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Doing Theology: Appeals To Ellen White's Authority-3
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September 6-Doing Theology: Appeals To Ellen White's Authority-3

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Seek and read from the book of the Lord. Isa.34:16, RSV.

As we have noted the past couple of days, president G. I. Butler of the General conference had been seeking to maneuver Ellen White into giving the authoritative answer to his biblical/theological issues, since he didn't have enough evidence from "the book of the Lord" to carry his point.

The entire sequence of the Butler letters is of great interest, given the way many Advnetists view the work of Ellen WHite. Many have both silently and verbally wished that she were still alive in our day so that they could ask her the "real" meaning of the particular scriptural passage. In the Butler sequence we find her answer to such an approach-silence, frustrating silence. The General Conference leaders wanted her to function as a theological policewoman or an exegetical reference. That, significantly enough, is exactly what she refused to do.

Not only did Ellen Whtie decline to settle the biblical issue through appeal to her writings, but she went so far as to infer to the delegates at the Minneapolice meetings on October 24 that it was providential that she hadlost the testimony to J. H. Waggoner in which she had purportedly resolved the law in Galatians issue once and for all in the 1850s. "God has a purpose in this. He wants us to go to the Bible and get the Scripture evidence"(MS 9, 1888; italics supplied).

In other words, she was more interested in what the Bible had to say on the subject than in what she had written. For her, the testimonies were not to become the authoritative last word on Bible topics. Nor were they to take the place of the Bible. She would emphasize that point forcefully in early 1889 in the publication of Testimony 33, which has an extensive section on the role of her writings. We need to become familiar with that section. Why not read it today or this coming Sabbath(see 5T 654-691)?

Ellen White made it explicit that her writings were to bring people "back to the word"(ibid., 663) and to aid them in understanding biblical principles, but she never held them up as a divine conmmentary on Scripture. But that was not always obvious to her fellow Adventists. And many even today have not grasped it.

Ellen White never ceased directing people to "the book of the Lord" and to Jesus. She did not point to herself or to her writings as the authority. That is the best witness we have to the validity of her gift.

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The leaven of truth will not produce the spirit of rivalry, the love of ambition, the desire to be first. True, heaven-born love is not selfish and changeable(COL 101).
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