Seventh-day Adventists & The Atonement

There are many who dismiss the Latter-day Saints as unchristian because of some of there more peculiar beliefs. This same standard holds for most of the faiths, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, that many protestants label as ‘cults’. An interesting exception to this rule would be the Seventh-day Adventists. In a recent post on a MySpace group someone identified this faith as occupying a ‘Christian with cult-like tendencies’ substrata of faiths, along with Pentecostalism. I have heard this same sentiment of Evangelical tolerance for the Adventists as an eccentric from of still legitimate Christianity before. In light of what I read today I find this curious. Produced below is an excerpt on Seventh-day Adventist belief from scholar Harold Blooms 1992 book, ’The American Religion’:

“Since 1844, Jesus Christ has been at work blotting out sin, which turns out to mean something very different from forgiving sin. Adventists part from Southern Baptist Fundamentalists, for one instance, in that repentance and forgiveness are hardly even provisional. You can die utterly repentant, and apparently forgiven, and yet your bad influence ongoing long after your death still can be held against you. Salvation will come only when all sins are blotted out by being placed by Christ upon poor Satan, the universal scapegoat, after which Christ will descend again to earth, as it was hoped initially he would have done on October 22, 1844.

“I cannot think of another American doctrine, even among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that assigns so crucial a role to Satan. Were that malign spirit to be blotted out prematurely, then there could be no salvation for Seventh-day Adventists. Ellen White’s Jesus is more a defense attorney for mankind then he is the bearer of the Atonement. In a mad literalization of the rituals of Leviticus, the necessity of the Christian Atonement vanishes. Satan, unwillingly of course, takes upon himself the sins of the world, and so we are given what in effect has to be called a Satanic Atonement. Perhaps that is the final vengeance of those who suffered the Millerite Great Disappointment of 1844. Ellen White’s sturdy frustrations are at last set aside at the expense of the ultimate scapegoat. Amiable as Ellen White was, there is something dangerously unamiable about this doctrine, and one need not be a Christian theologian to observe that it is scarcely Christian.” Pg. 156 (For the recorded, Mr. Bloom does not consider Mormons to be Christian either, but rather are members of a new religious tradition.)

Now I generally give a lot of leeway to groups that want to identify themselves as Christian. As far as I’m concerned, one qualifies oneself as Christian, in a worldly sense, by embracing Jesus Christ as the central character, indeed the overarching lynchpin to ones personal salvation. However here, with the addition of Satan as a secondary but essential salvation figure, an argument of non-Christian statues to the Seventh-day Adventists might have weight. Though I hasten to add that I have not as yet firmly embraced that opinion, as I only recently learned of the doctrine and am still processing its implications. I would be curious to hear responses on this from any source. Both in terms of the implication of the doctrine, and as to the uncertain statues that Seventh-day Adventism occupies (to many) on the cult-to-Christian Spectrum.