That is not the Seventh-day Adventist position. We do not adhere to "private interpretation" (2 Pet. 1:20 KJB). God, in the word itself, interprets His own words, line upon line (Gen. 40:8; Isa. 28:10,13). In other words, the Bible is interpreted internally, without 'me', 'you', or 'them' ever having existed at all. It says what is says whether 'you', 'me' or 'them' ever read it. So it is not "predicated upon a chiliastic interpretation of Revelation". The very inherent structure of Revelation (see pages 5-38 -
Revelation 17 - Hydra Therapy, The Cure For A 7 Heads Ache : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive ) is built into itself, and the parallelisms define each place.
If what you claimed was correct, we would expect to find documentary and archaeological evidence of early Christians adhering to the Adventist interpretation, in particular, faith groups that are cited by Ellen G. White in the Great Controversy as being proto-Adventist, but when we look at the evidence concerning these groups, we find that almost none of them accepted the Nicene Creed or agreed with it doctrinally (the Paulicans, Bogomils and Albigensians certainly did not), which is a categorical problem, since acceptance of the doctrines in the Creed is a prerequisite to normative Christianity, and what is more, none of them could be verified as having worshipped on the Sabbath in preference to worshipping on the First Day, and many adhered to strange or unusual doctrines, except for the Waldensians, who were for the most part proto-Protestant (except that they taught that any righteous Christian male could confect the Sacraments, which reflects both a Sacramental theology alien to Adventism and also has a Donatist component and a crypto-Pelagian component in that it presupposes that such a thing as a righteous Christian male exists and that the righteousness of clergy is relevant with regards to sacramental efficacy. At any rate, whatever the distinctives of the Waldensians were, their beliefs were close enough to the mainstream Protestantism so that they later joined with the Calvinists in Switzerland before later adopting a more Arminian-Wesleyan approach to soteriology (and are now the largest Protestant denomination in Italy).
So at any rate, since we can’t find any historical examples of people adhering to the SDA interpretation prior to the 19th century, and since systematics using pure exegesis without regard to Patristics such as Karl Barth wound up with an exegesis that looks more or less like other Protestant systems of interpretation (and Karl Barth was extremely pure), and also since Martin Luther and John Calvin, while they did care about Patristics, also did subject everything to sola scriptura testing and wound up with Lutheranism and Calvinism, and also, well, the other major problem is that Adventism has a bit of an elephant in the room in that you regard the writings of Ellen G. White to be inspired and infallible prophecy. Naturally, this will shape your interpretation of Scripture in the same way the Roman Catholic belief since Vatican I in Papal Infallibility will shape their interpretation around those issues where Popes made a statement using the formula required to make it an infallible declaration of faith. If the writings of Ellen G. White are inspired prophecy, they cease to be of “private interpretation” according to Adventist interpretation of that verse*, which creates a chicken and egg problem.
Out of curiosity by the way, do you understand that the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Assyrian churches are historically separate and distinct from the Roman Catholic Churches and were not and are not under the control of the Bishop of Rome?
* The Patristic interpretation of 2 Peter is that no prophecy may be interpreted independently from the Church, and that no prophecy is an exposition of itself (indeed the Syriac translation of the Bible actually renders the verse in this way, that no prophecy contains its own exposition, that is to say, no prophecy is self-explanatory, thus, the Church has to discern what the prophecy means and in some cases it might not be knowable with certainty until the event itself).
The idea that 2 Peter is merely mandating exegesis is interesting, but regarding this point, while I am all for exegesis, there are numerous instances of Adventists following an interpretation that seems to traditional Christians such as myself to be extremely eisegetical, for example, Memorialism is insisted upon based on the phrase “this do ye in remembrance of me” in 1 Corinthians 11, however, in the original Greek anamnesis does not mean “memorial” but rather “anamnesis”, that is ot say, a sense of recapitulaion or participation in the prior moment, and in 1 Corinthians 10 St. Paul makes it clear that bread and wine are the Body and Blood, and additionally in the corresponding institution narratives in Matthew and Mark, they lack the phrase “do this in remembrance of me,” and thus an interpretation that involves our Lord invalidating his statement “This is my body” by declaring it subsequently to be a memorial is not sustainable, because the phrase relied upon to negate a literal physical or spiritual interpretation of This is my body or This is my blood are absent from Matthew and Mark and only present with regards to the Blood of our Lord in Luke, and are also absent from the Eucharistic discussion in John ch. 6.
Another example of Adventist eisegesis is over Tradition. Routinely traditional Christians are accused of following man-made tradition on the basis of Mark 7:13, but if read in context, our Lord is in this pericope and related pericopes in Matthew and Luke clearly talking about the Oral Torah of the Pharisees which was at the time being written down by the Scribes and would later be revised into the Mishnah and form the basis for the Talmud and the Rabinnical Jewish system after the destruction of the Temple and the various central authorities that Second Temple Judaism depended on for rulings on issues of Jewish law. Conversely, in 1 Corinthians 11:2, and in 2 Thessalonians 2:15 we are told to follow the tradition of the Apostles, and in 2 Thessalonians 2:37 to separate from those who do not (this passage also relates to Galatians 1:8-9.
I’ve also never seen any detailed Adventist exegesis of Galatians 3:15-5:15, and when I’ve complained about this, I’ve had 2 Peter quoted at me to the extent that St. Paul is prone to being misinterpreted. Yet paradoxically, if that’s the case, well, the Adventist Memorialist interpretation of the Eucharist rests on a reading of 1 Corinthians 11 which is not compatible with the direct parallel texts to 1 Corinthians 11 in the Gospels According to Mark and Matthew. Likewise, Colossians 2:8 is used to attack the traditional church, but when Colossians 2:16 is brought up with regards to the Sabbath, 2 Peter is again invoked regarding the Pauline epistles.
We also have the important issue of the identification by Adventists of Christ our True God with St. Michael the Archangel, which is not explicitly described in any Scripture and the problem is that our Lord cannot be God and an Angel, since angels are inherently created, literally being the messengers of God, whereas Christ is according to John 1:1-18 the Logos, the only begotten Son and Word of God, who is God, who created all things, who became flesh for our salvation, and in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.
Additionally there’s also the problem of Adventists denying established aspects of the history of the early church, for example, the historical process of the development of the New Testament canon. It is a fact that there is no text prior to the 39th Paschal Encyclical written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 AD which says that only the 27 books we now identify as the New Testament should be used, no more, no less; all prior canonical documents either are missing books (such as 2 Peter, Jude, 2 John, 3 John, and especially the Apocalypse of St. John (Revelation) or add books such as the psuedeipgraphical Apocalypse of Peter and 1 Barnabas, or the spurious Epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans, or legitimate Patristic writings that the early church decided were important but not New Testament Scripture, such as 1 Clement and the Didascalia and the Shepherd of Hermas. And all fourth century manuscripts we have that contain a complete New Testament differ from the Athanasian canon, which is consistent with the scholarly view that it took about another century for this canon to be fully accepted through the Greek and Latin churches, and in the case of Syriac Aramaic speaking Christians, it was not until the early 6th century that these books had been translated and added to the West Syriac version of the Peshitta.
There are other problems as well, such as inaccurate claims about what Emperor Constantine did or did not do (for instance, it was not St. Constantine but St. Theodosius who, in 379, made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire, banning Paganism, Arianism and other false religions; I have not encountered any Adventist text that acknowledges the persecution of Nicene Christians by Arians who denied the deity of Christ and the Trinity between 336 AD and 386 AD (for this even continued into the reign of St. Theodosius in that while he was opposed to the Arians, the large numbers of Arian converts among the Lombards frightened him, and he felt compelled to try to turn over a Christian church in Milan to the Arians, which was prevented only by a vigil held in that church for several days by St. Ambrose of Milan, and fortunately, the Emperor blinked first, and the Arians did not in that case engage in an insurrection, but later Arians did sack Rome, repeatedly, and VIsigothic Arian tribes in North Africa later converted to Islam.
