Theology with Meat

© JULIAN KASTRATI, 2004, 2012.  PLEASE NOTE: F ootnotes are acknowledged but withheld for copyright reasons What do Adventists mean when they say that the Bible is their only creed and what are the methodological implications involved? ‘We have no creed but the Bible.’ This has been the constant chorus heard among Seventh-day Adventists from the very beginning of their existence. Since the early days, the Adventist pioneers, took a strong stand against the endorsement of any creeds or formal statements of doctrinal belief. They consistently held that the Bible and the Bible alone should be the church’s rule of faith and practice. However, throughout its brief history, in order to protect its own identity from rivalling epistemologies, the Adventist Church has had to formulate statements of beliefs, as a current majority understanding, such as the adoption of 27 statements of fundamental beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists during the 1980 General Conference Session (a

by John Shelby Spong http://johnshelbyspong.com/ “Today, there is a general agreement around the world that monotheism is the proper definition of God. The monotheistic God, however, has taken very different forms in the various region of the world: 1. The Judeo-Christian world of the West and those parts of the world that were colonized by the West; 2. the Islamic world of the Middle East, a world that stretches now from Indonesia to Libya, and 3. the Hindu-Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Confucius, Shinto world of the Far East. Generally, though more in the West than in the East, the theistically understood deity is dominant. God is thus generally thought of as a being, external and supernatural, the dispenser of blessings and punishments and the worker of miracles. It is this theistic understanding of God, which has been in place for the last 12,000 to 15,000 years that appears to be dying the world over. The death of theism is not the death of God; it is the death of a human definition o