The heavenly trio

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of anti-trinitarian interest in some pockets of Adventism, although forthrightly rejected by the Seventh-day Adventist Church as a whole. Those who lead the anti-trinitarian movement turn for support to the Advent pioneers. But they shouldn’t, for reasons that will soon become evident. While many of the Adventist pioneers were anti-trinitarian, most of them were not anti-trinitarian in the same sense as is the current anti-trinitarian movement. The theological concern of the Adventist pioneers had to do with a particular truth they regarded as vital, and it was this:

the personhood of Christ distinct from the personhood of the Father.

Once we actually take the time to read what the pioneers wrote on the Trinity, we discover that they were against a particular view of the Trinity called “modalism,” which is “the doctrine that the persons of the Trinity represent only three modes or aspects of the divine revelation, not distinct and coexisting persons in the divine nature” (Oxford Online Dictionary). Modalism is essentially a Christianized version of ancient Greek monism, which is “the doctrine that only one supreme being exists” (Google Dictionary). Modalism rules out any notion that God consists of three distinct personal beings who are one in nature and character.

Ironically, in a plot twist that the current anti-trinitarians are apparently unaware of, we will discover that their view hails from pagan roots and is actually a version of the view the Advent pioneers were against. The Advent pioneers, even with their blind spots regarding the Sonship of Christ, exist in the theological lineage that produced the current doctrine of God held by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Contrary to what has been claimed, they are not the theological forefathers of the current anti-trinitarian movement hanging around the edges of Adventism. Thanks in significant part to the concerns of the Advent pioneers, the view settled upon by the Seventh-day Adventist Church is most emphatically not a modalism framing of the Trinity. It is, by contrast, what might be called “Covenantal Trinitarianism,” which paints the most beautifully relational picture of God imaginable.

In this chapter, we will examine some of the strongest anti-trinitarian statements made by the Advent pioneers. As we do so, their specific theological concern will become evident. All of the statements we will consider here were written by pioneers of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with the exception of E.J. Waggoner, the son of a pioneer and an influential second-generation theologian in early Adventism. Please read their statements at a pace that will allow you to process exactly what they were saying, giving special attention to the sections I have emphasized in bold type. A consistent pattern of thought will be evident.

J.N. Loughborough

Let’s begin with J.N. Loughborough. One of the earliest non-trinitarian statements to appear in Adventism, the following was published in The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald in 1861. We begin with this statement because it is one of the clearest representations of the core concern of the Advent pioneers:

It is not very consonant with common sense to talk of three being one, and one being three. Or as some express it, calling God “the Triune God,” or “the three-one-God.” If Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each God, it would be three Gods; for three times one is not one, but three. There is a sense in which they are one, but not one person, as claimed by Trinitarians.

It is contrary to Scripture. Almost any portion of the New Testament we may open which has occasion to speak of the Father and Son, represents them as two distinct persons. The seventeenth chapter of John is alone sufficient to refute the doctrine of the Trinity. Over forty times in that one chapter Christ speaks of his Father as a person distinct from himself. His Father was in heaven and he upon earth. The Father had sent him. Given to him those that believed. He was then to go to the Father. And in this very testimony he shows us in what consists the oneness of the Father and Son. It is the same as the oneness of the members of Christ’s church. “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one.” Of one heart and one mind. Of one purpose in all the plan devised for man’s salvation. Read the seventeenth chapter of John, and see if it does not completely upset the doctrine of the Trinity.

To believe that doctrine, when reading the scripture, we must believe that God sent himself into the world, died to reconcile the world to himself, raised himself from the dead, ascended to himself in heaven, pleads before himself in heaven to reconcile the world to himself, and is the only mediator between man and himself. It will not do to substitute the human nature of Christ (according to Trinitarians) as the Mediator; for Clarke says, “Human blood can no more appease God than swine’s blood.” Com. on 2 Samuel 21:10. We must believe also that in the garden God prayed to himself, if it were possible, to let the cup pass from himself, and a thousand other such absurdities. J.N. Loughborough, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 5, 1861

Please hear what Loughborough is arguing against and what is he advocating for.

He is against making God out to be “one person.” Let that register clearly, because it will become increasingly important as we proceed. Loughborough is against a doctrine of God that would erase the fact that Jesus and the Father are “two distinct persons.” He wants us to understand that there is an actual relationship within God’s intrinsic reality, not merely the projection of a relationship that isn’t really there. The Father and the Son are not two manifestations of one person, but rather two persons who are of “one heart and one mind.” Loughborough’s view was, therefore, a theological precursor to what eventually became the official position of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He was trying to affirm the distinct divine personhood of both the Father and the Son, defining their “oneness” as a oneness of heart, mind, and purpose.

Loughborough was in process, however. He was a young Bible student formulating thoughts in a young movement. He knew two things clearly, but was fuzzy on the theological solution. The two things he knew clearly were that (1) the Father and the Son could not possibly be one and the same person, because (2) that would eradicate the idea of a real relationship between the two. The thing he was unclear on was that, while there is a trinitarianism that erases the distinct personhood of the Father and the Son (modalism), there is a trinitarianism that insists upon the distinct personhood of the two (a covenantal or relational trinitarianism, which we will explore as we continue our study). At this early stage of the Advent movement, Loughborough could not see a version of the Trinity that would answer to his concern. But that is exactly where Adventism ended up going in due course of study. And this theological development was due, in significant part, to the legitimate concern expressed by Loughborough and certain other pioneers. They set a course for Adventism that allowed the movement to sidestep modalism in favor of an authentically relational doctrine of God, what Ellen White would eventually articulate as “the Heavenly Trio.”

Joseph Bates

Next, let’s consider Joseph Bates. In his autobiography, this Advent pioneer recalls precisely why he found it impossible to embrace God as a Trinity:

Respecting the trinity, I concluded that it was an impossibility 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. I said to my father, “If you can convince me that we are one in this sense, that you are my father, and I your son; and also that I am your father, and you my son, then I can believe in the trinity.” Joseph Bates, The Autobiography of Elder Joseph Bates, p. 204 (1868)

Again, the core concern is on full display. Bates is rejecting a specific idea. He finds it impossible to believe that God consists of one person projecting the illusion of three persons. That is, Bates was rejecting modalism.

Do you see what this means for the current trinitarian debate?

In rejecting the Trinity doctrine, Bates was not rejecting what came to be the position of the Adventist Church. In fact, Bates was pointing toward the church’s current position even as he could not yet fully see it. He was rejecting the idea that Father, Son, and Spirit are all one and the same person, knowing that such a picture of God would reduce God to a non-relational being and render the New Testament portrayal of the relationship between the Father and the Son an absurd charade. As with Loughborough, the thinking of Bates was, therefore, tending toward the position that was eventually formulated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This position holds that God consists of three individual persons who are one in a manner that does not eliminate their distinct identities. In other words, the concern of Bates has been answered and satisfied by the doctrine of the Trinity that was eventually developed and is currently held by the church. Said another way, the Seventh-day Adventist Church does not hold a modalism view of the Trinity and, therefore, does not hold the view Bates and the other pioneers were pushing back on.

Bates, like Loughborough, was in process as a Bible student. His core concern was the same as that expressed by Loughborough and, therefore, was a theological bridge to the current view of the church. We are indebted to Bates for driving us away from modalism toward a doctrine of God that is distinctly interpersonal. How else would it be possible to say that “God is love” with any coherent meaning.

R.F. Cottrell

A year later, Roswell Fenner Cottrell expressed, in a less articulate form, the same concern expressed by Loughborough and Bates. You will see that he also displays an effort to understand the Sonship of Christ, but is not biblically literate enough to work out its meaning. He seems to be aware of his deficiency in that he settles for accepting the fact that Christ is God and, yet, the Son of God, simply because the Bible says so: “If the Scriptures say” a thing, “I believe it,” he reasons. Cottrell recognizes the challenge entailed in affirming the two apparently contradictory declarations of Scripture, but all he can do is agree with the two propositions without understanding how both can be true. Track with his thinking here:

But if I am asked what I think of Jesus Christ, my reply is, I believe all that the Scriptures say of him. If the testimony represents him as being in glory with the Father before the world was, I believe it. If it is said that he was in the beginning with God, that he was God, that all things were made by him and for him, and that without him was not anything made that was made, I believe it. If the Scriptures say he is the Son of God, I believe it. If it is declared that the Father sent his Son into the world, I believe he had a Son to send. R.F. Cottrell, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 1, 1869

That one person is three persons, and that three persons are only one person, is the doctrine which we claim is contrary to reason and common sense. The being and attributes of God are above, beyond, out of reach of my sense and reason, yet I believe them: But the doctrine I object to is contrary, yes, that is the word, to the very sense and reason that God has himself implanted in us. Such a doctrine he does not ask us to believe. A miracle is beyond our comprehension, but we all believe in miracles who believe our own senses. What we see and hear convinces us that there is a power that effected the most wonderful miracle of creation. But our Creator has made it an absurdity to us that one person should be three persons, and three persons but one person; and in his revealed word he has never asked us to believe it. . . .

But 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 popedom, does not say much in its favor. . . .

Revelation goes beyond us; but in no instance does it go contrary to right reason and common sense. God has not claimed, as the popes have, that he could “make justice of injustice,” nor has he, after teaching us to count, told us that there is no difference between the singular and plural numbers. Let us believe all he has revealed, and add nothing to it. R.F. Cottrell, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 6, 1869

Cottrell seeks to protect the individual personhood of Christ, like Loughborough and Bates, which is a good thing. But he gets trapped in a theological cul-de-sac by committing to a simplistic approach that fails to consider what the Bible itself means by designating Jesus as the Son of God. He sees isolated verses without considering their larger narrative context. He believes “all that Scripture says” about Christ, but he clearly does not yet know all that Scripture says about Christ.

On the one hand, Cottrell affirms the divinity of Christ, since the Bible explicitly states that Christ is God. But then he leaps forward with, “If the Scriptures say he is the Son of God, I believe it. If it is declared that the Father sent his Son into the world, I believe he had a Son to send.” There is a glaring blind spot on display here, evident to those who have taken pains to understand what Scripture says about the Sonship of Christ. We cannot fault Cottrell for not knowing what he didn’t know, but what he didn’t know created significant problems for him.

Rather than panning out to ask Scripture what it means by calling Christ both “God” and the “Son of God,” Cottrell simply assumes that if Jesus is called “Son,” that must mean He was, in some sense, at some point, brought into existence by the Father as a divine son. This conclusion assumes that divinity is a quality of being that can be brought into existence, or conferred upon a created being, which is the premise of pantheism, as we will soon discover. Of course, Cottrell does not discern this implication. But by operating on this assumption, he misses the whole point of the Sonship of Christ as Scripture itself frames it. He sees individual trees (verses), but he does not see the forest (the story that informs the verses).

The Sonship of Christ

Let’s briefly review the sonship narrative of Scripture for our own sake, in order to highlight the big story that Cottrell and the other pioneers overlooked.

When the writers of the New Testament call Jesus “the Son of God,” they are consciously working out His Sonship identity from the Old Testament script, which runs like this:

God created the first man, Adam, in His own image, and that man was “the son of God” (Genesis 1:26; Luke 3:38).

Having fallen into sin, the son of God, Adam, transferred his rightful “dominion” over the earth to Satan (Genesis 1:28; Luke 4:5-6).

God then promised to redeem Adam’s fall by the birth of a child through the womb of a woman, a second Adam, a new son of God, and thus to save humanity from within our own genetic realm (Genesis 3:15).

The promise of a new son of God was then proclaimed to Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 12:1-3). The outworking of this promise is literally the entire point of the Old Testament story, and its fulfillment in Christ is literally the whole point of the New Testament (2 Corinthians 1:20).

The covenant couple—Abraham and Sarah—give birth to Isaac, who is identified in Scripture as the “son” of “promise” (Genesis 21:1-7; Galatians 4:23). The story clearly centers on a succession of sons. At this point, the concept of primogeniture emerges in the narrative—that is, the birthright of the “firstborn” son drives the story forward (Genesis 27:19, 32; 43:33; 48:14-18). The firstborn son is the channel through which the covenant promise is to be passed on from generation to generation.

Isaac and Rebekah have a son, in the succession of covenant sons, whom they name Jacob. Jacob’s twelve sons become a nation and are corporately called by God, “My son, My firstborn” (Exodus 4:22-23). God also tells them, I “begot you” to a covenant purpose distinct from all the other nations (Deuteronomy 32:18). And it is right here that we have the origin of the language and concept of God’s only begotten son. Understood in context, this phrase means God’s unique covenant son, not in some sort of mystical sense, as if God literally birthed Israel into existence, but rather that God brought forth Israel as a nation for His covenant purpose. Likewise, this language does not indicate that God literally birthed Christ into existence as a secondary deity sometime in eternity past, but rather that Christ was born to the world within the covenant lineage of the human procreation process.

Next in the narrative—through the lineage of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Israel—David is covenantally “begotten” as God’s “son” and thus is a type of the coming Messiah (Psalm 2:1-7; 89:19-29). Following David in the covenant lineage, Solomon is also designated by God as “My son” (1 Chronicles 22:10).

When we read the whole story, the point and meaning of Scripture’s sonship language could not be clearer.

Finally, just as promised, the long-awaited Messianic Son of God is born of a woman into the world. As the New Testament opens, we are told explicitly that He is the long-awaited “Son of David,” “Son of Abraham,” and, as such, “the Son of God” (Matthew 1:1; 2:15; 3:17; 4:3). We are also told, just as explicitly, that He is none other than God Himself in the flesh (Matthew 1:23; John 1:1-5; 1 Timothy 3:16). Jesus is the Son of God in the covenant sense, as the fulfillment of the entire Adamic, Abrahamic, Davidic narrative. The story never probes His ontological,2 metaphysical3 origins, beyond informing us that He is none other than God, eternal God, in the flesh.

While Cottrell feels compelled to affirm that Jesus is the Son of God, he is apparently unaware of the overall scheme of biblical thought on the matter, so he cannot make sense of the truth he rightfully affirms. He is loyal to what the Bible says in a few stand-alone verses, but he overlooks what the Bible says as a whole regarding the Sonship of Christ. As a result, he unwittingly ends up with a lesser God begotten by a greater God. The Bible does not, in fact, teach that Christ began to exist as the divine Son of God at some point in eternity past, but rather that God Himself began to exist as the covenant Son of God, or the second Adam, at the point of His incarnation.

James White

In 1868, James White wrote along the exact same lines as Loughborough, Bates and Cottrell:

Jesus prayed that his disciples might be one as he was one with his Father. This prayer did not contemplate one disciple with twelve heads, but twelve disciples, made one in object and effort in the cause of their master. Neither are the Father and the Son parts of the “three-one God.” They are two distinct beings, yet one in the design and accomplishment of redemption. James White, Life Incidents, p. 343, 1868

Again, the underlying concern is evident: the Father and the Son each possess distinct personhood. Clearly, modalism was the version of the Trinity doctrine James White and the other pioneers were resisting. They believed that the relationship between God the Father and God the Son was real, and they were endeavoring to protect that truth for significant theological reasons. If the Father and the Son were merely projected modes of expression emitting from a single being, then the entire relational dynamic between them that we read about in the Gospels is a meaningless fiction.

But even as James White and other pioneers were pushing back on the modalism view of the Trinity, James White himself sought common ground with trinitarians:

The S. D. Adventists hold the divinity of Christ so nearly with the Trinitarians that we apprehend no trial here. James White, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 12, 1876

Clearly, while the pioneers found it absurd to view the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as one being projecting three persons, they believed in the divinity of Christ. James White was trying to make this clear. A little less than a year later, he moved deeper into the subject. While Loughborough, Bates, and Cottrell were positioning themselves against modalism, James White felt the need to affirm the divinity of Christ and, in the process of doing so, he coined some helpful terminology that would later inform the thinking of his wife, Ellen. Watch what he says here:

We may look upon the Father and the Son before the worlds were made as a creating and law administering firm of equal power. Christ did not then rob God in regarding himself equal with the Father. Sin enters the world and the fall occurs. Christ steps out of this firm for a certain time, and takes upon himself the weakness of the seed of Abraham, that he may reach those who are enfeebled by transgression. With his divine arm our adorable Redeemer has hold of the throne of Heaven, and with his human arm he reaches to the depths of human wretchedness, and thus he becomes the connecting link between heaven and earth, a mediator between God and man. James White, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 29, 1877

This is a phenomenal development of thought, especially given the historical context in which James arrived at it. Here we see a preliminary effort to enlarge the frame regarding the Adventist doctrine of God. Until this point, James and his fellow Advent pioneers had only been insisting on the distinct personhood of Christ alongside the Father. Now, James is reasoning further forward to work out the implications of what that distinct personhood means if Jesus is, Himself, divine.

James White offers three insights, which, although still in their first phase of development, are quite brilliant:

1 He suggests that the persons we now know as the Father and the Son should be seen as both existing before Creation, and that in their pre-creation coexistence they should be seen as “a creating and law administering firm of equal power.” Hold onto this language, because it will show up again in the later writings of Ellen White. For now, it is helpful to simply notice that James White was already, at this early stage of the movement, discerning the two beings as “a firm of equal power” existing together prior to Creation and the Fall—not as Father and Son, which are post-creation roles, but as a “firm of equal power.”

2 Then James paints a chronological picture for us. He suggests that one of the beings that existed within the “firm of equal power” underwent a transition of position: “Sin enters the world and the fall occurs,” he explains, and then “Christ steps out of this firm.” This is an early and groundbreaking perception within the Advent movement. James perceived that Jesus Christ—the divine person we know in redemption history as the Son of God—was nothing short of “equal” with the divine person we know within redemption history as God the Father. They coexisted as a “firm of equal power,” until one of them stepped out of that firm to embark upon activities necessitated by the Fall.

3 Brother White then explains why Christ stepped out from the “firm of equal power.” He did this to become “a mediator between God and man.” And with that, this Adventist pioneer gave us, and his wife, Ellen, the key insight that would make sense of the whole theological conundrum of the Sonship of Christ. Why did one of the members of the “firm of equal power” choose to “step out” and occupy a different position? He did so in order to mediate the knowledge of God to humanity.

Thank you, James White!

With this background, as we will soon discover, Ellen White would proceed to further develop the two crucial ideas set forth by James White and the other pioneers:

 the distinct personhood of each of the three members of the Godhead, which renders the relationship between the three to be actual and the love that defines God’s identity real