Dr. C. Raymond Holmes, a former minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America who became a Seventh-day Adventist in 1971, passed to his rest in the early morning of June 16, 2022, while conducting a seminar at the annual Michigan Conference camp meeting. His wife Shirley, whose conversion to Adventism had preceded and facilitated that of her husband, preceded him in death on May 3, 2021. They had been married 65 years.

After joining the Adventist Church and attending the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University, Ray Holmes distinguished himself as a local pastor and later as dean of students and professor of homiletics at the Andrews Theological Seminary. He would chronicle the story of his journey from Lutheranism to Adventism in his 1974 book Stranger in My Home [1], and would raise his denominational profile even higher with his later book The Tip of An Iceberg, which explains how the authority of Scripture is undermined by the blurring of gender authority through the ordaining of women to ministerial roles identical to those given to men [2].

Background

The son of a Finnish immigrant, Ray Holmes was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on May 14, 1929. Though baptized as an infant into the Lutheran church, his early years were not marked by religious devotion, but in time he was invited to youth meetings at a local Baptist church. His awakened interest in the Christian faith brought him back to the religion of his upbringing. The Lutheran church soon received him into membership, and while singing in the choir at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Waukegan, Ray met Shirley, the woman destined to change his life forever.

After their marriage in June of 1955, Ray and Shirley moved to Marquette in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a part of the state that would remain their home for the rest of their lives. Ray attended Northern Michigan University in Marquette, from which he graduated in May of 1958. Sensing the Lord’s call into full-time gospel ministry, Ray thought of attending a Lutheran seminary in Minneapolis, which had a conservative theological reputation. But for reasons he couldn’t quite understand at the time, the Lord impressed him to apply to a different seminary, this one in Maywood, Illinois, an institution whose liberal theological leanings would test and through conflict confirm his allegiance to Scripture as the Christian’s supreme authority.

Practical sanctification was decidedly unpopular at Maywood, while the higher-critical approach to Scripture was very much in vogue. At one time, Ray later recounted, a bedsheet banner was flown from the Seminary flagpole which read, “Down With Piety” [3]. One aspect of theological liberalism on display among the students was their use of alcoholic beverages, justified on the grounds of Jesus being condemned as a “winebibber” {4]. (Jesus’ enemies also called Him a blasphemer, as I recall (Matt. 9:3; Mark 2:7), which was a lie if ever there was one! Basing one’s conduct on such flimsy evidence would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.)

Ray’s Seminary experience was a daily battle, but his faith survived those three years intact. At the age of 31 he began his first ten years of ministry, marked by positive interaction with the members for whom he labored while simultaneously marked by conflict with fellow ministers who had embraced the higher-critical, doubt-ridden approach to the authority of Scripture. One fellow minister, after hearing Ray’s impassioned defense of Biblical authority, stated vehemently: “The time is soon coming when people like you will not be allowed in the ministry!” [5].

Confronted by Adventism

It was in the midst of this conflict that Pastor Holmes found himself confronted by the doctrinal claims of Seventh-day Adventism. At this pivotal moment in his ministry, Pastor Holmes likely saw himself as being “hit from both sides.” On the one hand, he was contending with the encroachments of theological liberalism in the Lutheran church. On the other, he faced the encroachments within his own family of a theology despised and scorned by the great majority of his fellow conservative Christians. Describing his frustration at this new challenge, he wrote:

I had only a limited knowledge of Seventh-day Adventist doctrines, but I felt certain of their heretical nature, that they represented legalism and a radical departure from historic Christianity [6].

I became familiar with Stranger in My Home soon after its publication, while I was still a teenager. Our family read the book together for evening worship. I was deeply moved by the story. Little did I know at the time that nearly forty years later I would be called to join Dr. Holmes on a key denominational committee that would be summoned to address the issue of women’s ordination.

Dr. Holmes describes as follows his eventual confrontation with the claims of the Bible Sabbath:

As I grappled with myself over the Sabbath, in a desperate search for direction I counseled with three Lutheran theologians. Though they did so in different ways, all of them upheld the principle of the Sabbath while insisting that the observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week was part of Jewish culture. It was certainly a command of God, they said, but only for the time of Moses. Contemporary culture recognizes Sunday as the day of rest and of the Lord’s resurrection. The other nine commandments, however, did still apply, as they were considered to be moral, ethical, and corroborated by creation and human society.

Such counsel was initially pleasing, as I was looking for reasons not to believe the Sabbath. But over the next three years all the reasons I could muster were dashed to bits by the fundamental principle of Bible interpretation adhered to by faithful Protestants since the sixteenth century. It was Luther’s principle of sola scriptura, the Bible alone, and the belief that the Bible is to be interpreted literally unless the context indicates otherwise. In my lonely struggle I did my best to apply that principle to the seventh-day Sabbath, studying every Bible text that referred to it.

Only one conclusion was possible: the Bible upheld the seventh-day Sabbath. Study of the Bible itself convinced me that those three theologians were wrong [7].

“A Hermeneutical Disaster”

As the ordination controversy gained traction in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Dr. Holmes penned the book by which most church members likely remember him: The Tip of An Iceberg, in which he demonstrates how the eradication of gender role distinctions in spiritual leadership is based on the same premise by which theologians from his erstwhile church defended the observance of Sunday over the Biblical Sabbath [8]. Just as the Lutheran theologians with whom Dr. Holmes consulted during his struggle with the claims of Adventism urged him to accept the “principle” of the Sabbath while consigning the seventh day to Jewish culture, so the argument for women’s ordination seeks to consign the primacy of the male gender in spiritual leadership to a patriarchal culture presumably at odds with the Christian message [9].

It isn’t difficult to see just how ruinous such logic can become to more than a few doctrines and moral precepts taught in the Bible. If one relegates the specifics of certain Biblical teachings to an antiquated, supposedly irrelevant culture, retrieving only “principles” from such teachings in the process, where does one stop? This is how many theologically liberal Christians have justified acceptance of homosexual practice within the church—by simply taking the “principle” of marriage, discarding the one-man-one-woman requirement as culturally outdated and applying the marriage “principle” to two men or two women who presume themselves to be “in love.”

A few years ago Time magazine, describing the growing struggle in evangelical churches over the gay issue, noted the historical connection between tolerance for homosexual practice in the church and erasure of gender role distinctions in the home and the church:

For many evangelicals, the marriage debate isn’t really about marriage or families or sex—it is about the Bible itself. And that makes many evangelicals all the more uncompromising. The roots of the conflict are deeply theological. . . .

And there is another, just as fundamental, obstacle. So far no Christian tradition has been able to embrace the LGBT community without first changing its views about women. The same reasoning that concludes that homosexuality is sin is also behind the traditional evangelical view that husbands are the spiritual leaders of marriages and men are the leaders in churches. . . .

“It is not an accident that the women’s-liberation movement preceded the gay-liberation movement,” [Episcopal Bishop Eugene] Robinson says. “Discriminatory attitudes and treatment of LGBT people is rooted in patriarchy, and in order to embrace and affirm gays, evangelicals will have to address their own patriarchy and sexism, not just their condemnation of LGBT people” [10].

More recently the same connection between women’s ordination and the gay issue was noted in The Atlantic regarding the 2019 decision by the United Methodist Church to reject gay clergy and same-sex weddings:

Conservative delegates argued that their position is a matter of biblical fidelity. “Traditional believers regard scripture as being the ultimate authority,” [Keith] Boyette said. “When it comes to something like our teachings on human sexuality and what the Bible spells out as the boundaries there, those are essentials.” Other delegates, however, argued that conservatives focus on this issue to the exclusion of others, such as divorce, and that conservative Methodists are perfectly willing to interpret the Bible’s teachings on other issues, such as women in ministry [11].

Dr. Holmes, rising to address the Theology of Ordination Study Committee appointed by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, warned the church with passion in his voice of the pending “hermeneutical disaster” that would strike the denomination if compromise were adopted relative to the gender authority issue. For me, as a fellow Committee member, those words were among the most decisive and noteworthy of our many hours of deliberation.

Conclusion: The Legacy of C. Raymond Holmes

Dr. Holmes joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church following a brutal inner struggle with his Lutheran faith, rejecting the cultural subversion of the Bible in favor of the supremacy and transcendence of the Bible. Standing before the Theology of Ordination Study Committee in that memorable moment, Dr. Holmes asked, “Did I make a mistake when I made that decision?”

Not long ago Dr. Holmes described to me and some others a reunion he had attended at the Sharon Lutheran Church in Bessemer, Michigan, where he served as pastor at the time the claims of Seventh-day Adventism constrained first his wife and later him to follow the Word of God into sacred history’s final prophetic movement. During Holmes’ pastorate at the aforesaid church, membership was over 600, with two services every Sunday. Now, many years later, the faith of its sponsoring denomination eroded by theological liberalism and its attendant cultural conformity, Dr. Holmes reported that the membership of this church has now dropped to less than 35.

Such continues to be the narrative followed by those who permit the Bible to be trampled underfoot by culture, scholarly conjecture, and the vagaries of experience [12]. Seventh-day Adventists cannot, dare not, travel this primrose path to perdition. The journey, integrity, and legacy of Carl Raymond Holmes offers a clarion call to God’s people to travel instead the narrow path of Biblical faithfulness to life everlasting (Matt. 7:14).

This valiant warrior, one of the scholarly giants of contemporary Adventism, now rests from his labors. Dying with his proverbial “boots on,” he was still pastoring in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—the land of his dearest memories—conducting a seminar at camp meeting, when at last he laid his burdens down. Winston Churchill’s words eulogizing Franklin Roosevelt come to mind: “What an enviable death was his!” The witness and example of C. Raymond Holmes, and that of his dear wife, will endure till the end among the striving Adventist faithful. The special resurrection awaits (Dan. 12:2) [13].

REFERENCES

1. C. Raymond Holmes, Stranger in My Home (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Assn, 1974).

2. ——The Tip of an Iceberg: Biblical Authority, Biblical Interpretation, and the Ordination of Women in Ministry (Wakefield, MI: POINTER Publications, 1994).

3. Ibid, p. 21.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid, p. 23.

6. ----Stranger in My Home, p. 44.

7. ----The Tip of an Iceberg, p. 23 (italics original).

8. Ibid, pp. 87-104.

9. Ibid, p. 88.

10. Elizabeth Dias, “A Change of Heart: Inside the evangelical war over gay marriage,” Time, Jan. 26, 2015, pp. 47-48 (italics supplied).

11. Emma Green, “Conservative Christians Just Retook the United Methodist Church,” The Atlantic, Feb. 26, 2019 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/united-methodists-fracture-lgbt-plan-rejected/583693/

12. Kevin Paulson, “The Trend Continues,” ADvindicate, July 26, 2019 http://advindicate.com/articles/2019/7/17/paulson-draft-1-atack-kn4n4-n82ly

13. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, p. 637.

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