The Gift of Prophecy (The Role of Ellen White in God’s Remnant Church)

The human element in her writings

The fact that Ellen White claimed not to express her own ideas but that which God had shown her doesn’t mean that everything she wrote for the church came to her via a heavenly pipeline. What she was shown in the visions she had to write down in her own words. And when she was shown historical scenes that were part of the great controversy, she had to go to history books to find out the names of the places and the dates of the events that she had seen. Consequently, she wrote in the introduction to the book The Great Controversy , “In some cases where a historian has so grouped together events as to afford, in brief, a comprehensive view of the subject, or has summarized details in a convenient manner, his words have been quoted” (GC xii). Today we know that she used material from books written by other authors in many of her books. This shouldn’t surprise us. Like Moses, Paul, and other biblical authors, she received dreams and visions from God, but she also had to do research before she could write out many of God’s messages. GP 56.2

Like the biblical authors, Ellen White at times made mistakes in regard to historical matters. In the Bible we find that Matthew mistakenly wrote “Jeremiah” instead of “Zechariah” (see Matthew 27:9), and Stephen (or Luke) confused the names of Abraham and Jacob in Acts 7:16 (cf. Genesis 23:10-16; 33:19). Because these details weren’t important to the message, God didn’t intervene to correct them. Similarly, in the writings of Ellen White, one can find details that may not be historically correct. When such things were pointed out to her, she was quite willing to correct them. For example, in her description of the St. Bartholomew Massacre in France in 1572, she followed Wylie’s History of Protestantism and wrote in the 1888 edition of The Great Controversy , “The great bell of the palace, tolling at dead of night, was a signal for the slaughter” (GC [1888] 272). When it was pointed out to her that many subsequent historians believed it was not the palace bell but the bell of the church of St. Germain that gave the signal for the slaughter, she changed the sentence to read, “A bell, tolling at dead of night, was a signal for the slaughter” (GC [1911] 272). GP 56.3

In 1912, her son W. C. White wrote to an inquirer, “Mother has never wished our brethren to treat them [her writings] as authority regarding details of history or historical dates.” ⁷ In the same letter W. C. White said, “When writing out the chapters for Great Controversy , she sometimes gave a partial description of an important historical event, and when her copyist who was preparing the manuscripts for the printer, made inquiry regarding time and place, Mother would say that those things are recorded by conscientious historians. Let the dates used by those historians be inserted” (3SM 447). And even conscientious historians can be mistaken. (However, this doesn’t mean we can ignore everything she wrote about history.) GP 57.1

It is important to remember that such minor inaccuracies don’t change the message. That’s why God didn’t think He must intervene supernaturally. GP 57.2