Sat 31 July 2010 6:26am PST

An Interview with the Author of Cleanse and Close

LastGenerationTheology.org associate David Qualls interviews Pastor Larry Kirkpatrick, author of a new book that could impact the shape of Adventism.

Published on LastGenerationTheology.org on 2005-12-28

DQ: Welcome to this interview. We are glad that you can spend a few moments to tell us about the new projects that have taken shape. Let’s jump right in. I hear more and more people talking about “LGT.” What is “LGT”?

LK: David, it is good to be able to share. You ask about LGT. Down through the pages of history, many movements have been named by their detractors. The Methodists did not originally call themselves “Methodists,” but their opposers scorned them and derided them for their methodical approach to Christian living. That is where the name Methodist came from. So they were named by their enemies. In the Adventist world, again primarily those disagreeing with the views we are discussing gave it a distinct name. Those who have opposed it have called it, (and when you read the context, you see that it is often with some disdain) “Last Generation Theology.” So we looked at that and here is what we faced. This is a commonly used designation for it. You just can’t get around that. And there really is, from our own perspective, a positive sense to it. So we decided to embrace it. “LGT” is just the shorthand for “Last Generation Theology,” three syllables rather than nine. It is very handy, like USA or SDA.

DQ: Why the title, Cleanse and Close?

LK: The full title is Cleanse and Close: Last Generation Theology in 14 Points. “Cleanse” for the cleansing of the sanctuary (Daniel 8:13, 14), and “Close” for the close of probation (Revelation 22:11, 12). These two doctrines are essential elements of the system of belief found in Scripture. Without them, we are far more prone to develop misconceptions concerning the meaning of righteousness by faith, and wrong expectations concerning the Christian walk. These are neglected areas, but that doesn’t mean they should be neglected. The book itself is not only about these two doctrines, but they are there.

DQ: When did you begin work on the book, and what motivated you to write it?

LK: At the beginning of April 2005 there was nothing. We started with a blank page. Nor did the website exist. We started at zero. Near the end of April the project began in earnest. So in just seven months we went from nothing, to a developed consensus statement, then through countless drafts of the main text, to the finished product in time to launch today at GYC Chattanooga. Let me tell you, it was a race all the way through. My laser printer finally died. But we have the book!

Why write this book? There are so many reasons. One is that some of us grew tired of seeing the same cheap raids made on what we believe time and time again. You get certain well-known authors who write books out of Andrews or articles that show up here and there. Their approach is normally to represent some scarecrow version of LGT, and then, after using their own definition of what this doctrine is, to demonstrate how dangerous it supposedly is. It makes it a lot easier to do when they have no real definitive standard to compare against. So one of the things we saw was that there needed to be a gathering up of the ideas that really stand at the heart and soul of LGT, and of Adventism, and a systematic presentation of them as a group.

Another reason is that for the past few years some of us have felt very strongly that for the benefit of the Youth Conferences movement, some of these ideas should be explored. Instead, for a variety of reasons, that hasn’t really happened. So we saw that as a grassroots movement, the thing to do was to present the case at the grassroots. What was needed was an easy to read primer. It made sense to put them in one place and to shine a light on the ideas that, for many of us involved in various ways in the movement, have so powerfully and preciously impacted our own relationship with Jesus.

Another reason is that the GreatControversy.org ministry is doing a worldwide work, and we are moving into non-English language websites. We have two already (Spanish and Korean). We even have sometimes a person who is learning a foreign language from scratch in order to be able to give the Third Angel’s Message in that language. But we don’t want to spend energy reduplicating what others are doing. So we realized that for our own purposes, we needed to really determine what would be our core theological emphases. So the LGT14 gives us that. Now, when we create a site in Chinese, we can emphasize the LGT14.

DQ: Is this book geared toward Seventh-day Adventists? Who are you trying to reach? There are several non-referenced Ellen White passages in the book.

Now we prepared the book for who do you think? Yes, we did leave out the issue of Ellen White, and never put anything we shared from her writings between quote marks anywhere. Someone who has never been confronted with Ellen White here will be able to consider many of the ideas of Adventism at face value, without getting an easy out (“I don’t have to seriously consider these ideas or see whether they might, in fact, be biblical, because they were written by some random Victorian religious woman”). Let’s weigh the ideas in the light of inspiration and on their own merit. That was where we wanted to go.

Although there are some people like that who will read the book, many of its readers will already be members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church; most will already be of the sort who are not only very aware of Ellen White, but have a high regard for what Heaven did through her, and have installed on their computers the Ellen G. White CDROM. In other words, we knew when we presented the book this way that many would open it up and before proceeding very far, notice her indisputable influence. So we knew that people would see that. No question. So there was no possibility of fooling anyone. But we used this approach anyway because we weren’t trying to fool anyone. In fact, we think that the studious will benefit by lining up all the Ellen White passages that we were so blessed by in our study.

DQ: You keep saying “we.” Who collaborated with you on this book?

LK: There were pastors and ordained ministers, there were college teachers, there was input from teenagers. We had a lot of help from the best minds in LGT. We are very thankful. But keep in mind, too, that this isn’t about who wrote but it is about the ideas that make up core Adventism. Weigh the ideas on their own merit, and keep in mind the system relationships. We range from human nature and the doctrine of sin, through the basic parameters of the gospel, to the humanity of Christ, the atonement, the delay and hastening of the Second Coming which help us understand why we all are still here, to the great controversy war. Yes, the topics are intense, areas that can take you to deep probing of what this is all about.

DQ: Tell us more about why you wrote this book? Why these topics? Why not do a nice book on a spiritual topic and just let the large presses edit your work so that you can get it onto the shelves of the ABCs?

LK: Why these topics? Well, its like Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs when he went to recruit Coca Cola CEO John Sculley: “What… do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water? Or do you want to come to Apple and change the world?” God put us here to give a message that will finish the work, that will change lives, that will do something that has never been done in any corner of this universe at any time. Talk about a high calling! Sure, I could be writing innocuous books about conventional religious topics. I could shut my mouth and line the bookstore shelves with tomes devoted to precious truths. But these topics are the ones that have to be dealt with. The people need present truth. This isn’t for boring people who become worried that the end-times are going to be too intense and secretly hope that God will put them six feet under during those frothing movements through the rapids of earth’s last seconds as history ticks down to zero.

Some ABCs will carry the book. Others won’t. Again, this is not a book written for those who are tethered to the notion that we should just live lives that are semi-superior morally, but walk through life trying not to be perceived as weird and planning to grow old and die. This is a book that will ring the alarm bells, perhaps appearing to threaten our cozy (and I might add, sleepy) status as a “mainstream” church.

DQ: How is this tied to the new LGT website?

LK: If you look around, no one has really taken this emphasis and devoted a web site to it. So we are doing it. Keep in mind that Cleanse and Close is just the sketch, the primer, the introduction. We feel there is a need for more in depth information as well, and over time this will be appearing on the site.

DQ: How does the LGT14 compare/contrast with the 28 Fundamental Beliefs of the church?

LK: We have an article on this we may publish at some point. But I can say here that by no means do we view the LGT14 as a replacement for the 28FB. Rather, it is a reinforcement. The LGT14 and FB28 live together. The LGT14 does not have an explicit doctrine of baptism, or with reference to the gift of prophecy, or several of our other beliefs from the 28. This is by design, because we never intended the LGT14 to be a foundation for a totally different set of doctrines. We just wanted to call attention to areas in Adventist belief that have been neglected.

In a way, the 28FB are like the white picket fence around the house, and the LGT14 are what is living inside that house. I am not defined as much by my brown hair, blue eyes, and Caucasian skin, you know, the surrounding appearance, as I am by what is happening in my brain. That is who I am. You have to go inside to find out who I am. The church’s beliefs are the same way. The different facets are like the slats on a white picket fence. But to see what drives Adventism, you have to go into the house.

You can deal with our faith on a superficial basis or you can consider it in terms of its deeper implications. Because those deeper implications place us out of harmony with other large Christian bodies, many have retreated from even thinking about what is inside the house, what are the deep implications of Adventism. They have focused on presentation; on the white picket fence. So we have acceptance among other Christian bodies. But our ideas are muted.

So, what value such acceptance? If you have to paint your face to be accepted elsewhere, then what happens to your standard of simplicity and accurate self-representation? The onlooking world is due more from us than a pretty face. We need to be what we are, an apocalyptic, end-time movement raised up by God with beliefs that place us out of the mainstream.

The only wise policy that I can see is to be what we are. We must be what God designed us to be. Anything less is liable to lead us into crooked paths where we are more concerned with muting our faith to preserve acceptance outside, than in preserving the breath-taking implications of Seventh-day Adventism at the core.

DQ: How will this book help me to be a better, more loyal Seventh-day Adventist Christian?

LK: I really appreciate this question. Really, this is the most anti-offshoot book I think any Seventh-day Adventist has ever presented to the church. It doesn’t take on the offshoots directly, but it is anti-offshoot by being pro-church and also by urging recognition of the deep things of Adventism. If we really understood our identity, the church would be preserved from a great deal of mischief, both from outside and from the inside.

You have to know who you are. You have to know what your purpose is. Otherwise, when you knock on the door and find yourself standing face to face with someone you are inviting to study the Bible or you are trying to give them some literature, or to invite them to an evangelistic meeting, if you don’t really know why you are there, then you are not going to have a clear basis for urging them to come and join you. We are not here to do Bible studies and to baptize; we are here to facilitate the preparation of souls for translation. Bible study and baptism are helpful in that. But church membership is not the goal itself. It should happen, but they should join this church because it is the best way to prepare for translation, and not for any other reason.

DQ: Is this new light?

LK: I don’t think so. It is treasure God has already given us as a people. But we have not embraced it. It is like one time I was colporteuring, and I was able to make a presentation in a home, and I was trying to get our message books, The Great Controversy in particular, into the hands of this woman. And as I described the book to her she rose up and walked across the room to the bookcase and there it was; she already had it on her shelf! “But I have never read it,” she said. Now she was a non-Adventist. But even she had the truth sitting there right in her home, waiting to be embraced. Back to the fence illustration, some of us know the fence quite well, but may be less sure about the inner identity of the house. We need to know the house we live in better. Again, the book is not a collection of new doctrines; it is simply the organizing of ideas that were all freestanding already.

So new light? No. Neglected light? Yes. We need to embrace the truth we already have. There is nothing heretical about that!

DQ: Some people say we should just focus on Jesus and not on any idea of a “last generation” as playing a significant role in the end-times; that to draw attention to a “last generation” is to tend toward focusing on self rather than Christ. What would you say to those people?

LK: They have created a convenient—and false—dichotomy. The last generation does focus on Jesus. They follow Him wherever He goes (Revelation 14:4). Those who refuse to follow do not finish beside Him giving glory to Him on mount Zion. I wonder to whom how many people Jesus will at last have to say “I never knew you,” who were so obsessed with focusing on not focusing that they actually missed Christ. These truths are here because Jesus wants us to have them. We neglect truth at our own peril. If you look closely at these kinds of charges, they have no basis. It is emotion and supposition. When someone proposes to you a dichotomy, look closely and see what is their basis? Is there really a basis for it, or is it merely an artificial assertion?

DQ: How do you think the church will respond to the book?

LK: On a purely human level, no church that expects to pass itself off as mainstream, as conventional, as normal by 2006 standards, can accept what this book says. If the end of all suffering could have come a century ago, then the sufferings of the past hundred years are unnecessary and further, are placed directly at the doorstep of Christians. But remember, God has not taken the strongest and best but the weakest of the weak, and called them to make His final show-stopping demonstration. Of course we are going to drift and linger and falter and limp to the end. It will look hopeless. It will look as though the church is about to fall and that God’s purposes are about to meet with final and irretrievable defeat.

But things have looked that way before. Just before the flood, just before the Red Sea crossing, just before Christ’s resurrection, and just before the Reformation. But our God is bold. He will act just when the picture appears most disastrous. No church that expects to pass as conventional can embrace the things in this book. But who is to say that the forces of conventionality and compromise and domestication will always prevail? We do not remain church militant but become church triumphant. Not only that, but never forget: this movement was founded on willingness to follow Jesus wherever He went. The pioneers were laughed to scorn, but a subset remained and went on to be used of God to found His Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The people, you see, come and go; they arrive on the scene, percolate, retire, and die. But God keeps His truth alive. As long as the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy writings persist, new generations of believers will be pollinated. From the stones will rise new voices. The dead will be turned to life. True, many will join us at a superficial level and true, many will never graduate from that level because many who lead will never see far beyond that. But at the same time, God will have His perfect work. His arm is not shortened, His Spirit is not weakened. Daniel reminds us that many shall be made white and shine as the stars (Daniel 12:3). Our privilege is to live in this hour. For generations, people have wondered what it would be like to live in this hour. Now we are here. Now we get to see with our own eyes.

Some in the church will reject. Some will accept. It is the nature of things. You and I are part of the church. In part, our own past behavior has contributed to the attitudes in the church. We may as well own that. But our business at this time must be to repent and intelligently and wisely begin by living these truths, and proceed with giving them wise expression. God will intervene for His people.

DQ: What about the Youth Conferences movement? What role will Cleanse and Close play there?

LK: Of course, we hope that the book will be a great help. It is the same juice that started the movement in 2002; it is cut from the same cloth. I think that most of the people involved know instinctively that the movement is not about perfecting Seventh-day Adventist conservatism. It is not about eradicating rock and roll music from our worship services. That is a nice byproduct, a helpful effect; but it is not the essence of this movement. Certain pieces, like GYC, are becoming quite firmly established. So it is getting the top-rung media speakers. So what? Is it a sign of health when top media speaker X addresses the youth? Is he giving this (LGT) message? If he’s not, then he’s probably not really any part of the forward motion. I’m not talking about anyone specifically, but in general terms. This is an hour for present truth, not precious truth only.

GYC is not the parent of many children; it is one sister ministry among many. It has been a privilege to be involved with GYC from its inception until now. And yet, finishing the work means much more than preaching so that hearts are moved. I agree with what the General Conference said in 1974: “The church’s mission depends on correct theology.”

This is about more than just theological talking heads too. Not talking heads, but living sacrifices. Again, as the General Conference said in 1974, the work can be finished in a very short period when we give ourselves without reservation to God in this hour: “When a generation of Seventh-day Adventists is truly serious about becoming exhibits of what God’s grace can do, the moment of final decision by the whole world for or against God will not be long delayed.”

DQ: So is this book really a delayed answer to the appeals of 1973 and 1974?

LK: It is the capsulisation of several ideas in one place, in one structure. It is very closely related to those appeals. When I sat in the meetings at Pine Springs in 2002 I saw that too. The answer is coming at last. That was when I saw where this could go. This movement, unless we absorb the New theology on the way and wind up doing more laps in the wilderness, can take us all the way to the kingdom.

DQ: One more line of questioning if I may. What about the scholarship of the church? The theologians? Why have none of them written a book like this?

LK: Well, all the scholarship and theologians of the church are not ensconced away in the comfortable halls of the ivory towers. Out on the front lines the pastors and laypeople have some scholarship and theology too. The scholars from our schools have had half a century to produce a book like this. We could wait another 50 years too. Or maybe 500. I’m not willing to risk that. This church might last 250 years as a distinct entity on its present course, although that is by no means certain. But it would never last 500. Now is the time to finish the work. The negative trends are too strong. This great movement presently underway, if it doesn’t hold tight to its purpose, will turn into just one more wave that went up and came down. We dare not paddle about waiting for the next wave. God-willing, this can be the big one and we can ride it out.

We have the opportunity, not of a century, but of all the ages. We can be the ones who empowered by Christ see closure at last. The pointy-heads can chatter amongst themselves behind the curtain. Our business is to understand precisely why we linger here and what is the way home. And then to put one foot in front of the other and move with determination in that direction until we arrive or fall on the field of battle and are replaced by others. And God will crush Satan under our feet shortly (Romans 16:20).

DQ: What is your vision for this book? What do you hope to accomplish by authoring this book?

LK: We need to help the church better understand its own identity again. If we don’t know who and what we are, we will misspend energy. If the church does that, she will be delayed in her arrival at closure for the great controversy war. The reason so much theological strangeness persists out there is because we have avoided looking at our roots, and the implications of our faith. Consequently, we wander all over the map, imbibing Purpose Driven this and Natural Church Growth that. But Christ our husband has already given us our identity.

If the book helps us become more faithful to Him, it will have made a difference. We should have been home a century ago. Let’s take an inventory about what our mission is as a people and look again for the off-ramp. It is time to go home. We are Seventh-day Adventists. We await the return of Jesus. If that is what we are really about, then we will look squarely at LGT and give it a fair hearing. Cleanse and Close is meant to jump-start the discussion concerning Seventh-day Adventist identity. Let us see what happens!

DQ: Thank you for sharing your responses.

LK: Thank you. LGT