What was so jarring about the process against Desmond Ford was that church leaders were willing to sacrifice him overtly on the altar of tradition. Given that the SdA church, from its beginning, had fought against tradition in favor of a new reading of the scriptures, it was shocking to the many members who had internalized that belief to see church leaders condemn Dr. Ford for sins against a creed they were unable to defend from the Bible. In that sense, the Ford affair became a pivotal event in SdA history. 1980 was the year when Adventism ceased to be a movement and became a denomination among many others.
Ford was primarily advocating for a Lutheran/Reformed understanding of “righteousness by faith” and “sola scriptura.” (It was this, incidentally, and not any controversy over the sanctuary doctrine that led him to leave Australia for PUC). Ford’s critique of the sanctuary doctrine was merely the outworking of these two Reformation principles; first, that you could not accept a doctrine that said that the work of salvation was not finished at the cross, and secondly, you could not retain a dogma that was not based on the Bible. If you did, you betrayed both the gospel and the Reformation.
In my view, Ford was technically right, but at the same time offending against the spirit of the Christian gospel. The Christian gospel, as it emerged from the first century, is based on the idea that Jesus, somehow, provided salvation for humanity and that this salvation is available for the asking “by faith alone.” Now, if that is true, why is it crucial to understand the underlying theology? If somebody gives you a car, why do you need to understand how the power train works?
Ford, like Luther, brought great comfort to a lot of people who had been condemned to eternal doubt, if not destruction, by a theology marinated in perfectionism, but what I saw happening at the time was that moral perfectionism was being replaced by its theological variant. You see this reflected in Ford’s own assessment, quoted in the review above, that the end of all things would have been ushered in in post-apostolic times, at the latest, if the church had correctly grasped the nature of the Christian gospel. This, to me, sounds very much like magical thinking, of the the type that Ali Baba resorted to when he entered the robbers’ treasure mountain. A single password was all he needed, sesame. When his uncle forgot which cereal it was and tried barley and wheat, the mountain scorned him.
Car owner don’t need to be auto mechanics, but they need to know a thing or two about maintenance, and so do Christians. It is for that reason the church has pastors. Ford did wonders as a pastor, and much of his scholarship was unimpeachable, but when theology (or any ideology) becomes self-referential, its usefulness is compromised. As a result, the Ford imbroglio was quickly filed away in the envelope of “Theological controversies” and ceased to have much of an existential impact on the church.
But on the other hand, the heavy-handed way it was handled destroyed the General Conference as a religious authority. Ever since, it has often been nothing more than the SdA Vatican and a far cry from the days when it prided itself in being God’s highest authority on earth.