On August 11, 2004, Jack Provonsha died in Colton, California, at the age of eighty-four. He was emeritus professor of philosophy of religion and Christian ethics at Loma Linda University, and the founding director of the university’s Center for Christian Bioethics.
An ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister, Provonsha earned an M.D. at the College of Medical Evangelists (currently Loma Linda University) in 1953. He joined its faculty five years later. In 1967, Claremont Graduate School awarded him a Ph.D. in Christian ethics.
Prior to assuming his university post, Provonsha served as a pastor in Utah, a missionary pilot in Alaska, and a family physician. Spectrum readers will remember him as a contributor to the magazine and as the author of God Is With Us (1974), A Remnant in Crisis (1993), and You Can Go Home Again (1982), among other books.
A memorial service is planned for September 18, 2004, at 2 p.m., in the Campus Hill Church on the campus of Loma Linda University. The Center for Christian Bioethics, which can be contacted at (909) 558–4956, is organizing the service.
—The Editors
By David R. Larson
(August 23, 2004)
Charles Scriven reports that he first heard Doctor Provonsha at a conference for Seventh-day Adventist doctors and ministers that he attended as a young man with his family of origin, presumably somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. As an earliteen more than forty winters ago, I first heard him at a similar conference at Hobergs Resort in Northern California’s "Lake District" that I attended with my father, mother, brother, and sister.
Instead of participating in the recreational activities planned for the young people, I slipped into the large meeting room and from a discrete position along the back wall listened to what the adults were discussing. I’m still glad I did because the topic that snowy afternoon, if not the actual title, was "contemporary issues in religion and medicine."
I now recall only two of the issues: seamless hose and hypnosis. His face totally expressionless, Doctor Provonsha, a panelist from what we now call Loma Linda University, a campus six hundred or so miles to the south of Hobergs, said nothing in response to the report that some deemed it immodest for Adventist women to wear seamless hose in public. He had much to say about hypnosis, however.
Doctor Provonsha approached this topic by portraying humans as beings who are created in God’s image with self-determining freedom. Some things, like rocks, can be acted upon; others, like laboratory mice, can react to pleasurable or painful stimuli; alone among earth’s living beings, humans can freely act, he suggested. Anything that permanently decreases this human capacity is ethically wrong, he contended. Anything that permanently preserves and promotes it is ethically right.
Although some concluded that he opposed every form of hypnosis because they all decrease self-determining freedom, his position was actually more subtle and conditional. If in specific cases it would permanently decrease a patient’s self-determining freedom, hypnosis would be ethically wrong, he held. If in other cases it would permanently increase this kind of freedom, it could be ethically right.
Correctly understanding Doctor Provonsha’s early position on hypnosis is important for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the term is used with so many different meanings that generalizations can be dangerous. On the other hand, throughout his subsequent career he addressed many other ethical issues as he did hypnosis, the first topic he addressed as a specialist in Christian ethics. When discussing such matters, he always returned to a vital question: Will the practice in question permanently increase or decrease self-determining freedom, the image of God in humanity?
This theme was an important thread in the fabric of Doctor Provonsha’s thought. Another was radical monotheism, an overwhelming sense of God’s presence at the center of all things. A third was wholism. He explicitly agreed with Plato that the relationship between the human body and soul is a microcosm of the relationship between God and the universe. He disagreed with both Plato’s dualistic and Spinoza’s monisitic or pantheistic understandings of this relationship, however. Human nature is a multidimensional unity, as is all reality, he held.
Agape, volitional love, the positive expression of self-determining freedom, was a fourth important thread in Doctor Provonsha’s thought; the importance of symbolic words and deeds was a fifth. That Jesus Christ lived and died to change our views of God rather than God’s view of us was a sixth. The distinctive mission of the Advent movement as a "prophetic minority" was a seventh.
In all these ways and others, Doctor Provonsha was an eloquent spokesperson for a distinctive school of North American Adventist theology. Others who saw things—or still see them—largely as he did include Dalton Baldwin, David and Daniel Cotton, Paul Heubach, A. Graham Maxwell, D. Malcolm Maxwell, and Louis Venden. The relationship between human freedom and divine foreknowledge has been a matter of continuing discussion among these influential leaders. Doctor Provonsha denied complete and absolute divine foreknowledge, not because he thought God is in any way inadequate but because he believed that free choices are intrinsically incapable of being known before they are made.
Although he studied under Paul Tillich, Paul Lehman, and Joseph Fletcher at Harvard University, and although his major professor at Claremont Graduate School, Joseph C. Hough, Jr., is now the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he always regarded Ellen White as one of his most important authors and Arthur Bietz, longtime senior minister of the White Memorial and Glendale City Seventh-day Adventist Churches, as one of his most decisive mentors.
Doctor Provonsha suffered many hardships and sorrows in every chapter of his life; nevertheless, he was far from humorless. Among his colleagues in the Loma Linda University Faculty of Religion, probably only Wilber Alexander committed to memory a longer list of amusing anecdotes. Like the rabbis with whom he was often compared, he loved to tell stories, particularly those with comical but thought-provoking twists. He also enjoyed painting, sculpturing, hiking, rock climbing, scuba diving, and playing his harmonica, an instrument I think he learned to play in his early and lonely years as a shepherd in Utah. When he was alone with his closest friends, he also enjoyed singing.
Not long ago, when discussing his approaching death Doctor Provonsha observed that music, not mathematics, is the proper mode of discourse when considering eschatology, the study of "last things." The music has momentarily stopped for him, much like the magnificent pause in the "Hallelujah Chorus" of Handel’s Messiah. Soon, very soon for all of us, the songs of joy and gladness will begin again; but this time they will never end! "Praise God from whom all blessings flow!"
By Roy Branson
(August 20, 2004)
Jack Provonsha teaching an hour-long Sabbath School overflowing a classroom amphitheater of people in the Loma Linda University Medical Center: That is my enduring image of the calm, steely man of God who shaped generations of Loma Linda students to believe that their faith was reasonable, a professor who enduringly influenced the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Together with Graham Maxwell, his colleague at Loma Linda, Jack Provonsha reassured thousands of Adventist health-care professionals that knowing the truth about God is very much the same as knowing the truth about nature. Both are the work of reason. Scientific knowledge is reason’s reflection on God’s creation. Or as Jack put it, "the laboratory can be as holy as the chancel and the marketplace as sacred as the sanctuary."
Jack Provonsha and Graham Maxwell deemphasized paradox and mystery. Why has the Lord not returned? We know the answer. God is still revealing his character to the unfallen worlds. How should we act morally? We know how to find out: We use our reason to learn from the Bible how Jesus acted, and from God’s creation what the principles of morality are.
Jack Provonsha, who earned a Ph.D. in Christian ethics and was also a practicing physician throughout his teaching career, embodied the conviction that there is no necessary opposition between being a modern person and a faithful Seventh-day Adventist. He taught at a time when it was still an open question whether Adventist theologians should listen appreciatively to voices "outside the faith." He always did.
Jack’s classroom lectures and writings were peppered with quotes and concepts from not only the Bible and Ellen White, but also from myriad Christian and secular authors. Jack lived the health message. For exercise, he carried weighted backpacks up the hills in his regular walks behind his home. He arrived promptly at appointments, was always prepared, didn’t pound his fists in committees, and led his younger colleagues in establishing Loma Linda’s Center for Christian Bioethics. He was thought of as a possible president of Loma Linda University.
Jack was not someone with whom one was chummy. You didn’t just drop in to his office to share a good laugh. But if you called him at moments of decision in your life, you remembered what he said. The first time we had such a chat he encouraged me to go directly from the Seminary into a Ph.D. program in his chosen field of religious ethics.
The second time we talked, I had completed my doctorate and was establishing the ethics program at the SDA Theological Seminary. The president of Andrews University had informed the Seminary faculty that we were all duty-bound to come to his office and tell him if we had views that deviated at all from traditional Adventist beliefs on the age of the earth—whether or not that was a subject we were teaching. When I called Jack for advice, he unhesitatingly said, "If you are not teaching that subject, the president has no right to demand to know what you think."
I valued every minute I was able to spend in Jack’s presence. But one doesn’t need to be a person professionally devoted to religious ethics to mourn his loss. Any Seventh-day Adventist who espouses a reasonable faith owes a debt of gratitude to Jack Provonsha.
By Charles Scriven
(August 17, 2004)
I neither taught with, nor studied under, Jack Provonsha.
But I read his books and articles, now and then listened to his talks, and once sat around a table, for two days, with Jack and fifteen other highly stressed Adventist theologians.
That was in June of 1981, and seventeen of us were in a hotel in Atlanta. The background to our meeting was the controversy associated with Desmond Ford. The pressure associated with that controversy was pushing some teachers and pastors out of their jobs, and some out of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
By the end we had put our names to a two and one-half page document we called "The Atlanta Affirmation." As no one will have to guess, we expressed our dismay at the defensiveness and recrimination that was undermining the "openness, curiosity, trust and love" that we considered necessary to the fulfillment of Adventist mission. Today it’s a safe bet, however, that few Adventists—for that matter, few Adventist college teachers—have heard of "The Atlanta Affirmation." I suppose that today many younger Adventists have never heard of Desmond Ford.
Had we known that, would we have tried so hard to say something that would matter?
I don’t know. But I do remember that someone had asked Jack Provonsha to share a devotional thought on the second day of the Atlanta meeting. He told us in that devotional that when he was a young man—a physician who had also trained to be a theologian—he’d dreamed of helping to fix the problems in the Church. But now he was older—perhaps he was the age then that I am now—and the problems seemed as severe and intractable as ever.
So he’d come to see, Jack told us, that you have to find the meaning—the satisfaction—in the journey itself. I am sure he backed this up with reference to some biblical story, but I have forgotten which one. What stayed with me was the passion of a man who was still digging into Scripture, still facing the hard questions—still fighting the good fight—even though he sensed that his career would end and the problems remain.
Now all this reminds me that Jack was, among other things, the embodiment of hope. Optimism is confidence based on what you can see to be true. Hope is confidence based on the trust you have in a God whose ways are past finding out and whose earth and church are awash—always, it seems—in turbulence.
But if in this world setbacks weave in and out with breakthroughs, it is still possible to be, like the prophets, resolute and joyful alike. As Jack showed us in Atlanta, you can, despite the whips and scorns of time, face forward, challenge the darkness, and invest in the possibility of…well, in the possibility of daybreak.
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