Jones And Waggoner After 1888

Both men were raised high and both ended outside the church. This study tells that plainly, because a source that hides it has no claim to be trusted anywhere else — and because the way they fell is a warning aimed straight at the people most sure they are right.

A study on Righteousness By Faith · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 13 min read

Why This Has To Be Written

There is a way of telling the 1888 story that never gets to this chapter. The message is vindicated, the resistance is condemned, and the two messengers walk off the page still holding the light. It is a tidier story and it is not true.

A study that will not say what became of them cannot be trusted when it says anything else, and the omission would be noticed by exactly the readers most worth having. So here it is, briefly and without relish.

How High They Were Raised

Begin with the height, because the fall means nothing without it. Over more than a decade Ellen White wrote about these two men in terms she used of almost no one else.

“I believe without a doubt that God has given precious truth at the right time to Brother Jones and Brother Waggoner.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 566

“The Lord has raised up Brother Jones and Brother Waggoner to proclaim a message to the world to prepare a people to stand in the day of God.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 1814

She also put a figure on what the opposition had cost, writing to the man whose letters had primed Butler against them:

“These letters resulted in retarding the work of God for years, and brought severe and taxing labor upon me.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 1759

These are not men who were tolerated. They were vindicated, defended, and elevated — by the one voice in the movement whose endorsement carried most weight.

What Became Of Waggoner

Waggoner went to England in the early 1890s and spent about a decade there, editing and writing. His later work moved steadily toward a way of speaking about God’s presence in creation that the church came to judge pantheistic — the divine not merely working in all things but somehow diffused through them.

Then his personal life gave way. He divorced his wife and remarried, and that ended his ministry among Seventh-day Adventists. His credentials and his membership lapsed in the years after 1900. He died in 1916.

The seeds of the theological drift can be read in his own books if you go looking, and they are not what a reader expects. In The Glad Tidings — the same volume that gives the finest exposition of the law in Galatians in this whole controversy — there is also a strand of pure individual authority:

“…when one holds a truth directly from God, ten thousand times ten thousand great names in its favor do not add a feather’s weight to its authority; nor is his confidence in the least shaken if every great man on earth should oppose it.”

E. J. Waggoner · The Glad Tidings (1900), p. 33

Read fairly, that is sound Protestant ground, and in 1888 it was exactly right — truth does not rest on human authority, and his opponents needed to hear it. But a principle true in one direction has no brake in the other. Held without a counterweight, my conviction needs no confirmation from anyone becomes immunity from correction. That sentence was published three years before his final break, and it describes the mechanism of it.

What Became Of Jones

Jones rose higher and stayed longer. He edited the Review and Herald, sat on the General Conference Committee, and led the California Conference. For a decade after Minneapolis he was among the most influential preachers in the denomination.

What undid him was not doctrine first but authority. After the reorganization of 1901 he turned against the church’s structure itself, and then against the men running it, with the same absoluteness he had once turned on the ten kingdoms. He allied himself with Dr. J. H. Kellogg through the Battle Creek crisis. His ministerial credentials were withdrawn in 1907, and he was disfellowshipped in 1909. He kept writing against the denomination until his death in 1923.

He never renounced righteousness by faith. He went on preaching it, outside, to smaller and smaller rooms.

The Alpha, And Where She Traced It

The theology that drew both men in came to a head in Kellogg’s book The Living Temple, and Ellen White’s account of reading it is worth having in full, because of where she traces the error to.

She had not read it — the same practice she had kept since 1887 — until her son pressed her to look at particular paragraphs:

“Living Temple contains the Alpha of these theories. The Omega would follow in a little while. I tremble for our people. These beautiful representations are similar to the temptation that the enemy brought to Adam and Eve in Eden.”

Ellen G. White · Sermons and Talks, vol. 1, p. 341

Eden. Not a new heresy — the oldest one, returning in beautiful representations. And note what had wounded her most about the book’s reception:

“…the worst of it—that which struck right to my heart—was the assertion made regarding the book: ‘It contains the very sentiments that Sister White has been teaching.’”

Ellen G. White · Sermons and Talks, vol. 1, p. 341

There is the whole mechanism in one sentence. The counterfeit does not announce itself as the opposite of the truth. It arrives wearing the truth’s own clothes — quoting the same authors, using the same vocabulary, claiming to be what you already believed, only more so.

The 1888 message says Christ in you, the hope of glory. The counterfeit of that exact truth, and only of that truth, is the divine is in you already. Nothing else could have caught these particular men, because nothing else was close enough to what they had spent their lives preaching.

What This Proves And What It Does Not

Say plainly what the record will bear.

It does not unmake the message. What was preached at Minneapolis was Paul’s before it was theirs, and Ellen White endorsed the truth they carried, not the men’s futures. Solomon’s end does not unmake Proverbs. Balaam’s oracle was true. A message is not verified by its messengers and it is not cancelled by them either.

Nor does it vindicate the men who resisted them. Butler and Smith were not proved right in 1907 by something that had not happened in 1888. The objections examined in an earlier study stand or fall on their own merits, and none of them was these men will one day leave.

And it does not make them frauds. Nothing in the record suggests either man was insincere at Minneapolis. They believed what they preached, they preached it under real opposition, and it was true.

The Warning Is Aimed At Us

Here is the part that should make any of us uncomfortable, and it is the reason this study belongs in the series rather than in a footnote.

The two men who fell were not the ones who lacked light. They were the ones who had been proved right. They had stood against the leadership of their church and been vindicated by the prophet of that church — publicly, repeatedly, over years. If being right, and being told you were right, were protection, no two men in that generation were better protected.

It was not protection. It may have been the danger itself. A man who has been correct against the whole assembled leadership once has learned a lesson that is very hard to unlearn — that the assembly can be wrong and he can be right — and that lesson, held without its counterweight, will eventually put him outside every check that might have saved him.

Which is why the last study in this series is not about 1888 at all. It is about the difference between being honored by God and thinking too highly of yourself, and how narrow the path between them turns out to be. Jones and Waggoner walked it for fifteen years and stepped off. That is not a story about two unusual men. It is the ordinary danger, in unusually clear light.

How To Speak About Them

With restraint, and without the small satisfaction that creeps into accounts of a fall.

They were young men who saw something their elders had stopped seeing, said it plainly at cost to themselves, and were used to bring a great many people to Christ. Then they lost their footing, over years, in ways that are documented and need no embroidering. Both things are true, and the second does not get to be the headline.

A note on sources. The high statements above are quoted by page from Ellen White’s own documents. The biographical facts of the two men’s later years — the dates, the credentials, the disfellowshipping — come from the standard denominational record rather than from those documents, which largely close before the events. That distinction is kept deliberately, and it is the subject of the next study.