.

And so they come into the church being those new generation Adventists, but the second generation Adventists, as I am and as my family is because they had this great benefit of being born into the church, but at the same time a church that are not pressing into them that they need to go to the Bible because their salvation depends of how they understand the Bible because faith, we are saved by faith, but faith comes from hearing and hearing the Word of God.

So if you don't understand and you don't know the Word of God, you don't know God.

You may sing whatever you want and you may confess whatever you want, but if you individually are not going to the Bible and understand, not 1 passage, another passage, but the entirety, the totality of the Bible, how God put it in this way, is like you are going to enter into a family.

You know that when we are baptized, really baptized, we are adopted into the family, right?

Well, now, when you are adopted into the family or when you are married into a family, you need to understand what?

If you want to know who I am, what are you supposed to do?

You start asking questions, and the questions are all about what?

Now, if you need to know God, to follow God, to have faith, to be saved, you need to know God.

Why God did that or the other killed these people or the other?

If you don't know God, can you have faith?

If you don't have faith, can you be saved?

So this is a matter not only of unity, But it is the matter of the salvation of people that are in the church and outside the church.

And today, oh well, and then we went to yesterday to discover that the causes of these things are based on some fundamental principles.

The principle of knowledge, which is where do we get our knowledge about God?

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On the Unity of the Church

03 The Cause of Division: Macro-Hermeneutics

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