Abstract
In a review of the historical development of Seventh-day Adventism, an early interest and somewhat superficial involvement in protection of religious liberty can be detected. However, this interest was mostly initiated and acted upon in response to events which directly involved the members of the Adventist community. In other words, there was no apparent interest in religious liberty or other human rights for their own sake nor, for instance, in cases which involved non-Adventists. This was especially the situation with Adventists in America in the second half of the nineteenth century.1
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Notes
Cf. E. S. Gaustad, Rise of Adventism (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Everett Dick, ‘The Cost of Discipleship: Seventh-day Adventists and Tennessee Sunday Laws in the 1890’s’, Adventist Heritage 11:1 (Spring 1986): 26–32.
Jonathan Butler, ‘The Seventh-day Adventist American Dream’, Adventist Heritage 3: 2 (Summer 1976): 9.
Ellen G. White, Ms. 16, 1890. Published in part in Ellen G. White, Evangelism (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1946), p. 179.
Cf. Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism & Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 151–8 and 221–37.
Roy Branson, ‘Covenant, Holy War, and Glory: Motifs in Adventist Identity’, in Spectrum 14: 3 (December 1983): 21
Branson, ‘Covenant, Holy War, and Glory: Motifs in Adventist Identity’, in Spectrum 14: 3 (December 1983): 21–4.
Deut 24: 19–21. Cf. Joe Mesar, ‘Income-Sharing in the Local Church’, Spectrum 16: 2 (1985): 24–8.
Edward W. H. Vick, ‘Against Isolationism: The Church’s Relation to the World’, Spectrum 8: 3 (March 1977): 40.
Adventists have never elaborated or clarified their understanding of pragmatism as a philosophical concept. It only affected them as a way of practical thinking and decision-making which one could also call adaptability or flexibility. For more about the Kantian concept of pragmatisch and American application of pragmatism, see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 49–54
Robert Handy, ‘Pragmatism’, A New Dictionary of Christian Ethics, ed. John Macquarrie and James Childress (London: SCM Press, 1986), pp. 491–4
H. S. Thayer, ‘Pragmatism’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 8 vols, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, and London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1967) 6:430–6.
Some observed that Adventist moral teaching constituted a ‘Fine-tuning’ of traditional Christian morality. The highly specific prohibitions, or as one author labelled them, ‘taboos’, included the consumption of tea, coffee, alcohol beverages, spices, meat (especially pork), the use of tobacco, cosmetics, the wearing of immodest dress and jewellery, card-playing, gambling, theatre-going, etc. See Pearson, Millennial Dreams (1990), pp. 43–4; and Gary Schwartz, Sect Ideologies and Social Status (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 116–36.
Theobald, ‘From Rural Populism to Practical Christianity: The Modernization of the Seventh-day Adventist Movement’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 60:1 (July-September 1985): 114.
Jonathan Butler, ‘The World of E. G. White and the End of the World’, Spectrum 10: 2 (August 1979): 7.
E. Chellis, ‘The Review and Herald and Early Adventist Response to Organized Labor’, Spectrum 10: 2 (August 1979): 25
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© 1998 Zdravko Plantak
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Plantak, Z. (1998). Emergence of Concern for Human Rights in Adventism. In: The Silent Church. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26649-4_3
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