Dr. Desmond Ford spoke at the Campus Hill SDA church on 9/6/08, and gave a presentation on forensic atonement. In Loma Linda, this is not a popular topic, as most of the theologians teach the false gospel of a bloodless atonement.
But this is a 10 minute segment of the sermon he gave:
Dr. Desmond Ford spoke at the Campus Hill SDA church on 9/6/08, and gave a presentation on forensic atonement. In Loma Linda, this is not a popular topic, as most of the theologians teach the false gospel of a bloodless atonement.
But this is a 10 minute segment of the sermon he gave:
I had heard Ford speak many times before, but there was something about this video that really impressed me. I saw a man who had been through the wars FOR THE GOSPEL. Yet he still has an ever gentle spirit. He truly manifests the spirit of Christ.
What a terrific clip and you’re right, Stan, he really does manifest the spirit of Christ. What also struck me was that his presentation was so conversational and natural and he didn’t use any notes. You could tell that he was there because he has a genuine concern for Adventists.
Something that I also found interesting was the video response to Des Ford’s presentation (under the original clip) where the senior pastor at the Calimesa SDA Church, Chris Oberg, was interviewed by a guy from Spectrum. It struck me that she seemed very confused about the atonement and wasn’t comfortable with a God that demands a sacrifice to appease His own holy wrath. She made reference to Fritz Guy saying that God is God and could just decide to forgive if he wanted to. Both she and the interviewer seemed perplexed by the concept of propitiation that is really so much at the heart of the Gospel itself. Sadly, I see this as a reflection of a lack of understanding in the church of the perfect holiness of God and the need to be reconciled to that perfect holiness because of the offense of sin, a reconciliation that can only come by the imputed righteousness of Christ.
What a terrific clip and you’re right, Stan, he really does manifest the spirit of Christ. What also struck me was that his presentation was so conversational and natural and he didn’t use any notes. You could tell that he was there because he has a genuine concern for Adventists.
Something that I also found interesting was the video response to Des Ford’s presentation (under the original clip) where the senior pastor at the Calimesa SDA Church, Chris Oberg, was interviewed by a guy from Spectrum. It struck me that she seemed very confused about the atonement and wasn’t comfortable with a God that demands a sacrifice to appease His own holy wrath. She made reference to Fritz Guy saying that God is God and could just decide to forgive if he wanted to. Both she and the interviewer seemed perplexed by the concept of propitiation that is really so much at the heart of the Gospel itself. Sadly, I see this as a reflection of a lack of understanding in the church of the perfect holiness of God and the need to be reconciled to that perfect holiness because of the offense of sin, a reconciliation that can only come by the imputed righteousness of Christ.
Great minds…
Just had a conversation with my still SDA wife who is preparing a 5 minute talk on evangelism, my comment was that you can not share what you do not have, that it is impossible to present the gospel if you have no assurance of salvation yourself. That acceptance of God’s sovereignty, we are dead in sin, Christ’s COMPLETE atonement and WE ARE SAVED by grace through faith in Christ, that in believing this we are ‘credited as righteous’. She believes this but her church won’t. Unfortunately - THE SABBATH - entered the conversation, sigh.
Stan, thanks for posting that link and Aaron, thanks for drawing my attention to Chris Oberg’s interview.
What a profound declaration of the gospel! Here are two sentences I copied down from Ford’s address that really struck me:
“God is better than we have ever hoped, though we are worse than we ever suspected.”
“Until you die to the law as a method of salvation, you are lost.”
My joy that the gospel was preached with such clarity in an Adventist church turned to sadness when I watched the interview with Oberg, apparently conducted minutes after Ford’s presentation. She had just heard one of the most powerful expressions of the gospel and she walked away confused about why Jesus had to die. This is so sad. She even gave lip service to the “Good News Tour” guys who are building their aberrant soteriology on the idea that a good God cannot express wrath. What these people (Oberg included) don’t understand is God’s holiness! They cannot fathom his response to sin because they do not see that our sin is utterly offensive to him. God’s love and goodness cannot be rightly understood apart from his holiness, and by imposing human perspectives of these concepts onto God, we cannot possibly understand why Jesus had to die to satisfy his wrath. Worse, when these concepts are removed from each other, God’s self-revelation ends up being mocked. The truth of God is exchanged for a lie, as the apostle Paul would say (Romans 1:25).
It is just so troubling to see a clear declaration of the gospel met with puzzled looks in the audience and an Adventist pastor muddying the waters like this.
Just had a conversation with my still SDA wife who is preparing a 5 minute talk on evangelism, my comment was that you can not share what you do not have, that it is impossible to present the gospel if you have no assurance of salvation yourself.
John, that is a great observation. Much of what is passed off as evangelism in Adventism is really indoctrination, because the gospel is not seen as precious. Instead of proclaiming the good news, the focus is so often on what makes Adventism unique, as if the key is to get people to give assent to these all-important doctrines. Instead, they should follow Ford’s example by preaching that man is far worse than he thinks he is, and that God is far more gracious than we can imagine.
Thanks to all contributors on this thread. What’s sadly ironic in this situation is that at some point, the reporter said something implying that because of his position regarding penal substitutionary atonement Dr. Ford is more closely to conservative adventism than those in the church where he preached, not getting over the old view. The sad irony is that you can be a pastor in the SDA Church in good standing and cling to the moral influence theory of the atonement which denies God’s wrath and implicitly his justice, but you cannot be a pastor in good standing in the SDA Church if you’re in conflict with the Investigative Judgment, like Des Ford.
I feel that the moral influence theory is another way of putting fig leaves on naked body before a holy God, an attempt to have peace with God at the cost of denying the reality of the nakedness of sin indirectly by denying God’s justice and his right to punish severely our sins.
I have a personal view about why the doctrine of a God without wrath appeals peculiarly to the adventist mindset. In Adventist theology the classic doctrine of eternal hell which presents God’s wrath in punishing sinners eternally is not in harmony with his love, and consequently the punishment of sinners is reduced to a limited amount of time. Following on the reductionistic part, is just one step further to affirm that God’s wrath is just a historic tradition of the Christendom and should be sent to the Theological Recycle Bin. I’m not sure if this is or is not a true slippery slope, but I see the idea that God’s love trumps his justice present in both the annihilationist thinking and in the moral influence theory. Hope Stan will not be offended by what I said, I know that he believes in God’s wrath and justice.
Are you not from everlasting,
O Lord my God, my Holy One?
We shall not die.
O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment,
and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.
You who are of purer eyes than to see evil
and cannot look at wrong,
why do you idly look at traitors
and remain silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he? Habakkuk 1:12,13
The prophet here ascribes to God the greatest detestation, and such an immortal hatred of sin that he cannot look upon it, but, with a wrathful aversion of his countenance, abominates and dooms it to punishment. But perhaps God thus hates sin because he wills to do so, and by an act of his will entirely free, though the state of things might be changed without any injury to him or diminution of his essential glory. But the Holy Spirit gives us a reason very different from this, namely, the purity of God’s eyes: “Thou are of purer eyes than to behold evil.” But there is no one who can doubt that the prophet here intended the holiness of God. The incomprehensible, infinite, and most perfect holiness or purity of God is the cause why he hates and detests all sin; and that justice and holiness are the same, as to the common and general notion of them, we have shown before. John Owen, Dissertation on Divine Justice
Thanks to all contributors on this thread. What’s sadly ironic in this situation is that at some point, the reporter said something implying that because of his position regarding penal substitutionary atonement Dr. Ford is more closely to conservative adventism than those in the church where he preached, not getting over the old view. The sad irony is that you can be a pastor in the SDA Church in good standing and cling to the moral influence theory of the atonement which denies God’s wrath and implicitly his justice, but you cannot be a pastor in good standing in the SDA Church if you’re in conflict with the Investigative Judgment, like Des Ford.
I feel that the moral influence theory is another way of putting fig leaves on naked body before a holy God, an attempt to have peace with God at the cost of denying the reality of the nakedness of sin indirectly by denying God’s justice and his right to punish severely our sins.
I have a personal view about why the doctrine of a God without wrath appeals peculiarly to the adventist mindset. In Adventist theology the classic doctrine of eternal hell which presents God’s wrath in punishing sinners eternally is not in harmony with his love, and consequently the punishment of sinners is reduced to a limited amount of time. Following on the reductionistic part, is just one step further to affirm that God’s wrath is just a historic tradition of the Christendom and should be sent to the Theological Recycle Bin. I’m not sure if this is or is not a true slippery slope, but I see the idea that God’s love trumps his justice present in both the annihilationist thinking and in the moral influence theory. Hope Stan will not be offended by what I said, I know that he believes in God’s wrath and justice.
Gabriel
Back to basics; Adventists do not accept total depravity, God will save them because they’re basically good people who occasionally do bad things, so God will not judge harshly those who not inherently sinful. A sort of Adventist universalism.
Back to basics; Adventists do not accept total depravity, God will save them because they’re basically good people who occasionally do bad things, so God will not judge harshly those who not inherently sinful. A sort of Adventist universalism.
Occasionally sinners with other words, the majority of times they are good people, righteous people. Given as it is, obviously those sins are not too grave to bring an awful curse, enough to require God’s wrath to be poured in abundance on sinners. This is strange in the face of Adam’ and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, one single mistake which brought condemnation, death, destruction to all the earth. One single sin.
But this vision requires faith, trust in what the Bible says, in spite of our mind which is accustomed to think that sin is a little thing, after all, nobody is perfect, and God is to obtuse to require what is impossible. That’s what is our default position, in which we are born, our natural way of thinking. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12:2) At every step, beginning with Genesis 3, the Bible requires us to trust God’s word rather our natural intelligence and intuition, at every step challenging us to renounce trusting in ourselves and instead trusting in God.
That’s quite a challenge, I admit, as justification by faith alone is another challenge. It requires to look sin in the face and recognize that we are spiritual bankrupt, beyond any hope of becoming or making ourselves acceptable before God, that we are, as our friend John pointed, totally depraved, and at the same time believing that God justifies us in this state, God justifies the ungodly, not the godly, and take God’s word and naked promise as sufficient. About Abraham, the apostle Paul, speaking about the kind of faith which brings justification, says:
In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” Romans 4:18
That’s justification by faith alone: no hope in yourself, but trusting against hope, against intuition, trusting that in union by faith with Christ his righteousness becomes by imputation, is counted to us and we are perfectly righteous, and this is sufficient for our salvation, now, tomorrow and in eternity. . In spite of being transformed and experiencing sanctification, we are still sinners saved by God’s grace as in the first day we believed. Our flesh and depravity still clings to us and perverts our good intentions (the man of Romans 7), But the good news is not good news outside the bad news about ourselves.
I am captain of my ship and control my destination by my choice, my work
It seems that we are all born Arminians!
It was when God revealed to me the reality of my sinful nature (years before I even heard about Reformation Theology) that I began to question the ‘me’ in that equation.
It is when we see ourselves as God sees us that Grace becomes truly amazing.
On another thread Shubee posted this link to Dr. Ford’s website with an excellent discussion of the gospel and why the moral influence theory is unbiblical:
The moral influence theory is gaining ground across the spectrum of liberal “evangelicalism “ as well as spreading like wildfire in the SDA church.
It is clearly a denial of the true gospel and needs to be exposed as such. Ford in his usual gracious style certainly implies the MIT is a false gospel, but seems to be too kind to the perpetrators of this dangerous doctrine.
Obviously, Desmond Ford is a not a Martin Luther. He is too kind and gracious toward the enemies of the gospel. However, Dr. Ford was a meaningful bridge from Adventism to biblical Christianity for me. As a believing unbeliever, I well remember listening to some tapes from Dr. Ford in my living room with tears streaming down my face as I heard the wondrous gospel for the first time. In my case, Dr. Ford was a significant catylst in my quest for biblical truth. When an inquiring Seventh-day Adventist determines that even one of their doctrinal pillars is not biblical, it creates concern that the other teachings may not pass close scrutiny as well.
Although Dr. Ford knows more about the details and history of the so-called “investigative judgment” than anyone else, I have often wondered why he hasn’t renounced Ellen White as a false prophet. After all, without Ellen White, there is no investigative judgment alibi. To his credit, his website and magazine do not quote her any longer. Moreover, Dr. Ford is no longer an official member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church at his own request. Belief transition does not usually happen overnight. It is comforting to know that God never goes on a rescue mission that fails. God’s timetable certainly differs from ours.
“He is too kind and gracious toward the enemies of the gospel.”
It is reprehensible that the Gospel is subverted by those who claim to be Christian, there is a part of me who would love to see their ____ kicked, but accept that a more confrontational tact would not convict the ‘enemies’ nor cause his message to be more effective for the larger audience. A calm presentation of God’s truth is more effective than an attack, now if I could just remember that!
To further the cause of tolerance and popularity, NEVER espouse the following:
Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Irresistible Grace
Perseverance of the Saints
SAVED by God’s grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone!
