The Dream of Adventism and Other Really Good Ideas

“Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed.” — Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric

My denomination, the Advent Christian Church, has entered a period of administrative challenges due to increasing leadership vacancies and declining membership. In response to these challenges, a strong contingency of young leaders has emerged to propose both structural and doctrinal changes, the latter of which, if adopted, would effectively remove some number of Advent Christians from fellowship. What follows is a response to the discussion to date, offering both analysis and humor for what is observed to be a problem with the predominant rhetoric—though the behaviors can be broadly ascribed to actors within the religious “pop debate culture”—and its effect to move the audience without first giving itself to critique. The author attributes the basis of thought to Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, and others as noted.      

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A little while back, I attended a small Bible study, whose members’ behavior was rather typical. I remember nothing of the discussion other than the impressions made by two toddlers playing. Their laughter interrupted the adults, whose speech sounded as though the subject were very serious. When talking about religion, after all, people are often serious. Yet on this day we were reminded that, for children, the chief attitude is that of play. Looking back, I am sure we looked silly in the sight of those children for thinking there were matters more important than their game of chase.

This bible study came after I had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to my kids. Each night, I would read them a chapter, and my daughter would giggle at moments when I would least expect it. She giggled, for instance, at my presentation of the adults who are exaggerated forms of polite vices and the idiosyncratic. The story does well to reintroduce to adults the default anxiety of children living in a world whose hostility is the effect of its strangeness, and the structures of which are products of strange adult decisions. As in the example of Alice, children walk through doors of all the wrong dimensions, and they are bossed about by grownups with allegiances to time, to authority, and to other things which have their purveyors but with no visible analogue. They are but shadows without objects, dark interruptions upon which brighter possibilities would otherwise shine.

Cast among our strange adult behaviors is our manner of speaking mechanically as if we were also speaking technically. The habit of religious speech in our day is offered in the interest of fact, in what Matthew Arnold called “the supposed fact,” and its assertions pass without pause to consider what constitutes fact in a world of competing accounts of reality. The presentation of religion in this manner is fraught with expressions of human temperament and concern. As is most often the case in America’s pop debate culture, policy terms are introduced with implicit positive or negative appraisal, having also introduced impulse by way of rhetoric that must first alarm us to the gravity of the problem before making descriptions of an intended next state ostensibly greater than its prior and into which, if accepted, the mass is coerced to move.  

True policy language is a neutered language which makes judgment of a thing a dialectically insecure position. Its terms are utility terms to bring the subject into inquiry. What was once the labor of inquiry to elicit truth from impulse before deciding the terms of debate is traded for now typical rhetorical techniques. Examples include offering “academic studies” to give one’s argument the prestige of having a no-kidding social scientific effect, or offering one’s credentials which are assumed to carry implicit trust. The common effect of these techniques cannot be understated. For in a society which confuses accreditation for education and education for wisdom, argument can easily pass as informed or as backwards in relation to these techniques, and there is routinely offered little to no vantage point neither for finding distinction between the rhetorical and the dialectical nor for determining what about this manner of speech transcends the theoretical into the moral (and so inserts its imperatives into forums of action, whether of duty or of responsibility). 

I believe it is the expression of something primal when one believes a good proposition cannot be sustained without first finding and conquering its opposite, but I suppose debate will have its place in the Western pedagogy so long as there are ideals which lend to its exercise. I also believe that the religious life should never offer itself as a solution to the world’s conflicts but rather that the religious life should offer its own conflicts.

I believe, too, that Kingdom is the Wonderland imagination of God for his people, and I believe this sort of thing quite carelessly. 

Religion in debate has little use for metaphor and symbol, which is to say it has little use for religion. Religion enters us into a world of value. Its language moves us upward towards an unreality that is the really real and whose dimensions are untranslatable in the patter of specialists. There are certainly a number of fine religious words like redemption and advent that when used can transfigure our experiences into symbol, but these words do not comport well in matters of deliberation for new processes and mandate. Such words, when used well, are the religious life’s aesthetic difference, whose expressions were once the business of religion as is attested by the frescos and sonnets. Taken up together at its origins, we have a body of symbol that is the poetry of Scripture, the tongue of angels, and the language vehicle to bring critical life events into ultimate reality. For example, without religious symbol, marriage, as the secular would have it, would be but an economic partnership, rather than a union of “one flesh” giving matrimony its passage into new being. These symbols make up the grammar of faith and invite us to become performers in the story.   

But religion must now prove its case to have no excess in the aesthetic nor to make much claim about dreams. The terms on which a religion can exist as a publicly acceptable religion are elastic save one which is but the effect of showing one’s difference to a subgroup marked as backwards or fringe. You can know a religion has gone this way when “reform” or “adapt (or die!)” become sacred causes from which the body is not spared for matters of all the usual aggrandizing techniques. Of these techniques are phrases intended to elevate one’s position as though it were a “biblical” position with import from a “deeper” or “right” theology whose antonym is most assuredly imputed to another. These terms are but general terms par for the course of religious debate. Yet as I stated earlier, seldom in debates are there scruples about proceeding without the labor of definition.

Even with the appropriate terms, however, there is labor left to assess the persuasive power of an argument by virtue of its form. As for the present discussion of the Advent Christian Church and its next state, there is now said to be a new ought for a course of action whose prescriptions can neither be vindicated by principles of no dictation and theological charity, nor proven for their effect. There is but a repeated body of fact insisted upon the mass as an urgent matter to which there is no alternative than systematized change. This kind of argument has persuasive power only among readers who share the same sense of crisis and fear inaction as it were a mode of failure.

I’m confident that making bad arguments will not make more Advent Christians, just as making good arguments will not make more Advent Christians. Though I’m sure there are lessons to take seriously about the Advent Christian Church in its current state—perhaps chiefly that a denomination is inevitable to go the way of all other denominations—not one of them is that any of us have a religion worth modeling from the top. The best we can do is present ourselves in an uncomfortable process of preparation and do so with awareness of the comedy all around us; we’re now Adventists with plans for our future.

Perhaps, too, this comedy is the consequence of a lack of compelling Adventism, but I would offer that this consequence is not that of an administrative or doctrinal failure but rather of a creative failure. Adventism should present itself as the foremost means whereby the Christian posture towards the end of the world is searched and found, and it should do so at the risk of appearing incompatible with a Christianity whose reality is exhausted by all the usual conflicts of existence. How this goes about is by accounts of reality in which the world now exhibits the set of conditions to meet final redemption, showing that all our conflicts, even religious conflicts, are all very small and fleeting and have met their moment of decision. Adventist expressions can raise both expectation and disappointment into an aesthetic that borders cognitive distortion, pulling the present scene into ever-looming peril. If done well, these expressions present a Wonderland dreamscape of its own in which Christians can experience the Revelation effect all over again and reorder their lives according to its impressions.

Adventism is a space at which different realities meet, each looking at the other’s critical matters as silly, unserious things, and wondering why all the fuss. At least, that’s my hope. But for whatever one can say of the Advent Christian Church, about which direction it should or shouldn’t go, we must concede the reasons our members believe they belong to the name are and have been historically varied, and I would caution leaders against assigning those reasons to all the usual categories. There are those who discuss their religious constitutions as it were a technical discussion, and then there are those whose faith is brought so near that its ritual cannot be divorced from the personal. If current trends hold, I should part from the former for a quality more inviting to me than presenting Adventism as an erudite and serious religion, and that is the possibility of presenting Adventism as the language of religion’s dream into which the structures of the world are brought to sudden end with literary play, “Let the one who does wrong still do wrong, and the one who is filthy still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous still practice righteousness, and the one who is holy still keep himself holy” (Revelation 22:11).

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