Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Charge Number 3

“On the question of meat eating, Mrs. White uses language that is positively against God’s Word.” For example: “In Testimonies for the Church 1:548, she calls meat eating ‘a suggestion of Satan.’” EGWC 370.3

The critic presents a long list of statements in the Bible that set forth God’s permission to use flesh foods, and illustrations of their being used. The reader is supposed to conclude that she flies in the face of Scripture. EGWC 370.4

Let us first present, in its context, the phrase quoted from Mrs. White: EGWC 370.5

“Some think that they cannot reform, that health would be sacrificed should they attempt to leave the use of tea, tobacco, and flesh-meats. This is the suggestion of Satan. It is these hurtful stimulants that are surely undermining the constitution and preparing the system for acute diseases, by impairing Nature’s fine machinery, and battering down her fortifications erected against disease and premature decay.”—Testimonies for the Church 1:548, 549. EGWC 371.1

Mrs. White does not call “meat eating ‘a suggestion of Satan.’” She speaks, instead, of what some “think” and of the source of their thought. They “think that they cannot reform.” Is it not such thinking as this that keeps multitudes from making spiritual progress on innumerable matters? And would not any minister tell a man who said that he could not “reform” that such thinking was “a suggestion of Satan” and “positively against God’s Word”? EGWC 371.2

The question of whether, under some conditions, meat might be the best food available is not even under discussion here. EGWC 371.3

Christians quite uniformly believe that it may be wholly consistent with the objective of progress in the path toward the ideal, even to urge “reform” in some practices that the holy prophets permitted and sanctioned by a specific code. Moses permitted the Jews a “bill of divorcement.” But did Christ speak approvingly of this? No. He reminded His hearers that “in the beginning it was not so.” Not only did Moses permit slavery; he gave specific instruction as to how the slaves should be marked and how long they might be kept in servitude. Within the memory of some still living in America that Scriptural fact has been employed by Christian ministers, to say nothing of multitudes of laymen, to prove that those who wished to abolish slavery were, in the words of the charge before us, using “language that is positively against God’s Word.” And what was the best answer to that reasoning? “In the beginning it was not so.” EGWC 371.4

Those who call men back to Eden are not speaking “against God’s Word.” The story of Eden is the foundation of God’s Word; the restoration of Eden, the goal of the plan of salvation. Nothing more definitely distinguishes Mrs. White in her writings than her presentations of the beauty and perfection of Eden as a stimulus to higher and holier living in word and in deed. And in the particular matter before us, that of diet, nothing more clearly distinguishes Mrs. White in her presentation of the Edenic ideal of a fleshless diet than her warnings against extremes, her reminders that circumstance of country and a person’s condition may alter cases, and her appeals to judicious endeavor in leading men along the path toward Eden. EGWC 371.5