THE NEXT ADVENTISM
We Need a New and Better
Understanding of Ellen White BY LOREN SEIB OLD
I remember when I got old enough to go to the adult Sabbath School class in my home church. It was a sort of rite of passage: to get to discuss faith with adults. I always enjoyed open- ended questions that made people think, not just give pat answers. Yet, every time an especially engaging question came up, one old woman would invariably say, “Ellen White says that there are things that are none of our business, and it is dangerous to look into them.” Te class would fall silent. Trough the years, I have heard from a great many people
who make White sound like the mythical troll under the bridge—they declare that no one can pass who doesn’t agree to everything she said (or allegedly said). Most of us who grew up Adventist heard someone claim, “Ellen White says somewhere…,” and it didn’t much matter whether she actually said it or not. So many apocryphal Ellen White ideas were floating around! Tat simple phrase was an effective way to control, even manipulate, others. And there is such a plethora of her writings from which you can extract lines to prove a variety of points—even contradictory ones.
Few doubt that Ellen White had good intentions—but she did bend the truth. So, what do we do with her now?
What We Know Now What we didn’t know back then, but do know now, is the problematic provenance of White’s words: Ellen White didn’t write all of Ellen White’s writings. She copied much from other writers, and her secretaries craſted a lot more. I don’t buy the excuse that “It wasn’t illegal back then.” She
said—and she wasn’t reticent about it—that God gave her messages to her directly. She penned stories of angels standing at
26 AD VENTIS T T OD A Y
her shoulder, telling her what to write. In one case, she claimed that supernatural beings dictated a letter that just happens to be in the precise words of a book she had next to her.1 For a hundred years, we uncritically believed every such story.
We shouldn’t anymore. Few doubt that Ellen White had good intentions—but she did bend the truth. So, what do we do with her now? Te recent book Reclaiming the Prophet analyzes Ellen White
not just as a prophet, but as a human being with both limitations and accomplishments. Yet, it does turn down the aura of holiness that attaches to her. It contextualizes her as a Victorian woman and tries to understand why she wrote as she did. Tough some Adventists saw this as welcome—or at least unthreatening—the Ellen G. White Estate objected. It said in an unsigned statement, “Te presentation of what constitutes divine inspiration [in Reclaiming the Prophet] hardly exists. Perhaps from the authors’ perspective this is because belief in inspiration is a matter of faith rather than evidence. Some chapters are more carefully nuanced than others but overall the book remains unbalanced to the human side. Where present, inspiration is at best an ‘encounter’ with God that is significantly diminished by human deficiencies. Tere is little biblical or Ellen White perspective on the operation of the prophetic giſt.”2 In other words, Ellen White is not sufficiently saintly in
Reclaiming’s analysis; consequently, the book, printed by Pacific Press, was removed from circulation (though its authors shared it widely as a computer document.)
She Made the Church Thrive Te authors of Reclaiming the Prophet, even those who are no longer Seventh-day Adventists, all speak warmly about her. Tough its 11 authors take different approaches, the one common theme is what Ellen White accomplished for the denomination: despite the plagiarism and all of her personal contradictions, the Seventh-day Adventist Church thrives because of her. Of course, the “Well, it worked, didn’t it?” argument doesn’t do
away with her limitations, as the book’s editor, Eric Anderson, notes. “We knew that Ellen White was neither unique nor infallible,” he says. “She is not unmarked by her historical context. She was not the final authority for all biblical interpretation. She was not always original but oſten borrowed words and ideas from other writers, thoughtful men and women who did not themselves claim divine inspiration. She took for granted many (but not all) of the same ideas that the Methodists and Baptists of her time accepted, from amusements to the age of Earth. Even her apocalyptic vision was rooted in her own time.
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