The SDA Forgotten Foundation - Materialism

This week we thought we would talk about a foundation - if not THE foundation - of the SDA movement that has been forgotten about. In fact, it is the foundation upon which all the pillars of our faith rest. But in spite of that, as we will show, Satan has buried this forgotten pillar under a pile of rubbish called "Spiritualism."

Now most SDAs understand that the doctrine of the conscious state of the dead is spiritualistic. We should all know that the deceased do not have disembodied spirits. Today we are going to learn **why** the belief in the "conscious state of the dead," or "the immortality of the soul" is a form of "spiritualism". It is this aspect of our faith - the understanding of the root problem with spiritualism - that has been "forgotten" over the last century or more.

Uriah Smith taught that the idea that the soul is immortal was the fundamental problem underlying that idea. That is, the idea of "immateriality." The belief in immateriality is the belief that something that is not made of matter exists - like the common idea of a soul, for example. Uriah Smith said immateriality is preposterous because "all nature is material," and also for the reasons that something not made of matter is impossible to comprehend, and that scripture expressly presents to us the materiality of human nature - and actually of all things. The prefix "Im" means "not," and the word "material" means, well, "material," or "matter" - you know, physical stuff. Today the word "material" and "materialism" are linked more popularly to the idea of accumulating worldly goods. But back in the 1800's, at the time Uriah Smith was writing, "materialism" more commonly meant the belief that all that exists is made of matter, or "material." Notice also that Uriah Smith attributes even the thoughts of the conscious mind to matter also. He said that "we do claim that all vital and mental phenomena result from material causes." The pioneers believed that consciousness is a function of certain material organizations. It is a process of the physical brain. Some SDAs today use the phrase "soul sleep" to express the Adventist position on the state of the dead, but this really isn't the best expression since it might convey that the soul is something separate from the body and that it continues to exist, albeit unconsciously, when the body dies. The early SDAs rejected the idea of a separate soul altogether, which is probably why Ellen White and the other pioneers didn't use the term 'soul sleep' to express their views. They understood that when the brain stops working, the mind ceases to exist (See Psalm 146:4).

Now, the early SDA pioneers wrote a ton on the topic of spiritualism and immateriality – that the issue with spiritualism, again, is immateriality. In fact, it's clear from reading their writings that they equated spiritualism with the belief in anything immaterial. And actually, this is just what spiritualism means in philosophy, as it says in Encyclopedia Britannic