What Ellen White Said About 1888

She rebuked the messengers. She refused to read either side’s arguments. She called the disputed question not vital — twice, years apart. And she called the message itself most precious. All four are true, and any account that drops one of them is selling something.

A study on Righteousness By Faith · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read

Why This Is So Easy To Get Wrong

Everyone who writes about 1888 quotes Ellen White, and almost everyone quotes her accurately. The distortion does not happen in the quotation. It happens in the selection.

She wrote about this controversy for more than a decade, in letters, manuscripts, sermons and periodical articles. The White Estate gathered the material into a single collection of some eighteen hundred pages. It contains statements that will delight anyone who believes the message was rejected, and statements that will comfort anyone who believes the whole affair has been overblown. Both sets are genuine.

So the only honest method is to take them in order and let the tensions stand. Four things, in the sequence she said them.

Before: She Told Waggoner He Had Erred

In February 1887 — twenty months before Minneapolis — she wrote to Waggoner and Jones directly. It is not the letter their admirers quote.

“I have no hesitancy in saying you have made a mistake here. You have departed from the positive directions God has given upon this matter, and only harm will be the result. … It is no small matter for you to come out in the Signs as you have done, and God has plainly revealed that such things should not be done. We must keep before the world a united front.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 22

Her objection was not to what Waggoner believed. It was to his taking a contested question public in the denominational paper, and then carrying it into a general session. Of Waggoner himself she writes that he:

“…has had his mind exercised on this subject, but to bring these differences into our general conferences is a mistake; it should not be done.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 23

And she offered a precedent from her own house, which is as searching a paragraph as she ever wrote about how truth ought to be handled:

“My husband had some ideas on some points differing from the views taken by his brethren. I was shown that however true his views were, God did not call for him to put them in front before his brethren and create differences of ideas.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 24

However true his views were. She is not saying James White was wrong. She is saying that being right does not by itself authorize a man to make his rightness the front of the work.

In the same letter she is gentle with the other side too — noting that Butler had carried such a load of burdens that he “was not prepared to do this subject justice.” Nobody in this correspondence is a hero and nobody is a villain. They are all being corrected.

She Would Not Read The Arguments

Now the sentence that governs how every other statement of hers on this subject must be read, and it is almost never quoted:

“I have not read Elder Butler’s pamphlet or any articles written by any of our writers and do not mean to.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 22

Elsewhere in the same collection she explains the practice, and the reason is stronger than mere neutrality:

“I have not been in the habit of reading any doctrinal articles in the paper, that my mind should not have any understanding of anyone’s ideas and views, and that not a mold of any man’s theories should have any connection with that which I write.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 21

Consider what that means, because it settles a great deal.

She was not an umpire in an exegetical contest, and she deliberately disqualified herself from being one. She had not read Butler’s eighty-five pages. She had not read Waggoner’s articles. Whatever she said about the message, she was not saying it as a person who had weighed the two cases on Galatians 3 and reached a verdict.

Which means that anyone — on either side — who quotes her to settle the law in Galatians is asking her a question she declined to answer, on purpose, in writing.

During: Precious Light, And A Reservation

At Minneapolis her position was consistent with all of the above, and it is the single most misquoted sentence in this whole history — because it gets halved.

“Dr. Waggoner has spoken to us in a straightforward manner. There is precious light in what he has said. Some things presented in reference to the law in Galatians, if I fully understand his position, do not harmonize with the understanding I have had of this subject; but truth will lose nothing by investigation.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 163

Those who want her endorsing Waggoner stop after precious light. Those who want her defending the old position stop after do not harmonize. She said the whole thing in one breath and then asked for investigation — and note the careful if I fully understand his position, from a woman who had just told them she was not reading the articles.

Twice she refused to let the exegetical question be made the crisis. In 1887: “These questions are not vital points.” At Minneapolis, to a man who had just declared that if their view of Galatians was wrong they had no third angel’s message at all: “The question at issue is not a vital question and should not be treated as such.”

Two statements, eighteen months apart, saying the same thing to opposite sides. That is consistency, and it is the opposite of how she is usually deployed.

After: The Hardest Thing She Said

If the story stopped there, the comfortable conclusion would be that Minneapolis was a regrettable quarrel over a secondary question. She did not permit that conclusion.

“This light from heaven by some was rejected with all the stubbornness the Jews manifested in rejecting Christ, and there was much talk about standing by the old landmarks.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 518

There is no softening that. The comparison is to the rejection of Christ Himself, and the phrase she puts beside it is the very slogan the resistance had rallied under. Whatever was not vital about the Galatians question, something in that room was rejected, and she names it as light from heaven.

She is equally direct about the men who organized the resistance, and she grants them their motive in the same sentence in which she condemns the result: “You may have thought that you were verily doing God service; but it served the cause of the enemy rather than the cause of God.”

A Most Precious Message

And then the sentence everyone knows, which deserves to be read in the light of everything above rather than in place of it:

“The Lord in His great mercy sent a most precious message to His people through Elders Waggoner and Jones.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 1336

She goes further still, and ties the message to the beginning of the final work:

“The time of test is just upon us, for the loud cry of the third angel has already begun in the revelation of the righteousness of Christ, the sin-pardoning Redeemer.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 1073

That is as high a claim as she makes for anything in her lifetime. The revelation of the righteousness of Christ is not a helpful emphasis. It is the loud cry beginning.

How All Four Fit Together

Set them side by side and the apparent contradiction dissolves, because the four statements are not about the same object.

• The rebuke to Waggoner is about method — how a contested view should be carried.
• The refusal to read is about her own role — she would not be the referee of a human argument.
• “Not a vital question” is about the exegesis of Galatians 3 — one disputed reading of one chapter.
• “A most precious message” is about the righteousness of Christ received by faith — which was never the thing in dispute, and is the thing that was refused.

She was never adjudicating an argument. She was testifying about a message and rebuking a spirit — and those two things could be done without ever opening Butler’s pamphlet, which is precisely why she did not open it.

The exegetical question was small and she said so. The thing standing behind it was the loud cry beginning, and she said that too. Both, from the same person, without inconsistency.

Two Warnings About Quoting Her

First, to anyone who leads with “a most precious message.” The same collection has her telling the messengers they had made a mistake, declining to endorse Waggoner’s reading of Galatians, and refusing on principle to read his articles. A defence of the 1888 message that cannot accommodate those is not a defence of what she actually said.

Second, to anyone who leads with “not a vital question.” The same collection has her comparing the rejection to the Jews rejecting Christ, and locating the beginning of the loud cry in the very message being resisted. Whoever uses her to make Minneapolis a storm in a teacup is using half a witness.

And a caution about the volume itself. The 1888 Materials contains her documents and the compilers’ framing of them — headings, introductions, and explanatory notes written by the White Estate. On the page these read much alike. A paragraph beginning “she in 1885 said that…” is an editor writing about her, not her writing. Before quoting anything from that collection as hers, check that the sentence is in first person and belongs to a dated letter or manuscript rather than to the apparatus around it.

Every quotation in this study is from her own documents and is cited by page so that you can check it. That is not a courtesy. On this subject, given how the sources have been used, it is the minimum.