The Fingerprint Was Already Ours

A response to OneVoice27, Two Streams! at Fulcrum7.

A recent Fulcrum7 essay proposes a test, and it is a clean one. Take the phrase “practicing the presence of God.” If those words mark a movement, if they are the fingerprint of a mystical stream that has crossed into the church, then the voice that uses them cannot be the voice of God. The essay opens on that very question: “I wonder what voice it is that is speaking?” Its answer is a counterfeit. OneVoice27, it argues, is the One Project rebranded, and its vocabulary carries contemplative prayer and ecumenism into Adventism under the cover of the three angels’ message.

The trouble with a fingerprint is that it must belong to a hand not our own. This phrase names a book the church’s own press has been commending for six decades, and the denomination’s clergy journal once described that book’s aim without alarm: “That we should establish in ourselves a sense of God’s presence by continually conversing with Him” (Ministry Magazine, 1981-07-01, p.22). That is where the argument comes apart, and it is worth being precise about how.

The Monk Was Already in Our Pages

The book is The Practice of the Presence of God, written by Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French lay brother. As the denomination’s clergy journal recorded, he was “A member of a Paris Carmelite community, he died in 1691” (Ministry Magazine, 1981-07-01, p.22). The Catholic provenance is real, and the essay is right to name it. Nothing about that is in dispute.

What the essay does not acknowledge is that Adventist editors have commended this same book for generations. In 1964 the Review and Herald observed that it “has influenced many thousands of people through a book entitled The Practice of the Presence of God” (Review and Herald, 1964-09-24, p.12). In 2003 the same paper printed a reader’s testimony: “It was Brother Lawrence, a humble monk, who changed my view of work” (Review and Herald, 2003-06-26, p.10).

Set those side by side. A Catholic author is not thereby a false teacher, and the journal that supplied the biographical facts drew the opposite lesson from them, holding the monk up as a model rather than a warning. The provenance is solid. The doctrinal verdict the essay hangs on it is the essay’s own, and it runs against the very periodical that supplied the facts.

The Charges Rest on Page Numbers, Not Passages

A fingerprint identifies because it is unique, so the essay needs this phrase to be foreign, a tell that could not have come from inside. Yet when it reaches for the movement’s own sources, the trail thins. The definition it relies on for “practicing the presence of God” appears to originate with Matt Slick of CARM, an outside apologist, rather than with OneVoice27 itself. An unattributed quotation on a website is a citation lapse; it is not theology, and it cannot carry the weight of an indictment.

The same looseness runs through the stronger accusations. The essay attributes the practice to Adventist authors, Joseph Kidder in Majesty and John Dybdahl in Hunger for the Soul, down to page 60 and the instruction to slow the breath. It cites Richard Foster advising prayers of protection before entering the silence. But no passage from any of these books is produced; the reader is handed page numbers and asked to take them on faith. Said without the vocabulary, the essay points at a shelf and announces what is written inside without ever opening the book. A charge this serious deserves a quotation, not a summary.

That is the category error at the center of the case. It treats an inference as though it were evidence.

Shared Words Are Not a Shared Agenda

The one-voice argument runs on a list of websites. The identical sentence about practicing God’s presence, the essay says, appears on Catholic, Episcopal, non-denominational, and deliverance-ministry pages, and this is taken to show a single stream flowing across every denomination. Consider the distance between what is shown and what is inferred. Devotional sentences circulate across traditions constantly, and a shared quotation carries no institutional cooperation with it. Follow the logic to its end and two strangers humming the same hymn on different trains have joined a choir, with a conductor somewhere they have never met. Shared words are a shared inheritance, not a shared agenda.

The leap from “these sites quote the same line” to “these sites are one voice” is the leap the essay would prefer the reader not inspect. The same move governs its climax: that OneVoice27 is a counterfeit three angels’ message because its slogan speaks of uniting nations, echoing the commission to go to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. That parallel rests on a single word appearing in both texts. A verbal coincidence is not a rival commission, and dressing it up as one does not make it evidence. The asserted institutional backing, from the North American Division to the General Conference to Adventist World Radio, arrives in the same unproduced form.

The Two Revivals Are Real, and Unsettled

Here the essay stands on firmer ground, and that should be granted plainly. The two-streams picture, a revival that feels good set against a revival that convicts, is no invention. It has deep roots in the church’s own teaching on the early and latter rain. Ministry magazine warned in 1939 that “the latter rain can bring no seed to perfection” unless the former rain has first done its work (Ministry Magazine, 1939-09-01, p.5). The frame is genuinely Adventist.

But the frame is also, on the essay’s own evidence, disputed. The same journal wrote in 2012 that “these terms have become lightning rods; they engender heated discussions and sometimes more heat than light” (Ministry Magazine, 2012-08-01, p.6). The denomination has not settled which movements belong to which rain. The essay asserts an answer as though the matter were closed, when the church’s own press treats it as open and contested. In plain terms, the essay reads a verdict off a map the church has not finished drawing. That is the difference between theology and the appearance of theology: only one of them admits the dispute is live.

What the Test Costs

The essay asked whose voice is speaking, and the answer it wanted was an outside voice slipping in. But the phrase it chose as the tell has been commended in the Review and Herald for generations and held up as a model in the denomination’s own clergy journal. The fingerprint was our own.

That is the cost of drawing the line where the essay draws it. To make “practicing the presence of God” the mark of a false stream is to place the church’s own devotional inheritance outside the church. A movement may be wrong, and the essay may even be right about OneVoice27, but it will not be shown wrong by a test that fails against its own editors’ pages.

If the voice is counterfeit, the fingerprint will have to be found somewhere the church’s own press has not already put its hand.

— Dr. Miriam Sorensen, Theology Editor