Beth Shalom
Seventh-day Adventist

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I’ve been asked to share my reflections on “the theological significance of the State of Israel, including an evaluation on prophetic applications.” My approach will be to sketch the reasons why up to now Seventh-day Adventists haven’t much considered the State of Israel and possible responses.

The first reason why contemporary Israel hasn’t figured in Adventist thinking is due to our concept of revelation. For us revelation is something inscribed in a book. That makes Israel ancient history. For us Israel is always back there. For Seventh-day Adventists the actual presence of live Jews around us isn’t a theological datum. For us, the interaction between God and our Jewish contemporaries isn’t revelatory, because for us current events aren’t the stage of revelation. At best, current events might be considered fulfillments of prophetic words penned long ago, but they don’t reveal anything new about God. For us revelation is a matter of going back to the Bible. We assume revelation ended when the canon closed. Our concept of finalized revelation makes it difficult for us to consider the possible theological significance of contemporary events or contemporary Jews.

The root cause of our Adventist difficulty with seeing divine revelation in contemporary events is what Hodgson and Farley have labeled “the scripture principle.” “The scriptural principle” exhaustively locates revelation in the past. This is because “the scriptural principle” identifies divine revelation with a text, a text which was obviously written down in the past.

Ontologically, all reality is circumscribed by that text from the past. Epistemologically, all truth is defined by that text from the past. According to the logic of “the scriptural principle,” the events of salvation history are merely the unfolding of what is already deposited in the immutable text. According to the logic of “the scriptural principle,” subsequent events can only be valid to the extent to which they conform to the written norms of the past. Events which do not conform to familiar patterns are theologically meaningless.

“The scriptural principle” is the oldest way Jews and Christians have envisioned divine revelation, salvation history, and biblical authority. When after the Enlightenment other possibilities of envisioning the past became available, but were consciously rejected, the ancient “scriptural principle” hardened into modern Fundamentalism. Adventists have difficulty viewing contemporary events as possibly being revelatory, because we’re still under the spell of “the scriptural principle.”