Last Sabbath, the Loma Linda University Church hosted a meeting with a panel of authors who recently contributed to a controversial book about Ellen White. The panelists:
Larry Geraty, Ron Graybill, Gilbert Valentine, Terrie Aamodt, Johnathan Butler, and Eric Anderson. Randy Roberts was on hand as well, communicating questions to the panel from the audience.
We reported on this book in June, after the publishing was halted by Pacific Press. Apparently, the GC persuaded the Pacific Press to bench the book.
Some Highlights of the Discussion
Feel free to consult the video at the appropriate time-stamps for the fuller context.
1:30 My name is Larry Gerity. The last four years as a proud member of this Loma linda University church.
4:02 And thanks to to Adventist Today and Spectrum for helping us get the word out about today's Sabbath seminar.
6:02 Now, last April, this book appeared, Reclaiming the Prophet, an honest defense of Ellen White's gift. Now, I'm not going to talk about the editor of this book. [I’m] Leaving him out.
9:27 Ellen White has been abused or misused in certain ways we have given her authority that she shouldn't have been given we've tried tried to pretend that she's not a person with a context. They found both extremes, the people who said Ellen White is perfect and inerrant, and the people who said she's a terrible scoundrel, to be wrong.
10:06 The influence of Ellen White, not only in this room, but in our churches and schools and particularly with younger people, it's safe to say that her influence is diminishing. So, we we we put together this book.
12:01 Pacific Press made the decision. They decided to pause the distribution of a book that they were very proud of.
12:28 Now, as far as I'm concerned, the pause in the publication of our book is temporary. Now, I admit right away that there's some people in Silver Spring who want it to be permanent. We'll see. We'll see about that.
14:38 Um, I have a friend who comes from a different perspective who said that we were trying to rehabilitate Ellen White, but because of all the borrowing and all of the lying that she did, what we're trying to do in this book is impossible.
15:30 Um, one good friend, good Adventist historian in Australia, um, thought that our book was had fallen into the trap of taking Ellen White to the beauty parlor and he couldn't understand how good Adventist historians could take her to the beauty parlor. But then of course John replied to that and said, "Well, we didn't take her to the beauty parlor." The White Estate did that.
20:57 Just what kind of authority do we attribute to the gift? They recognize the gift. Recognized that there was an authentic manifestation of what we see as a New Testament spiritual gift in this woman. But just what was the nature of the authority?
22:50 It seems to me that what amounts to deception, though probably not intentional, has been practiced in making some of her books, and that no serious effort has been made to disabuse the minds of the people of what was known to be their wrong view concerning her writings.
25:10 My uh first exposure to Ellen White was my mother's efforts to follow her councils. And the first thing that I started to resent about Ellen White is that my mother said I couldn't go to school when I was I was anxious to go to school and I couldn't go to school when I was seven because of what Ellen White said.
27:23 I think for me the chapter that was uh most revealing was was Gil's chapter about Ellen White's temperament. I think many of us have uh struggled with the issue of Ellen White's temperament, why she would be so harsh, why she would uh be unrelenting in her criticism.
35:12 And Siegfried Horn uses this expression. He says there was such a nimbus around Ellen White. Do you know what the word nimbus is? It's a halo, such a halo around Ellen White that they wouldn't dare, he says, to try and correct things. His wording is the men here do not dare to release her statements that she didn't want to be considered an authority on history. They couldn't bear with the explosions. So while they may not then have been um deliberately falsifying things, they were not they were bound locked into an image of Ellen White of impeccable Ellen White of inerrant Ellen White and they were not brave enough, for pastoral reasons I guess, to try and correct things.
42:30 That we need to find maybe a middle ground between the two. We we uh there's there's too much extremism in relation to Ellen White and there's a middle.
44:50 Let's say a month from now after some mysterious discussions in Washington, our book is now widely available. You can get it at the Book of Bible House. You can get it on Amazon. What next? Where do we go from here?
46:46 One thing that's uh been said on that your October 19 meeting with the gift of prophecy. Well, if this had been published u by a non-Adventist press uh and people not uh so employed or distinguished in the Adventist tradition, we'd be okay with the book. It's the fact that it's coming out from Pacific Press. Well, they they they actually went further than that. They said, "If this were published by a non-adventist publisher, we would not have responded."
50:44 What what about a Sabbath school lesson quarterly devoted to understanding Ellen White? I mean, if we're really serious about correcting the the mistakes made over a hundred years, wouldn't you want to do all those things?
51:33 "At one point, Kenneth Wood said, "We say she's not inerrant, but we act like she is." And they were Arthur White, Robert Olsen, Kenneth Wood. They're all saying in 1982, "We need to do something to educate our public. We need to admit that there are mistakes here."
55:04 I had a Bible study group in my home (with young people) and we had read different books of the Bible and along with it various classics of devotional writing and I thought it was time to introduce steps to Christ that had meant so much to me when I first encountered it backpacking indeed when I was 16. And I thought this will be fun. And so we read it went through it and at the end they thought it sounded kind of harsh and I was going “What??”
56:30 While it is demanding and almost unbearable to be a prophet, the prophetic call is nearly irresistible. In some ways, having a prophet is more complicated than being a prophet. How do ordinary people respond to the prophets who appear in the in their midst? For millennia, they simply murdered them.
57:20 However, we must consider them on their own terms. As individuals blessed with spiritual discernment, at least a touch of mysticism, and a powerful prayer life, their writing and their speaking flow from these charismatic gifts. That brings us to Ellen Harmon White. Sometimes Ellen White has been a genie in a bottle. Increasingly, she has been explained away as a fussy, quirky woman who claimed to be more than she was. Too seldom has she been examined as a deeply gifted woman, conventionally powerless in a man's world.
58:59 Maybe maybe this would be a good time to mention the note that was passed to me by somebody who was mentored by Jack Provonsha who once said, "The greatest tragedy in Adventism was the deifying of Ellen White." That's that's how he felt. The greatest tragedy the greatest tragedy in Adventism was the deifying of Ellen White. We've tended to idealize her and then sanitize her and then canonize her. And none of those should have happened.
59:47 I think another interesting thing about deification is glamorization. If you go to Google images and put in the name Ellen G White, you'll see some of the most Miss America type pictures of her, you know, in in full color. you know, her nose is straightened out and her complexion is perfect and she just looks so glamorous.
1:02 Why is devotion such a suspicious category? Why would it be threatening to say Ellen White was a devotional writer?
104:05 And now we're faced with a widespread vernacular understanding in the church that she does have authority over the meaning of Scripture. And so when you say that she's devotional, you can't mean that she's merely devotional.
Q&A Period
106:33 But with women, no, they get held to a different kind of standard sometimes.
1:15:18 I mean uh I've just spent the last couple of weeks wrestling with a very painful letter that Ellen White wrote that damaged an individual and damaged his reputation after he died. That's traumatic for me as well as it was traumatic for him. I hope to write a paper on it sometime soon.
1:16:10 What is your opinion of printing EG white comments side by side with the Bible text? I think it was a great step forward for the Andrews University Study Bible to not include those.
1:18:32 Is the Ellen White you have studied, the Ellen White she proclaimed to be or the Ellen White [that] her admirers created?
1:19:30 As George Knight acknowledges in his chapter maybe gently and maybe for the first time Elomite herself inadvertently at times helped create the image that later flowed. So she's not guiltless in that she's human. She wanted her voice to be heard. She had the burden to help people and to to deliver a correction and at times she uses the language of dictation and that over time helps to build a picture. So, so it's it's not either or, it's a both and. I think I have a bit of a quarrel with some of what she said towards the end of her life in uh 1904 when she said she did not think she should be viewed as a prophet, but rather as a messenger of the Lord. Um, and she, you know, she said that and with some modesty, I suppose, but she functioned as a prophet. She did what prophets do. They exhort people. they and they expect their advice to be followed, which she very much did. And I think that some of the anger comes from the way the response to the way prophets operate. They often give offense. They're not sometimes tactful, uh not thoughtful perhaps of other feelings.
1:22:53 Would Adventism be a 23 million member church without a generally absolutist view of White’s inspiration? Well, I think it is fair to ask the question, where would we be without Ellen White? I don't think we would want to argue that every imperfection of our interpretations is necessary to a successful application of Ellen White. Think 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.
1:24:14 The Advent Christian Church has shrunk to 25,000 people. The Advent Christian church, the parish in Aurora is closed. And there are no Adventist there are no Advent Christians on the board. That is a kind of image, I think, of the future of Adventism without Ellen White's leadership.
1:30:21 I do think we have to take into account the the patriarchal world in which Ellen White lived and men were in charge Ellen White would not have had a seat at the table she would not have been listened to had she not had a vision um she needed that claim…. they wanted her in the room because she had some special connection to God. But I think to dismiss her and say, well, we're not going to listen to her unless there's a vision there, I think is that's the patriarchalism coming in. That's the chauvinism.
1:30:45 I think uh the leadership of Pacific Press is working hard to get this book out again. As I said, they're proud of it. They think it's a good book. But I'm still… maybe I'm naive here. I’m still optimistic that after these mysterious meetings in Washington, the book will come out again.
1:36:05 To see her as a person, as a person shaped by her experiences and someone who was deeply spiritual, deeply spiritually gifted, was not a perfect person, but somebody who's worth getting to know.
1:39:00 In the litany of negatives, we knew that Ellen White was neither unique nor infallible. She is not unmarked by her historical context. She was not the final authority for all biblical interpretation. She was not always original, but often borrowed words and ideas from other writers, thoughtful men and women who did not themselves claim divine inspiration.
1:39:37 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 [USA].
1:40:05 And we have to remember that most of us who wrote chapters in this book, we were already retired. We were we were not under any threat of losing our income by what we wrote.
1:41:30 How can we call Ellen White a prophetess when she herself did not call herself that? Her work was greater than that of a prophet? Why not just call her what she was, an apostle?
1:43:38 I think she was fairly self-deprecating in relation to scripture. Um she insisted that she was inspired. Uh but she didn't want to eclipse scripture. She was pretty careful about that.
1:45:02 Ironically, now it's hard to find a Seventh Day Adventist who reads the testimonies. You know, when for her, that was the cannon within the cannon. That was the material that mattered the most.
1:46:02 So I I'm inclined not to use the word inspired. I would like to use the word another New Testament word that she has a charisma. She is gifted in a unique way and that charisma is more dynamic than than the idea of a wooden stilted inspiration.
1:47:20 I think of people that I encounter as a pastor who were brought up in settings where they were so hammered over the head with Ellen White that they have an allergic reaction if she's even brought up. Um I have received comments at times about why I don't quote her more often. Many people who are deeply wounded not directly by her though certainly by ways she was used in their lives. So then to go back to this question, How do we find healing?
1:49:15 She's the product of a community's expectations. And so there's this tension between her own claims and what people are claiming for her and imposing on her.
1:51:44 And Ellen White would get frustrated with Edson sometimes and she would tell him, "Teenager with no impulse control, you should just try harder." which wasn't really very helpful, but she did understand on a deep level and did acknowledge some at least some of the reasons why he was the way he was and she persisted. Um, in that case, he eventually returned to the fold.
1:53:07 And so perhaps one of the ways we we find healing in all of this is learning how to forgive ourselves and perhaps to forgive Ellen who with the best of intentions and a sense of God's calling in a distinctive way hurt people sometimes intentionally sometimes unintentionally and maybe learning to forgive each other in the community is a way to healing. Amen.
Observations
There are several second-wave feminist references in this panel discussion, and small wonder, Loma Linda and the surrounding enclave have largely bought into female headship ideology.
There is discussion about church members who insist on applying verbal inspiration to Ellen White’s writings. This is not what the Seventh-day Adventist Church believes and teaches, nor should we. We believe in thought inspiration, not verbal inspiration (except for some instances where the Lord or someone else is quoted verbatim).
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