Profile of a Religious Man: Confessions of a Religion Addict

By Edwin Zackrison and Jerry A. Gladson

This book is a "journey book." Sitting down at a computer and producing the story has been a grand trek. I have learned that there is a principle in nature that some things need to mellow, calm down, and soak in. The refusal of winemakers to take a wine before its time is a notion I am coming to understand. It works with writers as well. Like a fetus signaling its mother that it is time to head for the hospital, a literary work stays in the mind until its time. In my education, I have read of the battles of great Church leaders who were eventually thrown out of their churches. In my denominational education, I was largely led to see them as heretics, rebels, eccentrics, revolutionaries, apostates, and as generally representing a lower form of spirituality. Church education often asked me to surrender my biases in favor of accepting a new set of assumptions--my denominational ones. We were to be critical of everything except our organization. I submit that there is danger in that. This book will cover incidents from the first forty years of my life as a religious addict. You may find something here that you can identify with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Nov 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532699061

Edwin Zackrison

Edwin Zackrison is a retired professor of theology and ministry at La Sierra University in Riverside, California. He is the author of The First Temptation (2015), People Under Construction (2020), and Profile of a Religious Man (2020).

Book preview

Preface

Walk a mile in my shoes, just a mile in my shoes.Before you abuse, criticize, and accuse, walk a mile in my shoes.

—Elvis Presley

When I was ten years old Dad brought home a five-inch television set. Don’t conclude that the quality of the screen compares with my six-inch iPhone screen. But we were so impressed that we could see what was happening covered over the lack of clarity.

On that little screen I saw for the first time a talent show that featured old people. Every performer competing for cash prizes, was at least forty years old. In 1953, Dad took me to Hollywood, and we were in the live audience of that weekly talent show. I marveled that anyone could suggest that life could begin at forty. In my young mind that was when life was ending! Jack Benny would disguise his actual age by telling us that he was only thirty-nine. As a kid I failed to catch that joke. I could not come to understand how thirty-nine was young!

Today I am retired. Thirty-nine and forty appear to be far in the past. When ticket takers ask if I am a senior I am elated. You mean they couldn’t tell?! Or were they just flirting with me?

This book covers incidents from the first forty years of my life. It is a journey book, which means this is the story of my journey through life for the first forty years.

Why? Who cares about my life? I have asked myself that question every day of the past thirty years that I have worked on this book. It covers some of only a little of my life. Who cares? Why write a book about any of my life? Nobody knows me. I’m not even sure my own children will read this book. Perhaps in some future moment of reminiscence, they might. I have received a few phone calls and emails from friends asking when my book will be out. But turning a question into a sale?—two different operations!

In my book, The First Temptation, I traced the treatment by theologians through the ages with respect to the original nature of the first biblical man and woman. Some believe they were created by God with original righteousness. Others hold that this is impossible because righteousness is the result of one’s response to experience. This book is my response to experience.

Mine was a well-planned life. My formal planning had started when I was sixteen years old and I made my personal decision to become a gospel minister. What I write in this book is not based on perfect memory. I do not believe that the human mind works like a tape recorder reproducing every fact correctly. For the past thirty years I have attempted many times to put my fingers to the keyboard and tell my story, but I have never gotten far. Yet others have called and written and urged that I tell it.

There is a principle in nature that some things need to mellow, calm down, soak in, and the like. The refusal of winemakers to take a wine before its time is a notion I am coming to understand. It works with writers as well. Like a fetus signaling its mother that it is time to head for the hospital, a literary work stays in the mind until its time.

Throughout my professional life I have kept copious notes and preserved many records. But the last thirty years especially have taken so many twists and turns that I have increased my notetaking. To my knowledge I have thrown out few letters or cards that I have received or written since I graduated from college. I have kept notes on phone conversations and since email became so widespread and prevalent, I have had instant documentation. I have organized these notes now to where I have a remarkably verifiable set of events as they affected my life and career and I am ready to tell some of my story because I believe it is not just my story but the story of many religion addicts.

I hope this book will be of encouragement to some. I do not write it to seek sympathy with my journey. My trip is rather placid in the light of the great pilgrimage books that have been written over the centuries. But this story will tell of my effort to overcome biases and false assumptions—it will tell of my struggle for love and understanding and the place where I thought I was assured some degree of fairness and compassion.

My story will tell of my love of truth and justice. It will tell of religious people who have overstepped their bounds in cruel and mischievous ways, including myself. Not the least of my purposes, this story should be an encouragement to other Church workers who may be facing the same struggles I have.

One of the great tasks of every adult on this planet is to make sense of life. I inherited, through my family and my education, one way to look at life. That was the Seventh-day Adventist view. I bought it totally. I fashioned every decision around that view. I committed myself totally and completely to the carrying out of the Adventist mission: to finish the work of God on earth. And while that sounds a bit arrogant to me now, it was presented as the only way to view my mission.

In short, I became as messianic as Adventism taught me to be. A significant element in religious addiction is messianism—that God has appointed you in a way that he has not appointed anyone else to do a job.

Some readers will call me naïve. They will say, nothing here is new, it is the framework of any organization, we all knew that. But that surely wasn’t true for me. Publicly, at least, this wasn’t true for any of the other leaders. I was to believe that this was God’s Church and when an important Church convocation decided, it was God’s choice. I was told this over and over.

A prominent Church leader once told me that I could expect at least four raw deals in the Church if I remained in its employment. I viewed the statement as theoretical until I discovered that he had come to make sure several of us on his faculty got one of those raw deals.

I believed only the best in the Church. I trusted and supported the brethren to do what was right. And I refused to listen to those who tried to warn me of corruption in leadership. I still have little time for such perceptions since my addiction is not completely de-programmed.

In my education I had read of the battles of great Church leaders who were eventually thrown out of their churches. In my denominational education, I was largely led to see them as heretics, rebels, eccentrics, revolutionaries, apostates and as generally representing a lower form of spirituality. Herein lays my greatest disappointment with Church education. It basically asked me to surrender my previous biases in favor of accepting a new set of biases and assumptions, i.e., the denominational ones.

Edwin Zackrison, PhD

University of Phoenix, Retired

Chattanooga, Tennessee

CHAPTER ONE

Religious Heritage

Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease.

—Heraclitus

Hinsdale, Illinois, October 1941

In 1941, Hinsdale, Illinois, was a small western suburb of Chicago, on the direct rail line to the Loop. At its center was Hinsdale Sanitarium, founded in 1899 by Dr. David Paulson (1868–1916), an Adventist physician from Michigan, on the old estate of Chicago businessman, C. B. Kimball.¹

Hinsdale was one of several of the Church’s institutions in the Chicago vicinity, which also included Broadview College in La Grange and Pacific Press in Brookfield. The Sanitarium had survived the Depression and in the 1940s enjoyed rebuilding and refurbishing until it became the first-class medical center that it is today.

Shortly before the refurbishing, and a month and a half before the Pearl Harbor day of infamy, I was born on my mother’s thirty-ninth birthday, in Hinsdale Sanitarium, to an Adventist family of Church workers—printers, artists, musicians, educators, editors, and writers.

We lived in Brookfield because my grandfather was an editor at Pacific Press Publishing Association and my father worked at a large printing plant in Chicago.

Christian and the book

On July 3, 1887, Christian A. Thorpe arrived in Chicago from Norway in the company of a family friend from Kristiansund, who had been in America for some time. On the journey, Christian’s friend gave him a book that would change his life and bequeath a new religious heritage to his family. The book carried an intriguing title: Thoughts on Daniel and the Revelation, by Uriah Smith (1832–1903), an editor/author and college professor in Michigan.

While Christian did not know it at the time, Battle Creek housed the world headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and was home to the famous Battle Creek Sanitarium, superintended by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943), famous for his break-through medical research and educational pursuits. He was also the inventor of breakfast foods such as wheat and corn flakes, as well as the developer of peanut butter.

C. A. Thorpe was born near Farsund, in the southern part of Norway. Raised on a small farm near the North Sea, he assisted his father in farming and fishing when he was young. When it came time to learn a trade, he moved into the city and learned cabinetmaking.

In America, he found a job working in a furniture factory in Chicago. While he had never heard of Adventists, he was fascinated by the contents of this book and its claim to unlock the secrets of the past, present and future. The more he read the more energized he became.

Step by step the book took him through the ancient biblical prophecies and their alleged historical fulfillments. He was snagged. Unable to get past the religious issues the book brought up, C. A. contacted the book’s publishers. In the process, he was invited to attend a religious camp meeting in Bloomington, Illinois, where he heard a speaker at the convocation, Elder O. A. Olsen (1845–1915), a fellow Norwegian and the president of the Adventist Church organization. He found the same emphasis in Elder Olsen’s sermons that he had read in author Smith’s book.

Elder Olsen encouraged him to visit the campus of Battle Creek College. Still a young man, C. A. ended up moving to Battle Creek where to his delight he met Elder Smith, the author who had changed the direction of much of his thinking.

Christian had met Mary Andreasen in Chicago, and Elder Smith performed their wedding on March 20, 1891. America had provided a new life for them and the Thorpes believed that God had directed it all. These two Norwegians were convinced that God wanted them to be active in the religious work of their newfound faith.

The most logical calling seemed to be the Church’s publishing enterprise. It was fully modern with new technology—power presses, the linotype (1884), paper cutters, book binders—that pointed to a great future for this work. Papers, periodicals and books could be distributed and dropped like the leaves of autumn wherever one traveled. Others would be attracted to the message, just as C. A. and Mary had been.

From his own experience, C. A. believed that a book could yield souls for the kingdom. So, he learned the printing trade and eventually became a highly valued multi-lingual editor in the expanding Scandinavian publishing work of the Church.²

In 1874, the Adventist Church founder James White (1821–1881) had established the Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association in Oakland, California, to evangelize the American west coast. In 1888, this printing plant became the Pacific Press and was later moved to Mountain View (in 1904) just before the devastating San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed its offices. The publishing house was soon rebuilt and the work in Mountain View continued for decades.

Branches were established in London, New York, Kansas City, Portland, and Regina, Saskatchewan. While they were all eventually closed, these printing plants established the mission of the Pacific Press as the center of the international publishing work.

Eventually the international headquarters came to be in College View, Nebraska, which seemed a reasonable location being near Union College, an Adventist school. This became the Thorpe home base for a time. In 1916, the Nebraska plant burned down. After the fire, the branch was moved again, this time to Brookfield, Illinois.

By then the Thorpes had four children, the youngest, Esther Virginia (1902–1992), would become my mother twenty-six years later.

Otto and the book

Back in Scandinavia another series of events was developing. In 1920, Otto Zackrisson, a local Stockholm businessman, was introduced to a curious publication, a Swedish version of Bible Readings for the Home Circle. The book changed the course of Otto’s life.

Bible Readings was delivered by a strange salesman; a town drifter eager to get money for wine had discovered it with its covers torn off in a garbage can around the corner from Otto’s bicycle shop. Otto gave the man twenty-five Swedish Ore (about five cents at the time).

The book was a virtual encyclopedia of biblical teachings arranged in a familiar catechistic form: question-answer-question-answer. No one knows what eventually became of the book, but had it still been around, it would have merited being showcased in a family museum given the impact it had on the Zackrisson family.

As Otto read the book, he found some of its teachings puzzling. Especially dissonant to him was the answer given to the question: What happens to people when they die? He had the answer to that—they go to heaven. But the book took issue with that and gave scriptural references to counter that view. Another question was: Which day is the biblical Sabbath? To Otto’s amazement the answer to that question did not square with his tradition either. The book identified the dead as being in an unconscious sleep and argued that the biblical Sabbath was Saturday. Who had written this book? No author was listed, only a publishing company in Oslo, Norway.

About that time, Otto came across a flier advertising a series of religious lectures soon to be held in Stockholm. Curious for a discussion on these questions, he attended the meetings. Full of inquiries, inspired by the book, he wanted answers to both questions. When the speaker opened to questions from the floor he was ready. But he got no answers. The lecturer just said he would be covering both those topics later in the series.

The interchange led Otto to attend all the meetings. When the lecturer finally answered Otto’s questions, he was astonished to hear agreement with what he had read in the book. Who was this lecturer? Who had published this book that had been retrieved from the trash, which agreed with this lecturer?

In those days, the religious affiliation of non-Lutheran Bible lecturers was often hidden until the time was right for disclosure—when attendance had substantially leveled out, so the speaker knew he was communicating with an agreeable segment of listeners. With the curiosity seekers gone by this time, only potential believers would be left, so the theory went.

Hooking people on a message before prejudice and bias could influence the outcome was the philosophy of the Adventist lecturer. Religious bigotry was a powerful force, and it could easily scare some people from even hearing "the Truth." Furthermore, revealing that you were an Adventist could result in persecution, vandalism, even physical harm.³ Tents could be ripped and burned.

Stories were told of evangelists who had been thought to be revolutionaries, heretics, cult leaders or fanatics. It was little wonder that Otto had a hard time finding out who these people were. Along with his oldest son, Harry, Otto attended the meetings, and they discovered that Bible Readings was an Adventist book.

In 1921, after the meetings, Otto joined the Adventist Church along with Harry and other members of the family.

Harry had been studying electrical engineering since 1919 at Stockholm Technical School. He was a mathematician, an artist and a musician. At the age of thirteen he had played violin for the King of Sweden. He also played trumpet in the King’s army band. He had the sensitivity and passion of an artist along with the logic and planning instinct of an engineer—an impressive combination.

Denominational officials labored with Harry to reconsider his engineering pursuits. The prophecies indicated that the Lord could return long before he could ever finish his extended engineering course, they argued. And how could an engineer really be of much use in the spread of the Adventist Truth? The end of time was imminent, and he needed to help prepare the world for it. This denomination would primarily have need of four kinds of professionals: medical workers (doctors, nurses), ministers (evangelists, pastors, administrators), teachers (all levels) and publishers (writers, artists, editors, printers, pressmen, bindery workers).

Other than preachers and educators, the Adventist strategy for evangelistic success included two crucial prongs, or arms, to finish the work so Christ could return. The medical work (or the health message) was the right arm of the Adventist message. This work would manifest the spirit of Christ and his compassion to the world and it carried soul-winning potential. Many people would listen to their physician before they would listen to an unknown lecturer preaching on a religious topic that sought to sway their minds away from their cherished beliefs.

Through the medical work, i.e., hospitals, sanitariums, orphanages, and doctor’s offices, the world would encounter Adventists, learn their dietary habits and doctrinal truths, associate with their nurses, doctors, receptionists, janitors and anyone else who worked there. The medical work would improve the health habits of the world and encourage a balanced mind required to accept Adventist teachings. When people were in good health, they could read the Adventist publications with a pure mind and be convinced of the Truth.

It was an enticing argument and Harry accepted it, dropped out of engineering school and moved to Denmark where he enrolled in the nurses’ training program at the Adventist Skodsborg Sanitarium near Copenhagen.

Here were the roots of my religious existence. Harry Albin Zackrisson (1901–1975) would become my father two decades later.

When Harry met Esther

In 1898, Dr. Carl Ottosen (1864–1942) had established Skodsborg Sanitarium on an old residence of the Danish King in a suburb of Copenhagen.⁴ Many years later, around our family dinner table, Dad would tell his experiences during his student days in Denmark. My favorite story was the one about the student who filled up sugar dispensers in the cafeteria with salt. When a resident glutton opened the dispenser and dramatically poured all of what he thought was sugar on his pudding, took his first bite of what was salt covering his pudding, I would laugh until the tears came. Dad would enhance the story making it funnier every time he told it. I would ask him to tell that story over and I never tired of it.

During Harry’s nurses’ training, publishing officials from the Adventist headquarters in America visited the campus and they had another tale to relate. They convinced him that the best way he could hasten the Lord’s return would be to devote his career to publishing work. They explained that when all the Adventist efforts were finally terminated, the books and periodicals could continue to win souls to the Adventist warning message. More people would be in the kingdom because of the publishing work than any other Adventist work.

So that was where he should be—producing books—editing, drawing, printing, writing, selling Truth-filled literature. With his natural aptitudes and interest in art and foreign languages he would find this work a good fit. Wishing to do God’s will, Harry dropped his nurses’ training and moved to Oslo, Norway, the center for the Adventist publishing work in Scandinavia, and began employment as a proofreader of Swedish Adventist literature. There he met Esther, the youngest Thorpe daughter whose father (C. A.) was now on a four-year assignment in Norway to edit and translate Adventist books into the Norwegian language.

Harry and Esther shared one serious flaw. Her mother was not sure that her daughter ought to be seeing a Swede. Nor would Harry’s friends overlook the dangers of his dating a Norwegian. It was not as controversial as an inter-racial marriage in America in the 1950s, but mildly scandalous, nevertheless. Harry ignored the cautions and went with his heart.

When the Thorpes returned to America, Harry accompanied them to finish his college education at Broadview College, the denominational center for Scandinavian Adventists in America, and near the Thorpes. While Harry was excited about going to America, he had planned to return to Norway after he finished school to help supervise the Adventist publishing work. But an administrative change intervened, and he ended up staying in America.

When I visited Stockholm in 1990, our guide at the Nobel Prize center in the Town Hall told us that during the 1920s, about a third of the Swedish population was in process of immigrating to America. There were Swedish Adventist enclaves in Illinois and Minnesota and Harry was the first in his immediate family to cross the Atlantic. A couple decades later two of his sisters would settle in St. Paul, Minnesota. Harry would find it impossible to return to Sweden until 1973 on vacation and several years after he had retired. He would never see his parents or some of his siblings again.

Now living in the Chicago area, Harry asked Esther to marry him. She accepted his proposal and they were married on November 14, 1926, in Brookfield. Harry’s surname was inadvertently changed from Zackrisson to Zackrison, a spelling error made by immigration officers when he became a U. S. citizen.

Without a job and without any certainty about denominational employment, Harry, always an industrious person and comfortable with change, enrolled at Mergenthaler Institute (inventors and manufacturers of the Linotype type-setting machine) in Chicago and became a journeyman linotype operator. For the next eighteen years, he worked for the Forslund Printing Company in Chicago. He had abandoned two careers to become a printer of Adventist literature but to his dismay, he ended up working outside the denomination.

My brother, James Willard, was born in May 1932. I followed in October 1941.

From Illinois to California

In 1944, Grandpa Thorpe retired from his editorial work in Brookfield. His second son, Dr. Louis P. Thorpe, a psychologist in private practice in Glendale and Professor of Psychology at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, encouraged Grandpa and Grandma to spend their retirement in Southern California, where the weather was delightful. Coincidentally, an invitation came from Glendale Academy, fifteen miles north of Los Angeles, for Dad to join the Academy Press to teach printing and serve as foreman in the composing room.

The pain of disappointment from his denominational work experience in Scandinavia had softened and Dad, whose confidence in the Adventist faith was strong, decided to take the offer. We all moved to Glendale. Jim, nine and half years my senior, was enrolled at Glendale Academy. Now both of us could get an Adventist education and be fitted for some slot in the Adventist enterprise if we chose.

A year later, Dad received an invitation from La Sierra College (now La Sierra University) in Arlington (now Riverside), sixty miles east of Glendale, to join the College Press. This seemed even better for now we could be educated in Adventist schools all the way through college, if time should last.

For the next several months, Dad slept on an army cot in the College Press. During the day, he worked in the composing room as foreman and taught college students the craft of printing. During lunch breaks and in the long summer evenings, he worked on building a two-car garage on the third-acre of land on Knoefler Drive that he had purchased half a mile from the college. On weekends, he drove home to us in Glendale in his black, four-door 1934 Plymouth.

When Dad finished the garage in 1945, he brought us to La Sierra to inspect what now would be our temporary home. He had built the structure all alone. He had mixed and poured the concrete floor, framed and stuccoed the walls and roofed the building.

Dad drove us up Knoefler Drive, little more than a cow path, to the spectacular and exciting unveiling of our new temporary home. This garage would be our home until a new house could be built just a few feet away on the front of the property. For the time being this arrangement would suffice. This was adventure for me. The war had left many in America poor. But we were together, and we were living life in the rugged west, committed to the Adventist message.

In the shadow of Sunshine Mountain to the south, Rattlesnake Hill directly behind us to the west and Two-Bit Mountain on the north, Dad had carved out a shelter for us. There were just a few square feet for each of us, but we cherished our real estate. And Dad would often remind us, It may not be fancy but it is all paid for!

So, we moved from Glendale to La Sierra: Grandpa, Grandma, Mom, Dad, Jim and me. We were in the country. We could have animals: dogs, cats, birds, goats, chickens, and ducks. And we eventually had all of those. For a four-year-old boy this was high adventure. I collected the eggs.

Grandma and Grandpa Thorpe had a little room added to the back of the garage. Jim and I were in one corner of the garage. Mom and Dad in another and a third corner served as the kitchen and dining area. I don’t remember where the bathroom was but after a few months Dad bought a tin shower from Sears and attached it to the side of the garage. Until then I took my baths in a galvanized tub brought in and placed next to the kitchen stove.

The arrangement was tight and cozy. Mom did her best to keep us comfortable as we gathered around the wood-burning stove at night in the middle of the room and listened to the radio, our entertainment. I never reflected on the fact that we lived like poor people. When you are happy, you don’t worry about such things.

Over the years, our garage would evolve into a storehouse, a workshop, and a temporary apartment. Once it even stood empty for the summer while we all lived in an army surplus supply tent out back. I never understood why—I just remember it was fun. In the eighteen years we lived in La Sierra, Dad never completed the garage door with hinges or springs and he never parked a car in it.

1

. Neufeld, SDA Encyclopedia,

586

.

2

. Christian, Sons of the North,

164

.

3

. James White, the founder of the Adventist Church had had a big nail thrown at him. Spalding, Origin and History of Seventh-day Adventists,

1

:

49–50

.

4

. Neufeld, SDA Encyclopedia,

1354

.

CHAPTER TWO

Life in an Adventist Home

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

—Phillips Brooks

Cities of refuge

Jim was enrolled in La Sierra College Preparatory (High) School and two years later I was enrolled in La Sierra College Demonstration (Elementary) School. We were in the protective custody of the Adventist Church, as safe as one could be from the evils of a cruel, wayward world. Dad figured we were largely protected now from the onslaughts of public education that could introduce us to false teachings and bad influences. While I never heard him say it, I came to believe that he thought we could now be destined to choose Adventist approved careers and marry Adventist girls, if time should last.

A Christian education might have dangers of its own, but at least we were in an environment where everyone at school—administrators, teachers, and students—was a Church member. Classmates were the same people we worked and went to Church with. The simplicity of the situation represented Adventist thinking: The Old Testament cities of refuge mindset.⁵ I was out of childhood before I learned that most Christians went to church on Sunday instead of Saturday. By then I knew that was wrong.

Our home was a library. When we moved into our new house most rooms had bookcases filled with all kinds of books. Dad regularly remodeled his study to accommodate his growing collection. Everywhere he went he carried a book and he taught me that books were my friends. His treatment of books bordered on reverence. He would have been excited at having a Kindle with 250 books in it. My brother and I each inherited this respect for books. I do not find it easy to part with a book even in its obsolescence. An out-of-print book can enter my realm of the classics.

My home today is full of books. I recently called a bookseller and when he took several boxes of these friends that he thought would turnover quickly in his little bookstore I suffered withdrawal pains. My oldest books are enshrined in bookcases with glass doors.

As a journeyman printer and craftsman, Dad had perfectionistic skills. He could tell by simply looking if a line was one point off in its spacing. The professional members of the printing trade richly valued his work. As a linotype operator he could work nights at the local newspaper, for five times the hourly wages he was making at Academy Press.

When we moved to La Sierra, Dad made such meager wages at the College Press that he found it necessary to work nights in Riverside at various print shops. I remember him being in such demand that he would be gone sometimes every night of the week (except Friday) earning the necessary funds to support us. Jim’s work on the college grounds crew also helped with our tuition. One print shop owner even offered to give Dad his shop when he retired. Dad turned it down because he believed he was involved in hastening the Lord’s coming by working for the Church.

Mom also went to work at the College Press as a proofreader and bindery worker. Not being the head of the household, she was paid about half of what Dad was making. This was denominational policy. This was a woman’s sacrifice for the work of God and her recognized place in God’s order. This would eventually be challenged in a lawsuit, which the denomination lost.⁶ But that was a long way off from where we were in the 1940s.

With both my parents working I became Grandma’s boy until I went to school. For the first ten years of my life I spent as much or more time with Grandma as with Dad and Mom. I awoke each morning to Grandma singing at the foot of my bed, O, lazy Eddie won’t you get up, won’t you get up, won’t you get up? She would greet me with a smile, something you would be hard put to find in photographs of her. Her generation apparently rarely smiled in pictures. But when they sang to their little grandsons they had cordial smiles.

Each day Grandma walked with me to the bottom of Knoefler Drive to meet Mom and Dad as they drove home for lunch. She told me stories as we walked along. On one of these little walks, when we got to the bottom of the street, she taught me how to tie my shoes.

In this immediate post-wartime, housing was hard to find, especially on my parent’s income. But I never heard discussions about our being needy. My parents worked for God and God would always provide because the cattle on a thousand hills belonged to him. (Ps 50:10). His eye was on the sparrow and weren’t we of more worth than sparrows? (Matt 10:31). The lilies of the valley neither toil nor spin. (Matt 6:28). We believed these word pictures. They were etched in my mind as a child. Ours was a religious home.

Dad paid cash for everything from his used cars to his building supplies. He shunned debt like the plague. Since credit cards were not a part of his culture shunning debt may have been easier than it is today, but I am not aware that he ever took a loan for anything. He would often say, My little shack may not be fancy, but it is mine—I don’t owe anything on it. And there was a sense of pride and accomplishment on his face when he said that.

The black cloud

Our home and our school worked together to create, mold, and give pattern to my life as a religious person. These institutions combined to compose me a religious man. What I learned at home was idealized at Church and supported at school. So, if I took it all seriously I was destined to become religious, inheriting from my environment an Adventist mentality that was typically characterized by four major elements: messianism, apocalypticism, perfectionism, and legalism.

Glaringly absent from this list of religious outlooks was grace. I learned little of grace as a child in the Adventist Church. While I heard the term used occasionally, definitions were so qualified by the emphasis on the laws of God (primarily the Ten Commandments) that I failed to grasp what was involved in God’s grace as how he treated the undeserving. Grace was something I was to earn—the very opposite of the biblical meaning. Since we were treated that way and we treated others that way it stood to reason that God also was conditional in his bestowal of love—if I was faithful I might eventually receive the rewards of salvation.

Here was an insidious collection of Christian traditions—both Catholic and Protestant. In theological terms these would be called semi-Pelagian, Arminian, Judaism, and Puritanism. However, for a five-year-old theology as an abstract discipline was not something I could understand. Mine was a folk religion—inherited from my environment.

Our Adventist prophet, Sister Ellen Gould Harmon White (1827–1915), who we were taught shared the same gift of inspiration as the biblical writers, wrote words that were burned into my mind as parents, teachers, family members, ministers, and friends read them to us.

Soon our eyes were drawn to the east, for a small black cloud had appeared, about half as large as a man’s hand, which we all knew was the sign of the Son of man. We all in solemn silence gazed on the cloud as it drew nearer and became lighter, glorious, and still more glorious, till it was a great white cloud. The bottom appeared like fire; a rainbow was over the cloud, while around it were ten thousand angels, singing a most lovely song; and upon it sat the Son of man. His hair was white and curly and lay on His shoulders; and upon His head were many crowns.⁷

Perhaps no other idea affected me more than this one paragraph from the hand of our infallible prophet. The thoughts in these few words formed my first notions of religion. I wanted to be in that number who would see Jesus’ return and be caught up to heaven where we would fly like the angels and have pet lions and tigers that would lie down with lambs. It was a five-year-old’s concrete vision of glory and eternal bliss. It was utopian.

More than anything else in the world I wanted to be ready when Jesus came back. I learned where the eastern sky began—looking directly out the kitchen window in our garage, right between San Gorgonio and San Jacinto peaks—that’s where I believed the Black Cloud would appear. As a super-conscientious five-year-old I did not really understand what being ready meant, but I figured it had something to do with Church and going to Church usually involved wearing a suit. I kept my suit close to me and slipping into it when I saw the Black Cloud could mean I was ready. I was serious. The event could happen any day and any thought of finishing elementary school, high school, college or getting married, etc., was a waste of anticipation and emotional energy. None of this was going to happen.

The Adventist culture

Seventh-day Adventism was born in the revivalist fervor of what is known in American Church history as the Second Great Awakening in New England during the early nineteenth century.

The Methodist circuit riders and local Baptist preachers made enormous gains; to a lesser extent the Presbyterians gained members, particularly with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in sparsely settled areas. As a result, the numerical strength of the Baptists and Methodists rose relative to that of the denominations dominant in the colonial period—the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists. Among the new denominations that grew from the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening are the Churches of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the Evangelical Christian Church in Canada. The converts during the Second Great Awakening were predominantly female. A

1932

source estimated at least three female converts to every two male converts between

1798

and

1826

. Young people (those under

25

) also converted in greater numbers, and were the first to convert.⁸

In the 1830s Elder William Miller (1782–1849), a Baptist lay preacher, had calculated, based on accepted principles of Protestant prophetic hermeneutics (interpretation theory) at the time, that Christ would return to earth in the fall of 1843. When the event did not occur, he discovered a flaw in his time schedule and readjusted the date to 1844. His linear time charts were based on his interpretation of the predictions of the Old Testament prophet Daniel to which he applied the day-year principle of interpreting prophecy, a common practice in his day. Basically, this method dictated that whenever prophecies involving time are given in the context of prediction, a day symbolized a year.

No one ever explained to us kids that these charts were based on a lot of controversial assumptions that prophetic interpreters of Miller’s day had battled over for years. There was no consensus among biblical scholars as to how to understand time prophecies in any absolute sense. We were not told anything about that. This was dogmatically presented to us as settled.

These interpreters commonly played with the prophecies of Daniel looking for events that verified their viewpoints. To us the Adventist view was depicted as the undeniable truth. These teachings of our Adventist elders were confirmed by our Adventist prophet, Ellen White and were considered absolute—final and unchangeable. She was known affectionately to her followers as Sister White, and she was the last word on our understanding of prophecy, for God spoke to and through her. If the elders came up with a doctrine and she verified it by vision, that absolutized the Truth for us.

Often an Adventist might say, I know ‘The Truth’ even though I’m not practicing it right now. The Truth was not to be questioned, though its livability and applicability might fall short. This was rooted in the idea that Adventists were right (biblical), which suggested (meant) that anyone who differed from this view was wrong (unbiblical). Its adherents called Adventism The Truth.

Coming into The Truth meant becoming an Adventist. And it was always The Truth, not Truth, or a Truth. Adventists didn’t have truth—they had The Truth. There was no other real religious Truth. If you found Adventism you found the genuine article. So deep was this notion that, as we were told, those who left Adventism usually became infidels, or atheists, and lost all interest in religion. Having once known The Truth [Adventism] they had nowhere else to go, our elders often reminded us. This was very powerful enculturation.

When Christ failed to return as predicted by Elder Miller, his followers scattered. Out of this Great Disappointment, as we learned to call it, came new sects, one of which was the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, and it would become known among other Christians as a movement (or cult) born in the error of prophetic dogmatism.

Aside from probably Adventists and historians of American Church studies, few members of other churches knew, or cared, about the origins of Adventism. But the growing movement quickly developed a reputation for sheep-stealing (proselytizing), though we called it evangelism. Most new converts were from other Christian denominations seeking additional Truth to what they already had. Adventist evangelists would anonymously move into towns with their tents and wagons and quickly establish themselves as members of the last true Church, or remnant Church, proclaiming the three angels’ messages as prophesied in Revelation 14.

At an expedient point in a series of meetings, or in a private conversation with those who had expressed an interest in accepting The Truth, the evangelists would eventually inform their interests that they were Adventists. This was exactly the method used in evangelizing all my grandparents.

The strategy was to hook people on the message before the prejudice against Adventism could create a barrier. Such marketing technique was not unique to Adventists. It is commonly used today especially with organizations that have an image problem. When was the last time you opened an email that offered you a free sweepstakes to realize that the prize you thought you would get was conditional on purchasing or committing yourself to something else?

After the Great Disappointment of 1844 several leaders of the movement spent serious time studying, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Unable to rectify these things Elder Miller finally repudiated the whole movement as an error and it occurred to many others in the original movement that date setting was a mistake. But some persistent Adventists were convinced that their calculations of time were correct, based on the day-year principle. As a result, they shifted their focus to the event rather than the time of the event. So, they remained firm in their belief that the date of October 22, 1844, was not a mistake.

After some study time together (in Adventist history called the Sabbath Conferences of 1848) this little group concluded that the event was not the second coming of Christ but rather something that had occurred in heaven.

While Miller had predicted the second coming for October 22, 1843, and later 1844, he had interpreted then shall the sanctuary be cleansed (KJV) of Daniel 8:14 to mean then shall the earth be cleansed. This was not a crystal-clear biblical teaching—it was built on several quantum leaps and assumptions. And most everything depended on the validity of the contemporaneous understanding of the day-year principle.

Elder Miller assumed that the long-standing view of other interpreters (that the Sanctuary referred to the earth) was correct. This had supplied him with the secret of the time of the second Advent (the Parousia). But here was not the only assumption he inherited from the winds of New England interpretation. The whole concept of time prophecy had been a Protestant interest dating back to Martin Luther (1483–1546) and before. The principle had served the Protestants well in their attack on the claimed authority of the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation.⁹

The fact that Jesus had warned against trying to know the time of his return was surprisingly overlooked, reinterpreted, or met with outright avoidance. Jesus had taught:

³⁶ But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. (Matt

24

:

36

)

Miller’s insistence that the end had come short-circuited such teaching and his interpretation eliminated that passage from serious attention. How did this happen? Elder Miller and the early Adventists reasoned that the book of Daniel was a closed prophecy in Jesus’ day. It was saved for opening until the time of the end. And the understanding the time prophecies, as interpreted by those in the Millerite movement, began in 1798. Hence Jesus could not have known the time—but we can know it because the book of Daniel is now a prophecy opened to our understanding. And that included knowing the time of the Parousia.

The English KJV showed that Daniel’s prophecy read, 14 And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. (Dan 8:14, KJV). Elder Miller thought that if he could just figure out when the 2300 days (which he interpreted as years) of Daniel 8:14 ended, he could know the date for the cleansing (KJV) of the earth at the second coming of Christ. To a biblical scholar Miller’s view was a stretch, but his following became a populist movement and before long thousands of people were whipping up their fervor with him. William Miller’s preaching needed the King James Version for its interpretation.

By December of 1844, it was apparent that something was wrong. That the date may simply be based on traditional Protestant principles of interpretation was not part of the concerns of those early Adventists. And so, they pursued a new interpretation of the event while leaving the time factor alone. This new notion would later be hailed (by Adventist writers) as the unique contribution of Adventism to Christian theology.¹⁰ Other Christians generally saw it as a cover-up and a stubborn refusal to admit that they had been mistaken. Adventists were accused of inventing a face-saving device, a fantastic notion.¹¹

Evangelical scholar Walter Martin (1928–1989) would write in his attempt to understand objectively the beginnings of Adventism.

So far as this writer is concerned, [this Adventist view was] an attempt to escape the terrible calamity which befell the Millerite movement, and the disappointment and embarrassment that must have followed the failure of the Millerite prophecies and their interpretations of the Book of Daniel.¹²

The theological interpretation given to the year 1844 and the inability of Adventists to give up the date, due to the prophet’s endorsement, became the occasion for the development of a new doctrine that, in the minds of many students of Adventism, would eventually rival the significance of the cross of Christ and engender serious heterodox ideas about the end of time as well as the significance of the Church itself. However, all theological aberration aside, it was this focus on the time of the end and the imminence of Christ’s coming that added an exciting passion to my developing faith. Statements from the prophet’s book, Early Writings, were read to us children at home, at school and in Sabbath School. These statements ironically brought fear to my heart. And the desire to live forever was kindled in my heart to the point that heaven-lost was everything-lost! Amid these experiential roots I was set to become a religious man.

A religion rooted in time

The zeal of Adventism was alive and well in my home. One never talked about the future without adding the words, If time should last . . . if time should last and you graduate from grade school, . . . or if time should last and you get married . . . Everything in my religion was connected to time. The movement had been born in time—the movement was fueled by the idea of time. One endured everything in life because Christ could return any day and things would change. The Black Cloud could appear at any time. The Church needs your tithe and offerings now. Set up your wills and legacies with the Church remembered.

Of course, there was a series of events that needed to occur before the Black Cloud could appear—the seven last plagues, the administering of the mark of the beast to all who kept Sunday, the sealing of God’s people who kept the Sabbath, the universal Sunday law. But the final events would move quickly in time as our prophet had written.

The agencies of evil are combining their forces and consolidating. They are strengthening for the last great crisis. Great changes are soon to take place in our world, and the final movements will be rapid ones.¹³

I cannot fully explain what this apocalyptic agenda did to my psyche and worldview as a little boy. It seriously affected all my planning for life and my general outlook on the world. It created places in my mind where I looked for the Black Cloud in time. It created a paradox in my life that I had to learn to live with—I took it all seriously.

I didn’t realize that paradoxes are often the same as double binds—impossible possibilities. If time should last and I should enter a life’s profession I would be very limited in what I could choose to do. Nothing that entailed violence or the breaking of the Sabbath or that enhanced or fed one’s ego (like show business, professional sports, law enforcement, or even firefighting) was legitimate. In the Adventist academy we received a short list of careers we might pursue.

Adventism elevated uncertainty to the level of dogma in my young mind. Along with other questions in the faith (like ‘am I ready for Jesus to come?’ And ‘does God love me in my sin?’) I experienced a certain placidness and escapism. I became super-conscientious—with a total psyche committed and involved—never achieving but always trying. I had to learn how to prepare while expecting. I was not given checkpoints for my situation.

I accepted everything taught to me at face value and learned to tolerate the indefiniteness of each day of life. And I finally channeled all my legitimate planning into working for the Church as my parents had done. Nothing else made sense. In fact, there was an overarching notion that anything else seemed like a denial of faith.

Grandpa and Grandma Thorpe were our connection to the Victorian age. If we turned on the radio Grandma would leave the room because a preacher at camp meeting had declared that the radio was the voice of Satan. Grandma wanted nothing to do with the devil. For Victorians everything had its place and was meaningful as it stayed in that place.

My cousin, who I met decades after his Dad had left the Church, remarked that all he remembered about Grandma’s house was that from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown you sat on a stool, and no one could drink Coca Cola!

Camp meeting

The Truth was emphasized at camp meeting. Classes were offered, and Truth-filled literature was available to help all become more fully entrenched (grounded) in The Truth.

Our camp meeting was held ten days each year on the campus of La Sierra College. Since we lived only half a mile from the school all these benefits were readily available to us. Each summer the lawns of La Sierra College would be dotted with Army surplus tents where families from around Southeastern California moved in to eat Loma Linda vege-burgers (and buy cases of vegetarian foods), purchase Adventist literature and listen to sermons delivered by guest ministers, Church administrators, and missionaries from around the world. The meetings went from 6:00 am to 10:00 pm daily.

The sociological value of these camp meetings was significant in strengthening the forces that kept the hope of Christ’s soon coming alive. These convocations created and maintained a culture that was familial and nurturing. I never missed a children’s meeting during those ten days each year—Grandma and Grandpa helped see to that. These were religious feasts for all—young and old alike. And I was heart-broken when the camp meetings were discontinued at La Sierra for a variety of reasons, not the least of which, I was told, that the tents virtually destroyed the college lawns every summer.

The death of my pioneer

In 1947, when I was five years old, Grandpa Thorpe died. I remember him as a tall, straight man who loved to walk and occasionally laughed. Of course, he wasn’t tall but when you are five years old everyone is tall. He was respected as a scholar, writer, editor, teacher and minister. I seldom saw him out of his black suit and tie. But to me he was Grandpa who took me on walks and paid attention to me. To this day I treasure the two artifacts that I eventually inherited from him: his reading (magnifying) glass and his letter opener with the Norwegian flag sculpted into its thin steel handle.

His library disappeared during my childhood. Ministerial students from the college got wind of his book collection and visited Grandma regularly to obtain his books one by one. She was generous with the young men who were planning a life in the ministry. By the time my brother and I had become theology students all his books were gone.

In Glendale, Grandpa and I had walked along Chevy Chase Drive and watched a triplex being built. Several times a week we walked around the corner from McHenry Road to California Street and on to Chevy Chase Drive. The structure still stands today, more than seventy years later. Yet in the deep recesses of my memory I can still see it being built.

When we moved to La Sierra, Grandpa and I would walk to the college and watch the big Adventist Church being constructed. It would seat more than 2000 people—an enormous structure to me, with three balconies and two transepts. On the way to the Church we would stop at various places to rest, for Grandpa was in his late seventies. Those places became shrines for me—stops where we ate lemon drops from his bottomless, cavernous suit pocket. I still like lemon drops. I was his little boy and when he died I cried. I did not understand. I thought he was going to live to see the Black Cloud coming in the east.

I happened to be with Grandpa when he took his last breath. No one planned it that way; I just happened to walk into the room. It was my first and only experience of watching someone die. For a five-year-old such an experience was unforgettable. When the hearse came and took his remains to Redlands for the funeral, tears filled my eyes. Grandpa was gone—my special friend would walk and talk with me no more. No more Grandpa to hold my hand and talk to me as we walked. I would miss him immensely. Something about life was not right. His death was to move me to many ponderous moments.

Much later I would learn that Grandpa Thorpe was a real Adventist pioneer, serving the Church as an editor longer than his own mentor Uriah Smith, the well-known Adventist founder. But at five years of age my devastation stemmed simply from my personal loss. And then I became convinced that the wait would be short for I would see him again soon, probably in just a few days. He was sleeping in the ground and when the Black Cloud appeared he would be called back to life, raised out of the ground to meet Jesus in the air. Then we would walk and talk again, this time around heaven together and forever, probably sucking on lemon drops!

I had some sweet thoughts at Grandpa Thorpe’s funeral. As we rode through the long, wide, straight streets of Redlands to his burial plot in Memorial Park, all the family was there—Mom and Dad, Jim, Grandma, the cousins from Sunland, the aunts and my uncle from Glendale. There was something nice about being together as a family. In future years I would attend most of their funerals as well. As a pastor I would even officiate at funerals at that same cemetery in Redlands. And each time I would visit my grandparents’ graves.

Devotion

My views of Adventism were tempered by the devotion of my family. They were Christians. I came to see that they were Christians in faith and Adventists in practice, or, as one of my colleagues would say, in sociology. Adventism was their affiliation. Christianity was their religion. And while I would go through a period in my development where I didn’t recognize this dichotomy, somehow that distinction helped me as well as others I knew who occasionally struggled with the inconsistencies apparent in any organized religion.

Mom and Dad were people who prayed, studied their Bible and practiced their faith. Dad taught Sabbath School, gave mission talks, played piano and organ for Church, was deeply engaged in the publishing work and never wavered in his faith. Mom took care of all of us. She made sure we had regular worship at home. She read stories at bedtime, played piano in Sabbath School and Church and practiced with Jim and me with our clarinets. She also had the full responsibility of her parents living with us.

Some people told me, Your parents were the nicest people we ever met. This blessing encouraged me to be a religious person. In this sheltered life I was nurtured. While the Adventist faith gave me little assurance of personal salvation, it at least told me that salvation was obtainable. Never knowing for sure that God loved me or would save me, at least I had this possibility held ever before me. It gave me something to work toward. Unfortunately for me fear was a stronger motivator than assurance or love.

When I would finally discover the assurance of the gospel I would become zealous in trying to emphasize to Adventist young people the importance of realizing that God loves you no matter what you do—for out of that realization grows one’s desire and motivation to respond to him. Only in knowing God loves us can we have incentive to respond. The Church I grew up in always made it clear that it was my shortcomings, not the Church’s, that were delaying the Parousia. Furthermore, ever to suggest that I was saved (in either past or present tense) would engender a kind of personal arrogance that only apostate Christians expressed.

Our prophet had forcefully instructed us.

Those who accept the Saviour, however sincere their conversion, should never be taught to say or to feel that they are saved. This is misleading. . . . Only he who endures the trial will receive the crown of life. . . . Those who accept Christ, and in their first confidence say, I am saved, are in danger of trusting to themselves.¹⁴

Any Church has an obligation to tell the Truth, but when it is confused on such basic matters as what constitutes the gospel the result is often exploitation. I learned the gospel was all about me and that was not true. So, I was a willing and vulnerable target. I was being formed into the image of all the religious people around me who talked about the meaninglessness of this world in contrast to the significance of the next. But we all seemed devoid of assurance. Christianity was not so much a celebration as it was a quest.

Most of what I remember from our days in Brookfield was recorded in my father’s 8mm home movies. There he recorded stuff that would become part of my cranial archives—automobiles I never saw, houses I have since visited, people arriving to reminisce—were all on the films. My first bath, my first attempt at solid food—Dad seemed to have missed nothing. Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa Thorpe, uncles and aunts, cousins and friends of the family, some I never knew dropping by, a brand-new car—other than in these films I remember only old, used cars. Dad recorded much of my history on silent 8mm film.

The war took its toll on the American economy and Dad had to change his approach to buying cars. When