Doctrine Has Consequences

An Indictment of Adventist Silence, Complicity, and the Theology That Made Both Possible

By Sidney Louis Davis Jr.

The Question

A reader asks: Has any racial atrocity ever been condemned by a General Conference Session of the Seventh-day Adventist Church?

The honest answer is an indictment in itself. No General Conference Session delegation has ever voted to condemn a specific racial atrocity. No General Conference statement names the Holocaust or antisemitism. What exists are general statements against racism, released at Sessions by church leadership rather than voted by the delegates.

I. What the World Church Actually Said, and When

The General Conference issued its first major statement on racism forty years after Auschwitz was liberated. It was released by General Conference president Neal C. Wilson, after consultation with the sixteen world vice presidents, on June 27, 1985, at the Session in New Orleans. The wording is important: the statement was released by the president, not voted by the delegates.

That statement condemns racism in the abstract. It acknowledges that racism, at its extreme, can lead to systematic persecution and even genocide. It names one atrocity explicitly, the political policy of apartheid. It does not name the Holocaust. It does not name antisemitism. It names no Jewish victim, and it says nothing about what Adventist leaders in Germany had done.

Ten years later at Utrecht, the pattern repeated. The Human Relations statement was approved by the General Conference Administrative Committee and released by the Office of the President, Robert S. Folkenberg, at the 1995 Session. It was a committee vote, not a Session vote. And with an irony that should be read aloud in every Adventist pulpit, it invokes Galatians 3:28: “there is neither Jew nor Greek.” The church quoted Paul’s words about Jews belonging, yet it never confessed that its own congregations had expelled Jews from belonging.

In 2020 came One Humanity, voted again by the Administrative Committee and again in general terms.

Year	Statement	Who acted	Names the Holocaust or antisemitism?
2020	One Humanity	GC Administrative Committee	No
1995	Human Relations	GC Administrative Committee; released at Utrecht Session	No
1985	Racism	GC president, after consulting vice presidents; released at New Orleans Session	No (names apartheid)

The world church has condemned racism in general and apartheid by name. It has never condemned what was done to Nazism’s Jewish victims.

II. The General Conference Was Not Merely Silent

The usual defense is administrative distance: Germany was Germany, and the General Conference was in Washington. The record does not support that alibi.

In 1936, the General Conference Session itself became a stage for Nazi public relations. According to historian Roland Blaich, the American lecture tour of Hulda Jost and the German delegation at the San Francisco Session was planned and orchestrated by German Adventist leaders together with the General Conference, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, and the German Foreign Office.

Jost was not a peripheral figure. Her political connections in the Propaganda Ministry made her influential among German Adventist leadership, and she is credited with working behind the scenes to reverse the 1933 ban on the church (Central European History).

The charge, then, is not only that the world church failed to speak. Its own quadrennial assembly hosted the regime’s message while saying nothing for the regime’s victims.

III. The Charge Against German Adventist Leadership

The German record is not a matter of interpretation, because the German church has confessed it. In May 2005, German and Austrian Adventist leaders acknowledged that some of their publications contained articles glorifying Adolf Hitler and agreeing with antisemitic ideology. Most damning of all, they confessed that their congregations excluded and separated members of Jewish origin and left them on their own, “delivered to imprisonment, exile or death.”

That confession has a name attached. Wachenheimer, an Adventist of Jewish ancestry in Leipzig, was expelled from the Adventist church at the insistence of individual members of the congregation. He was murdered at Buchenwald in 1942. The Gestapo did not do this. Fellow members did. The congregation did not need the state to remove a Jew from the Lord’s table; it did that itself.

The accommodation reached into the church’s vocabulary. In 1938, German Adventists were told that “Sabbath School” sounded Jewish and was not to be used. They complied. Sabbath School became Bibelschule (Bible School), and “Sabbath” on church bulletin boards became Ruhetag (Rest Day) (Jack M. Patt, “Living in a Time of Trouble,” Spectrum 8, no. 3 [1977]: 4, citing Review and Herald, December 12, 1946, 5). A movement that defines itself by the seventh-day Sabbath gave up the Hebrew name of its own identity marker on demand, rather than be heard sounding Jewish.

Historians have documented the editorial posture behind this. Erwin Sicher’s study in Spectrum 8, no. 2 (1977): 11–24 traced the “Nazi temptation” across Der Adventbote and other German Adventist publications. Cambridge-published scholarship notes that the Adventist press commented on Hitler’s 1933 Concordat only in positive terms (Der Adventbote, 15 February 1934).

IV. Regional Confession Is Not Global Confession

The German and Austrian apology is real and morally significant. A copy was provided to Yad Vashem. German unions have continued to speak, with a 2012 statement against antisemitism by Adventists from German-speaking countries and further statements since.

But look at who is speaking: Germany and Austria, not the General Conference. A regional confession cannot quietly stand in for a global one. The body that hosted the 1936 propaganda tour, never condemned the persecution while it was happening, and has issued three anti-racism statements without once naming the Holocaust has never offered a specific reckoning of its own. Until it does, the German confession only makes the silence in Silver Spring more conspicuous.

V. The Theological Indictment: Doctrine Has Consequences

Why did a church that claimed to keep God’s Sabbath find it so easy to drop the word “Sabbath,” expel Jews, and praise the man who was murdering them? The answer is not only fear, careerism, or censorship. The doctrine came before the deed.

A church that teaches that Israel forfeited its covenant, that the promises passed to a “spiritual Israel,” and that the destruction of Jerusalem was a national sentence on the Jewish people has already placed the Jew outside the covenant community in its theology. When the state demanded that Jews be removed from the congregation, that theology offered no resistance, because it had already done the removing. Supersessionism did not build the camps. It did empty the pews of any reason to stand at the door.

This is not a hostile reconstruction. It is what Ellen G. White wrote in the opening chapter of The Great Controversy, a book Adventists have widely distributed:

For nearly forty years after the doom of Jerusalem had been pronounced by Christ Himself, the Lord delayed His judgments upon the city and the nation. Wonderful was the long-suffering of God toward the rejectors of His gospel and the murderers of His Son. The parable of the unfruitful tree represented God’s dealings with the Jewish nation. The command had gone forth, “Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?” (Luke 13:7) but divine mercy had spared it yet a little longer. There were still many among the Jews who were ignorant of the character and the work of Christ. And the children had not enjoyed the opportunities or received the light which their parents had spurned. Through the preaching of the apostles and their associates, God would cause light to shine upon them; they would be permitted to see how prophecy had been fulfilled, not only in the birth and life of Christ, but in His death and resurrection. The children were not condemned for the sins of the parents; but when, with a knowledge of all the light given to their parents, the children rejected the additional light granted to themselves, they became partakers of the parents’ sins, and filled up the measure of their iniquity. The long-suffering of God toward Jerusalem only confirmed the Jews in their stubborn impenitence. In their hatred and cruelty toward the disciples of Jesus they rejected the last offer of mercy. Then God withdrew His protection from them and removed His restraining power from Satan and his angels, and the nation was left to the control of the leader she had chosen.
Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (1911), 27–28

Note the move. White denies that children are condemned for their parents’ sins, and in the next breath makes them “partakers of the parents’ sins.” Inherited guilt is disavowed in principle and restored in practice. Then the whole nation is handed over to Satan. Nor does she stop at the first century:

The Jews had forged their own fetters; they had filled for themselves the cup of vengeance. In the utter destruction that befell them as a nation, and in all the woes that followed them in their dispersion, they were but reaping the harvest which their own hands had sown. Says the prophet: “O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself;” “for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity.” Hosea 13:9; 14:1. Their sufferings are often represented as a punishment visited upon them by the direct decree of God. It is thus that the great deceiver seeks to conceal his own work. By stubborn rejection of divine love and mercy, the Jews had caused the protection of God to be withdrawn from them, and Satan was permitted to rule them according to his will. The horrible cruelties enacted in the destruction of Jerusalem are a demonstration of Satan’s vindictive power over those who yield to his control.
Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (1911), 29

“All the woes that followed them in their dispersion.” By 1933, German Adventists had been reading this chapter in their own language for over forty years. A reader taught that every Jewish suffering since A.D. 70 was a harvest the Jews had sown had been given no reason to stand between the Jews and the next one.

The collective-guilt reading of Matthew 27:25 fails on Matthew’s own terms. On the peshat, the verse records the cry of a particular crowd at a particular Roman hearing in a particular year. It is narrated speech, not a divine verdict. The Torah has already ruled on inherited guilt:

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.
Deuteronomy 24:16

Ezekiel repeats the principle: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). A doctrine that makes every Jew in every generation a defendant for that crowd’s words is not a faithful reading of Scripture. It contradicts the Torah that Yeshua kept.

The church should apply its own principle consistently. Adventists object, rightly, when every member is blamed for the conduct of the institution. If inherited guilt is unjust when aimed at Adventists, it is far more unjust when aimed at Israel across two thousand years. An entire people is not a defendant. Ancestry is not evidence. A church that refuses to be tried by collective guilt has no right to keep that weapon for use against the Jews.

Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
Matthew 25:45

Wachenheimer was one of the least of these. He came to the Adventist table, and the Adventist table put him out.

A Word on Consistency

This indictment applies in every direction. The same church that displaced Israel in its theology also wounded its Black members, and anyone who has felt that wound has every right to demand an answer. But the principle that condemns the church condemns any replacement of the Jewish people, from whatever quarter it comes. Teachings that declare Black people alone the “true Israel” and deny the Jewish people their identity repeat the very supersessionism this essay exposes in the Adventist church, only in a racial key. Jews do not need to be displaced twice: once by the church, and again by those the church also harmed. Solidarity against racism must be consistent. Opposition to anti-Black racism cannot excuse the erasure of Jewish identity, and opposition to antisemitism cannot excuse indifference to anti-Black racism.

VI. The Bill of Particulars

The indictment stands on three counts, each documented:

Accommodation where resistance was required. German leadership aligned with the regime, praised it in print, and stripped Jewish vocabulary from the church’s own worship.
Abandonment where protection was required. Congregations expelled Jewish members and left them, by the church’s own admission, to imprisonment, exile, or death.
Silence where condemnation was required, and worse than silence. The world church condemned nothing during the persecution, gave its 1936 Session as a platform for Reich propaganda, and in the eighty years since has not named the Holocaust in a single General Conference statement.

The remedy is not complicated. The General Conference should name what was done, name the victims, and repudiate the supersessionist theology that left Jews outside the circle of covenant concern. And it should do so by vote of a General Conference Session, on the record, before the whole world church. Until then, the silence remains part of the indictment.

Scriptures Cited

Deuteronomy 24:16 · Ezekiel 18:20 · Hosea 13:9; 14:1 · Matthew 25:40, 45 · Matthew 27:25 · Luke 13:7 · Galatians 3:28 · Galatians 6:6

Sources

General Conference, “Racism” (1985)
General Conference, “Human Relations” (1995)
Adventist News Network, “One Humanity” (2020)
Religion News Service in Christian Century, “Adventists apologize for failures during Nazi era” (2005)
Adventist News Network, “German, Austrian Churches Apologize for Holocaust Actions”
Adventist World, Wachenheimer memorial report
Roland Blaich, “Render Unto Caesar: Adventist Collaboration with the Nazi State” (Adventist Today)
Roland Blaich, “Religion under National Socialism: The Case of the German Adventist Church,” Central European History
Erwin Sicher, “Seventh-day Adventist Publication and the Nazi Temptation,” Spectrum 8, no. 2 (1977): 11–24
Adventist Review, German leaders’ statement against antisemitism
Jack M. Patt, “Living in a Time of Trouble: German Adventists Under Nazi Rule,” Spectrum 8, no. 3 (1977): 2–10
Review and Herald (Washington, D.C.), December 12, 1946, 5
Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1911), 27–29