As she rebuked spiritualism, compromising Protestantism, and unchanging Catholicism, she did not describe the ‘final movements’ of Earth’s crisis in a language that included communism, militant Islam, environmental crisis, or a resurgent, imperial China. She did not envision a relentless tide of secularism engulfing much of the world, including the homeland of the Reformation.”3 Another of the book’s authors, Jonathan Butler, references a
quote from pragmatist William James: “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.”4 In a November panel discussion at Loma Linda University, Butler said that at the beginning of a movement you get “trances and visions and holding up big Bibles. … But you still don’t know what’s going to result from that. Tere were many visionaries around Ellen White’s time, contemporaries of hers…but they’re anonymous now. We don’t know them, but we know Ellen.”5 Butler argues that we needn’t expect White to be a saint.
“Adventists are way too precious about the humanity of people,” he says. But the fruits of her ministry endure. When asked where the church would be without her, Anderson
responded: “Tink of all the things that she accomplished for us in terms of institution building, in terms of moving us from heterodoxy to orthodoxy and many other things. … I think those things are still there. Maybe even stronger with a more accurate understanding. I keep thinking about a school in Illinois called Aurora University. … Aurora University was founded by the Advent Christian Church [another of the Millerite denominations]. And yet today, Aurora University has virtually no Advent Christian connection. Te Advent Christian Church has shrunk to 25,000 people. Te Advent Christian church parish in Aurora is closed. And there are no Advent Christians on the board. Tat is a kind of image, I think, of the future of Adventism without Ellen White’s leadership.”6
Accepting Her Humanity Several studies of 1919 Bible Conference documents show that in White’s lifetime, church leaders already knew about the plagiarism—decades before Walter Rea and Ron Numbers identified it. Perhaps to protect her authority, messages said to be given by God for the blessing of the church were locked away, then dribbled out a line or two at a time at the discretion of a handful of Ellen’s apologists. To this day, the official church response to her plagiarism is a dismissive “Move along—there’s nothing to see here.” But White’s writings weren’t only constructive; they also did damage. We need to ask those who grew up in the fundamentalist
culture of, say, one of the Ellen White-obsessed self-supporting schools, or those who were inculcated with guilt by her many counsels or who grew up terrified of Jesus’ return—if they think 23 million members and a world-famous medical school was worth it. Te institutional habit of using White’s writings to control people has been hard to break. When sympathetic scholars say, in the mildest and gentlest way, “Let’s look at Ellen White as a human being,” it provokes administrative slapback. Te White Estate’s response seems to be that she gets a pass on all of these problems, because she’s a prophet.
Many of us are still prooftexting Ellen White statements like crazy, using sentences and phrases without a hint of context. What would a hermeneutic for her writings look like?
An Ellen White Hermeneutic A possible corrective, it seems to me, is to insist on using White’s writings with context. Recently an Adventist scholar of my acquaintance said,
“Tere’s nothing about this Ellen White problem that hasn’t been encountered in biblical studies.” If he’s right, why has facing up to it been so difficult? Adventists
have a hermeneutic for interpreting the Bible, but it isn’t always a very consistent one. We still tend to read toward our beliefs, which usually means defending Ellen White’s interpretations. But we’re far better than we used to be. We’ve set aside William Miller’s simplistic interpretive rules, and we haven’t fallen (intentionally, at least) into the fundamentalists’ inerrancy trap. (Tat’s thanks, at least in part, to White’s application of 2 Peter 1:21: that “holy men of God” were the speakers and writers, not God.) We admit that Bible writers copied from one another: Te
Gospel of Mark was plagiarized, at least partially, by Matthew and Luke. We also know that the order in which the books were
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