Here’s the real point of John Harvey Kellogg’s story: he built his pantheism theory by following, to their logical conclusion, the anti-trinitarian views held by the Advent pioneers.

The pioneers were not pantheists, but the logical underpinnings for pantheism lay just beneath the surface of their Arian leanings, and Kellogg was smart enough to trace the logic forward. Ironically, and as is often the case in the early developments of a concept, while the pioneers were rightly pushing back on modalism in order to defend the distinct personhood of Christ, they were unwittingly holding to a doctrine of God that ultimately ends up in the same place—namely, with a depersonalized picture of God. The point is a simple and vital one:

Any theology that begins by reducing God to an absolute singularity, void of eternal relational dynamics, logically erases the personhood of God and ends up imagining God to be an impersonal force. If God, ultimately, is a solitary one, then God, ultimately, is a non-relational, impersonal power, or, as Ellen termed it, a “nonentity.”

Kellogg simply reasoned forward from the anti-trinitarian premise that God is a solitary self, to the penultimate conclusion that God is an impersonal force, and then to the ultimate conclusion that God, as an impersonal force, pervades all of nature. If God is a solitary self, from which Christ eventually came into existence, and from which the Holy Spirit emanates as an influence, then Kellogg’s pantheism theory is conceivable. But if God is an interpersonal social dynamic of three personal beings who are one in relational love, then pantheism is inconceivable.

To demonstrate the connections, I will offer an ontological argument for the existence of God as a social unit.

1 To be a personal being requires a state of self-consciousness/awareness.
2 To be self-aware, is to be aware of one’s self as a subject of the awareness of others.
3 Therefore, if God exists as a personal being at all, God necessarily exists as a relational dynamic of more than one personal being.

Or we can reason it through like this:

Personhood is necessarily a state of self-awareness in relation to other persons. Personhood cannot exist, therefore, without interpersonal relationship. That is, personhood requires more than one person in order to be a functional reality.

By contrast, the absolute solitary existence of an absolutely solitary person is, therefore, an incoherent idea. It is a non-concept, and reduces God to what Ellen called “a nonentity.” To exist outside of interpersonal relationship is to not exist at all as a person. On the other hand, if God exists as a personal being, God necessarily exists as personal beings, plural, in a relational dynamic of more than one person.

Therefore, on purely rational, deductive grounds, the Trinity is not merely a theoretical idea, but is logically necessary to the existence of a personal God! If God is not a social dynamic, God is not. And if God is not a social dynamic, the only theory of God that remains is pantheism. Kellogg simply went where anti-trinitarianism logically leads.

If God is a solitary self, God can be conceived of in terms of power, but not in terms of love. And if God is conceived of in terms of impersonal power, Kellogg simply took the logical next step by claiming that God pervades all of nature as the power that animates all life. But if God exists in a social dynamic of three personal beings who are one in essential nature, God can be conceived of in terms of unselfish love. And if God can be conceived of in terms of unselfish love, which is the very function of personhood, pantheism is inconceivable.

Really, only two options exist: either some form of pantheism is true (God is an impersonal force that pervades all nature), or trinitarianism is true (God exists in an interpersonal relational dynamic of three distinct persons who are one in love). What cannot be true is that God ultimately exists as a solitary person. “Solitary person” is an oxymoron. A person, to be a person, either exists in relationship with other persons, or not at all. God, as one personal being, occupying the totality of reality way back before Christ existed, is a logical impossibility. Therefore, an interpersonal trinitarianism is the only picture of God that rules out the de-personalizing theory of pantheism, and anti-trinitarianism is the theological precursor to pantheism, whether the advocates of the theory have thought it all the way through or not. It makes perfect sense, then, that Ellen White found it necessary to articulate a robust trinitarian doctrine of God in response to Kellogg’s pantheism. With extraordinary insight, connecting all the theological dots, her response to pantheism/panentheism was to define God as a “Heavenly Trio” of coeternal divine persons.

In November of 1905, Ellen White wrote a general letter to church leaders that opened with, “I have not been able to sleep during the past night.” The source of her anxiety, again, was the influence of Kellogg in disseminating depersonalized ideas about God. In this letter, her clarity on the personal nature of God reached a high point. She wrote:

The Father cannot be described by the things of earth. The Father is all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and is invisible to mortal sight.

The Son is all the fullness of the Godhead manifested. The Word of God declares Him to be “the express image of His person.” “God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Here is shown the personality of the Father.

The Comforter that Christ promised to send after He ascended to heaven, is the Spirit in all the fullness of the Godhead, making manifest the power of divine grace to all who receive and believe in Christ as a personal Savior. There are three living persons of the Heavenly Trio; in the name of these three great powers—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—those who receive Christ by living faith are baptized, and these powers will co-operate with the obedient subjects of heaven in their efforts to live the new life in Christ. Evangelism, pp. 614-615; Manuscript 21, 1906, written in November of 1905

Words could not be clearer.

Ellen White is here combating pantheism with a trinitarian vision of God and essentially issuing a warning that anti-trinitarianism is the logical precursor to pantheism.

Kellogg was formulating his pantheistic theology as the logical outworking of an anti-trinitarian view of God. In response, Ellen White insisted that God consists of “three living persons of the Heavenly Trio.” The language she uses is redundant for emphasis. There are “three,” she says, and they are a “Trio.” And each one of the three is a “person.” Her clarity level here should be enough to settle the Trinity debate for every Seventh-day Adventist. We cannot not get it, unless we simply do not want to.

But the roots of pantheism reach far deeper in history than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, and we would do well to understand those roots. That’s where we will go in the next chapter.

1 See my book The Sonship of Christ for a detailed exposition of “covenant” as the relational framework of the plan of salvation.

“If God is an absolute singularity, there is no personal God at all, but only impersonal power, friendless energy, and loveless natural process.”
CHAPTER FOUR
A Gateway to Pantheism

In his remarkable introduction to existentialism, Irrational Man (1958), William Barrett makes an incisive observation regarding the fundamental fork in the intellectual road:

Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points of influence moves our world.

We all live within intellectual traditions that hail from either Hebrew or Greek patterns of thought, and most of us are a mixed (and often “mixed up”) combination of elements from both. We tend to make sense of reality through one of these two paradigmatic lenses. The history of thought is more complex than that, but not much more. Whether we know why we think the way we do or not, no mind is an island of originality in the ocean of ideas.

What, then, does it mean to conceptualize in Hebrew compared to Greek? Well, panning way out, it means something like this:

concrete vs abstract

paradoxical vs polemical

holistic vs dualistic

dynamic vs static

open vs closed

free vs determined

The line between these two tracks of thought is not without some overlap, but the line is sharp enough to represent two significantly divergent ways of processing reality.

There is a reason why the formal educational system of Western civilization emphasizes abstract, dialectic argument (pitting one idea against another) over paradoxical tension (endeavoring to synthesize the truths that lie at both ends of any given subject spectrum).

There is a reason why we imagine that we live in a universe with a divergence of value between the body and the soul, the seen and the unseen, the earth and heaven, as if all that is physical is bad and transitory while that which is immaterial is good and eternal.

There is a reason why so many people operate on the assumption that “everything happens for a reason,” that when a person dies “it was their time to go,” and that when pretty much anything happens, it is because “God is in control” or “God has a plan” or “God is up to something.”

And there is a reason why God is thought of by many people in terms of power and control, rather than love and freedom.

Western culture is immersed in Greek thought. We’re all philosophical pagans in our basic orientation to reality, unless we deliberately receive and nurture the Hebrew revelation of God given through the prophets as the one radically different and utterly exquisite alternative.

Plato

Plato was a Greek philosopher who lived from about 428–348 BC. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence Plato’s thinking has had on the Western world. British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, says, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality).

Plato’s concept of True Form versus illusion suggests that there is some ultimate something that is real, perfect, immaterial, immutable,1 and impassible.2 Compared to the True Form, everything else is unreal, because everything we see in our physical realm and everything we think about in our conceptual realm only approximates that which is perfectly real. From this premise, thinkers following Plato imagined God to be absolute in the sense of constituting, or at least controlling, all of reality. And this would mean that nothing exists that is not God manifested in various forms, making the divine reality synonymous with all of reality.

In a word, pantheism.

Pan—All

Theo—God

Pantheism—All is God and God is all.

Aristotle

Following Plato’s philosophical vision of the absolute, Aristotle (384-322 BC), who was Plato’s protégé, articulated God as the Unmoved Mover. That is, God causes all movement in the universe, while remaining forever unmoved Himself. God determines all events and outcomes, and, yet, God is completely unaffected by all events and outcomes by virtue of the fact that all events and outcomes are of His own doing. Because God is really all there is, everything that happens is simply an extension of God, or God’s will. Therefore, no genuine emotional response arises from God, because nothing happens that He does not cause. Free will, therefore, is an illusion. God, the Absolute, is the doer of all things that are done.

In a word, determinism.3

Or, in layman’s terms, destiny or fate.

Plotinus

Jump forward now some 500 years after Plato and Aristotle, and meet a fella by the name of Plotinus, a Hellenistic philosopher who lived from about 204 to 270 in Campania, a region in southern Italy. Plotinus is regarded as the first neoplatonist, meaning he initiated a renewed interest in Plato’s thinking and offered his own interpretations of the ancient philosopher.

The key idea Plotinus extracted from Plato was monism. According to Plotinus, based on Plato’s True Form concept, reality consists of a single eternal principle that Plotinus called, “The One.” Everything that exists came from The One, and everything is of one essential substance with The One.

Again, the core idea coming through is that everything is one thing in various projected forms. All there is, is The One. All distinction and autonomy is illusion. There is no such thing as free relationship between autonomous agents.

Sabellius

Living about the same time as Plotinus and active for a time in Italy, there was a priest by the name of Sabellius. While we have no record of these two men meeting, the theology of Sabellius was pretty much a Christianized version of the neoplatonism of Plotinus.

The theological perspective formulated by Sabellius became known as “modalism.” He suggested that the God of Scripture is the One True God and manifests Himself in three modes of expression—Father, Son, and Spirit. To say that there is One True God, necessarily means there can be no actual other divine person who is God in the same way the Father is God. To say that the Son is God, and to say that the Holy Spirit is God, must mean, therefore, that they are manifestations of the Father in different forms. But they are not, in reality, persons distinct from the Father. Karl Barth articulates modalism like this:

As God is in Himself Father from all eternity, He begets Himself as the Son from all eternity. As He is the Son from all eternity, He is begotten of Himself as the Father from all eternity. In this eternal begetting of Himself and being begotten of Himself, He posits Himself a third time as the Holy Spirit, that is, as the love which unites Him in Himself. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1956

According to Barth, since God is a solitary self, the Trinity does not present to us an actual self-to-other relational dynamic, but rather a self-to-self monism in which the Father is both the Son and the Holy Spirit manifesting Himself through these two modes of expression. Sound familiar?

Arius

Arius of Alexandria was a priest and theologian who lived from about 256 to 336. We have none of his original writings. We can, however, construct an accurate understanding of his position, or at least the position that came to bear his name, from the surviving written works of contemporaries who quoted him. Socrates of Constantinople, a historian of the time, quotes Arius as follows:

If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily follows, that he had his substance from nothing. Church History by Socrates of Constantinople

Arius was making an effort to correct the modalism of Sabellius, but the solution he suggested failed by means of retaining the core problem of modalism, only from a different angle. He saw that modalism had the effect of making Jesus out to be the Father manifested in a different form. This would mean, of course, that the relationship between the two that we encounter in the New Testament would be a mere projection. By making Christ a created being, distinct from the Father, Arius thought he was offering a needed correction of modalism.

His position centered on the New Testament use of the word “begotten.” He overlooked the larger sonship narrative of Scripture and took the word “begotten” to describe the ontological origins of Christ, insisting that it means that there was a point at which Christ began to exist “from nothing.” And with that, Arius felt he had proven that Christ is a real person distinct from the Father, as opposed to modalism’s erasing of that vital distinction. But this merely moved the problem to a more ancient era, leaving us in precisely the same theological position given to us by modalism—namely, that God, ultimately, is a solitary self, void of relationship. In his view, Jesus was God’s anciently begotten Son, exalted to divine status by the Father, before which the Father, as the one eternal God, existed alone, without any personal divine counterpart. By making Jesus a lesser God created by a greater God, Arius apparently failed to realize that his position had the net effect of giving us yet one more version of Plato’s monism with its tendency toward pantheism.

This view is what scholars call “Arianism.” There were others after Arius who modified his position slightly by suggesting that Christ was of similar substance with the Father, but not of one substance with Him. This is not, however, a significant modification because it offers no solution to the problem entailed in Arianism at the core level.

If Arius had panned out far enough to take in the big story of the Bible, centering as it does on the begetting of a promised Son to redeem Adam’s lost sonship status, he may have seen that Christ is clearly set forth as the Adamic, Abrahamic, Davidic Son of God in a messianic sense, “begotten” through a chosen human lineage as the covenantally faithful Second Adam. He may also have noticed that this fully human Son of God was declared to be none other than “God manifested in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16), “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), “the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20). God, very God, in the human person of Jesus Christ, was “begotten” of the Holy Spirit through the womb of woman into our world. And if Arius had noticed all of that, he may have realized that the word “begotten,” with reference to Christ, has nothing to do with His metaphysical beginnings, long ago. The Bible tells no story about one great God bringing a lesser God into existence. That idea appears nowhere in Scripture. It is the product of Christian thinkers trying to do theology with Greek underpinnings.

The Advent Pioneers

In the previous two chapters we explored the core concern of the Advent pioneers and the development of Ellen White’s thinking regarding trinitarianism.

Paying attention to exactly what the Advent pioneers were saying, we know precisely why they were resistant to trinitarianism. It is clear, as we’ve noted, that they were specifically pushing back on trinitarian modalism. Nor do we need to guess why they found the idea unacceptable, because they explicitly tell us why. Modalism collapses God the Father and God the Son into a single person, rendering the biblical description of the relationship between the two meaningless. This is what the Advent pioneers could not accept. They felt compelled to defend the divine personhood of Christ for the specific purpose of insisting that the love between the Father and the Son is an authentic interpersonal love and not a mere projected illusion. They were seeking to affirm the relational nature of God by taking one vital step in that direction, the one step they could see to take, which was to reject the Trinity as framed by modalism.

Yes, the Advent pioneers came short of arriving at a definitive covenantal trinitarianism. Like Arius before them, they failed to see the sonship narrative of the Old Testament as the origin of the sonship language of the New Testament. So they felt compelled to believe that Jesus must have had a point of beginning sometime in the ancient eternal past. But that was a secondary byproduct of their real concern, which was that a clear sense of the divine personhood of Christ, distinct from the Father, be maintained. They were headed in that direction by virtue of the fact that they discerned the necessity of understanding God to be innately relational.

By divine revelation, Ellen White saw where the concern of the pioneers logically leads. She realized that (1) if Christ has distinct personhood from the Father, and (2) if Christ is Himself divine, then (3) Christ must have always coexisted with the Father, possessing within Himself “life, original, unborrowed, underived.” Reasoning further forward, she discerned (4) the divine personhood of the Holy Spirit distinct from the Father and the Son. With all these pieces in place, she concluded that (5) the Father, the Son, and the Spirit together constitute what she termed, “the Heavenly Trio.”

To Ellen White’s understanding, the Father is God, but not all there is of God. The Son is God, but not all there is of God. The Holy Spirit is God, but not all there is of God. Each of the three possesses eternal, divine personhood in relation to the others and all three collectively constitute the totality of God.

Viewed as Bible students engaged in a historical journey of theological development, the Advent pioneers may be regarded as vital contributors to Ellen White’s thinking and to the formulation of the church’s present trinitarian position. They need not be viewed as an embarrassing problem in our history, but rather as an important part of the solution to a crucial theological conundrum. They were honest Bible students with a completely legitimate concern regarding the trinitarianism with which they were familiar—namely, modalism. Ellen White’s treatment of the topic addressed their concern and progressed forward to articulate a richly relational trinitarianism.

Nevertheless, the blind spot in the thinking of the Advent pioneers, while honest, had to be rectified, because all forms of monism, including Arianism, potentially lead to pantheism. This became evident in the case of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. A man of formidable intellect, he simply followed the semi-Arianism of the Advent pioneers where it led. He reasoned forward from the premise of God as an Absolute One, to the conclusion that God is an impersonal force that pervades all of creation. In other words, the pantheism Ellen White detected in Kellogg’s theology was built on a foundation of anti-trinitarianism.

A Precursor to Pantheism

So why, exactly, is the anti-trinitarian doctrine a problem?

Quite simply, because it reduces God to an absolute singularity. In so doing, it paves the way to pantheism, which paves the way for freelovism!

This is not difficult to understand, once you see it. But some clear thinking, in the context of the history we’ve previewed above, is vital in order to get us there.

If we begin with the premise that God is a social unit of three persons who eternally coexist in a relational circle of other-centeredness, we have the conceptual premise upon which to see ourselves as freewill persons subject to moral dynamics in relation to other freewill persons. Please read that sentence again for clarity, because it really is the whole point here.

Now, then, the Bible encapsulates this entire conceptual framework with the word “covenant.” Covenant is a massively beautiful truth that conveys the idea of individual persons living with relational integrity toward one another. It is the lofty idea that “God is love,” from which we deduce that we live in right relation to God and one another only when we love like God loves. Knowing God as a relational dynamic of self-giving love is the only premise upon which a covenant construct of reality can be formulated. Stated more succinctly, knowing God as love is the only way to love.

Both modalism (God as a solitary self, projecting the illusion of interpersonal relationship) and pantheism (God as synonymous with nature and therefore void of personhood) defy the entire biblical narrative of covenantal love between free persons. Both theories do this by depersonalizing God from opposite ends of the very same conceptual spectrum. Then, once we hold a view of God that is void of personhood, we have no logical premise upon which to perceive ourselves as free persons living in adjacent freedom with other free persons.

By contrast, the doctrine of God hammered out by the Advent pioneers (Christ is a divine person distinct from the Father), by Ellen White (God is a “Heavenly Trio” of self-giving relational love), and by Adventist scholarship (a definitive doctrine of the Trinity that rejects modalism in favor of three co-eternal persons), constitutes an extremely rational, theologically rich, emotionally attractive, and morally transformative doctrine of God.

The anti-trinitarian doctrine that we are currently encountering around the edges of Adventism, is, essentially, a modern version of Plato’s monism or Sabellius’s modalism, which is the very idea the Advent pioneers were clumsily resisting in the early stages of the movement, and which Ellen White flatly rejected by insisting that God consists of “three living persons” who together compose a “Heavenly Trio.”

Anti-trinitarianism was completely untenable for Ellen White for one simple reason: it reduces God to a solitary self. Reach back far enough into eternity past, and the anti-trinitarian scheme of thought wants us to envision God as absolutely, utterly, intrinsically, ontologically alone, which, whether they’ve thought it through rigorously enough or not, reduces God to an impersonal singularity void of love. This, the advocates of the doctrine insist, is the “One True God.” But if God is an absolute singularity, there is no personal God at all, but only impersonal power, friendless energy, and loveless natural process. And that, dear reader, is the very definition of pantheism. Anti-trinitarianism, reasoned through to its logical conclusion, is pantheism.

I am not suggesting, of course, that any given anti-trinitarian is an overt, conscious pantheist, any more than Kellogg would have said, “Yeah, I’m a pantheist.” I am suggesting, however, that if a person pauses to carefully think through the logical implications of anti-trinitarianism, pantheism is the conclusion of the matter. There are many people who do not think through the implications of their beliefs. Most anti-trinitarians I’ve conversed with reject the Trinity simply because, as they say, “It’s a Catholic doctrine” and “the Adventist pioneers didn’t believe in the Trinity.” But they haven’t given much thought to the matter beyond that. Nevertheless, anti-trinitarianism is what it is, and what it is, quite simply, is a form of monism, which logically leads to pantheism. Whether or not any given anti-trinitarian will go where their picture of God leads, is another matter.

But, someone will say, “Anti-trinitarians believe in Jesus, so won’t that logically rule out pantheism for them?”

Well, maybe. But then again, Kellogg believed in Jesus. The fact is, the “Jesus” of anti-trinitarianism is not the same “Jesus” the trinitarian believes in.

How does Jesus figure in to the anti-trinitarian view?

At some point along the way, after having been a solitary self for an eternity prior, God became a Father by birthing a Son, upon whom He conferred divine status. A greater God brought into existence a lesser God. Again, pantheism is here slipping in through the theological cracks. If the divinity of Christ is a created, begotten, caused, or otherwise, by any means, an actualized quality of being, what is to prevent us from imagining that we, too, could be made divine? And what prevents us at that point from taking the next logical step into the assumption that all of our natural urges and desires are divine?

Well, not much!

Anti-trinitarianism, pantheism, and free-lovism are all logically connected, as Ellen White discerned in the case of Kellogg. If we strip away labels and deal strictly in concepts, the connections are as easy to grasp as 1, 2, 3.

1 Anti-trinitarianism. Personhood is vital for relationship and relationship is vital for love. If Jesus is merely a generated extension of the Father, and if the Holy Spirit is merely an influence emanating from the Father, God is a solitary self. Relationship vanishes from the theological picture, and with it any coherent notion of love.
2 Pantheism. If God is a solitary self, and as such void of interpersonal love, God can only be thought of as an impersonal force synonymous with all the other impersonal forces in the universe, including ourselves.
3 Free-lovism. If God and the universe are one and the same, then we humans are synonymous with God. All of the natural impulses that drive us are merely manifestations of God and as such cannot be regarded as morally wrong. “Whatever is, is right,” because whatever is cannot be otherwise than it is, in a universe defined by impersonal power and void of interpersonal love.

The point is a forceful one: pantheism equates God with the universe and in so doing depersonalizes God. Having depersonalized God, pantheism makes God synonymous with the energy or power that animates the natural world. If God is not a personal being, then it is inconceivable that “God is love” in any kind of interpersonal sense. And if God is synonymous with the forces and phenomena of nature, we humans are merely an extension of God and do not possess individual personhood distinct from God. All there is, is natural process, which unfolds as a deterministic cause-and-effect machine. Individual personhood, free will, right and wrong, good and evil do not actually exist. This is the basic idea Ellen White was getting at when she articulated pantheism as an idea that reduces God to a “non-entity” and portrays God as being without “personality,” or without the quality of being a person.

At the end of the day, within all forms of monism, whether materialistic monism, philosophical monism, or religious monism, the foundational idea is the same: everything is really one thing and all distinction, moral agency, and love are mere illusion.