By Sam Oliveira
This week I had the privilege of talking with Professor Jud Lake from the Religion Department at Southern Adventist University. Lake said he has been teaching at Southern for 23 years and each time he teaches – especially a class called “Adventist Heritage” – he learns something new.
“I still feel excited and passionate about these truths as I did when I first encountered them,” he said in a recent interview. “Now, I just have a [deeper] understanding and appreciation [than] before.”
Throughout our conversation, I asked him if he thought the way the early pioneers approached prophecy was wrong. Could there have been a difference if we had approached prophecy differently early on?
“I think our pioneers [made an approach] that was appropriate for their time,” he said. “But then you have the second generation Adventism, the famous [righteousness by faith] 1888 crisis,” he said. “… [For] the early pioneers, everything was fresh [and] it was exciting. They were developing this church [and] new doctrines and [Jesus’] teachings, but as time went on, the second generation, the children of those pioneers lost something.”
Lake said church leaders slowly shifted their focus until legalism started to be the main issue with the “Mark of the Beast,” Christ’s soon return, and God’s law thrown in – … “They lost the centrality of Christ… and that brought on the crisis of the 1888 [in the] General Conference, and the debates on righteousness by faith, but that experience changed the denomination.”
This legalistic spiral shows up even today with the older and younger generation perceived to be at odds.
“If you go about it in the wrong way, and you lose sight of Christ, the freshness, the beauty of it, the assurance is gone,” Lake explained. “And it becomes scary [for] Adventists that are my age, in the late 20th century. Even as far back as when I was a teenager in the 1970s, that generation of adults [was] struggling with legalism. They had lost sight of Christ, and the prophecies were all the beast and the plagues. And it was fear. Then we went through some theological crisis, and a lot of people left, but Christ became central again. Today, the challenge is there are so many distractions. Can people [think] about what really matters?”
Yet, Lake believes the Biblical account of end-time events has the potential to captivate a new generation of believers.
“The idea of the supernatural invading this planet [and] Jesus coming back and invading this world and radically turning it over, and in a matter of moments, is something that can be very appealing, “ Lake concluded, “because it’s radically different from what the world teaches today.”