Seventh-day Adventism

Why This Study Belongs Here

You may know Seventh-day Adventists as kind neighbors, gifted doctors, and people who take their Bibles and their health seriously. The church runs hospitals and schools around the world and reports about twenty-four million members. It officially confesses the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and salvation by grace. So why does it appear in a section on cults?

Because a cult, as this section uses the word, is a theological category, not an insult (see What Is a Cult?). It names a group that uses Christian words while denying the Gospel or the God it reveals. Paul warned of another gospel (2 Corinthians 11:4; Galatians 1:6–9). Adventism keeps much Christian vocabulary. But its system teaches that since 1844 Christ has been reviewing the lives of professed believers, that the seventh-day Sabbath will be the final test of loyalty to God, and that those who finally refuse it will receive the mark of the beast. A gospel that ends in that test is not the Gospel of Christ's finished work.

Christians have disagreed about this. Walter Martin, after long meetings with Adventist leaders in the 1950s, concluded in The Truth About Seventh-day Adventism (1960) that the church was not a cult. Anthony Hoekema, in The Four Major Cults (1963), concluded that it was. We side with Hoekema because the investigative judgment and the Sabbath test reach the first question we ask of any teaching: what must someone believe to be saved? The same questions apply to every group in this section: who is God, who is Jesus, how is a sinner saved, and what is the final authority?

Nor is Saturday itself the issue. Seventh Day Baptists keep the seventh day, and they are a separate people with no prophetess and no last-day test (see The Baptist Family Today). A believer may regard a day to the Lord (Romans 14:5–6). The issue is what this system makes the day mean.