It was a historic Annual Council of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Fundamental Beliefs were reviewed for the first time since they were put together in 1980. That alone would have made the Council historic. But the review was completely overshadowed by the issue of ordination, and how the church should relate to women in leadership. I was not there, but I just spent a couple of days with the Biblical Research Institute Committee of the General Conference at Andrews University and had a chance to debrief a number of major players in these events. I will share some of what I have come to understand, respecting confidentiality and the fact that I know a lot less than I would like.

First let me reflect on the Fundamental Beliefs (hereafter “FB”) discussion. The “28″ were reviewed over a period of years, taking into account consultations with many groups of leaders around the world and also suggestions that were mailed in to headquarters from leaders and lay people all around the world. Appeals for change focused particularly on two doctrines, the Trinity and Creation. Changes were then proposed in 2013 and circulated further around the world church. The revised set of FBs was then discussed last week and further revisions were made. The current state of the document, including all changes and comments by the committee chair and editor, can be found at http://www.adventistreview.org/assets/public/news/2014-10/FUNDAMENTAL_BELIEFS_STATEMENT-last_version.pdf. As you will see from this document, everything was done in the open, including suggested changes and comments on the process. Please refer to that as I share some brief comments aided by the discussion at BRICOM. Two global changes I won’t comment on further are putting Scripture references in canonical order and the use of inclusive language wherever that would not be painfully awkward.

FB1 is on The Holy Scriptures. The main intent of the wording changes there is to highlight the centrality of the Bible in SDA doctrinal discussions. There has been a tendency through the years to settle discussion by means of quotations from Ellen G. White (a respected founder of the Church who is viewed by most SDAs as having the gift of prophecy) rather than careful Bible study. The new wording of this fundamental highlights the centrality of the Bible in any discussion of doctrine in the Adventist Church. I consider this a very important and helpful re-emphasis.

FB2 is on The Trinity. There is a rising movement in some circles of the Church (particularly conservative circles) to return to a less trinitarian formulation of Adventist belief in the godhead. Since the Church had been fairly settled on the issue for around a hundred years, this caused church leadership considerable concern. The point was well taken that the title of FB2 (“Trinity”) was a word not found in the Bible. So it was argued that the wording should be more biblical and less philosophical (perhaps simply “God”). But the argument was then made that if the Church removed the word “Trinity” from FB2 the anti-trinitarians would declare victory, which would not have been the intent of those framing the language. So in the end little change was made, only to emphasis that “God is love.” What that biblical point (John 3:16; 1John 4:8) may seem obvious, it was missing in the earlier version.

To be continued. . .