The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

IV. Bates—With Conditionalist Background Supports Position

Captain JOSEPH BATES (1792-1872), former ship captain, temperance advocate, abolitionist, and intrepid traveling preacher, was another Seventh-day Adventist pioneer and leader of pioneers. Earlier he was a member and then a minister of the Christian Connection. He wrote the first tract (1846) issued by Seventh-day Adventists, and was the oldest of the group of founding fathers of the Sabbatarian Adventists, often affectionately being called “Father Bates.” He too was a builder of solid foundations. And coming from the Christian Connection, he was likewise a believer in Conditional Immortality and its corollary positions. The outcome was not hard to foresee. CFF2 675.1

1. CLEAR CONCEPTS IN EARLIEST ADVENTIST TRACTS

In Bates’s tract The Opening Heavens (1846)—one of the earliest tracts issued by the Sabbatarian Adventists-he decries the blight of Swedenborgianism and Spiritualism that was “settling down all over the moral world,” ¹² and the spiritualizing tendency that would destroy the literality of the resurrection and the new heavens and new earth prophesied in the Book of God ¹³ as the eternal home of the saved. And he speaks of God’s people in the New Jerusalem as “immortal saints.” ¹⁴ CFF2 675.2

And in his Second Advent Way Marks (1847) Bates stressed the two resurrections, the first limited to “the dead in Christ,” occurring at the Second Advent, along with the translation of the living saints, at the last trump.” ¹⁵ Then he speaks of “another resurrection, at the expiration of a thousand years,” ¹⁶ and of events that will come “after immortality.” ¹⁷ CFF2 675.3

These expressions are only inklings, but undeniable ones, of his considered belief that the gift of immortality is not bestowed until the Second Advent and its attendant resurrection. CFF2 676.1

It will thus be seen that the two dynamic leaders of the Sabbatarian Adventists-James White and Joseph Bates-as well as Ellen Harmon White, were already committed to Conditionalism before the formal organization of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It was therefore inevitable that Conditionalism should be one of the fundamental doctrines of the newly formed church. CFF2 676.2

2. CONDITIONALIST UNDERSTANDING SAFEGUARDS AGAINST SPIRITUALISM

Through holding to the Conditionalist immortality only in Christ positions-the unconscious sleep of the dead, the conferring of immortality only at the resurrection, and the ultimate and utter destruction of the wicked-the Adventists were prepared against the delusions of Spiritism, as it sprang up in 1848, holding that the phenomena were not the spirits of the departed dead but were simulating evil, or demonic, spirits. CFF2 676.3

The nineteenth-century upsurge of Spiritualism first appeared in the form of a mysterious signal code of spirit rappings in the home of the Fox family near Rochester, New York, and soon became a “spectral cult,” ¹⁸ the modern form of the ancient necromancy forbidden in the Pentateuch. Beginning in crude form, with rappings, levitations, and slate tracings, it changed to subtle forms, assuming a religious garb, and soon penetrated the Protestant churches. Finally, it developed into spiritualistic organizations, eventuating in Spiritualist “churches.” But from the very outset both groups of Adventists were fortified by Scripture against susceptibility to Spiritism’s baleful teachings, and they never ceased to expose its demonic source. CFF2 676.4