The Third, Prophetic, “Shut Door” (Rev 3:7)
The topic of the Shut Door has been, frankly, due to prevailing misunderstandings, an “embarrassing” one in the history of Seventh-day Adventism. That mainly stems from the fact that it is the one teaching/understanding where early Adventist all had to express that they had been somewhat wrong, even in “error”, in their prior understanding on what was then such a decisive and divisive issue. (See this document by the White Estate for a developmental history of this topic amongst early Adventists/SDA’s). The fact of the matter is that these early Adventist were actually pointedly wrong in the extent to which they had believed that the (first understood) Shut Door (a.k.a. the “Midnight Cry’s” Shut Door (Matt 25:1-13)) applied, and not merely because they had believed that there had then been a “Shut Door” event (i.e., a demarcating point in time that enduringly separated the aware “just” from the equally aware/knowing “unjust”).[1] As EGW correctively said in 1883 (Ms. 4 = 1SM 63-64):
