I will now pass to a brief notice of your comments on chapter four; and first your arguments on the “elements of the world.”
You say (page 58):—
“What are these ‘elements’ which the apostle speaks of, in which they were in bondage until God sent forth His Son made under the law? Are they the commandments of God, the law of liberty, that holy, pure law which will be the rule in the Judgment? We think this would be a conclusion most absurd. We claim with great confidence that these ‘elements’ refer to a different system. The original word is defined by Greenfield: ‘Elementary instruction, first principles, the lowest rudiments in knowledge, science, etc.’ The word is translated ‘rudiments’ in the revised version and in the Diaglott. The same word occurs in Colossians 2:20, where it is translated ‘rudiments.’”
I have never been guilty of the absurdity of claiming that these “elements” are the commandments of God. I am just as confident as you are that they refer to something else.
Paul tells me what they are, when he says they are the “elements of the world.”
You say this means the ceremonial law. Will you please tell me what the world had to do with the ceremonial law? If the ceremonial law was the elements of the world, then the world ought to have adopted it, instead of despising the Jews because of it, for we know that the world will love its own. And will you tell me how you reconcile the statement that the ceremonial law is the elements of the world, with your previous statement that it was “given by angels”?
It does not change the argument a particle to translate the word “rudiments.” I readily grant that the rudiments of the world in Colossians 2:20, mean the same as the “elements of the world” in Galatians 4:3. I also claim, what I think you will hardly deny, that the term “rudiments” in Colossians 2:8 has the same meaning that it has in the twentieth verse. It is precisely the same term.
Now in Testimony No. 7, in the chapter on “Philosophy and Vain Deceit,” Sister White quotes Colossians 2:8, and says that she was shown that this verse has especial reference to Spiritualism. That is, philosophy and vain deceit, or Spiritualism, is “after the rudiments of the world.”
Will you claim that there is any connection whatever between the ceremonial law and Spiritualism? Is Spiritualism according to the ceremonial law which God gave to the Jews? Impossible. But it is according to the elements of the world, to the carnal mind, which is enmity against God; it is “according to the course of this world [according to the rudiments, or elements of the world], according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience; among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind,” when “we were by nature the children of wrath.” Ephesians 2:2, 3. The “elements of the world” are “the things that are in the world,” namely, “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” 1 John 2:15, 16. These are not “of the Father,” but are “of the world;” they are practiced by those who know not God, and to these things we were all subject before we were quickened by grace. It is not, as you say, on page 57, that “their being under these ‘elements,’ or ‘rudiments,’ brought them into ‘bondage,“’ but their being under these elements was in itself the bondage—the bondage of corruption.