I grew up a Seventh-Day Adventist. Even though I have no desire to be a Seventh-Day Adventist today, I have more positive feelings about my former church than negative feelings. At least I think I do. My feelings are complicated.
My dad was a minister in the church who was pushed out in 1980. The man who pushed him out was conservative and canny administrator Neal C. Wilson, who died in 2010.
I sat in on many of the meetings that saw my dad’s fate sealed.
It’s left a big emotional imprint on me. It’s a reason I struggle with authority and continually isolate myself so as to preserve a maximum of freedom.
Logically, I see that Neal Wilson had no choice as a normative Adventist but to push out my father (and the rest of the family). Emotionally, I hated Neal Wilson as a teenager because I loved where we lived at the time — Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley — and it hurt me when we had to leave for Auburn, more than two hours drive north-east.
I have more sentimental feelings about Pacific Union College than any other place I’ve lived. I have no desire to live there today, but I feel like it was the one place in my life where I came closest to happiness.
This feeling is a illusion as my intimacy disorder isolates me at Pacific Union College as it does everywhere else I go in life.
For the first time in about a year, I surfed to the Spectrum Magazine website (the website for Adventist intellectuals). And I read an article by Doug Wilson, a family doctor in Napa who’s the brother of the conservative head of the Adventist church today, Neal C. Wilson’s son Ted N. C. Wilson.
Adventism continually cycles through liberal and conservative tendencies. Unlike Judaism, and like Roman Catholicism, the Adventist church is hierarchical and there’s one leader.
Doug Wilson writes: “I consider myself a somewhat progressive California boy. I gratefully accept the contributions of science, modernism and post-modernism to my world-view. I happily worship Love and the Creator alongside siblings of any wisdom tradition. I desire liberty and justice for all, so I advocate for my gay friend’s right to marry. That my daughters should have an equal chance at church leadership is a truth I hold to be self-evident. Since Dr. Bruce Lipton showed in The Biology of Belief that biological evolution, from the perspective of the cell, is a story of increasing co-operation that allows increasing awareness, I find biological evolution and modern cosmology fit compatibly with my Christian values. My circle of care and self-identity has, at least at times, moved beyond ego-centrism, beyond ethno-centrism, beyond Adventist-centrism, and beyond species-centrism to compassionately embrace all life. So why am I proud of the direction our church is heading?”
I’m sure I would feel comfortable hanging out with Doug Wilson. He sounds like a lovely man. But his views are balmy. He says he worships “Love.” Worshiping anything other than God is idolatry. Love is not always right or good. Pursuing love can seriously screw up your life and the lives of those around you. Sometimes love is the right response to a life situation and other times it is hate (how should one react to rape and murder and torture?).
He’s moved beyond species-centrism? The world was made for man. It wasn’t made for insects. God gave man charge of the earth and gave him the charge to cultivate it.
Any religious group that moves beyond a centrism focused on itself is not going to last long.
