[quote author="Randy"]Glenn,
I have also enjoyed your posts here, as well as your dialogue with Cliff Goldstein on ProgressiveAdventist.
I would also concur with you that Walter Rea’s book was a difficult read. I would also like Greg, suggest you take a look at Canrights’s book(s). As Daniels and Prescott were there to give first hand reports, so were Canright and Kellogg and so many others.
Thanks, Randy for the affirmation. Rea did a good job in the various appendices of lining up the various outside sources EGW used and comparing them to actual references from her writings. Some of the comparisons were intriguing. Others less so. But there’s a wide consensus that her borrowing was extensive, nonetheless. The problem was with his individual chapters which weren’t well organized in my opinion.
[quote author="Randy"]I might have missed it Glenn, but were you the String Prof at WWC in the 80s when I was there....just curious.
No, I was not a prof of any sort at Walla Walla. But thanks for asking.
[quote author="Greg"]Glenn, I understand your desire to forge a middle path between the historical Adventists on one side and the former Adventists on another. I would suggest to you, however, that Ellen White herself would discourage you from this exercise, since she made such high claims for her writings.
She did at times make sweeping, self-serving and grandiose statements about her statements. At the same time she readily admitted her fallibility, denied herself a role as the final arbiter of scripture, urged the Bible as the sole and perfect rule of faith, urged the church to continue reading the Bible to learn truth, and refused entreaties by partisans within the church to support their own or oppose their opponents interpretation of things. In one notable and I think endearing instance of the dispute about “the daily” in Daniel 8, after having once believed a certain way and then changing her mind, she later grew fed up with the whole business and told those seeking her stamp of approval to go back to the Bible and not rely on her.
That’s good enough for me.
Ultimately, as I think Guibox has noted, the church has been the primary culprit for placing EGW’s writings and authority above their appropriate place. And unfortunately, the church has too often responded to criticism by not only burying its head in the sand, but in turning around and making the problem worse by elevating her authoritative role in the form of lists of fundamentals. To use another metaphor, the church has too often tried to get out of a hole by digging deeper.
Incidentally, if I might draw another contemporary analogy; in The End of Faith, author Sam Harris says (among other things) that while fundamentalist forms of religion represent the greatest danger to society, religious fundamentalism is at least in some ways internally consistent, whereas religious moderation and religious moderates, while posing less danger to modern societies are actually in the awkward position of trying to justify their religious faith on the basis of religious books that themselves don’t lend themselves to moderation. I think this is somewhat Greg’s concluding point above.
And this is quite frankly, a valid criticism. And I think it carries weight in both the EGW debate as well as how we as modern American citizens living in Constitutional democracies where freedom of religion is sanctified relate to an ancient text of scriptures that were originally drafted in response to theocratic societies where it was not. The problem for the modern Christian is to accomodate oneself to wanting to follow the Bible faithfully, while not assuming responsibility for the text’s more extreme injunctions, such as those found in Genesis 38 (the requirement to impregnate the widow of a deceased brother to further the deceased brother’s blood line); Exodus 21 (rules that accomodated slavery); Leviticus 12 (declaring separate periods of “uncleanliness” for women based on the sex of the child); Leviticus 27 (where appropriate prices were given for male and female slaves); Numbers 15 (where breaking the Sabbath earned a man the death penalty); Deuteronomy 13 (where the death penalty is declared for those who would tempt us to abandon our faith), etc.
As Christians, we’ve come up with various heuristics or models for approaching these anochronistic passages and instructions; dispensationalism; casebook versus codebook, etc. What’s important is, we’ve adapted, taking that which is principle and eternal and separating it from what is temporaral and applicable for the needs of the time.
The position of the SDA as it relates to EGW is somewhat the same. Obviously, not ALL of the Bible is intended to be literally authoritative in all its particulars through all time and over all forms of society.
In much the same way, how at least some of us SDA’s relate to EGW is based on just such an adaptation. That she said outrageous things from time to time; that she changed her mind; offered judgments based on the state of society at the time; was occasionally intemperate towards others, and so on, thus is not viewed from our vantage point of being all encompassing. As Guibox has noted, this is not the view of the most hard-core SDA’s. But like the false dichotomy that I believe Sam Harris sets up regarding the Bible, religious moderation in the SDA sense permits a looser, more generous treatment of EGW. A saying in AA goes something like this--take what you like and leave the rest. When the Bible or our Christian experience is confusing, we can either throw up our hands and quit, or we can gleam that which is most necessary for our faith and live with it, trusting the our faith and relationship with God will lead us through.
If people are questioning my questions on the church, I can blame it on the two masters courses I took through them! I have a scapegoat!
