Spectrum Magazine has consistently been on the cutting edge of examining Adventist theology and issues. But it has also frequently featured Adventist art and poetry. During this, Adventist Forum's 40th anniversary year, we will be periodically featuring some of the art from these issues. Spectrum archives are available here. This set of images is taken from 3 different issues in 1969. The artist is Dirk K. Koopmans.

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From: A portfolio by Dirk Kerst Koopmans:

"Art has in its nature a religious essence. In the field of painting this is transmitted by what the eye sees and by the hand which directs the artist's brush. Thus an encounter with the transcendental is possible. The closer this becomes, consciously or unconsciously, the more the meaning of art is fulfilled."

Introduction by Bonnie Dwyer / 1970 Spectrum article by Roy Branson and Herold D. Weiss

In the second volume of Spectrum, one sees the writers and editors responding in a significant way to the life of the church over issues ranging from missions to race relations and regional conferences to Ellen White. Conversations, scholarship, and articles about Ellen White have filled our pages ever since. While there are several significant articles about her in volume two, Roy Branson and Herold D. Weiss significantly set out an agenda for Adventist scholarship about her.

“Most Seventh-day Adventists know that for some time we have been able to make Ellen G. White say almost anything we want,” they wrote. “Her authority is universally recognized in the church, but what we make her say with authority often depends on who of us is quoting her. In the life of the church, therefore, she speaks with many accents. Sometimes on a single topic we make her voice blare out arguments on both sides of a debate. . . . The result of having so many Ellen Whites is that the Adventist church may soon have no Ellen White at all.”

They suggested that the church needed to make it a top priority to establish a more objective way of understanding what she said. Then they laid out four steps on how to go about that process. But rather than summarize their work, it follows in its entirety my comments here. Your comments would be most welcome following that.

But before I turn you over to Drs. Branson and Weiss, I also want to draw your attention to the first Forum symposium that appeared in Volume Two. While not on Ellen White, it did deal with revelation and centered on a presentation by Baptist scholar Bernard Ramm with responses from Wilber Alexander, Edward Heppenstall, and Jack W. Provonsha. You can read it here: http://spectrummagazine.org/files/archive/archive01-05/2-1ramm.pdf.

And now over to Branson and Weiss.

by ROY BRANSON and HEROLD D. WEISS

Most Seventh-day Adventists know that for some time we have been able to make Ellen G. White say almost anything we want. Her authority is universally recognized in the church, but what we make her say with authority often depends on who of us is quoting her. In the life of the church, therefore, she speaks with many accents. Sometimes on a single topic we make her voice blare out arguments on both sides of a debate.

Take the subject of health reform. One Ellen White talks reasonably about the advantages of temperate living. Another Ellen White fanatically demands that we eat only foods grown according to certain rigidly defined methods. Which is the real Ellen White ?

Sometimes we make her march determinedly in opposite directions - as in our discussions of justification by faith versus perfection, or God's sovereignty versus man's free will. As important a topic as the universality of salvation throws us into a dilemma when quotations extracted from her writings are simply strung together end-to-end. She appears on both the banner of those who say that the heathen who never hear the name of Christ will be as if they never were, and the banner of those who insist that every man is given light sufficient for a choice determining his eternal destiny.

The result of having so many Ellen Whites is that the Adventist church may soon have no Ellen White at all. Conceivably all that may be left will be a few members shouting at each other in her name; the great majority, having already despaired of understanding her, will only wonder what all the commotion is about.

It should be clear by now that among the top priorities of the church ought to be the establishment of more objective ways of understanding what Ellen White said. The church needs to see a coherent whole in her wide-ranging writings. To find a consistent method of interpretation for these writings should not be thought of as merely an intriguing academic possibility; it is an essential and immediate task for the church.

Up to now, two main ways - both of them wanting - have been used to understand Mrs. White's thinking. One way has been to compile quotations taken at random from all her works, and then to group these quotations simply by topic. The other way has been to consider as more authoritative those statements that start with the words "I was shown," or some similar expression.

Both of these ways have sometimes proved useful, but they remain inadequate. A collection of quotations by topic often exaggerates the seeming contradictions among them. As a result, the consistent viewpoints Ellen White actually had are obscured, and her persuasiveness is diminished. On the other hand, to take as authoritative only the statements that cite a specific vision depreciates the value of the many things God "showed" her through the guidance of the Holy Spirit pervading her life. She was led by God even when she could not refer to a particular vision for a specific admonition.

The church has not sufficiently perceived the full significance of Ellen White's message by using these means. New methods are needed. What follows is a set of proposals to make possible a more consistent interpretation of these inspired writings.

The first step should be to discover the nature of Mrs. White's relationship to other authors. We know that she borrowed terms, phrases, and historical accounts from others. To find the real Ellen White we must undertake the vast, but absolutely necessary, task of learning exactly what kind of use she made of the work of these other writers. Sample cores have been taken,[1] but the vital information - the nature, selection, and use of the abundant material available to her and integrated by her in her writing - is still a mystery. Until we know more precisely which authors she respected sufficiently to rely on, we will not really know Ellen White or her ideas.

The second step should be to recover the social and intellectual milieu in which she lived and wrote. How can her testimony be understood until the economic, political, religious, and educational issues that were the context of her words are recognized ? Unless we know what meaning specific words had in the culture of her day, how can we know her meaning in using them ?[2] Either Ellen White lives for us first in her own cultural situation or she does not live for us at all. Of course, if we hear her speak within a definite cultural milieu, we do not thereby confine the significance of her words to that context. Understanding her in terms of the nineteenth century does not mean that what she said is irrelevant to the twentieth century. Actually, finding how her words pertained to the past century is a necessary step in establishing their relevance to our own. Like most things in nature, words do not live in a vacuum.

The third step should be to give close attention to the development of Ellen White's writings within her own lifetime, and also to the development of the church. What was first written as a small series of books grew through the years into the rather voluminous Conflict of the Ages series. Personal letters became articles in church papers, only thereafter to be transformed into parts of books. Events in Mrs. White's life and currents in the church are relevant to understanding why her writings took the shape they did. Compilations of her writings published since her death should be examined in terms of the issues that confronted the church when the editors did their compiling.[3]

By taking the three foregoing steps we can know with more assurance what the real Ellen White said. By making certain that our investigations follow clearly defined guidelines, we can more completely free our interpretations of conflicting personal biases. When we compare what she took from her sources with what she ignored in them, we can see more clearly a trend in her thinking. By knowing the streams of thinking in which these sources fall, and by being aware of what other alternatives existed for her, we can see for the first time the significance of her choice of sources. By putting ourselves in the crosscurrents of her day, we can see why she used one argument on a topic at one time and another argument on the same topic at another time. Anything we learn about her and the church at every stage in the preparation of her writings can only help draw us further into her mind.

Our final step should then be to apply in our day the words she spoke in her day. We may never be able fully to recapture Ellen White's original intentions or the absolute truth of what she meant. But if the methods proposed here, or similar ones, were implemented, the church would be much closer to her ideas than it is now. Setting up objective criteria for interpretation would restrain individual prejudice and decrease confusion. With relatively greater consensus on what she said, we would increasingly agree on what she would say today. Her influence, instead of waning, would then become more pervasive.

Using such methods would put the church in touch with a more vital and interesting Ellen White, with nuances and enthusiasms we do not recognize now. This more vibrant Ellen White would not always agree with her modern readers (any more than she did with her original readers), but she would be a more believable person. She would be seen as God's human spokesman - perhaps less magical and less awesome, but also less obscure and less ignored, and therefore actually more influential than she is now. And if she were more vital and effective, she would thereby be actually more authoritative also. Rather than being an impersonal voice subject to our manipulation, she would become again the living, breathing person who drew men to God.

Following methods like those outlined here would open up far-reaching scholarly enterprises. No one Adventist during his entire life could accomplish the tasks that would emerge. Indeed, no single discipline has adequate tools to do the job alone. It is imperative, therefore, that Adventist scholars from various disciplines bring their different perspectives and insights and equipment to the challenge of understanding Ellen G. White.

This kind of interdisciplinary effort by the Adventist academic community could help more clearly to distinguish the essence of Adventism.

NOTES
1 An example is William S. Peterson's article in this issue: A Textual and Historical Study of Ellen White's Account of the French Revolution.

2 In an unpublished study, Ellen G. White and Fiction, John O. Waller examines the meaning of the word fiction in Mrs. White's time and relates his findings to her use of the term.

Richard Rice's article, Adventists and Welfare Work: A Comparative Study (Spectrum 2, 52-63, winter 1970), recounts some of the attitudes and endeavors of social welfare activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus gives an idea of the issues that concerned Mrs. White when she commented on social welfare.

The task of recreating the milieu in which Mrs. White and other early Adventists discussed interracial relations is attempted by Branson in Ellen G. White: Racist
Or Champion of Equality? Review and Herald, April 9, 16, and 23, 1970.

3 In his recent book, Ellen G. White and Church Race Relations (Washington, D. C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association 1970), Ronald D. Graybill has established the setting, in Mrs. White's life and in the work of the church, of her comments on race in Testimonies for the Church, volume nine (Washington, D. C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association 1970), pp. 199-226.

Jonathan Butler, in Ellen G. White and the Chicago Mission (Spectrum 2, 41-51, winter 1970), shows that a knowledge of the church's controversy with John Harvey Kellogg is essential to an understanding of Mrs. White's seemingly contradictory statements on inner-city mission work.

AUTUMN 1970

For as long as I've been a pastor (and that's longer than you think) pastors have been saddled with images and metaphors drawn from the world of business and capitalism to describe pastoral vocation. Some of us have nearly given up, declaring, "If I'm being asked to be the religious version of a used car salesman, then forget it!" There have been a few voices that have helped pastors recover the ancient pastoral art. Among these voices are well-known pastors and theologians like Eugene Peterson, William Willimon, Walter Brueggemann... and M. Craig Barnes.

The current issue of The Christian Century has an incredible article by Barnes, entitled "Poet in Residence: Listening for the Sacred Subtext," which is essentially chapter 2 of Barnes' new book, Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in Ministerial Life (Eerdmans). Here's an excerpt:

Poets are devoted more to truth than to reality; they are not unaware of reality, but they never accept it at face value. The value of reality is found only by peeling back its appearance to discover the underlying truth. This is why poets care about the text, what is said or done, but only in order to reveal subtext, which reveals what it means. They value the reality they see primarily as a portal that invites them into a more mysterious encounter with truth. This is what distinguishes poets from those whose contributions to society are focused simply on following a particular text. Engineers, for example, follow their textbooks in constructing bridges that lead across deep ravines. And one hopes that they have been very, very devoted to those texts. By contrast, a poet who crosses the engineer's bridge will go home and spend all day constructing verse that reveals the longing of the soul to find such an overpass when we stand on the banks of a disaster and peer down into the valley of death.

The last thing anyone sitting in a church pew needs is for the preacher to give advice on following the necessary algorithms for engineering better bridges. Or lessons in economics, politics or how to raise children. This doesn't mean that any of these topics are out of bounds for the pastor-poet. But to be faithful to our particular calling, we need to get beneath the reality of what is being said and done to explore the often mysterious truth of what this means. In making interpretations of this mystery, the pastor is not a free agent but a faithful devotee to his or her biblical and theological tradition of interpretation. This tradition is filled with poetic insights that guide the contemporary pastor into a particular way of uncovering reality to expose eternal truth. Both the realist and the truth teller are necessary, but they are seldom found in the same office of leadership.

This should be required reading for every pastor. If you are feeling burdened by expectations, whether from the outside or (worse yet) those you place on yourself, then this article will be salve for your soul.

I'm not sure who thought of it first, but I learned these thoughts first from Walter Brueggemann in his incredible and lesser known book, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Brueggemann is writing more about preaching, but the sense is the same. He makes an urgent call for "Poetry in a Prose-Flattened World."

Prose-flattened world. This has been an evocative phrase for me for the past 5 years and relates deeply to what I have been writing (here and here and here). Brueggemann writes:

Poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism, the only proclamation, I submit, that is worthy of the name preaching. Such preaching is not moral instruction or problem solving or doctrinal clarification. It is not good advice, nor is it romantic caressing, nor is it a soothing good humor.
It is, rather, the ready, steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers of this age. The preacher has an awesome opportunity to offer an evangelical world: an existence shaped by the news of the gospel.

Here's to being Pastor-Poets!