This article was presented at the History of Christianity section of the American Academy of Religion Western Region Annual Meeting which was held at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, on March 29-31, 2008.

From its inception as an identifiable movement in the early 1850s, Seventh-day Adventists have regarded Ellen G. White a latter-day prophet and messenger of God. According to the church’s current fundamental beliefs statement, the biblical gift of prophecy “was manifested in the ministry of Ellen G. White” and “her writings are a continuing and authoritative source of truth and provide for the church comfort, guidance, instruction, and correction.”[1] Although the statement makes it clear that “the Bible is the standard by which all teaching and experience [including White’s writings and visions] must be tested,” it identifies the prophetic gift of White and her ministry as the work of the Holy Spirit and as evidence that points to the Adventist movement as “the remnant church”—i.e., God’s end-time movement that “heralds the approach of [Christ’s] second advent.”[2]

The twin notions that (1) White, from age 17 to her death at age 88, served as a messenger of God for the last days and that (2) her prophetic gift is one of the signs that Adventism is “the remnant church of Bible prophecy”[3] have attracted a tsunami of criticisms against her and the church she co-founded. For many Christians (especially the conservative Protestants of the nineteenth century and the fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants of the twentieth century), these two claims were sufficient to place Adventism outside the boundaries of Christianity. The critics of Ellen White, in particular, have charged that she was a false prophet and that her visions were delusions. They also accused Adventists of regarding White’s writings as equal in authority to the Bible. These criticisms, in addition to several other theological issues that many Christians had with Adventists, helped Adventism to secure a place in the catalogues of non-Christian cults that began to be circulated from the beginning of the twentieth century.

There is, however, a dimension to White’s work that served to temper the marginalizing impact of her visionary claims and the distinctive teachings of Adventism that she endorsed. Especially in the latter half of her public work, White made pronounced efforts to revise some of the original teachings and emphases of Adventism and set the church in a trajectory that would ultimately result in Adventists viewing their movement as a part of, rather than being apart from, mainstream Christianity. In other words, the very person who was the reason for and the force behind the marginalization of Adventism from the mainstream of American Christianity was also the engineer behind the theological re-direction of her community toward the mainstream.

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