ADVENTIST HISTORY


Ellen White and the Flat Earth BY LOREN SEIB OLD


That ancient people thought Earth was flat shouldn’t surprise us: it looks and feels flat. Even to those of us who understand gravity, “up” and “down” are so intuitive that it is challenging to picture other human beings oriented 180 degrees to where we stand. Te “flat earth” theory enjoyed some popularity in the 19th


century and continues as a fringe view into the 21st.1 It even touched briefly the unfolding message of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Ellen White alludes to it in an enigmatic passage in Gospel Workers:


I quickly determined that the book was about flat-earth theory, and then I was even more surprised to find within it a quote that I recognized as coming from Ellen White.


“When at one time a brother came to me with the message that


the world is flat, I was instructed to present the commission that Christ gave his disciples, ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations ... and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end.’ In regard to such subjects as the flat-world theory, God says to every soul, ‘What is that to thee? follow thou Me.’ I have given you your commission. Dwell upon the great testing truths for this time, not upon matters that have no bearing upon our work.”2


The Bible’s Earth A spherical Earth was proposed by Pythagoras as early as the 6th century BCE. Around 330 BCE, Aristotle offered empirical evidence for a spherical Earth based on observation of lunar eclipses. But Christian scholars struggled for centuries to reconcile scientific evidence of a moving, spherical Earth with the Bible,


30 AD VENTIS T T OD A Y


which they insisted must be the ultimate authority on the shape, construction, and location of our world. John wrote about “the four corners of the earth” (Rev. 7:1), and corners are not generally associated with spheres. Other passages refer to the “vault” of heaven, which sounds like a ceiling arching over a flat world (Isa. 40:20, 21; Job 22:14). Our blue planet is “founded upon the seas” (Psa. 24:2), which are immeasurably deep (Jer. 31:37) and stretched out “above the waters,” which are “under the earth” (Psa. 136:6; Ex. 20:4), making the continents massive floating raſts. Te world isn’t traveling through space, either, according to Psalm 93:1: “Yea, the world is established, never to be moved.” Te familiar story of Joshua in the battle with the Amorites specifies that the Sun—not Earth—stood still (Josh. 10:13). So, the planet was flat, immovable, and at the center of the universe, with Sun, Moon, and stars circling above it. Te Ptolemaic spherical Earth suspended in space gained ecclesiastical acceptance only aſter extensive debate. Geocentrism—the idea that Earth was the center of the


universe—was harder to give up. For advocating the Copernican model of planets circling the Sun, the astronomer Galileo was condemned as a heretic. Even Luther, Calvin, and Wesley rejected the Copernican cosmology on biblical grounds. Yet, by the Middle Ages, the spherical Earth was considered


conventional wisdom among most educated people. Tat Christopher Columbus had to fight the Catholic Church to get sponsorship for his Atlantic crossing is a myth propounded by American writer Washington Irving, who wanted to make the case that science was held back by recalcitrant Christianity. Columbus had no doubt about the sphericity of Earth; his problem was convincing investors that he could sail to the other side of it and bring back riches for them.


Alexander Gleason Te Second Great Awakening—the historical revival from which Seventh-day Adventists originated—led to a new level of literalism in Bible interpretation. While Adventists were calculating day-for- year time prophecies and asserting that a six-day creation began a mere 6,000 years ago, other Biblicists were studying Scripture’s descriptions of Earth. In 1979 I wandered into an antique store in Crookston,


Minnesota, where a title caught my eye. On a shelf of old books, I saw Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe? by Alexander Gleason, released in 1890 by the Buffalo Electrotype and Engraving Company. I quickly determined that the book was about flat-earth theory, and then I was even more surprised to find within it a quote that I recognized as coming from Ellen White.


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