Jones and Waggoner were united and emphatic in uplifting Christ as the Divine One. Their mature presentations were not marred by any lingering sense of Christ being less than eternally pre-existent and equal with the Father. Note how Waggoner exalts Christ in The Glad Tidings, page 141:
Christ was Mediator before sin came into the world, and will be Mediator when no sin is in the universe, and no need for expiation [forgiveness]... He is the very impress of the Father's being... He did not first become mediator at the fall of man, but was such from eternity. No one, not simply no man, but no created being, comes to the Father but by Christ.
In his small book, Christ and His Righteousness (1889, 1890), Waggoner repeats thirty-one times his belief in the full, eternal deity of Christ. The widely promoted idea that he was an Arian or a semi-Arian is refuted by this and other evidence. One recent work published by the Review and Herald asserts that Waggoner taught "that Christ was a created god" [small g]. He never taught this.
Jones joined Waggoner in the same proclamation of the full eternal Deity of our Savior:
In the first chapter of Hebrews Christ is revealed as God, of the name of God, because he is of the nature of God. And so entirely is his nature of the nature of God, that it is the very impress of the substance of God. This is Christ the Saviour, Spirit of God, substance of substance of God. And this it is essential to know in the first chapter of Hebrews in order to know what is his nature revealed in the second chapter of Hebrews as a man.
The very heart of the 1888 message was a clear revival of New Testament justification by faith. But the messengers succeeded in clearing away the debris of many centuries of contentious dispute. What enabled them to make this breakthrough? Not superior wisdom or talent! Their understanding of the cleansing of the sanctuary restored their vision to near-apostolic purity, and was intended by the Lord to prepare a people for Christ's coming. For example:
The just shall live by faith. How much of a man's life must be just? —All, every moment; for the just shall live by faith...
No deed that we can do can be just by the law only. By faith alone can a man or any act of his be just. The law judges a man by his works, and the law is so inconceivably great that no human act can rise to its height. There must therefore be a Mediator through whom justification shall come....
All the deeds of humanity are vitiated...
In Christ is the perfect righteousness of the law, and the grace to bestow the gift of his righteousness through faith. And of this the prophets themselves are witnesses, for they preached justification through Christ, by faith...
There is but one thing in this world that a man needs, and that is justification—and justification is a fact, not a theory. It is the gospel.... Righteousness can only be attained through faith; consequently all things worthy to be preached, must tend to justification by faith....
We need the righteousness of Christ to justify the present just as much as to make perfect the imperfect deeds of the past.
[We] wonder that any should ever suppose that the doctrine of justification by faith is going to lower the law of God. Justification carries the law on the face of it... It establishes the law in the heart. Justification is the law incarnate in Christ, put into the man, so it is incarnate in the man....
Christ gives his righteousness, takes away the sin, and leaves his righteousness there, and that makes a radical change in the man.
As we shall see in a later chapter, Waggoner's relating justification by faith to the law in no way echoes the error of the Roman Catholic council of Trent counterfeit of justification by faith. The 1888 view of justification by faith was to prepare a people of whom the Lord could say: "Here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus." (Revelation 14:12)
Both messengers were charmed with the glory of Christ.
Waggoner urged that we "consider Christ continually and intelligently, just as he is." How can we do that?
To see him "just as he is" requires a full, balanced view of Christ as both our Substitute and Surety, and our Example and Model. It is impossible to appreciate him as our divine Substitute unless we also "see" him as our Example. The latter makes glorious the former, and the former makes effective the latter:
He should be "lifted up" in all his exceeding loveliness and power as "God with us," that his Divine attractiveness may thus draw all unto Him.
The fact that Christ is a part of the God head, possessing all the attributes of Divinity, being the equal of the Father in all respects, as Creator and Lawgiver, is the only force there is in the atonement.... If Christ were not Divine, then we should have only a human sacrifice.... He could have no righteousness to impart to others. The sinner's surety of full and free pardon lies in the fact that the Lawgiver Himself, the One against whom he has rebelled and whom he has defied, is the One who gave Himself for us.
Jones and Waggoner laid the foundation of their message faithfully on the idea that Christ, being our Substitute, imputes his righteousness to the believing sinner. This was the view that the sixteenth-century Reformers held, that our acceptance with God is based entirely on the substitutionary work of Christ—never on an iota or scintilla of our own work:
Since the best efforts of a sinful man have not the least effect toward producing righteousness, it is evident that the only way it can come to him is a gift...
It is because righteousness is a gift that eternal life, which is the reward of righteousness, is the gift of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Christ has been set forth by God as the One through whom forgiveness of sins is to be obtained, and this forgiveness consists simply in the declaration of his righteousness (which is the righteousness of God) for their remission. "God, who is rich in mercy" (Eph. 2:4), and who delights in it, puts his own righteousness on the sinner who believes in Jesus, as a substitute for his sins. Surely, this is a profitable exchange for the sinner, and it is no loss to God, for he is infinite in holiness, and the supply can never be diminished... God puts his righteousness upon the believer. He covers him with it, so that his sin no more appears....
At last the sinner, weary of the vain struggle to get righteousness from the law, listens to the voice of Christ and flees to his outstretched arms. Hiding in Christ, he is covered with his righteousness; and now behold! he has obtained, through faith in Christ, that for which he has been vainly striving... It is the genuine article, because he obtained it from the Source of Righteousness...
There is in the transaction no ground for finding fault. God is just, and at the same time the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. In Jesus dwells all the fullness of the Godhead; he is equal with the Father in every attribute. Consequently the redemption that is in Him—the ability to buy back lost man—is infinite. Man's rebellion is against the Son as much as against the Father, since both are one.
But what the 16th century Reformers never did, Jones and Waggoner went on to do.
They built upon this foundation a grand edifice of Biblical truth that is unique and distinctly Seventh-day Adventist as a completion of the Reformation begun long ago. They developed a message of righteousness by faith parallel to and consistent with the unique Adventist truth of the cleansing of the sanctuary. "The message of Christ's righteousness" that is to lighten the earth with glory is ministered from the most holy apartment of the heavenly sanctuary, where Christ our High Priest is completing his work of reconciliation on this antitypical Day of Atonement.
This required a clearer view of Christ's sacrifice on his cross, and of it is righteousness manifested in human flesh, clearer than had ever been seen before.
We are told by an inspired pen that the loud cry of the third angel's message will be more light than noise:
It is the darkness of misapprehension of God that is enshrouding the world. Men are losing their knowledge of his character.... 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.
We will see how the 1888 message itself fulfilled that specification required of a true outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the latter rain. But we must first take a brief look at how Ellen White related herself to the message of Jones and Waggoner. Efforts have been made to discredit their message by representing Waggoner in particular as having apostatized from the truth a few weeks or months following the 1888 Conference.
Two important factors must be noted:
1. Competent modern theologians are beginning to support the view that Waggoner taught at and following the 1888 Conference. They are simply giving up error and taking the Bible for what it reads. Some of these will be cited later in our study as favoring the same view of justification by faith. When Waggoner said that justification by faith "makes a radical change in the man", he meant that the believing sinner is "made obedient to the law". This is not the Roman Catholic view by any means!
2. Ellen White's enthusiastic endorsements of the Jones-Waggoner message continued for years after the 1888 Conference. Here are a few examples:
In 1889 she supported "this light which these men are presenting", and said that "the very message the Lord has sent to the people of this time is being presented in their discourses." "The present message—justification by faith—is a message from God; it bears the divine credentials, for its fruit is unto holiness." In 1890 she spoke of "the evidences given in the past two years of the dealings of God by his chosen servants, ... whom God is using." In 1892 she continued: "God is working through these instrumentalities... The message given us by A.T. Jones and E. J. Waggoner is a message of God to the Laodicean church."
In 1893 she exulted that "light and freedom and the outpouring of the Spirit of God have attended the work" of Jones. In 1895 she spoke frequently of how "God has given them his message. They bear [present tense] the word of the Lord... These men... have been as signs in the world,... moved by the Spirit of God,... [and were] Christ's delegated messengers." "God has upheld them,... and he has given them precious light, and their message has fed the people of God." As late as 1896 she said that "he who rejects the light and evidence God has been liberally bestowing upon us, rejects Christ." Scattered over the years, these endorsements number over two hundred!
Conclusion: the only way to charge apostasy on Waggoner during this period is to discredit Ellen White by assuming that she was either naive, misinformed, or derelict in her duty.
A most essential element of the 1888 message was a refreshing break-through in understanding justification by faith. But before we examine it, our next chapter considers another essential concept taught by both Jones and Waggoner. Documentary evidence exists to show that Waggoner held this view before, during, and after the Minneapolis Conference, even in the face of strong opposition. It was a unique understanding of "Christ's righteousness", and forms an integral part of the message he and Jones presented with Ellen White's endorsement.