New Evangelical Ideas Resembling Adventism

I don’t know whether the growing lack of clarity in many evangelical quarters about the person and work of Jesus Christ is due to outside influences or internal weaknesses. Perhaps it is a bit of both. But it is shocking to me how many new evangelical ideas are uncanny in their resemblance to the Adventism I grew up with. For me, a personal example is that of David M. Moffitt’s recent book Rethinking the Atonement. It features a foreword by N. T. Wright and aims to move past beyond traditional views of the atonement that the author considers to be “reductive.”

One essay in this book is distressingly titled “It Is Not Finished: Jesus’s Perpetual Atoning Work as the Heavenly High Priest in Hebrews.” Though Moffitt does not come from an Adventist background, his proposed revision of the biblical doctrine of Christ’s atonement has features which are deeply disquieting to me. The author attempts to pit Christ’s cry on the cross “It is finished!” (John:19:3And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands.
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In fact, I found out recently that [Seventh day Adventist] Roy Gane has publicly stated that his writings on atonement have partly been the basis for Moffitt’s new thinking about the epistle to the Hebrews. Indeed, Gane cites Moffitt’s Rethinking the Atonement as an example of a new work in evangelical scholarship that is much closer to the Adventist position. The two-phase atonement, an Adventist innovation that robs Christ of his rightful glory and robs Christians of their assurance of salvation, is slowly working its way into the evangelical consciousness.

—Kaspars Ozolins (Former Adventist, born in Latvia to an Adventist family, Assistant Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)