A great many Adventists, regardless of the official pronouncements of the church hierarchy, consider "the Spirit of Prophecy" to be an infallible authority in which there is no error.
This belief is at the heart of the Ellen G. White problem. If her writings are divinely inspired, how then to account for such things, to name one of many possible instances, as the deletion of visionary material upholding the Shut Door teaching from the official canon of her works and her repeated denials of having ever held such a view? Then there are the troubling instances in which she was simply wrong, as in her infamous declaration that "if there was one sin above another which called for the destruction of the race by the flood, it was the base crime of amalgamation of man and beast . . . (which produced) the confused species which God did not create,"(38) or her claim that virtually every physical malady can be traced to masturbation which is caused by eating meat and other "stimulating" foods?(39) One response to this problem, unfortunately one followed from an early date on, was to simply delete the troublesome statements from later editions of her works. When the deleted material has been subsequently discovered and questioned, the White Estate's (the legal entity which controls her writings and official legacy) standard response has been to issue a confusing statement to the effect that Sister White did really not mean to say what she seems to have said.(40) These official pronouncements evidently provide sufficient reassurance for the many Adventists who would never think of questioning White's writings in the first place, but they leave a lot of other people less than satisfied…………………..
In 1976 Ronald Numbers' Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White was published. While Numbers actually took a rather conservative stance in a scholarly discussion of the historical and social context of White's work, he clearly demonstrated that much of her "health message" was derived without credit from other health reformers. The Adventist Church did its best to block the book, and by the time it was published Numbers had been dismissed from his position on the faculty of Loma Linda University, the flagship of the Adventist educational establishment. (43)
If Prophetess of Health shook up Adventism, the 1982 publication of Walter Rea's The White Lie (44) came like an earthquake. Through the years, Ellen White had frequently been accused of plagiarism. Just as frequently the accusations were denied to the satisfaction of most Adventists. Rea was a well established Adventist minister and self described devotee of White. In the course of graduate work at a non-Adventist university, much to his discomfort he discovered a number of uncanny parallels between the works of other nineteenth century religious writers and White's writings. His attempts to bring the results of his research to the attention of General Conference officials were repeatedly met with statements that more study was needed before the issue could be publicly discussed. Rea, however, refused to keep silent. After an article on the controversy appeared in the Los Angeles Times, he was relieved of his position as an Adventist minister.
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