I've only recently spent 2 years around Adventists. Every time I tell my Evangelical "friends" they me I shouldn't. Why? Because apparently, the SDA church believes that the Archangel Michael IS Jesus.
I don't know if that's a better question for the Traditional Adventists....but frankly, I'm very puzzled. I e-mailed my old SDA Academy Bible teacher, but he hasn't replied yet.....and it's been about a month.
I am also a former Adventist. I was raised in the SDA Church but left last year due to disagreements with some of the 28 fundamental beliefs. To answer your question, many Traditional Adventists do believe that the Archangel Michael is Jesus. Ellen White repeatedly referred to Michael as Christ in her writings.
What you should understand, though, is that Adventism teaches that the term
archangel can refer to the commander of the angels, who would not necessarily be an angel himself. Thus, Adventists today are not calling Jesus a created being by identifying Him as Michael. In Adventist thought, Michael is a title for Christ in His "great controversy" against Satan and the evil angels.
What you should also understand is that most of the Adventist pioneers were anti-trinitarian in their beliefs:
From about 1846 to 1888, the majority of Adventists rejected the concept of the Trinity—at least as they understood it. All the leading writers were antitrinitarian, although the literature contains occasional references to members who held trinitarian views. . . .
Those who rejected the traditional Trinity doctrine of the Christian creeds were devout believers in the biblical testimony regarding the eternity of God the Father, the deity of Jesus Christ "as Creator, Redeemer and Mediator," and the "importance of the Holy Spirit." While some, very early in Adventist history, held that Christ had been created, by 1888 it was widely accepted that he had preexisted from "so far back in the days of eternity that to finite comprehension" he was "practically without beginning." Whatever that beginning may have involved, it was not by "creation." Moreover, they weren't initially convinced that the Holy Spirit was an individual divine Person and not merely an expression for the divine presence, power, or influence.
"Respecting the trinity, I concluded that it was an impossible for me to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, was also the Almighty God, the Father, one and the same being," wrote Joseph Bates regarding his conversion in 1827. He told his father, "If you can convince me that we are one in this sense, that you are my father, and I your son; and also that I am your father, and you my son, then I can believe in the trinity." Because of this difference, he chose to join the Christian Connection rather than the Congregational church of his parents. One might be tempted to dismiss Bates's assessment as simple ignorance of the meaning of Trinity, but there were then and remain today a variety of views claiming the term "Trinity." Cottrell observed in 1869 that there were "a multitude of views " on the Trinity, "all of them orthodox, I suppose, as long as they nominally assent to the doctrine." (
http://www.sdanet.org/atissue/trinit...n-trinity1.htm)
The question of Ellen White's views on the Trinity is debated among Adventists:
In 1846 James White dismissed the doctrine of the Trinity as "the old unscriptural trinitarian creed." A century later, the denomination he co-founded voted its first official endorsement of a statement of "Fundamental Beliefs" that included reference to the Trinity. That a major theological shift occurred is no longer subject to debate. That most of the early leaders among Seventh-day Adventists held an antitrinitarian theology has become standard Adventist history in the forty years since E. R. Gane wrote an M.A. thesis on the topic. What is now disputed in some quarters is Gane's second hypothesis, that Adventist co-founder Ellen G. White (1827-1915) was "a trinitarian monotheist." Since the 1980s, that view has come under intense attack from some writers, mostly from outside the academic community. Nevertheless, the renewed scrutiny of the role of Ellen White in the development of the Adventist Trinity doctrine has raised enough questions to warrant a fresh examination of the issue. (
http://www.sdanet.org/atissue/trinit...n-trinity2.htm)
The belief about Michael relates to the Trinity issue because many of the early Adventists had a different view of the nature of Christ than Adventists today, believing that He had a beginning of some sort. The Adventist pioneers' views were strikingly similar to what Jehovah's Witnesses teach on the Trinity, the origin of Christ, and His preincarnate identity as Michael. Adventism's views on the Trinity have evolved over time (though some would question how much), and you won't find the majority of Adventists today agreeing with JW statements on these matters (although there are still pockets of such thinking here and there within Adventism). So, while Adventists now adamantly insist that the belief in Michael as Jesus does not mean that He is a created being, the early Adventists would not have been so clear on that.
My biggest problem with the Michael-equals-Christ theory is this text:
Daniel 10:12 Then he said to me, "Do not be afraid, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart on understanding this and on humbling yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to your words.
13 "But the prince of the kingdom of Persia was withstanding me for twenty-one days; then behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I had been left there with the kings of Persia. (NASB)
If Michael is only
one of the chief princes, I do not believe that He could be Jesus.
