By internalizing DA principles in dealing with spiritual conflicts I unwittingly incorporated the central, Minneapolis principles that permeate DA and Patriarchs and Prophets, Great Controversy, Steps to Christ, and other Ellen White books, which I soon read. I first learned of the Minneapolis conflict in 1950 when I happened to overhear Felix Lorenz telling what he had heard at the General Conference session about our rejection of a message in 1888. I knew nothing about the message, nor would I have paid any attention, except for the excitement in his voice. Several years before I was introduced to its central, Christ our Righteousness principle, it was integral to my ministry.

Important in preparing me to proclaim that message was a three month honey moon on an Idaho look out tower with my bride, Patricia Tooley. Months before our 1952 wedding I became concerned about whether I could be a truly spiritual minister, able to lead people to Christ and to a genuine conversion. I knew I could indoctrinate. But observing some very sociable pastors who seemed shallow and those they baptized gave little evidence of a transforming relation to Christ, challenged me to take this question seriously.

And somehow, my marriage shifted that concern into high gear. Having with me all five of my Conflict series and with much time to read and meditate, I assumed I would in this way find assurance; for I never questioned my call to ministry. But as I finished these and my concern only deepened, I decided I not to finish my theology course unless I was assured.

I did not dare to share my struggle with my wife, but was concerned that my dilemma might impact her, as she had married a pastor in training. With the issue still unresolved, I arranged for her to spend the last week with her mother, two or three hours away, so nothing would distract my sole focus. But that week rapidly became history and the last day came. During it, I repeatedly reminded the Lord that I must have an answer that very day.

Night came without an answer; so, deciding not to go to bed until I had an answer, I spent the hours kneeling before the alidada board (area map) in the middle of the 14' by 14' room on stilts, 50 feet above the ground. As I prayed without words, which had long been exhausted, I simply waited for an answer. Midnight passed and one o’clock, then two and three.

Then, like a bolt of lightning my mind was flooded with light that centered on John 17:3: “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.” I was assured that I could be a spiritual minister if I sought to relate everything I studied to Christ.

Too thrilled to consider sleep, I lay down but spent the next two hours singing praises to God before rising to load my car and head for my wife. My life and ministry have ever been committed to that principle. Moreover, memory of that experience would be vital as we faced serious financial and health problems.

Indeed, that very day, as my wife and I headed back to Walla Walla College, our engine blew, with a rod breaking the block. To save money needed for college I hired a fellow student, with my non-expert help, to rebuild a different engine. To make sure it would not fail me I, at the cost of hundreds of dollars, put almost all new parts in it. The delays experienced, however, were unbelievable. I had paid him for his time, but when college started he quit working on it.

Stuck with no prospects of a car, I was finally able to hire a reluctant student to finish the job. But something was dreadfully wrong -- its top speed on the level was about 30 MPH. Since he had only finished what someone else began I could but pay him for his work. With money rapidly going I finally took it to a garage; but other hundreds of dollars did not make it work. After one more failed attempt with a retired mechanic, Since it was an older model, I finally had to abandon it as worthless. What went wrong? We never knew. But one thing was clear; attempts to save money can be very, very expensive. I could have bought a much newer car for less money.

Meanwhile, without a car, my wife for weeks trudged from College Place to Walla Walla day after day in the heat of the sun, vainly seeking a job where she could keep the Sabbath. One good paying job required only one Sabbath a month; another only half a day each Sabbath, with assurance she could attend church every Sabbath. Finally a bakery offered twenty hours a week at 75 cents an hour, barely enough to cover our rent, but she took it. Finding her work place absolutely filthy, she scrubbed everything. At week's end her employer told her he had never had such a valuable employee and paid her a dollar an hour for the 33 hours she had worked.

But the memory of the look-out experience was even more vital a few months later, as also was a dramatic providence as I was coming down with the Asian Flue. I was unusually tired on a Friday night and the next morning I felt I could not even get up, let alone make preach at Grandview, 100 miles from where we lived. Pat tried in vain to contact my homiletics professor; so I felt we must go. I lost my voice en route, but all four of us in the car felt we should proceed and that if He chose, the Lord would give me a voice. He did. Not only was it clear as a bell, but I had perfect freedom to speak and felt no discomfort -- until I sat down. Then, forced by a raging fever to leave the pulpit, I hardly managed to get to the car to lay down. On returning, I was barely able to use my legs to help Pat virtually carry me into the house and undress me.

For days I could not even turn over in bed. I lay there not knowing if I would live or die, bit was at perfect peace, knowing that God had assured me of His presence. Nor did I regain strength when I recovered. The flue had intensified undulant fever, a problem that would go undiagnosed for another two years. Having to sleep twelve to fifteen hours a day to just to survive prevented me from working. Indeed, at times it was all I could do to sit in class and go home to bed.

In the meantime, several years would pass after hearing Felix Lorenz’s comments before I discovered the Minneapolis message and recognized in it the principles into which the Lord had inducted me when I had no idea of I was learning theology. This helped me see that the Minneapolis message was not so much a theology as an experience in relation to Christ, Who is Himself the central principle of every doctrine.

But back in the old horse barn hay loft, as I prayed through DA a question arose to which I found no answer: “If Christ’s nature was just the same as ours and He was tempted just as we are, how could He have gone from infancy to the age of moral choice without the least sin, since selfishness is sin? In all four years of college I asked every religion teacher in each of three colleges; but, though they readily responded to other question, all simply ignored the question.

An interest I took in Bible paradoxes while in college such as, “the first shall be last and the last first.” greatly expanded in my first pastorate, where I concluded that truth is itself paradoxical. That is, as with law and grace, it always has balancing principles that externally appear to conflict with each other, but that are so internally united and inter-dependent that each is essential to the integrity of the other. This principle permitted me, during an intense study of the nature of Christ prompted by an unusually sharp Jehovah’s Witness leader, to discover the answer to my question, an answer so simple, I was amazed that I had not seen it all the time.

That answer came in 1956, before I as yet knew anything about Minneapolis and at the very time Le Roy Froom, after whom I was named, and Roy Allen Anderson were surrendering our historic position on the nature of Christ in discussions with Walter Martin. Seven years before (1949) and shortly before I entered college, as an early signal of theological change, Bible Readings was revised to repudiate a historic position clearly enunciated in Desire of Ages, that Christ took the nature of man with its hereditary results 6000 years after the fall -- the very position that had prompted my question.

Their own unresolved confusion over this issue and a corresponding attempt to correct an imbalance resulting from our failure to resolve it caused our representatives to “sell the farm,” by denying the truth we held to correct our mistaken claim that Christ’s nature was “just like ours.”

Believing God had given me a key to the conflict that erupted with the publication of Questions on Doctrine, I first conveyed it academically in my 1966 thesis, “Ellen G. White’s Concept of the nature of Man as it Relates to Bible Teaching Objectives.” There I demonstrated her view that biologically (“according to the flesh”) Christ’s nature was exactly like ours, but that spiritually (“according to the Spirit”; Rom 1:3-4), it was very unlike ours.

I intended to use my thesis as the basis for a doctoral dissertation dealing with the larger issue of righteousness by faith, but this was first delayed by a mission call to Africa, and then, when ready to take a subsidized leave from Columbia Union College to do my dissertation, the needs of our son caused me to resign to direct LaVida, a Navajo Mission in New Mexico. Thus, thirteen years passed before I could complete the assignment I felt called to do.

This delay, however, proved providential. For during that time Desmond Ford, who had long promoted QOD’s erroneous, nature of Christ position, began to proclaim Plymouth Brethren theology, borrowed from his Manchester doctoral professor, F, F. Bruce.

Providentially, the principles I intended to develop were just those needed to address his new issues. After I completed my dissertation but, before it was published as Theology in Crisis, Ford gave his October 27, 1979 Pacific Union College lecture repudiating our sanctuary message, taking the very position I had identified as the logical result of his forensic-only justification theology.

Meanwhile, I was asked to sit on the October 3-4, 1979 righteousness by faith committee. Whereas 20 out of 24 stood with Ford in the 1978 committee, his view was shut out in 1979 in a larger committee to whom GC President, Neil Wilson gave advance copies of my dissertation.

Right after his lecture, Ford was removed from his PUC class room and given nine months to prepare a defense of his position. In August, 1980 we met at Glacier View to examine it. Contrary to opposite, equally biased reports, every element of his eschatological theology that violates principles of Adventism was repudiated.

Many administrators and pastors, as well as members, found answers to Ford issues that had perplexed them in Theology in Crisis. Some found it interesting and relatively easy to read. To others, this unrevised dissertation proved heavy reading. Anxious for lay people to profit, I attempted for a decade and a half to write it as simply as possible. In 1994 Review accepted Adventism in Conflict for publication in 1995.

Because of its strategic importance I again treated the nature Christ in both Theology in Crisis and Adventism in Conflict. But most important were the first few chapters that spell out the paradoxical principles I used in dealing with Ford’s theology, principles that permitted me to clearly affirm the truth involved, even while exposing its use as a vehicle for conveying error.

But I prepared my most complete nature of Christ treatment in Questions on Doctrine Revisited (2005), which examines principles involved in our now five decade conflict. I began writing this sequel to Adventism in Conflict before it was published in 1995. In 1996, after writing the main chapters but before doing the concluding chapters, Review editors unanimously approve d its publication. However, because it was a sensitive issue, administrators stopped its publication. It was again accepted about five years later when, at the encouragement of the book editors, I resubmitted. I even received and signed a contract before the marketing division turned it down. Thus, in 2005 I had it published by AB Publishing, a private Adventist publisher.

Not long after its publication and shortly after Julius Nam completed his dissertation on the same subject, I joined him and his friend Mike Campbell, whose doctoral dissertation will also cover this issue, to prepare a proposal to the General Conference for a 50th Anniversary forum at Andrews University. Our purpose was to invite all parties who had some special interest in the issues to present a paper on the subject, addressing any aspect of their choice, hoping to provide a positive environment in which contenders for various points of view could share with and hear each other. Only time will tell whether the apparent progress in relationships will continue. But the atmosphere of that forum, the last week-end of October, 2007, was one of courteous cordiality among all participants that exceeded our highest expectations.

Our hope for increasing unity without compromise resides in our conviction that both those who support and those opposed to QOD defend something important. If we truly listen to one another, while depending upon divine revelation as our only authority, each will find principles in the position of others that offer to give needed balance to his own view. Our call is not for compromise. For there is no true unity in compromise, but for the unity of whole truth, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, commissioned to teach us “all truth.”

Only the practice of priesthood of believers principle, in humbling ourselves one to another under the authority of God’s Word (1 Pet 3:3-5), can permit the fulfillment of Christ’s prayer just before His Gethsemane struggle:

Sanctify them through the truth: Thy Word is truth. ... Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word. That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent Me. And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they be one even as we are one: In in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one: and that the world may know that thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them, as Thou has loves Me (John 17:17, 20-23).

That prayer was only partially and then but briefly fulfilled at Pentecost. The complete fulfillment involves all “which shall believe on Me through their word.” And it must take place to fulfill the perfection Christ calls for in preparation for the final fulfillment in latter rain power just before He comes, of which Ellen White declares:

Those who wait for the Bridegroom’s coming are to say to the people, “Behold your God.” The last rays of merciful light, the last message of mercy to be given to the world, is a revelation of His character of love. The children of God are to manifest His glory (Christ’s Object Lessons).

Jesus’ prayer thus identifies perfection with unity of the members of His body, the church and equates this unity with His glory. So also does Ellen White in COL, as she identifies this with “the revelation of His character of love. Thus alone can the three angel’s messages be fully given to the world, to “fear God and give glory to Him.” We can only give glory to Him by reflecting His character of love in an exhibition this world has never before seen in His church, the glory of His character of love.