Another comment about something Samuele Bacchiocchi said in his latest Endtime Issues, number 134:
Incidentally, Jehovah’s Witnesses are notorious for rejecting the Trinity, promoting instead the divine creation of Christ. To support their teachings, they have even published their own Bible, based on manuscripts more agreeable to their teachings.
That sounds much like the Clear World Translation … or is it the New Word? Or maybe the New Clear Bible? For clarification, see “The Clear Word Bible: Is It the Word of God?” by Dale Ratzlaff and Verle Streifling, and Deliberate Distortions in SDA’s “Clear Word Bible” by Dr. V. Streifling. And my post on it. And the section on this website about it.
It is noteworthy that Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as the various churches stemming from Church of God Seventh Day (Worldwide Church of God, United Church of God, Church of God International, etc.), inherited the view of Christ as the first creature of God from our own Seventh-day Adventist Church. The reason is that they left our Adventist church prior to our acceptance of the doctrine of the TRINITY.
Concerned Adventists who reject the TRINITY because some of our pioneers were anti-triniterian, fail to recognize that our pioneers gradually understood Bible truths. It took them years to sort out what was biblical and what was unbiblical in the teachings of their previous denominations.
– Source: Endtime Issues 134 [PDF]
Bacchiocchi says that the Adventist pioneers gradually understood Bible truths. I won’t harp on about his grammar, because his first language is not English, and he has probably just picked up terms like “Bible truths” from “Bible Christians” whose pastors [was not Christ the true pastor, making all others imposters?] address them as “brethern” or “bretheren.”
I will, however, point out how strange his argument is.
What on earth happened to the Adventist founding fathers to make them lose sight of truths that had been understood and formalised 1500 years before they got confused and denied them? The Trinity was accepted before the Council of Nicaea in 324 AD, but due to debates and errors, it was only formally defined at that time, drawing a clear line between error and truth.
This was not a case of Adventist pioneers gradually understanding the truth. This was a case of Adventist pioneers slowly pulling themselves out of a pit of false teaching that the rest of Christianity had left behind centuries ago. What got them there? Adventism’s roots lie in a religious phenomenon that gave rise to groups like Mormonism, Christian Science, and, yes, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They just did a better job of returning to biblical Christian teaching on many issues, the Trinity being one.
But they did not gradually understand the truth until they had lost most of it first. In a massive sweep, they lost huge chunks of the truth, going their own way, away from the faith revealed and clarified over time by the Holy Spirit. Some went so far as to even deny the Holy Spirit’s part in the Trinity. Adventism recovered a lot of the truth. But Adventism still has a way to go on its journey from that huge loss.
We should see their founders’ rejection of the Trinity as a huge step backwards in terms of sound, biblical teaching. We should see their other teachings, including the Sabbath, 1844, the Investigative Judgement, soul sleep, etc., as part of that era of confusion where they lost so much truth. The true remnant would not have lost so much, in order to gain so little.
See my post on post-modern Adventism – that is a sign that they are abandoning, albeit slowly, the traditions that they developed a century and a half ago, and returning to orthodox, historical Christianity.
