Ellen G. White and Her Critics

4. Her Letter to Eli Curtis

In Mrs. White’s letter to Eli Curtis, to which we have already referred, is found this further statement: “The Lord has shown me in vision, that Jesus rose up, and shut the door, and entered the Holy of Holies, at the 7th month 1844.”—A Word to the “Little Flock,” 12. The argument against Mrs. White here rests, of course, on the mere use of the phrase, “shut the door.” The reasoning is as follows: “The words ‘the shut door,’ consistently meant one thing only to Seventh-day Adventists in the years immediately following 1844, namely, the shutting of the door of mercy, therefore when Mrs. White uses the phrase, that is what she means, therefore she is teaching that there was no more mercy for sinners after 1844.” EGWC 216.2

Two comments on such reasoning are all that are needed. First, in the light of the historical record in the preceding chapter, it is evident that the earliest Seventh-day Adventists explicitly refused to make the “shut door” synonymous with the door of mercy, and that though their view was befogged by their original Millerite interpretation of the phrase, “the shut door,” they could not bring themselves to believe that there were no exceptions. EGWC 216.3

Second, not the pioneers in general, but Mrs. White, is here speaking. In her vision of March 24, 1849, quoted later, she says that the shutting of the door means the closing of Christ’s work in the first apartment of the heavenly sanctuary and His entering into the second apartment. True, that vision was two years after the Curtis letter. But the “shut door” phrase in this letter is used strictly in harmony with that 1849 vision. EGWC 216.4

Mrs. White does not say that there is no more salvation for sinners because Christ closed the door of the first apartment and went into the most holy place to do His final work of ministry. EGWC 217.1