Dr. Erwin R. Gane, retired editor of the Adult Sabbath School Lessons and former professor of theology at several Seventh-day Adventist colleges in Australia and North America, passed to his rest on September 26, 2021, in Fort Collins, Colorado, in the company of his loving family. He was 90 years of age [1].

Because of Dr. Gane’s pivotal role as an apologist for distinctive Adventism in key doctrinal controversies in the church during the last decades of the twentieth century, together with his mentorship in my own theological and spiritual journey during my youth and young adulthood, I have chosen to pen the following lines in his memory.

Historian and Theologian

Dr. Gane was a scholar of the Protestant Reformation, one of the very best in that field in the context of late-twentieth century Adventism. His command of the issues of righteousness by faith, the perfecting of history’s final generation of Christians, together with the study of the books of Daniel, Revelation, and the doctrine of the sanctuary, made his academic ministry enlightening and faith-affirming to those blessed by his instruction and influence.

An Australian by birth, Dr. Gane taught at Sydney SDA High School and Avondale College (now Avondale University) and also served as a pastor in New South Wales. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1962 to pursue graduate studies in theology at Andrews University and the University of Nebraska, the latter being where he received his doctorate in the English Reformation. He went on to teach religion at Union College and Pacific Union College, also serving as a local pastor in Michigan, New Jersey, and California. In 1986 he began his work as editor of the Adult Sabbath School Lessons, from which he retired in 1995.

Through the course of his life he authored nine books and a number of professional articles, and was a sought-after lecturer relative to modern and contemporary issues in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Scars of Battle

Indeed, it was his role as a prominent defender of classic Adventist doctrine relative to the gospel, righteousness by faith, perfection of character, and the sanctuary message, which earned for him the affection and accolades of faithful Seventh-day Adventists in so many parts of the world, in particular those impacted by challenges to our faith relative to the above issues during the final decades of the recent century.

It was my privilege to meet and hear Dr. Gane for the first time as a junior at Monterey Bay Academy in central California, when the righteousness by faith/perfection controversy was beginning to escalate in North America, Europe, and Australia. My own interest in these issues had begun in my early teens, and as the justification-focused, perfection-denying theology of such as Desmond Ford and Robert Brinsmead gained increased publicity during the 1970s, it became increasingly clear to me that the unscriptural, truncated gospel taught by these men and those of similar thinking posed a mortal threat to the integrity of the church’s doctrinal and moral witness. The decades since have served only to enforce and vindicate this conviction on my part.

Dr. Gane and I became fast friends at that first meeting of ours at Monterey Bay Academy. A year later, as a senior at the same school, I urged the Religious Vice-President of the student body to invite Dr. Gane to speak again, which he did. Few speakers could connect with young people as powerfully as he; few could help the young more clearly understand what the great issues in the church were all about and why they were not—as many naively assumed during those years—a matter of mere semantics. Gane’s ministry offered notable evidence that distinctive Adventist doctrines were neither unpopular nor relegated to irrelevance among intelligent Adventist young people, despite stereotypes and urban legends to the contrary. More recent movements such as GYC (Generation of Youth for Christ) have confirmed more dramatically what Dr. Gane’s labors demonstrated.

The decision of the Pacific Union College administration to invite Desmond Ford to teach theology on their campus exacerbated further the salvation-and-perfection controversy in North American Adventism, not to mention on the PUC campus itself. Dr. Gane had warned the PUC administration and faculty against bringing Ford to teach at the school, citing the departures of his teachings from Scripture and the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy. Sadly, Dr. Gane’s warnings were not heeded, with devastating consequences for the college, its constituency, and countless other Adventists in the North American Division.

My freshman year as a theology major at PUC was the second year of the controversy on that campus, and Dr. Gane and I often found ourselves conferring together in our efforts to facilitate awareness of the issues that were being discussed, helping students in particular to discern the difference between the errors of the Fordian gospel and the teachings of the Bible and Ellen White’s writings. Early that year Dr. Gane invited me to become his reader in the religion department during my sophomore year. The joy of working with him in such close proximity became one of the most treasured memories of my college experience.

Toward the beginning of my sophomore year, Desmond Ford launched his infamous attack on the doctrine of the investigative judgment, the significance of 1844, and the sanctuary message in general, thus inflaming the conflict in the church and on campus even further. Dr. Gane did his best to help both colleagues and students understand the Biblical soundness of this core doctrine of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. His knowledge and charisma enabled him, better than most, to put into simple words what many regarded as complicated subjects.

Dr. Gane was honored to serve on the Sanctuary Review Committee assembled by the General Conference to assess the credibility of Ford’s doctrinal challenges at the Glacier View consultation in Colorado in August of 1980. He would later recount times during those meetings when he went with Ford on walks in the woods, trying to help him understand the Biblical basis of the 1844 theology and its various facets—in vain, as it turned out.

Dr. Gane’s insight and courage in warning the college of the dangers of Ford’s teachings should rightly have earned him the gratitude of colleagues and the school’s administration. Tragically, as is so often the case in such circumstances, just the opposite was the result. Many of Gane’s fellow faculty, along with top college leaders, were sympathetic to the Ford heresies, including his denial of the sanctuary message which the General Conference had rejected. Even if not entirely in accord with Ford’s arguments, many believed he had the right to promote his theories without losing his job. (Too many, then as now, wrongly held that scholars had the right to dispute even fundamental Adventist doctrines in the name of so-called “academic freedom.’) Ford’s defrocking at the recommendation of the GC made his sympathizers at Pacific Union College both livid with rage and determined to wreak vengeance on supporters of the church’s Bible-based teachings.

Dr. Gane, understandably from their perspective, became their prime target.

I will spare our readers the sordid details, but Dr. Gane truly suffered for his integrity at the hands of certain of his colleagues, many of whom were as guilty as Ford in denying our faith and thus quite ineligible for compensation from the church’s coffers, let alone worthy to vent their anger on one whose faithfulness to our teachings had put them to shame. My junior year at the college was, sadly, the last of Dr. Gane’s teaching career in the denomination. The years that followed grievously tested his faith and that of his family.

But the Lord hadn’t forsaken this valiant champion of truth, whose battle scars could easily have earned him the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor if such commendations existed. In 1986 Dr. Gane was called by the General Conference to serve as editor of the Adult Sabbath School Lessons, an appointment which in many respects vindicated his ministry during those years of struggle.

That Signature Sense of Humor

As was noted in the Adventist Review memoir of Dr. Gane, he was blessed with a special sense of humor [2]. Young people especially loved him for it. Books have been written to celebrate the wit of various political figures in America and elsewhere. Examples of Dr. Gane’s wit might fill a book’s pages as well.

When he preached the Sabbath sermon for which I had suggested he be invited during my senior year in academy, he spoke of an encounter between his father and a stranger on the streets of Sydney, Australia, in which the stranger asked, “Have you been born again?” (Pronounced a-gane in Australian English, remember!) Dr. Gane’s father replied, “Of course, and I’ve been a Gane ever since!” Sitting in the choir loft that Sabbath, I caught on immediately, but a friend sitting in front of me took five minutes to catch on, only to barely control his laughter once he did!

Dr. Gane often spoke of theology he disagreed with as “unmitigated bunk” or “unmitigated poppycock”—phrases you had to hear him use to understand how amusing they could be! He would also speak of people whose minds were “like concrete, thoroughly mixed and permanently set.” When advising young people of the challenges of marriage, he spoke of how “moonlight and roses soon changes to daylight and dishes.”

Conclusion

In fairness, Dr. Gane had his rough side as well. Anyone who whispered in his classes learned quickly what it meant to incur his wrath. Romantic couples who engaged in public affection beyond what he considered appropriate could also expect a reprimand. But we loved him anyway.

Most of all, Dr. Gane knew how to blend courage with compassion, wisdom with knowledge, boldness with love. No matter how strongly he denounced error, few who heard him could doubt that his heart nurtured no hatred for those he differed with.

Even in his later years, as his health declined, Dr. Gane continued to bless the church with his ministry, even if he had to use a wheelchair from which to teach a weekly Sabbath School class. I remember cheering his heart over the telephone one evening as I told him how his son Roy, now a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Languages at Andrews University, was presenting a seminar on the Andrews campus titled, “1844 for Dummies,” which was attracting large numbers of students who weren’t even getting worship credit for attending.

Truly, “a prince and a great man [has] fallen this day in Israel” (II Sam. 3:38). Let us pray Dr. Gane’s example inspires many more of the young to stand without compromise for the truths of God’s Word, even in the face of contempt and malignity from peers and colleagues. Aiming to please as many and offend as few as possible is not part of the true Christian’s agenda. Those faithful watchmen on Zion’s walls who warn of danger from afar might, like Dr. Gane, suffer for their courage. Perhaps they won’t experience the same earthly vindication Dr. Gane received when he was rescued from professional oblivion by the leaders of God’s world church.

But a much greater and more permanent reward awaits the striving, victorious faithful. Crowns of splendor and mansions of abundance await the triumph of those willing to lose friends and temporal security for the sake of divine truth and the saving of souls from error.

Few inspired passages could more rightly encapsulate the legacy of Dr. Erwin Roy Gane than the following:

If God abhors one sin above another, of which His people are guilty, it is doing nothing in case of an emergency. Indifference and neutrality in a religious crisis is regarded of God as a grievous crime, and equal to the very worst type of hostility against God [3].

We cannot purchase peace and unity by sacrificing the truth. The conflict may be long and painful, but at any cost we must hold fast to the Word of God [4].

REFERENCES

1. “Former Sabbath School Editor Erwin Gane Passes Away at 90,” Adventist Review, Oct. 1, 2021 https://www.adventistreview.org/church-news/story16869-former-sabbath-school-editor-erwin-gane-passes-to-his-rest-at-90?fbclid=IwAR2ULmzR18prpJMZoVZ2hvvde1qv-hlsFEF8sZI9qbcvJh4Y7-hBm7vtXps

2. Ibid.

3. Ellen G. White, Testimonies, vol. 3, p. 281.

4. ----Historical Sketches, p. 197.

Pastor Kevin Paulson holds a Bachelor’s degree in theology from Pacific Union College, a Master of Arts in systematic theology from Loma Linda University, and a Master of Divinity from the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University. He served the Greater New York Conference of Seventh-day Adventists for ten years as a Bible instructor, evangelist, and local pastor. He writes regularly for Liberty magazine and does script writing for various evangelistic ministries within the denomination. He continues to hold evangelistic and revival meetings throughout the North American Division and beyond, and is a sought-after seminar speaker relative to current issues in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He presently resides in Berrien Springs, Michigan