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The "California Conspiracy"
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August 24 - The "California Conspiracy"

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Jesus knew what they thinking and asked, "Why are you thinking these things in your hearts?" Luke 5:22, NIV.

Thinking can be a good thing.

But it is not necessarily good. That is especially true when it is fueled with conspiracy theories.

It was just such thinking that overwhelmed Butler and his friends on the eve of 1888  General Conference session. The match that set the conspiracy blaze aflame was a lat September letter from California pastor William H. Healey to George I. Butler that suggested that the Western leaders (Jones Waggoner, W. C. White, and Ellen White) of the church had develped a scheme to change the denomination's theology.

Before the arrival of Healey's letter, Butler appears to have been emotionally stable. He didn't like the thought of the controverted points on Daniel and Galatians coming up, but the August letters of W. C. and Ellen White had convinced him of the necessity of permitting it.

However, it devastated the already-tense General Conference president when he received what appeared to him to be news of an organized conspiracy just a few days before the opening of the Minneapolis session. Suddenly the events of the past two years all seemed to make sense to him. The reason the Whites had pushed so hard to get a hearing for Jones and Waggoner's new theology was that they were all in it together. Certainly, Butler concluded, here was a conspiracy of the most dangerous type and a threat to Adventism's time-tested beliefs.

That reasoning led Bulter into a spurt of last-minute frenzied activity as he organized his forces to resist what he saw as the Western coalition by sending off a series of telegrams and letters to the delegats, warning them of the conspiracy and urging them to "stand by the old landmarks."

Meanwhile, the Whites, Waggoner, and Jones, and the other California delegates remained ignorant of the fact that the Battle Creek forces viewed them as conspirators. As W. C. White put it, he was "innocent as a goose" about the misunderstanding, an wnawareness that soon led the Westerners to play unwittingly into the hands of the conspiracy theory advocates.

Correct thinking is difficult enough. But when it is tainted with conspiracy theories it becomes emotionally impossile. We still need to be aware of such thinking and pray for God's grace to be free from it.

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The blessing of the Lord will rest upon those thus work the land, learning spiritual lessons from nature. In cultivating the soil the worker knows little what treasures will open up before him. While he is not to despise the instruction he may gather from minds that have had an experience, and from the information that intelligent men may impart, he should gather lessons for himself. This is a part of his training. The cultivation of the soil will prove an education to the soul(COL 88).
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