Prophetess of Health

Preface to the Third Edition

By Ronald L. Numbers

When I began toying with the possibility of writing a book about Ellen White, in 1972, I feared that the exercise might prove in vain. I knew that the Seventh-day Adventist church would never publish anything critical of the founding mother, and I suspected that no non-Adventist publisher would be interested in such a parochial topic. However, when my friend Vern Carner—a cross-wearing provocateur on the religion faculty at Loma Linda University—"guaranteed" that he would find a publisher for me, I plunged ahead, confident that at least I would benefit from the experience. True to his word, Carner talked Harper and Row into looking at my manuscript (after an editor at Eerdmans politely brushed me off). The story of the book's reception and my experience is well told in Jonathan M. Butler's essay that appears in this edition of Prophetess of Health. To my great satisfaction, the book not only contributed to a reevaluation of White within Adventism but elevated her from a virtually unknown historical actor to a minor star on the stage of American religious history.

The current quest for the historical Ellen White began in the late 1960s.¹ Although I joined the project early on, I can take no credit for having launched it. That recognition goes largely to a clique of critically trained young scholars then on the faculty of Andrews University—Roy Branson (Christian ethics, Harvard), Herold Weiss (New Testament, Duke), Bill Peterson (Victorian literature, Northwestern), and Don McAdams (European history, Duke)—who set about to deconstruct the iconic Ellen White that her family and apologists had carefully crafted over the preceding century. I began interacting with the group in the summer of 1969, when, fresh out of graduate school at Berkeley, I took a job in the Andrews history department.

A few years earlier, Branson (a cousin of mine) and I had helped to organize the Association of Adventists Forums, an independent organization of educated Seventh-day Adventists, which began publishing a new journal called Spectrum. The autumn 1970 issue carried the first rumblings of the historiographical revolution in the making. In "Ellen White: A Subject for Adventist Scholarship," Branson and Weiss called for uncovering "the real Ellen White." Their agenda comprised discovering "the nature of Mrs. White's relationship to other authors," recovering "the social and intellectual milieu in which she lived and wrote," and examining "the development of Ellen White's writings within her own lifetime." They naively (or perhaps ironically) promised that such an approach would reveal a "more vibrant Ellen White...a more believable person," who would become "actually more authoritative." The same issue of Spectrum included an article by Peterson that served up a concrete example of what the unmasking process might reveal: a self-described inspired writer who owed a greater debt to unacknowledged historical sources than to divinely sent visions.²

In the thirty years since Prophetess of Health first appeared, two key documents—reprinted here in abridged form—have come to light that contribute greatly to our understanding of White's early ministry and the ways her contemporaries viewed her claims to divine inspiration. In 1987 the Adventist historian Frederick W. Hoyt finally mustered the courage to make public a historical bombshell that he had discovered several years earlier: the published (but long forgotten) transcript of a trial in early 1845 of a Millerite elder in Maine, Israel Dammon, accused of vagrancy and disturbing the peace. The trial record shows seventeen-year-old Ellen Harmon, accompanied by James White (her future husband), caught up in the very "fanaticism" that she would later denounce: kissing, touching, crawling, and shouting. During the trial some three-dozen witnesses testified about the activities of Dammon and his rambunctious Adventist associates. They portrayed Ellen Harmon as a young trance medium who went by the name of "Imitation of Christ" and who lay on the floor for hours with a pillow under her head, receiving and relating her visions. This image hardly comported with the decorous picture of the fledgling prophetess later painted by the Whites and their supporters.³

In 1979 the editor of Spectrum, Molleurus Couperus, published the hitherto unreleased transcript of an innocently named "Bible Conference" for church leaders, held in 1919, just four years after White's death. For two days the custodians of White's reputation wrestled with such potentially explosive questions as "How should we use the writings of the spirit of prophecy [that is, the writings of Mrs. White] as an authority to settle historical questions?" Arthur G. Daniells, longtime president of the church and confidant of the late prophetess, identified the two most pressing public-relations problems facing the church: "One is on infallibility and the other is on verbal inspiration." He and other participants identified specific instances of plagiarism as well as the process by which "a lot of things got into the Testimonies," widely believed to have come directly from White's visions. Daniells knew from personal experience that it would be fruitless "for anybody to stand up and talk about the verbal inspiration of the Testimonies, because everybody who has ever seen the work done knows better, and we might as well dismiss it." He suspected that James White had long ago anticipated the difficulties now facing the church:

He knew that he took Sister White's testimonies and helped to write them out and make them clear and grammatical and plain. He knew that he was doing that right along. And he knew that the secretaries they employed took them and put them into grammatical condition, transposed sentences, completed sentences, and used words that Sister White did not herself write in her original copy.

"If that explanation had been accepted and passed on down," he said wistfully, "we would have been free from a great many perplexities that we have now." But instead of bravely educating church members about White's practices, he and his colleagues timidly suppressed the proceedings of their remarkably candid conference.⁴

During the decade or so after 1976 the effort to determine just how much White had copied from other sources grew in intensity. Prophetess of Health had received considerable attention—both positive and negative—for identifying small amounts of copying, laid out in parallel columns. Partly inspired by my revelations, Walter T. Rea, a senior Adventist pastor and longtime admirer of White, undertook a diligent search for more parallels. The publication in 1982 of his iconoclastic book, The White Lie, shocked the Adventist community by exposing the vast extent of White's copying. Rea's later work on White's Conflict of the Ages series proved, in his words, "beyond any reasonable doubt that far more than 80% of the material enclosed within the covers of these books was taken from others."⁵

To determine for themselves the extent of the problem, church leaders spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay a New Testament scholar at Pacific Union College, Fred Veltman, to assess exactly how White had constructed the books she claimed to have written. After meticulously examining 15 of the 87 chapters of The Desire of Ages (DA), White's much-revered life of Jesus, Veltman concluded that "On an average we may say that 31.4 percent of the DA text is dependent to some extent on literary sources." In contrast to scholars who had blamed White's assistants for the plagiarisms in her books, Veltman concluded that "Ellen White, not her literary assistants, did the literary borrowing." His research had shown "that Ellen White at times felt free to take verbatim expressions from the writings of others but that for the most part she paraphrased her sources. Generally the closer one is able to move back through the textual tradition to Ellen White's own hand, the greater is the degree of literary dependency." After such revelations, including the previously unimaginable fact that White had borrowed from works of fiction, it hardly made any difference whether future investigations uncovered one or a hundred more instances of plagiarism. White's reputation for literary excellence and originality lay in shambles, and her honesty was under challenge.⁶

A second church-financed study of the prophetess, this one by the White Estate historian Ronald Graybill, also boomeranged. While working at the Estate in Takoma Park, Maryland, Graybill had simultaneously pursued a doctorate in American religious history at the nearby Johns Hopkins University. Given his free access to White's unpublished manuscripts, he decided to focus on the private life of the prophetess, as wife and mother. The resulting portrait was not pretty. Graybill revealed that by the 1870s the Whites' marriage had deteriorated so badly that they occasionally lived separately. "If they had to 'walk apart the rest of the way,'" Graybill describes her writing to James in 1874, "she hoped that at least they would not try to 'pull each other down....I do believe it is best for our labors to be disconnected and we each lean upon God for ourselves.'" While visiting in California two years later, Ellen confided to her friend Lucinda Hall that James was trying to control her at the same time that he, in Michigan, was complaining about her attempts to control him. "My husband is now happy. Blessed news!" Ellen announced sarcastically in a letter to Hall. "If he will only remain happy I would be willing to ever remain from him. If my presence is detrimental to his happiness God forbid I should ever be connected with him....I do not think my husband really desired my society." To her husband she wrote sharply: "I shall use the old head God gave me until he reveals that I am wrong. Your head won't fit my shoulders. Keep it where it belongs, and I will try to honor God in using my own. I shall be glad to hear from you but don't waste your precious time and strength in lecturing me on matters of mere opinions." At times Ellen experienced dreams or visions in which her heavenly guide would point out James's defects, while assuring her that she deserved more credit for what they had achieved. She undiplomatically reminded James that he had been "highly favored in being connected with one whom God is leading, counseling, and teaching." In 1880 she forbade him from joining her on the West Coast. The next year he died.⁷

Although she loved her children and frequently fretted about their spiritual and physical health, she was not above manipulating them with appeals to her heavenly authority. "I have written you letters dictated by the spirit of God, and I beg you not to disregard my efforts," she admonished son Edson on one occasion. On another she wrote: "God has taught your mother, and she has taught you your wrongs." Frequently, she played favorites, heaping praise on Willie—her "best boy," her "sunshine"—while reminding Edson "that his life was 'a mistake,' 'worse than useless,' and 'a failure.'"⁸

Regrettably for Graybill, he tried to outsmart church leaders by submitting two versions of his dissertation: a complete one to his committee at Johns Hopkins and a sanitized one to his bosses at the White Estate. The discovery of Graybill's duplicity created a minor scandal. As one distressed church leader noted, the Hopkins version of the dissertation "leaves the wrong impression of Ellen White. It seems to suggest that she was a power-hungry woman who had visions on command. It suggests, for example, when James White got into trouble with other church leaders, Mrs. White would have a vision to help him out." Not surprisingly, Graybill lost his job—and his standing as the church's most scholarly defender of White.⁹

The Adventist leadership did not look kindly on those who wrote critically about the prophetess. Immediately after completing his controversial essay on White's historical scholarship—but before he could be dismissed—Bill Peterson escaped from Andrews University to the University of Maryland. Herold Weiss, under pressure from the president of the General Conference, who urged the university to fire him, fled from Andrews to nearby St. Mary's College in South Bend. Roy Branson lost his bid for tenure at Andrews and his chances for ordination as a minister; for years church leaders blackballed attempts to hire him in the denomination's educational system (though he now teaches at Columbia Union College, an Adventist school in Maryland). Loma Linda University terminated Jonathan Butler just as he was beginning to write a full-scale biography of White (for reasons largely unrelated to his scholarship), forced Vern Carner off the faculty, and got rid of me without a formal firing by promising a year's severance pay in return for a letter of resignation. Walter Rea lost his job and (temporarily) his pension after thirty-six years in the ministry. By suppressing publication of his research (and requesting that I not even mention it in Prophetess of Health), Don McAdams for a time prospered as an administrator in the Adventist educational system, though he later left church employment.

Butler's promised biography never materialized, but he did publish several insightful studies of White. For a church still enthralled by White's vivid descriptions of end-time events—and still expecting the imminent return of Jesus to earth—Butler's 1979 essay on "The World of E. G. White and the End of the World" undermined the eschatological foundations of Seventh-day Adventism. In it Butler argued that White's "predictions of the future appeared as projections on a screen which only enlarged, dramatized and intensified the scenes of her contemporary world," not scenes revealed to her in vision. Even more provocatively, he insisted that "What Seventh-day Adventists must fully acknowledge...is the element of prophetic disconfirmation. The prophetess predicted that Protestant America would end with the passage of Sunday legislation, the repudiation of constitutional government, the persecution of the Saturday-keeping minority, resulting finally in the Second Coming." But none of these predictions had come to pass. In 1991 Butler published a reassessment of White's childhood and youth, emphasizing her formative experiences with the "shouting" Methodists, the fanatical wing of Millerism, and the visionary culture of New England.¹⁰

Before the appearance of Prophetess of Health Ellen White remained largely hidden in the shadows of American religious history. If mainstream historians deigned to mention Adventists at all, they typically paired William Miller with Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy as founders of innovative American religious movements.¹¹ After 1976 this neglect gave way to featured roles, as Prophetess of Health established itself, in the judgment of Martin E. Marty, as "the standard biography" of White.¹² In short order White became a fixture in accounts of women and religion in America.¹³ She replaced Miller as the archetypical Adventist, often appearing bracketed with Smith or Eddy or some other reformer to illustrate the fecund nature of the spiritual marketplace in America.¹⁴ Peter W. Williams declared White—along with Anne Hutchinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson—to be one of the most prominent women in American religious history.¹⁵ Paul K. Conkin canonized White with Eddy and Ann Lee of the Shakers as one of "the great trinity of female prophets in American Christianity."¹⁶ In similar fashion White rose to prominence in the history of American health reform.¹⁷ And because of later work of mine on the history of antievolutionism, she also acquired a reputation as the godmother of "scientific creationism."¹⁸

Not all readers appreciated or even grasped my intended message. One befuddled college freshman, having slogged through Prophetess of Health for a course on American religion, indulged in some historical revisionism while writing his final exam:

When 1843 came and went, many were hugely disappointed. Ellen White was one of those. As the years passed, she realized that she could not adjust to a non-Millerite philosophy. She was dreadfully unhappy and she yearned to be re-included in a sect. From these yearnings & the teachings of Ronald Numbers emerged the foundation of Seventh-day Adventism.¹⁹

Some Adventists used me as a foil in their own psycho-theological struggles. One Adventist religion teacher, for example, contrasted his progressive view of Ellen White's inspiration with my assumption of "an absolute once-true-always-true model for the phenomena of revelation and inspiration, not unlike a conservative fundamentalist holding to inerrancy"—ignoring the fact that conservative Adventists (correctly) faulted me for possessing no doctrine of divine inspiration whatsoever.²⁰

After some hesitation, many Adventist scholars embraced the findings, if not always the implications, of Prophetess of Health.²¹ In the mid-1990s the editorial board of Spectrum voted me one of the five most influential Adventists in the past quarter century.²² However, the corporate Seventh-day Adventist church, which now claims "more than 20 million believers" worldwide, continues to portray Ellen White much as it did in the years before 1976. In 1992, for instance, the Review and Herald Publishing Association released a book titled The Great Visions of Ellen G. White, by Roger W. Coon, an officer of the Ellen G. White Estate. "Adventists," he declared, "have held since earliest times that her writings were inspired by the Holy Spirit in the same manner—and to the same degree—as those of the 40-plus writers of the Bible." He devoted an entire chapter to White's 1863 vision on health, assuring readers that "Science has confirmed virtually all the counsels that emanated from Ellen White's first major health reform vision of 1863." As far as Coon and the White Estate were concerned, Prophetess of Health did not exist.²³

The most extensive recent study of Ellen White is Herbert E. Douglass's Messenger of the Lord: The Prophetic Ministry of Ellen G. White, authorized as a college textbook by the board of trustees of the Ellen G. White Estate, the General Conference Department of Education, and the church's Board of Higher Education. Like Coon, Douglass highlights White's similarity to the biblical writers and exposes the character defects of her critics, whose lack of confidence in the prophetess he attributes to the influence of Satan. Forsaking conventional biography for apologetics, Douglass addresses everything from the "shut door" to masturbation. "Modern research indicates that Ellen White's strong statements can be supported when she is properly understood," Douglass assures his readers. "Two medical specialists have suggested that in a zinc-deficient adolescent, sexual excitement and excessive masturbation might precipitate insanity." Yet despite the gulf between his views and mine, Douglass has always been a kind and friendly critic.²⁴ My fond hope is that his irenic spirit will infuse the continuing quest to discover the historical Ellen White.

Madison, Wisconsin
February 2006