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Karl Kime's observation echoes ours. He wrote,

The sanctuary doctrine is hopelessly anthropomorphic. It pictures divine beings performing activities in time (”On October 22, 1844, Pacific Standard Time, Jesus entered the Most Holy Place”) in a specific place. These beings are traditionally pictured as having legs and arms and heads, and they roam around in the tabernacle of heaven, a “place” theoretically capable of being mapped if we just knew the appropriate celestial coordinates. Yet surely if it were a place, some egghead working at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (just over the hill from where I live) would have located it—or at least theorized its location—by now.

The entire story bears a resemblance to an episode of Star Trek. More importantly, why would an omniscient, omnipresent God need a “body” or a tabernacle to perform “work”? And why is the “investigative judgment” taking so long? I have an outmoded laptop computer that works faster. And isn’t the average high school physics student, even those educated at Adventist schools, now equipped with sufficient information to force the abandonment of the doctrine as a tale told by ancients, signifying nothing?

The notion that Jesus “intercedes” is the greatest illogicality of the doctrine. Jesus is viewed, at least in orthodox circles, as wholly god, of the same substance as the Father (homoousias to patri) — that is, as god. Why would Jesus need to intercede before God, since He is in the most significant way ontologically identical to God the Father (logically there cannot be two loci of ultimate being)?

Who, precisely, is Jesus interceding with? The divine intercedes with the divine to tell Him something the divine already knows? Excuse me while I change the channel from Star Trek re-runs.

And this leads to a corollary problem: Why would God, who by orthodox definition knows everything immediately, need Jesus to mediate anything? Isn’t it fatally Manichean to suggest that Jesus needs to intercede, persuade, make a case for, judge or do anything at all apart from God? And isn’t it a contradiction of all orthodox theology to suggest that it would take any amount of “time” for God to judge anything, since he is possessed of all knowledge that is knowable at all times? Why would God need any intercession to render a “judgment”? And why would God need to wait until October 22, 1844 (in what time zone — Greenwich Mean Time?) to commence “deciding” anything, when He is defined according to orthodox categories of divine attributes? The whole thing collapses by the sheer weight of its incoherence.

The sanctuary doctrine is merely an embarrassing vestige of our unsophisticated past. Get rid of it. Move on. Any more paper expended in discussing its irremediable idiocies is a waste of trees, not to mention ecclesiastical energy.

Karl Kime

Glendale, California

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