So what should we do about diversity of belief among Seventh-day Adventists? "Part One" asked this question in relation to our beliefs about how God created the earth. Imagine worshipping together with some of the most important founders of the Church—men like James White, Joseph Bates and Uriah Smith—who did not believe in the Trinity the way you do.

Adventist Church historians note that these leaders believed that Trinitarian ideas were unscriptural and brought into Christianity through paganism and Roman Catholic theology (Light Bearers to the Remnant, p. 167). In fact, as we developed formal statements of our beliefs as Seventh-day Adventists, the doctrine of the Trinity was nowhere to be found. The first and second paragraphs of an early statement do focus on God the Father who is represented by the Holy Spirit and Jesus, the Christ who is “the Son of the eternal Father.” But, importantly and purposefully there is no assertion of a belief in a Triune God. Today, points two through five of our statement of “Fundamental Beliefs” all focus on the Trinity. Point two begins this way: “There is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a unity of three co-eternal Persons.”

The point is, our beliefs did not drop out of heaven in a neatly packaged statement toward which all Adventists held immediate and unwavering conviction. There has always been a good deal of diversity among us regarding what we believe and how open we are toward God’s leading in the future.

Recall that our Church founders struggled through an intensely difficult time of rejection because of their beliefs in the second coming of Jesus. Most of them were rejected by their churches because of their belief in William Miller’s preaching about Jesus’ coming. Later, when they organized formally, they did not want their unity to result in the type of harsh exclusionism that they themselves had suffered.

The difficulty the Church faced in the development of our belief in the doctrine of the Trinity is a good illustration for today. In the former trouble, no one questioned whether Jesus was our Savior and Lord; the difficulty lay in how we understood His relationship with God, the Father. So in our current difficulty, no one is questioning whether God is the Creator of all the universe; what some are struggling to understand is just how He went about it.

Writing about unity and tolerance in the Church, Ellen White said: “We cannot then take a position that the unity of the Church consists in viewing every text of Scripture in the very same light. The Church may pass resolution upon resolution to put down all disagreement of opinions, but we cannot force the mind and will, and thus root out disagreement. These resolutions may conceal the discord, but they cannot quench it and establish perfect agreement. Nothing can perfect unity in the Church but the spirit of Christlike forbearance” (11MR 266.1).

It is “the spirit of Christlike forbearance” to which I call us in our present turbulence over Adventist beliefs about creation. In "Part One," I quoted Clifford Goldstein’s thoughts on how much room for diversity we ought to have as a Church. In the "Part Three," I’ll highlight what Jan Paulsen, our General Conference president, has to say about unity and tolerance in the Church.