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.

The ministry of Ellen White in the Adventist church has had a marginalizing impact in two ways—(1) through her teachings that emphasized the distinctiveness and schismatic nature of Adventism and (2) through the objections to her and her teachings raised by her critics.

A significant part of White’s early ministry was focused on those distinctive, or “peculiar” (as referred to by early Adventists)—doctrines that provided the theological rationale for the formation of the Adventist movement. One of the first teachings that she helped formulate was the “sanctuary” doctrine. She claimed that she received a vision in early 1845 in which she saw Christ entering the Most Holy Place in the heavenly sanctuary.[4] This vision supported the developing view among Adventists that Christ, instead of returning to earth on October 22, 1844 as they had expected, began the final phase of his heavenly ministry. A major corollary to this view was that the door to salvation was shut to all who were not awaiting Christ’s second advent on October 22, 1844. This “shut door” view indicated that salvation essentially unavailable to those outside of the Sabbathkeeping Adventist community. Though this teaching would be revised into a more open view of salvation, there remains (as will be discussed further below) a streak of exclusivism in Adventist theology that has tended to pull the community away from the mainstream of Christianity.

Understandably, Adventism’s re-interpretation of the October 1844 experience has been criticized heavily by various Christians. To date, no other group subscribes to this teaching. In his assessment of this teaching, Jan Karel Van Baalen, a fundamentalist counter-cult writer, wrote in 1938: “Seventh-Day [sic] Adventism was truly born as ‘the result of a predicament.’” He argued that Adventism was created to make up for the disastrous time-setting effort by the Millerite movement and cautioned his readers that Adventism is the devil’s “bait,” which later reveals its “claws” to capture the less learned among Christians.[5] Such criticisms cemented Adventism’s self-perception as the only true organized church which further demonstrated the heretical nature of Adventist theology for those looking in. Through all this, White’s advancement of the sanctuary doctrine was a significant factor in the ongoing marginalization of Adventism.

White was also instrumental in establishing the seventh-day Sabbath teaching as another cornerstone of the Adventist identity. Although it was Joseph Bates who initially constructed Adventism’s Sabbath theology, it was her visions and advocacy of the Sabbath that played a significant role for the fledgling community in the early years of the movement. This Sabbath theology, as formulated by Bates and advocated by White, held that the seventh-day Sabbath represented the sign of one’s faithfulness to God in the end-time. Thus, Sabbathkeeping effectively became the mark through which God’s remnant was to be distinguished from the rest of the Christian world which, in the eyes of early Adventists, had become the eschatological anti-Christ power through their Sundaykeeping.

Adventism’s Sabbath theology, as can be expected, was not received well by Christians outside the church. Thomas Preble, who once was a Sabbatarian himself and originally introduced Bates to the seventh-day Sabbath teaching, was one of the earliest critics of this theology. In his book, The First-Day Sabbath, Preble asserted that Seventh-day Adventism, by stressing the Sabbath doctrine so much, belonged to the Jewish dispensation of the Old Covenant. Thus it was either an anti-evangelical movement or a non-Christian group.[6] Other criticisms of the Sabbath teachings of Adventism followed. One critic called Adventists a group of “deluded people” and their theology, particularly the Sabbath doctrine, the product of “a misapprehension and a misapplication of Scripture.”[7] Another labeled the Adventist system of doctrines to be “of Satan” and “not the doctrine of Christ.”[8] Yet another author denounced books published by Adventists on the Sabbath as containing “soul-destroying error” and “heresy.” He claimed he had “not been able to find anything Christian” in Adventist literature. To him, the Adventist Sabbath teaching was “nothing but an ignorant infatuation[,] . . . a misconception[,] . . . a misapprehension[,] . . . a sinful fanaticism[,] . . . [and] a miserable distortion of all historical facts.”[9]

In addition to the “sanctuary” and Sabbath teachings that White helped develop and advance among early Adventists, her visions and prophetic claim became the object of stinging criticisms—and the impetus for further marginalization of the Adventist community. William Sheldon, writing in Second Advent Pioneer, a “first-day” Adventist periodical, voiced warnings to “honest people” who “have been deceived by the ‘visions’ of Ellen G. White.” He asserted that it was his Christian duty “to show that she is not a true prophetess.” He charged that she had visions on the Sabbath only after her acceptance of the Sabbath—insinuating that the vision claims were made only to validate her new conviction. While granting that White’s belief in the divine origin of her visions could be sincere, Sheldon asserted that the visions were the product of “a self-acting clairvoyant.” Thus the Seventh-day Adventist Church, established and shepherded by this “clairvoyant,” had to be a false, misguided movement.[10]

Similar accusations followed as her notoriety in the Christian world increased with the spread of the Adventist work. One observer proclaimed that Ellen White contradicted the Bible and that her visions “do not come from the Lord; consequently, are of no value to the Christian, and should be rejected by all the true disciples of Jesus.”[11] By extension, Adventists were an unbiblical, unorthodox group that should be shunned by the Christian world.

Probably the most damaging criticism came from Dudley M. Canright, a former Adventist minister and protégé of James and Ellen White. After leaving Adventism in 1887, he published bitter diatribes against Adventism, including Seventh-Day Adventism Renounced[12] and Life of Mrs. E. G. White.[13] In these works Canright branded Adventism as a system of error and a “yoke of bondage” which “leads to infidelity.”[14] He then sought to discredit Ellen White’s claims to be a messenger from God by raising the charges of plagiarism, suppression of her own embarrassing writings, financial impropriety, false predictions and incorrect theology. Canright’s books would provide the basis for all the major criticisms found in the anti-Adventist literature of the first half of the twentieth century.[15]

Whether through the doctrines that she helped formulate or the claims of direct visions and call as God’s messenger, Ellen White was a pivotal figure in the development of the Adventist identity as a distinct, “peculiar” group far removed from the center of American Christianity. Especially in the early years of the movement, it appears that White was quite happy with situating her community outside the boundaries, of American Protestantism. White understood Adventism as a movement that had reformed out of Protestantism as a distinct remnant community. This position only served to secure Adventism’s reputation as a heretical, anti-Christian group by the Protestant world. However, beginning in the 1880s, White would make some significant moves that would lead to rethinking of the Adventist identity and re-location of Adventism vis-à-vis American Christianity.

Ellen White the Mainstreamizer

The last three decades of White’s life between 1885 and 1915 were the years of significant changes. Although these years saw Ellen White experiencing changes in her personal life (such as coping with the death of her husband in 1881 and living in Europe and Australia for a total of 11 years), they foremost represented a time of important theological re-direction toward historic Christian orthodoxy.

First, she helped re-shape the Adventist identity toward a reforming movement within Christianity, rather than away from it. In her 1888 volume, Great Controversy, which was a revision of her earlier works on Christian history and the end-time events, she gave a firm stamp of approval of this shift which was already taking place within Adventism. In that volume, she gave a very positive review of the various wings of the Reformation and the reform movements that proceeded from it. She no longer saw the remnant and the Babylon as having been formed, but as those which will form in the future. While she continued to believe that Sabbathkeeping would be a test of loyalty to God in the end-time, she pushed that event into the future—thus leaving room for a more cordial relations between Adventism and the rest of the Christian world in the present.[16]

Second, at the General Conference session held in 1888, she gave a ringing endorsement to a new emphasis on the person of Jesus Christ, grace, justification, and the gospel. When two young ministers—E. J. Waggoner and A. T. Jones of California—made a strong case for reclaiming Christ and grace in Adventism (as opposed to the emphasis on the law of God and Christian living that had dominated the Adventist life in the previous forty years), White applauded their efforts and rebuked the majority of church leadership that viewed the two young ministers with great suspicion. She wrote that the “message of the gospel of His grace” must be preached so that “the world should no longer say that Seventh-day Adventists talk the law, the law, but do not teach or believe Christ.”[17] In recounting this experience, she later wrote, “Of all professed Christians, Seventh-day Adventists should be foremost in uplifting Christ before the world.”[18] Though Adventists had from the beginning claimed Christ as their Savior, the decidedly Christocentric shift in emphasis that began in 1888 was possible because of White’s powerful affirmation of the orthodox Protestant teaching of salvation by grace.

Third, White led a decisive theological change to the Adventist view on the Godhead. Most early Adventist leaders, including her husband, were anti-Trinitarians and semi-Arians. Having been deeply influenced by New England restorationism, Adventist pioneers rejected the Trinitarian creeds and believed that God the Father was the supreme God and Christ was literally the Son of God begotten at one point in time in the past. The Holy Spirit was seen more as a power or influence of God than as a distinct person. However, beginning in the late 1890s White bucked what appeared to be the established Adventist position by making a sharp Trinitarian turn. In her work on the life of Christ, Desire of Ages, she stated, “In Christ is life, original, unborrowed, underived” and referred to Christ as “the pre-existent, self-existent Son of God” and the Holy Spirit as the “Third Person of the Godhead.”[19] She never explained how and why she came out on the side of the Nicean understanding of the Trinity, but this new development did not go unnoticed among Adventists and led Adventism toward becoming a full-fledged Trinitarian group that it is today.[20]

Fourth, White insisted throughout her career that her writings neither take the place of Scripture, be treated as equal in authority to Scripture, nor be considered an addition to Scripture. “The Bible must be our standard for every doctrine and practice,” she wrote in a letter to Adventist leaders.[21] As to the relative weight between her writings (which were often called “Testimonies”) and Scripture, she wrote: “Our position and faith is in the Bible. And never do we want any soul to bring in the Testimonies ahead of the Bible.”[22] Elsewhere she said, “I exalt the precious Word before you today. Do not repeat what I have said, saying ‘Sister White said this,’ and ‘Sister White said that.’ Find out what the Lord God of Israel says, and then do what He commands.”[23] She—and her husband—even expressed publicly that acceptance of her writings as coming from God and should not be a requirement of membership in the Adventist community.[24] While the predominant majority of Adventists would continue to regard her as a prophet and at times, contrary to her wishes, use her writings as an interpretive prism through which Scripture is read, White’s unequivocal statements affirming the sola Scriptura principle of the Reformation would open the way for communion with Protestant communities in the decades following her death.

Although the teachings that she espoused and her “prophetic” ministry seemed to erect an insurmountable barrier between Adventism and the rest of the Christian world, White—particularly in the last three decades of her life—laid the groundwork for the mainstreaming of Adventism that would take place over the century following her death. Her re-situating of Adventism as a reforming movement within Protestantism, her emphasis on Christ and salvation by grace, her repudiation of anti-Trinitarianism and semi-Arianism of early Adventism, and her commitment to the sola Scriptura principle and placement of her writings at a position subservient to Scripture allowed Adventism to claim a place within American Protestantism, albeit closer to the boundaries than the center.

Conclusion

Ellen White remains a complex, enigmatic figure in Adventism’s relation with the larger world of Christianity. She persists as a key separator of Adventists from its Christian neighbors. Her enduring presence in Adventism and the distinctive doctrines that she espoused continue to puzzle many who are looking in from the outside. Nonetheless, it is through the continuing influence of her writings and example that Adventists have found it important to seek rapprochement and fellowship with other Christians. White’s life and writings represent the continuing tension that Adventists experience between the need for the distinctive, separate Adventist identity and the desire to situate that identity clearly within the Christian tradition. She simultaneously nudges Adventism away from the Christian mainstream yet not outside it. As a result, Adventism sits in that uncomfortable place of both-and yet neither-nor. Is this awkward, off-mainstream positioning of Adventism an evidence of Ellen White’s internal contradictions and prevarication as some suggest, or a mark of her prophetic genius? The only appropriate answer may be: perhaps neither, perhaps both.

            [1]“Fundamental Beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists,” http://www.adventist.org/beliefs/fundamental/index.html, accessed February 28, 2008.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Seventh-day Adventist Church Manual (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2000), 33.

[4]Ellen G. White, Early Writings (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1882), 42-45.

[5]Jan Karel Van Baalen, The Chaos of Cults: A Study of Present-Day Isms (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1938), 100.

[6]T. M. Preble, The First-Day Sabbath: Clearly Proved by Showing That the Old Covenant, or Ten Commandments, Have Been Changed, or Made Complete, in the Christian Dispensation in Two Parts (Buchanan, MI: W. A. C. P., 1867).

[7]T. H. Woodward, Which Is the Sabbath? Saturday or Sunday? Or a Check on Adventism (San Francisco: H. G. Parsons, 1883), 10, 16.

[8]William Easton, Seventh-Day Adventists and Atonement (New York: Loizeaux Brothers, 1890), 15.

[9]Frederick Mutschmann, Sabbath or Sunday, Which? (Allentown, PA: Church Messenger, 1890), 3, 5, 21.

[10]William Sheldon, “The Visions and Theories of the Prophetess Ellen G. White in Conflict with the Bible,” Second Advent Pioneer, 1 January 1867, 52.

[11]Miles Grant, The True Sabbath: Which Day Shall We Keep? An Examination of Mrs. Ellen White’s Visions (Boston: Advent Christian Publication Society, 1877), 104.

[12]D. M. Canright, Seventh-Day Adventism Renounced: After an Experience of Twenty-eight Years (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1889).

[13]D. M. Canright, Life of Mrs. E. G. White, Seventh?day Adventist Prophet: Her False Claims Refuted (Cincinnati: Standard Publishing, 1919).

[14]Canright, Seventh-Day Adventism Renounced, 59, 64.

[15]See, for example, William C. Irvine, Timely Warnings (Neptune, NJ: Loizeaux Brothers, 1917); William C. Irvine, ed., Heresies Exposed: A Brief Critical Examination in the Light of the Holy Scriptures of Some of the Prevailing Heresies and False Teachings of Today, 4th ed. (Neptune, NJ: Loizeaux Brothers, 1955); Jan Karel Van Baalen, The Chaos of Cults: A Study of Present-Day Isms (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1938); J. Oswald Sanders, Heresies: Ancient and Modern (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1948); Horton Davies, Christian Deviations (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954); F. E. Mayer, The Religious Bodies of America (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956); and Arnold Black Rhodes, The Church Faces the Isms (New York: Abingdon Press, 1958).

[16]Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy between Christ and Satan (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1888), 79-390.

[17]Ellen G. White, Testimonies to Ministers and Gospel Workers (Mountain View, CA: 1923), 92.

[18]Ellen G. White, Manuscript 24, 1888.

[19]Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1898), 469, 470, 530, 671.

[20]The Fundamental Beliefs statements of Adventism written in 1931 and revised in 1980 are clearly Trinitarian. See Year Book of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1931), and “Fundamental Beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists,” http://www.adventist.org/beliefs/fundamental/index.html, accessed February 28, 2008.

[21]Ellen G. White to Brethren, August 5, 1888, letter.

[22]Ellen G. White, Evangelism (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1946), 256.

[23]Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1980), 33.

            [24]Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1948), 328. See also, James White, “Western Tour,” Review and Herald, June 13, 1871, 205.