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INTRODUCTION TO “RED BOOKS” FOR PCR MEMBERS

WHAT IS THIS PLAY?

“Red Books: Our Search for Ellen White” is interview-based documentary theater that explores the Seventh-day Adventist community's relationship with its founder, Ellen G. White. Using excerpts from some 200 interviews with current and former Adventists, the play travels through four generations of a religion and their perspectives on White to create a riveting discussion about icons — why they are built, destroyed, forgotten, and the impact on a faith community. "Red Books" reveals stories untold from Adventism's history — personal stories of faith and hope, as well as traumatic events that shook academia in the ‘70s. In bringing together the voices of a wide spectrum of Adventists, the play seeks to find our common ground in order to start the conversation about where we are, how we've come so far, and where we may be able to go.  (From redbooksegw.org/Redbooks/Home.html)

WHO IS/WAS ELLEN WHITE AND WHAT IS THE SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH?

A Brief History of Ellen White and the Adventist Church, by Julius Nam, Assistant Professor of Religion, Loma Linda University. (From the liner notes of the DVD)

Born in Maine in 1827, Ellen Gould White was raised in a devout Methodist family.  In the 1840s, she accepted Baptist preacher William Miller’s prediction that Jesus Christ would return and that human history would come to an end on October 22, 1844.  Though greatly disappointed that day, she kept her faith in the soon return of Jesus until she experienced what she believed to be a vision from God in December 1844.  She soon met James White, a former Millerite minister, and they were married in August 1846.  Over the next few years, the Whites worked closely with others to create a new community based on a re-interpretation of their October 1844 experience.  They also arrived at some distinctive conclusions about the Second Coming of Christ, the Sabbath, and the afterlife.  Their common experience and distinctive beliefs eventually would propel them into forming the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863.  Furthermore, Seventh-day Adventists came to accept Ellen White’s visions as coming from God

Ellen White had an instrumental role not only in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but also every major institution and ministry of the church until the time of her death in 1915.  Her most significant impact, though, was made through her writings.  She wrote extensively on Christian belief, lifestyle, and church matters.  She claimed that the content of many of her writings came in visions, and Adventists around the world continue to affirm them as having relevance today.  Her five-volume “Conflict of the Ages” series and books on Christ and salvation remain a powerful source for spiritual renewal in Adventism.

White’s ministry was not without controversy, however.  Some of her contemporaries questioned the validity of her vision claims and accused her of being delusional and even deceitful.  She was accused of plagiarism when it was discovered that she borrowed materials from other writings without proper attribution.  Others have also contested the specifics of her biblical, historical, and scientific claims as well as her predictions.  The Adventist church has aggressively defended her from this charges through extensive apologetic and scholarly endeavors.  But many, especially those outside Adventism, have found these responses unconvincing.

Even among those who accept her as a prophet and an inspired writer, coming to a clear, unconflicted understanding of White and her writings has been a challenge.  What is the exact relationship of her writings to the Bible?  Can one be an Adventist but be in disagreement with White on particular issues?  How should we in the 21st century interpret her works?  Whites writings--dubbed “Red Books” because of the red binding of her books--have been a source of joy and sorrow, inspiration and consternation, blessings and curses--depending on the way they have been perceived and used.  These Red Books continue to evoke a diversity of powerful and enigmatic responses in Adventism today.

WHAT WAS “THE CRASH,” THE “WOUND” IN THE COMMUNITY?
Greg Schneider

This question is answered more deeply and autobiographically in my lecture document, “Inside ‘Red Books:’ A View of Loss and, Maybe, Recovery.”  The wound was specifically the persecution and firing of many Adventist academics and pastors in North American and Australian Seventh-day Adventism in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  More generally the wound was the loss of confidence in the founder and prophet as well as in church leadership.  The “Crash” that led to the wounding was a confluence of two trends. 

First, a series of critical studies by professional historians undermined a long-standing fundamentalist reading of Ellen White as divine authority whose writings were near verbally inspired.  These studies demonstrated her large-scale dependence on human sources even for writings for which she claimed supernatural inspiration.  The best known of these studies was Ronald Numbers, Prophetess of Health (Harper & Row, 1976) now in a third edition published by Eerdmans in 2008.  Numbers, a central but silent figure in Scene 12, lost his job at Loma Linda University over the book, left the church, and went on to a distinguished career at the University of Wisconsin as an historian of science and medicine.  Another study, featured prominently in scene 11, was Fred Hoyt’s discovery of how “fanatical” and “disreputable,” by the standards he was taught, was the conduct of Ellen White in the earliest years of the Seventh-day Adventist movement.  Jonathan Butler, a key character in scenes 5 and 12, was a University of Chicago Ph.D. who intended to publish a fully professional critical historical biography of Ellen White.  This was a major factor that led to his dismissal from Adventist academia.  Butler is author of a moving and intimate account of Ronald Numbers’s interwoven personal and professional life, “The Historian as Heretic,” which prefaces the second and third editions of Prophetess of Health.

Second, the aggressive preaching of an anti-perfectionist Reformation theology of justification by faith by Australian professor and evangelist, Desmond Ford, won a wide and devoted following as well as an even wider and infuriated opposition within a sub-culture that was still deeply imbued with a 19th-century American perfectionist pietism.  Prof. Ford’s theology and his Biblical scholarship led him to accept an invitation to lecture on the one doctrine unique to Seventh-day Adventism among all Christian groups: the doctrine of an ongoing Investigative Judgment in a Heavenly Sanctuary, a special work by Jesus Christ as heavenly High Priest begun in 1844 when He moved from the Holy to the Most Holy compartment of the heavenly Sanctuary.  This was the rationalization of the disappointment of 1844 that allowed a remnant of Millerite believers to coalesce around Ellen White, who validated the Sanctuary doctrine, and become the Seventh-day Adventist church.  Ford’s lecture, a sidelight to the Reformation Gospel by his lights, gave  his opponents the tool they were looking for to knock him down and force him out of the Adventist ministry, an event that happened in the summer of 1980.  Many academics and, especially, pastors tainted by association with him also were forced out.  Desmond Ford and I arrived on the campus of Pacific Union College at the same time, Fall of 1977, and he delivered his fateful lecture on my campus two years later.  This lecture, Ford’s defrocking, and the aftermath of persecution and firings are the events most directly referred to by Scene 8, “The Crash.”