Good day, my brother. I must admit that I got lost in your arguments; not because they weren’t plain, but simply because it is hard for my mind to grasp some information. One thing is plain to me, however, and that is what causes division. God wants us to be unified on truth, not a set of beliefs. As we all know, beliefs can be wrong and lead us astray. Look at the apostle Paul who was once Saul. His beliefs led him to persecute God’s people. He even held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen to death. His beliefs blinded him to truth.
As a relatively new believer, I see things wrong with the conservatives as well as the not so conservative members in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. When I first began attending my church it was being held together by a small group of people - ages 50-83 - whose belief that God wanted the church to continue was so strong that to pay the bills they often did without personal needs to make sure the needs of the building were met. God paid off their faithfulness because now we have more than 110 members. Our location is prime; right in the midst of a diverse community. Diverse not just in income levels, but in cultures, religions and people who have no religion. We are becoming known in the community because of some of the programs that have been developed. This is good. However, there is another side to this equation. The older members. An example of what I am talking about this this. A decision was formed, voted on and passed by the 25 people who kept the church alive to have a hospitality center. Each week we set up a table with hot water for hot tea, cider or chocolate as well as water. After church we serve home made cookies. Since there wasn’t a table we purchased a beautiful wrought iron one with a glass top. Our greeters come early and set up the hospitality table. One day when I came in, the table was gone and in its place was a small desk. I searched high and low and could not find the table. So I found another, placed a table cloth on it to hide its condition and set up. Now I find that the “hospitality committee” has decided the table is too big and retired it. No questions asked, nor cared about. Another instance is the literature rack. We have a member who has faithfully maintained it as well as 7 Signs of the Times boxes around our area. One day when we came to church all of his literature was gone; nothing is in the racks. When we asked what happen we were told that a committee had decided to put individual bible studies in the racks. What happened to common courtesy? Why wasn’t he informed of this decision. Since he is appointed over the literature, shouldn’t he have been told? Yet another instance of blindness on the part of the “not so conservative.” We arrived at church one week to find the organ was gone. A decision has been made that an organ isn’t necessary. The woman who played it was told, 'find another ministry." All of these instances show a callousness unheard of when I was young. Personally I like organ music, and I like the old hymns. Now all of our music is mostly these new songs that only talk about the love of God as though He is some one-dimensional individual. I miss hearing the old songs. Several of our older members have moved their memberships to other churches, not because they wanted to go but because they have been made to feel unwelcome. Our member directory is only online, yet I know at least 10 people who have no computers!
We seem to have lost respect for others, thus we have no love.
I have often wondered if the one common element for those who will ultimately stand on the sea of glass, will be an open-mindedness, or willingness to accept a deeper or clearer understanding of truth, which God will reveal. What else could it be…certainly not every one will be a vegetarian, or even a Sabbath-keeper? In my view, this is not universalism, but more in line with what Paul talks about in Romans when he says some people will be saved who did not have formal spiritual training, but followed their consciences. Would we not presume that truth will be revealed in a complete way as we are glorified and spend time with Jesus in heaven?
Organized religion is mostly concerned about homogeneity. In a curious way, while we believe that salvation is only obtained individually, we do not support individualism as much as we promote or teach collectivism, at least where it pertains to the church.
Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to borrow Émile Durkheim’s term and call those ideas “Social Facts?”
Notice that Durkheim posits that social facts are external to the individual:
Likewise, I would say, the endless social atomization set off by the Reformation was also not only predictable, but inevitable.
I am puzzling about what, in an historical and sociological sense, “fully and accurately Christian” could possibly mean that would not be horrifying.
Are we presupposing an endpoint in which a Remnant of SDA Intellectuals will finalize the perfect set of Ideas that will will end this dizzifying historical spiral into social atomization and trigger some sort of Intellectual Eschaton in which the Remnant of SDA Intellectuals will be caught up into the Platonic Heaven of Perfect Ideas, whilst the Willfully Ignorant will be cast into Outer Intellectual Darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth?
Let me ask you this: if, as Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is within us, why are we trying to create it externally by manipulating Social Facts?
What a yeasty question! HOW ELSE, indeed!
But first perhaps we should examine what we mean by “believe.” Here is where we wade into metaphysical Tall Cotton.
Could this be the root of the problem? Ideas are Social Facts, and, if Durkheim is correct, such things are “external to the individual.”
How then, can Christ’s prayer for Oneness in John 17 ever be fulfilled if we are striving to achieve this Oneness in the external realm of Social Facts?
Is Christ’s Oneness with the Father merely in the realm of ideas?
Is our Oneness with Christ merely in the realm of ideas, of Social Facts?
What kind of Eschaton are we hoping for, really? What “belief” must we “prove” and “hold on to” in order to avoid “False Security?”
Euclid said it was self-evident that:
Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.
Do you likewise find that self evident?
Ah, I think here we have discovered the real root of the problem!
He is before all things, and **in Him** all things **hold together**. *--Colossians 1:17*
He must increase, but I must decrease. --John, the Baptist
Amen and amen!
The 2 cases cited by the author prove nothing. The founders of the SDA Church came from various denomination with their various beliefs. It took some time to come around to a proper understanding on many of these issues.
As for the Merikay case, the church was clearly in the wrong by not paying women the same as men for doing the same work. That was a shameful chapter in our history, as was our treatment of Blacks in the past. But, I’m not sure what it proves. It certainly doesn’t make a case for WO, nor does it take away from any aspect of present truth.
Matthew Quartey writes: “If you can’t support all our beliefs, why don’t you do the honorable thing and leave?” This sentiment, or some variation of it, is often made by some of our conservative church members when doctrinal disagreements occur.
Certainly, the author is correct to point out that some conservative church members are willing to part ways or to suggest the others leave if doctrine is at stake. But, isn’t this true about everybody, liberals included?
I have a friend who is an active environmentalist. He is a member of the Sierra Club and donates to environmental causes. If a regional officer for the Sierra Club starts tweeting, “drill, baby, drill”, my friend is going to react. He will work to have the “drill baby drill” tweeter removed from a position of power and influence within the Sierra Club. If that doesn’t work, my friend will probably shift his donations to the Environmental Defense Fund. Is anyone shocked by that my friend would behave this way?
Is the mission of Jesus Christ less important that the mission of the Sierra Club?
At some level, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church is an advocacy organization. That means that the message is important and not just any message will do. While it is important that everyone feel welcome in our Churches, not everyone gets a seat at the message table. Positions of power and influence should remain with those who believe in “the essential message” and in “the mission” of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. What is “the essential message”? That is a difficult subject. Try having that conversation at your Church. Emotions will run high. But the fact that it is hard to that conversation, the fact that is is difficult to define what is “the essential message”, doesn’t mean we are excused from the exercise. After all, the environment. . . I mean . . the Gospel . . . is at stake. 
I’ve seen many people saying this her e at spectrum throughout the years. First, I would ask them, “who told you this would be honorable?” It seems to me that those people just feel threatened by any diversity of ideas. Or they are afraid that someone who “ask questions” may eventually find out that there are some flaws in their religious beliefs.
Those who think they already have a complete, final version of truth are ignoring what EGW said on this issue.
It is obvious that the men at the GC have a tradition of supporting and even fighting in Court trying to preserve discrimination of women. In our days the discrimination of women is obvious in the case of WO. Nothing changed; if they are allowed to, the black suited old males will do the unthinkable to perpetuate discrimination of women.
This is what Adventists fear the most, “questioning!”
Excellent article. But I bet it will suffer fierce criticism from those people who are stuck in the past and/or have the inner need to “be in control” and pursue this obsession at Church because they cannot do it at home…
This is a great post, but it doesn’t quite get to what I see as the root of the problem–epistemology. How do we know what we know, and on what do we base our beliefs? There’s long been a tension between the post-enlightenment way of coming to knowledge, empiricism, and an epistemology that’s based on authority and tradition. And I think that tension colors most of these important questions about beliefs, and our disagreement over them. In my view the reason for disagreement between Adventists and Christians more generally is simply that the core of how these religious beliefs are formed and grounded is not reliable.
It seems to me that Christians typically give two types of answers when asked about the grounding for their beliefs. The first is to say that the Bible is the inerrant revelation of God, and that they base their beliefs on what the authors of those documents say. The second is to appeal to a personal relationship with (or revelation from) God. I have yet to hear convincing arguments to support the reliability of either epistemology.
There are a range of views on what exactly is meant by Biblical “inerrancy” but I see problems with all of them. If the Bible is claimed to be completely without factual error, how do we reconcile the clear factual differences throughout? If the Bible is claimed to be reliable in the sense that it contains important information about how we should live and relate to God, then many of those differences can be dismissed as unimportant human errors. But even if we take a more minimal approach to Biblical reliability we have to deal with the problem of Christian disagreement. Why do humans who appear to be sincerely and honestly seeking to know and understand God disagree? If we have a perfect revelation from an all-powerful deity who wishes to communicate with us, why does his happen?
It took me many years, but slowly I began to realize what is usually obvious to anyone coming to the Bible without preconceptions–the many authors of the Bible have many views about many things! They do not all agree. These are not just minor disagreements about the number of soldiers contributed to a battle by the tribe of Judah etc. Look at any important human question, and you’ll find many different answers.
For example, most of the authors of the Hebrew Bible appear to believe that the reason that humans suffer in this world is because of specific behavior such as disobedience to God. This is a clear thread throughout the prophets. They believed that God visited suffering and death on Israel, and others, based on whether they were following his commands or not. For many of these ancients, good people prospered and evil people suffered. So if you suffered it was because of something you did. We can see some authors, such as the writer of Ecclesiastes, wrestle with this belief. They saw that sometimes evil people prospered, and apparently good people suffered–but they did not know why! When we look around at the world we rarely see justice, and neither did they. After the Babylonian captivity we begin to see new views that most scholars label as “Apocalyptic.” If we don’t see justice here on earth, then perhaps God would deliver justice in the future. Most ancient Jews appear to have lacked a well-defined belief in an afterlife–some believing that nothing happened at all after death, and others believing that the dead, both good and bad, ended up in a shadowy place called Sheol. This belief evolved into something much closer to the typical Adventist view of suffering, that it’s caused both by our fallen natures and by a malevolent spiritual entity (the devil). This is a hugely significant change. In this view God is no longer directly responsible for our suffering, as he was for most of the OT authors. Suffering is not necessarily linked at all to our own behavior, and although we don’t see justice on earth, God will judge people after they die and ultimately restore a perfectly just world without suffering. This seems to be the view that Jesus held and taught, but it is decidedly not the view of the Old Testament prophets.
Because the Bible is full of differing perspectives by authors living in drastically different times and cultures, it seems obvious to me that Christians would struggle to agree on a single set of beliefs based on it. And of course that’s what we see in the thousands of diverse Christian sects. Even the authors of the synoptics have different views of Jesus, so of course we can end up with different sets of beliefs about him, his nature, the atonement, justification and the list goes on and on. To me this means that there is no way to come to unified and “true” beliefs about God or humanity through the Bible. It’s not a reliable way to come to knowledge. Of course this isn’t at all surprising if we view these documents historically and believe that the authors are simply humans with the same big questions as us, struggling to understand God and the human condition through time. But most Christians don’t see it that way. Most seem to appeal to the Bible as the perfect word of a perfect deity, and yet somehow disagree about nearly everything in it.
The second proposed way to come to religious knowledge is personal revelation or relationship. This might be called an “internal apprehension of the divine,” and includes things like a feeling of being guided by the Holy Spirit, internal peace and satisfaction when religious rituals are practiced, and even dreams or visions. This method of coming to knowledge faces some of the same challenges as the first. Honest people seeking the same thing (God) have mutually exclusive experiences. Hindus experience satisfaction when practicing traditional rituals, Christians see visions of Jesus, Muslims see visions of Mohammed etc. The types of experiences are often quite similar, but the beliefs that these experiences are claimed to support cannot all be true.
Some have claimed that we are rational to maintain beliefs based simply on this internal intuition of the divine, just as we are rational to maintain other beliefs based on our uniform (or nearly uniform) intuitions. For example, I believe that I am a physical being, and not just a brain in a vat being fed sense data. That’s based on intuition and assumption. I can’t provide evidence for that belief, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not rational. The important distinction, though, is that we cease to be rational in holding onto beliefs based only on internal experiences or intuition when we’re shown good reasons to doubt that experience.
It’s easier to think about this if we use an example that is more grounded in actual sense data. For example, imagine walking into your kitchen and seeing a cockroach on the floor. It’s rational to believe that there’s a cockroach there. However, what if I told you that I did not see the cockroach? Furthermore, what if I showed you a packet of a hallucinogenic drug, and said that I’d put some in your tea an hour earlier. Are you still rational in trusting your sense data? Nope! You’d have to do some tests to figure out if the cockroach was there or not. You might try to touch it, catch it in a jar for later observation, or take a photograph of it. There are lots of empirical tests we might do to try to test the authenticity of our experience.
It seems to me that we’re in a similar situation in regard to the internal experiences of God that many people report. First, they disagree with one another. Second, we have excellent evidence that humans are predisposed to see agency and human-oriented purpose all around us, even when it’s not there. We see faces in trees, intuitively believe that beautiful flowers are “for” us, and that we must have a special place in the universe. Many of these superstitious beliefs have also been overturned by modern empirical methods. To use a big philosophical term, we tend toward promiscuous teleology. There are lots of possible explanations for this that make sense when viewed through our evolutionary history. The animal who assumes that a rustle in the tall grass is a lion, and runs away, will survive better than an animal who investigates to see if it’s a lion or merely the wind. To me, these are all excellent reasons to be skeptical of these internal experiences of the divine.
The world is a weird place and often isn’t at all like we think it is intuitively. Historically we’ve seen many intuitive beliefs turn out to be false once subjected to methodical observation and inference, from the flat earth to the solid nature of objects, to the fact that fundamentally objects exist at all! Ask a physicist and they’ll tell you that fundamentally the cosmos is waves interacting with one another.
I don’t mean to say that any of that disproves God. Instead, like the example of the cockroach, I think it means that we should take our search outside into the realm of empirical investigation. Maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not, but we need evidence and investigation to find out. That’s why I consider myself an empiricist. It seems to me to be far and away the best method for coming to true knowledge about the world and ourselves. During my long slow departure from belief in God, I investigated all of my most deeply held beliefs and discovered I couldn’t provide reasons for them. I also discovered that I had apparently believed many false things. I don’t want to believe false things, and so I depend on applying skepticism to my beliefs and updating them when new evidence comes along. Like the article above alludes to, I don’t know how else I can avoid errors. I completely agree about the danger of certainty. But if we are evaluating and updating our beliefs, then we also need a reliable way to test them. As far as I can see, the best option is empiricism.
Ultimately my inability to answer these questions about the grounding for religious beliefs was a big reason that I left the church. But I still wonder, and I still search–because I’m human too! There are a lot of thoughtful Christians in the Spectrum community, and I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on this. Am I missing something? How do you ground your beliefs or come to knowledge about God and/or his requirements for us? I know of course that many authors in the Bible simply claim that we need faith in order to believe. But what is faith if it is not believing in something without rational grounding? “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe.” Does that leave Christians with outright fideism? (Faith completely apart from rationality.) I don’t mean to be insulting here, these are genuine questions. I didn’t give up my belief in God on purpose, and if I could find some rational way to believe, then I’d be thrilled to again have all the answers and certainty that I once had. But if it really does simply take faith, then I don’t even know where that leaves me.
" I consider myself an empiricist. It seems to me to be far and away the best method for coming to true knowledge about the world and ourselves. During my long slow departure from belief in God, I investigated all of my most deeply held beliefs and discovered I couldn’t provide reasons for them. "
Thank you for you honesty; what type of empiricism are you using? What categories of evidence you use and trust?
The answer is No, of course. Thomas was asking for absolute proof; proof that he could not doubt even if he wanted to. Thomas had much evidence. What he wanted was proof that would be so overwhelming that he could not not believe. God will rarely give us this, because then our free choice is gone! God will not manipulate us to believe even with the truth.
Speaking broadly it’s simply observation and measurement and then inference. I’m not so rigid that I would dismiss such things as miracles or even internal spiritual experiences prima facie. All we have is our own sense data and experiences to go on, so, at least initially, all of it counts! That’s what my example of the cockroach was meant to illustrate. I would accept that evidence on its face as demonstration that there was a cockroach in my kitchen, until given reasons to be skeptical of it. Once I have those reasons, then more rigorous methods should be used–methods which make predictions that can be falsified. For me thinking about how a belief can be falsified is key and then testing it is key.
Testimony is also acceptable to me, but we need to correlate the claims of others based on our own experiences and the reported testimony of others. If a claim falls outside of our experience, or cannot be demonstrated in some repeatable or testable way, then I am skeptical. It doesn’t necessarily mean I believe such claims are 100% false, but it means I withhold belief until they can be demonstrated empirically through measurement and inference. If they can then I update my beliefs in proportion to the evidence for it. Hope that helps!
I don’t mean to be rude, but I encounter this free will argument to defend God’s “hiddenness” frequently, and just genuinely think those who make it haven’t thought it through. Even from within a traditional Christian worldview it doesn’t make sense. What about the many humans and other entities which have been described as interacting more directly with God? Was the devil’s free will circumvented because he stood in the presence of God? Was Abram’s, or Moses’, or Adam’s? As with human relationships, it seems to me that belief that someone exists must come before “belief in” that entity. In other words, I must get to know someone and experience them in some way before I can come to trust them. Knowledge of someone must come before trust, and trust must come before obedience.
I’ve written about this so much that I’m not sure I want to take the time to lay it all out again, but look up arguments from philosopher of religion J.L. Schellenberg for some good material. Put simply it’s important to differentiate between “belief that” and “believe in.” There is no way in which “belief that” god exists and explicit knowledge of his personality and requirements for mankind should infringe on free will. That’s like saying that the parent who lives with and loves her child, showing her physical evidence of her presence every day, is somehow less loving than the parent who is absent, and sends postcards to her child from afar, which are passed on indirectly through many people, none of whom have actually met the parent.
Furthermore, there appear to be many people in the world, and I would count myself among them, who have earnestly sought after God, and yet have not experienced him. Unless I am somehow deceiving myself, I don’t believe I am resistant to the idea of a God. I have “desire to see” as your quote says, and yet do not. A simplistic example (and one which is not meant to be offensive) is that of Santa Claus. The belief in Santa is hopeful and encouraging. In a way, I would love it if it was true! I am not “resistant” to the belief that he exists or even could positively influence my life–I simply have never met Santa, and have never seen convincing evidence of his existence. (It’s a bit of an aside, but one could actually make the argument that there IS evidence for Santa from a certain point of view. There are, after all, presents under the tree on Christmas morning! And more than that, St. Nicolas was a historical figure! All I mean by that is that it’s not just evidence, but our careful and rational interpretation and inference of evidence that makes the difference.)
The typical defense I see from Christians when this is laid out is that people like me, “unresistant unbelievers” just don’t exist. They’ll imply or outright claim that I’m actually lying, and that my unbelief is not rational, but dogmatic. They’ll say that I’m in “rebellion” or “mired in sin.” There’s not a whole lot I can say to that sort of ad-hominem attack except that I sure don’t think that’s it.
I’ve already written more than I planned on, but hopefully that’s helpful to you. Thanks for reading what I wrote and thinking about these important questions. Much appreciated!
I would not judge you or even want to! I don’t assume rebellion are anything regarding you my brother. Free will is at the heart of the topic of believing of course in that we there in assume the capacity to believe or make rational choices by doing anything empirical. Atheism and Theism assume rationality yet Atheism has no way to get to objective rationality from the irrational, from material to mind.
An excellent post, and a thoughtful and candid one. I can only speak for myself.
I was raised an Adventist by two wonderful parents who were nominal in their belief: that is they took us to church, sent us to SDA schools, and lived ethical lives, but had no intimate relationship with God, as far as I could tell. They at least did not speak passionately about him. They loved one another as i have seen few couples do, and I had a wonderful childhood, only seeing them argue once. Our home was a place of peace. I was very fortunate.
I was required to read the D of A for 9th grade Bible, and fell in love with Jesus, the Savior revealed there… My father even noted it one day as he looked into my face, “Allen, are you in love?” I was. Since my parents did not seem to have the experience I did, I was reluctant to share it with them, so did not tell them of the feelings of my soul, something I have regretted not doing. Since my parents had no insight into my thinking, I do not find it unusual for people not to understand other’s feelings or thinking.
This experience (reading the D of A) has colored my whole life so that although I have studied science, and read much on skepticism and the unbelief of many folk, I have never been moved to give up the belief in a God who loves. Jesus was the key. I have a subjective experience with him, knowing the comfort that comes from taking the Bible seriously when he speaks through it to me. Even, in fact especially, when it condemns my behavior. I see it as a book of love, warning me from the path of death. This is the subjective part of faith, and dear indeed.
But without objective evidence, this would be just fideism, belief without evidence, which I would see more as gullibility, having seen such thinking. So are there objective things we can hold onto?
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Jesus is a remarkable figure, who claimed to be God. He was that, or a lunatic. I have met those who have claimed to see and hear things that I could not. Being a physician, I know the difference between deep insight into life, such as Jesus had, and psychiatric illness. The gospel writers each saw Jesus in a different way, nothing really unusual, as each of us sees others in different ways; my wife sees me differently than my students, etc., so that is not such an odd thing. Now if they all saw him the same, we would postulate collusion. John’s gospel is the outlier, but he even says he did not write all that could be written. But he did have a rather more theological view.
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I am amazed at the potential of human beings. They have the look of fallen sons of God when seen in all their wonderful diversity and ability. I find it hard to believe such astounding creatures could be the result of chance. The love between a man and a woman can be so much more than just sexual fulfillment,although that is part of it. The giving of each to the other is so profound it borders on the sacred.
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Same with the universe. The atoms in their complexity, following a few simple laws, governed by 4 fundamental forces resulting in the diversity and amazing wonder of it all. Living things and stars, all of the same stuff! It has the look of design. I understand that the mitochondria use quantum mechanics to extract the most from oxidative phosphorylation. How did that come by chance alone? Frankly, it could not have. That is not how chance works.
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The Adventist interpretation of Daniel 2, a simple vision giving insight into the political machinations of empires through the ages, that can be checked against history itself, has amazed people from the days of Jesus. I know the skeptics assertions, and they do not add up. But of course that is my take. I have noted the wonder this chapter gives to folk when they first understand it. It has confirmed the Bible in many minds.
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Lives of great Christians testify to the God of love.
Are all questions answered? No, suffering is a problem. Chance is as well. And why bad things happen to good people, but these issues were there from the beginning. The existence of evil is a profound problem.
Job, Habakkuk, the Psalmist in psalm 73 all struggled with suffering. Job’s friends stood with the prophets, but God honored Job! Seems he speaks out of both sides of his mouth.
But i see that, surprisingly, as God asserting himself as he wishes, doing things differently as he sees what the circumstances require. His asking of questions to Job that neither he nor we can answer has strange comfort. He is bigger than we are.
You might desire more consistency, but God is not responsible to you.
The cross, however shows what he was willing to do. An unfathomable thing.
So, I stand a believer, and unashamed.
I wish you a restful Sabbath, a thing the world cannot give.
I have often wished for an easier understanding of some parts of Scripture, but figured it was God inspired so it would only prove my arrogance if I complained about it. Realizing how high above all mankind God is, in thought and being and in every other way, it is no surprise that it might take some study to figure out some of the harder issues of Scripture.
Fortunately, God does make one thing very simple to understand - that he loves us enough to give his own life for us, that we might have eternity with him. Please consider the love God has for you, for all of us, while we are yet so undone, and trust Him with everything else that isn’t easy for us to get right away. He certainly deserves the benefit of any of our doubts or uncertainties.
We have a wonderful Savior - no complaints about that!
Excellent Post Allen
The reasons for the sort of confusion expressed in this article is set forth in the Desolations of Jerusalem documentary (at the following link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFUkpVzNmI4).
The adoption of the hermeneutics of the protestant churches has brought nothing but confusion and weakened faith in the sound doctrines that are the foundations of the Adventist faith.
It would be helpful to educate people here by describing (briefly, of course…) what are those “hermeneutics of the protestant churches.”
Those convinced that WO is such an absolute moral certainty that they assert those who will not do it to be akin to the Sanhedrin who crucified Christ, would seem to fall into the category mentioned above, that is, they have an inability to question a firmly held belief.
The column is a good one.
Or they’ve already questioned and questioned and questioned on all sides of the issue before finally landing on their belief. Sometimes the comparison to the Sanhedrin is not without merit. Sometimes it is without merit.
This is most likely a good thing, lest the “Adventist faith” become an idol.