Striking a Balance: Adventism and the Quest for Perfection

The God of the philosophers, who has inuenced the understanding of God in classical theism, is a perfect being. In this view God’s perfection is a xed and absolute state that does not accept new experiences.2 With such a denitional assumption, it is easy to read into the Bible the same static and settled condition of perfection when, for example, Jesus Christ commands us “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48).

3 As a result, such perfection would mean attaining a denite plateau from where no change is possible. Fortunately, the God of philosophers is not the God portrayed in the Bible. Of course, this does not mean that the biblical God is not perfect or does not desire perfection from human beings. But any claim about God should correspond to what the Bible arms about God and His activity.4 As such, any discussion about Christian perfection must start with the biblical testimony. As illustrated in the second part of this article, the range of Adventist understandings of perfection today includes dierent views. Some interpretations align better with the biblical testimony, while others reect human perfectionism. In a broad sense, human perfectionism refers to “any form of theological falsication or religious distortion of the biblical concept of perfection.”5 While perfection is God’s plan for His people, perfectionism is a poor human substitute for the divine plan. To understand what biblical perfection is and what its role is in the great controversy between Christ and Satan, this article starts where the Bible begins, with the creation of humans and their environment. It then explores the concept of biblical perfection in the Old Testament and New Testament. A brief overview of some important views in contemporary Adventist theology follows, where we will be looking at the position of last generation theology (LGT) as an illustration of perfectionism. Only the main distinctive characteristics of the LGT position are presented without pointing to the minor variants within this position; the same applies to the non-LGT view. Finally, the article ends with a synthesis of the concept and a conclusion. Due to space constraints, the perspectives of Ellen G. White and other inuential Adventist gures such as E. J. Waggoner, A. T. Jones, or M. L. Andreasen are not explored in this particular context, as they have been addressed by other authors.