The following statement is provided by Chris Rupe:

The first thing I remember about Dr. Bernard Brandstater is probably the first thing anyone else would notice… he was exuberant, animated, full of life, and always encouraging. I have never met anyone like him, so refreshing and exciting to be around.

 

Over the past 8 years of working with Feed My Sheep Foundation under Dr. John Sanford, I have had the privilege of being sharpened by Dr. Brandstater’s faith-filled, intellectual conversations—always at scientific conferences or speaking events relating to the topic of origins where our paths would frequently cross. I remember after a creation conference in 2012 when Dr. Brandstater reminded me saying, “Jesus was our Creator before He was our Savior”. Dr. Brandstater understood the foundational importance of the early chapters in Genesis. He understood that once you trivialize and allegorize the foundational biblical doctrine of Adam, original sin, death, paradise lost, and atonement—the Gospel loses it historical context—upon which the cross stands.

 

Dr. Brandstater lived to give Glory to God. With his voice and in his writings, he would implore the church, with all his might and vigor, that we must defend the foundations of our faith—or else we will lose the next generation. I know this was what motivated Dr. Brandstater to invest in me personally. If it were not for Dr. Brandstater, I would not be at Loma Linda University as a graduate student studying geology. He connected me to the Seventh Day Adventist community so that I could continue my calling to defend the Word of God. Thank you Dr. Brandstater!

 

Dr. Brandstater devoted his life for a worthy calling and a worthy Savior. I am just one of the many lives that he has impacted for all eternity.

 

I remember a story Dr. Brandstater once told me about when he was a young medical student. I’d like to read his account of what happened. Dr. Brandstater wrote this in an email in April of 2019:

 

The subject line of the email is “Dealing with Evolution and Creation”:

 

First my own personal story, to tell you when I was first awakened to creationism. I started medical school at Adelaide University in 1945, very fresh and very naive at the age of 16. By a margin of twelve months I was the youngest in my class of about eighty freshmen. …

 

So as a callow youth, I sat in Botany class, being lectured by a female professor named Patricia Mawson. She was a tall imposing redhead, with a strong projected voice, the daughter of the famous Antarctic explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson, who was Adelaide’s professor of geology. Patricia was the unchallenged authority who could fail your course with a single word. In sync with the science of her day, she taught botany within an evolutionary framework, and quoted Darwin repeatedly. All this was in contradiction to the Bible’s account given by Moses in the Book of Genesis, and imprinted in me for years by trusted Bible teachers in Sabbath School. So I was on guard against this teaching of botany.

 

In the lab one day Miss Mawson marched up and down behind the long rows where we students, on lab stools, were peering down our microscopes. We were pencil-sketching what we could see. Miss Mawson would pause at times to examine someone’s sketch. And for no reason she paused behind my stool and enquired, using my surname, which was a professor’s custom:

 

“Well, Brandstater… How are you doing? Are you finding what you’re looking for?”

 

I gulped a few moments, thinking what to say. Then, with an impulsive, reckless burst I answered: “Yes, I think I’m seeing the important things. But I’m not so sure about all that evolutionary stuff.”

 

There was silence for a few seconds. Not a word from Miss Mawson. She stayed briefly there behind me. Then this august professor leaned down and spoke quietly in my ear: “Yes, it is ridiculous, isn’t it!”

 

That surprise response from The Great One gave me renewed courage, and it lasted for weeks. It remains with me even till this late time in my life. I resolved to never again be hesitant to declare my convictions in matters of religious faith.

 

… I was not always well informed about some aspects of science, or about the ancient texts translated for us into the Holy Bible in English. But for me the clear words in my Bible carried authority.

 

... Through my earlier years there was no easy, compelling way to prove the existence of a personal Designer. But just in the last twenty or so years scientists have developed marvelous machines that enable them to examine the details of chemistry that make possible the extremely complex chemistry that is the essential basis of life and all its processes.

 

Cellular structures and processes are now well understood, and their precise chemical make-up is so exact that the world’s best chemists have not figured out how all its complexity first arose, and what was the source of all its magnificent information.

 

Accidental chemical reactions could never, by pure chance bring together the hundreds of amino acids, all in the right order that are needed to make the hundreds of proteins that are essential in every living cell. By means of probability theory they have calculated what are the chances of the right components coming together, all in the right order and at the right time. And the chances are so remote that some scholars declare chance could NEVER do it.

 

Some of the world’s topmost scientists have been bold enough and secure enough in their careers, to admit publicly that nature and its life could not happen without help from a DESIGNER. 

 

… If chance is an impossible explanation, the only alternative is DESIGN. In one of my articles I have declared that the evidence FROM SCIENCE can give us the words of the First Angel of Rev: 14:6,7:“Fear God and give him glory….and worship him that made the heaven and earth, and the fountains of waters.”

 

In our modern, decaying culture I would like this Creation message to be the loud voice message of our church: “Fear God! Quit ignoring him as if he does not exist! Science has proved life must have been designed! Listen to him!”

 

That was the heart cry of Dr. Bernard Brandstater.