Background The publication of
Questions on Doctrine grew out of a series of conferences between a few Adventist spokespersons and Protestant representatives from 1955 to 1956. The roots of this conference originated in a series of dialogues between
Pennsylvania conference president, T. E. Unruh, and evangelical Bible teacher and magazine editor
Donald Grey Barnhouse. Unruh was particularly concerned because of a scathing review written by Barnhouse about
Ellen White's book,
Steps to Christ. Unruh had sent him a copy of the book in 1949. In the spring of 1955 Barnhouse commissioned
Walter Martin to write a book about Seventh-day Adventists. Martin requested a meeting with Adventist leaders so that he could question them about their beliefs. The first meeting between Martin and Adventist leaders occurred in March 1955. Martin was accompanied by George Cannon and met with Adventist representatives Le Roy Edwin Froom and W. E. Read. Later Roy Allan Anderson and Barnhouse joined these discussions. Initially both sides viewed each other with suspicion as they worked through a list of 40 questions. Central to these concerns were four alleged items of
Adventist theology: (1) the
atonement was not completed at the cross; (2)
salvation is the result of grace plus the works of the law; (3)
Jesus was a created being, not from all eternity; and (4) that Jesus partook of man's sinful, fallen nature at the incarnation. By the summer of 1956 the small group of evangelicals became convinced that Seventh-day Adventists were sufficiently orthodox to be considered Christian. Barnhouse published his conclusions in the September 1956 issue of
Eternity magazine in the article, "Are Seventh-day Adventists Christians?" In it, they concluded, "Seventh-day Adventists are a truly Christian group, rather than an anti-Christian cult." This greatly surprised its readers, and 6,000 canceled their subscriptions in protest. Following this announcement, Adventists were gradually invited to participate in
Billy Graham's crusades.
Conflict within Adventism In Barnhouse's article it was stated that most Adventists believed in the sinless human nature of Christ and those who did not were part of the "lunatic fringe."
M. L. Andreasen, a conservative Adventist theologian, took exception to this statement. Further debate broke out between Andreasen and Froom in February 1957 after Froom published an article on the atonement in
Ministry magazine. In this article Froom argued that the atonement was a "full and complete sacrifice". He furthermore asserted that "the sacrificial act on the cross [is] a complete, perfect, and final atonement for man's sins."
Questions on Doctrine intensified the tensions over these issues because it brought more weight to the death of Jesus as a complete work of atonement and that though Jesus possessed Adam’s physical human nature after the fall, he did not inherit Adam's fallen spiritual nature. "When Adam came from the Creator's hand, he bore, in his physical, mental and spiritual nature, a likeness to his Maker—God created man in His own image." As a consequence, Andreasen embarked on a campaign against
QOD. He published a series of responses to Froom in 9 papers written in 1957/1958 and in a series of booklets entitled
Letters to the Churches (1959). On April 6, 1961, Andreasen's ministerial credentials were suspended by the church because of his ongoing public protests against church leadership. But a few months later on March 1, 1962, after Andreasen died on Feb. 19, 1962, the General Conference executive committee revoked its earlier decision on his ministerial credentials.
Evangelicals divided over Questions on Doctrine In 1960,
Walter Martin published his own response to
Questions on Doctrine, entitled
The Truth About Seventh-day Adventism, which had wide circulation. From June 1960 till July 1961 Adventist magazine
Ministry published a long series of responses to Martin's book, which are available online. Other evangelicals besides Martin who argued for the acceptance of Adventism as an evangelical Christian group were
Donald Barnhouse, E. Schuyler English, and Frank Mead. Many conservative Evangelicals disagreed with Martin and Barnhouse's positive assessment of Adventism. The leaders of this view included a large amount of
Reformed writers. Differences associated with the Calvinist-
Arminian dispute were a major part in the debate (Adventism is
soteriologically Arminian), but Martin did not regard conformity to Calvinism as a test of Christian orthodoxy. In 1962
Norman F. Douty published
Another Look at Seventh-day Adventism and Herbert Bird,
Theology of Seventh-day Adventism, both of which argued that Adventists were still a cult. Dutch Calvinist theologian
Anthony Hoekema grouped Adventism together with
Mormonism,
Jehovah's Witnesses and
Christian Science in his 1963 publication
The Four Major Cults. In this book Hoekema praises Adventists for moving away from
Arianism, but argues that
Questions on Doctrine failed to truly repudiate the doctrine of Christ's sinful nature, and similarly failed to remove ambiguities and inconsistencies regarding the atonement.
Legacy Questions on Doctrine has proven to be divisive for many Adventists in the latter half of the twentieth century. Church historian
George R. Knight has written that "Official Adventism may have gained recognition as being Christian from the evangelical world, but in the process a breach had been opened which has not healed in the last 50 years and may never heal." Conservative
Herbert Douglass agreed, "most, if not all, of the so-called 'dissident' or 'independent' groups of the last 45 years are direct results of the explicit and implicit positions espoused by [
Questions on Doctrine] on the atonement and the Incarnation." Around 138,000 to 147,000 copies of
QOD were circulated, but the book was so controversial that it was placed out of print in 1963.
QOD was not republished until
Andrews University Press independently chose to reprint the book in 2003 as part of their "Adventist Classic Library" series. This new edition contained
annotations and a historical introduction by George R. Knight. The text of the original book had also been available online for several years prior to this republishing, through a private website. "It's a very positive and aggressive statement of Adventist beliefs", according to George Knight. Walter Martin considered his impact on evangelicals' perception of Adventism one of the highlights of his career. ==50th anniversary conference==