Series: Our Reformation
Sermon: Our Reformation
Speaker and Writer: Japhet De Oliveira

Refresh: Open with prayer. Ask God for understanding through the Holy Spirit.

​Read: 2 Timothy 3:1-4:8 (ESV). Reread in the English Standard Version for new insights or questions. 

Reflection: If you were to nail your own 95 theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, as Luther did, what would they be? What would you protest? What standard would you call your Church to attain? Retired historian and prolific writer, George R. Knight, recently released a new book titled, Adventist Authority Wars, Ordination, and the Roman Catholic Temptation. In it, he outlines not 95 theses but 9.5 theses. The first nine of these are as follows:

1. The only basis for Christian unity is Scripture, trust, and the love of God. 
2. The Church Manual makes it clear that the General Conference is the “highest authority” for the world church, “under God.”  
3. It is God who calls pastors. All the church can do is to recognize God’s call by the laying on of hands. 
4. Ordination is not a biblical topic. (The passages using the word in the KJV generally mean to appoint or consecrate.) From the position of the Bible there is absolutely no difference between ordaining and commissioning. 
5. For Adventists the Bible is the only source for doctrine and practice. An appeal to policy is not an appeal to the Bible. A vote by a General Conference session is not equivalent to Bible evidence. 
6. On issues not definitively settled in the Bible, James White utilized the only possible way forward in unity of mission when he moved from a hermeneutic that stipulated that practices must be expressly spelled out in the Bible to a hermeneutic that held that practices were permissible if they did not contradict Scripture and were in harmony with common sense. (The new hermeneutic made it possible for the Sabbatarian Adventists to organize as a denomination.)  
7. The so-called noncompliant unions are not out of harmony with the Bible. 
8. Adventism has moved at times from being a church based on Scripture to one based on tradition and ecclesiastical pronouncements. 
9. The General Conference leadership in 2017 is coming dangerously close to replicating the medieval church in its call for the serious discipline of large sectors of the church on the basis of a non-biblical issue. (pp.108-110)

Tomorrow we will explore the final theses which are numbered 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 and 9.5. 

Recalibrate: What kind of Church should we be locally and globally?

Respond: Pray for faithfulness in leadership for yourself and for others. 

Research: Read chapter 3 in Adventist Authority Wars, Ordination, and the Roman Catholic Temptation.