The Objections To The 1888 Message

The men who resisted at Minneapolis had reasons. Four of them, and every one is stronger than the caricature. Here they are as they were actually made — and here is the one objection nobody thought to raise.

A study on Righteousness By Faith · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 15 min read

It is easy to tell this story with a villain in it. Two young men bring the gospel; the establishment refuses it; the establishment is wrong. Every part of that is defensible and the whole of it is a caricature, because it never asks the only question that makes the history useful: what did they think they were protecting?

They had four objections. None is foolish. One of them is, on its face, entirely fair.

The President Was Not In The Room

Start with the fact that governs everything else, and that most accounts mention only in passing. The session opened on the morning of October 17, 1888, and the official record notes that it was called to order by Uriah Smith, secretary of the conference — the president being detained at home by sickness.

G. I. Butler, president of the General Conference and author of the eighty-five-page pamphlet that had set out the case against Waggoner’s reading of Galatians, never arrived. He spent the session ill at home in Battle Creek, receiving reports and sending instructions.

Worse, he had been primed. Ellen White later wrote to one of the men responsible, and the sentence is worth reading slowly:

“You wrote that plans were all laid, and that A. T. Jones, Dr. Waggoner, and W. C. White, had things all prepared to make a drive at the General Conference. And you warned Elder Butler—a poor sick man, broken in body and in mind,—to prepare for the emergency.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 187

So the leadership did not encounter the message fresh. They arrived having been told, in advance and in writing, that a coordinated drive was coming from California — and their president lay sick a thousand miles away, broken in body and mind, having been told the same thing.

Nothing that happened in that hall is intelligible without this. The men in Minneapolis were not evaluating a doctrine. They believed they were absorbing an ambush on behalf of an absent friend.

Objection One: The Timing Was Unfair

The first objection followed directly, and it was made loudly and in public. Ellen White recorded it:

“He stated, over and over again, that he greatly deplored the introduction of this question and that he was so sorry it should be introduced at a time when Elder Butler was sick and could not be present to manage this matter. With emphasis he stated that it was a cowardly thing to broach this matter when Elder Butler could not be present, as he was best prepared to handle this question.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 222

Read that as an objection rather than as a symptom, and it has real force. A contested question is opened at a general meeting. The one man who has written a book on it, who holds the presidency, and who is universally regarded as best equipped to answer, is absent and too ill to travel. Raising it now means it gets decided without him.

Any of us would feel the weight of that on behalf of an absent friend. It is not a doctrinal argument at all — it is an argument about fair procedure, and fair procedure matters.

What can be said on the other side is only this: the question had not been sprung. It had been in the Signs since 1886, answered by Butler’s pamphlet in the same period, and circulated among the leadership for two years. Whatever else Minneapolis was, it was not the first anyone had heard of it. And Ellen White’s judgment of Waggoner’s own conduct was unqualified:

“Elder Waggoner had taken a straightforward course, not involving personalities, to thrust anyone or to ridicule anyone.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 222

Objection Two: Stand By The Old Landmarks

From his sickbed, Butler sent his verdict in four words. Ellen White quotes them:

“…in that conference Elder Butler felt called upon to send in telegrams and long letters, ‘Stand by the old landmarks.’”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 187

This is the objection with the deepest roots, and it is not a bad principle. A movement that had come out of the Great Disappointment by careful study, that had established the Sabbath and the sanctuary and the state of the dead against enormous opposition, had every reason to be wary of a new teaching that seemed to unsettle a settled position. Advancing light is real; so are men who arrive with novelties. Some test is needed, and does this contradict what God has already shown us? is not a stupid test.

The trouble is that the test cannot be applied until you know whether the new teaching actually contradicts the old — and answering that requires hearing it out, at length, with the willingness to conclude that you were wrong. A telegram cannot do that work. A telegram can only assert that the work has already been done.

And Ellen White’s reply to the whole procedure is one sentence:

“Just as though the Lord was not present at that conference, and would not keep His hand on the work!”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 187

Objection Three: The Prophecy Question

There was a second dispute at Minneapolis that had nothing to do with righteousness by faith, and forgetting it makes the temperature of the meeting impossible to understand.

A. T. Jones argued, from the historical sources, that the Alemanni rather than the Huns should be counted among the ten kingdoms of Daniel 7. The session’s own Bulletin records the point in those terms, and notes that a discussion followed in which a number of the delegates took part.

On its face this is an antiquarian quibble. It was nothing of the kind. The standard denominational exposition of Daniel was Uriah Smith’s — the book the whole movement taught from, written by the man now chairing the session in the president’s absence. A young editor from California correcting one of its lists, in public, in front of the delegates, was not experienced as a footnote.

And here the record corrects the story most of us have been told. The session did not shout Jones down. The Bulletin reports that at the close of the discussion it was voted that, taking all the light received and all the references given, the delegates would faithfully and carefully study the question, praying that the Spirit might guide them into the truth. It further records that the chair was to appoint a committee of seven to devise a plan by which those who believed they had received light on any point could bring it before the denomination.

That is not the behavior of a body slamming a door. It is a body voting to study, and building a mechanism for hearing new light in future. Whatever went wrong at Minneapolis, a formal refusal to consider is not what the minutes show.

Objection Four: The Law In Galatians

The fourth is the famous one, and it is set out in full — with Butler’s own case quoted from his own pamphlet — in The Law In Galatians. In short: Paul says the law was added and lasts till the seed should come, and neither can be said of the Ten Commandments; therefore the law in question must be the ceremonial system.

Butler stated the motive behind it plainly on his eighth page: the apostle’s references to the law in Galatians were being used by opponents “as a strong support to their Antinomian doctrines.” He was guarding a wall that really was under attack.

What All Four Have In Common

Now set them side by side.

• The timing was unfair — an objection about procedure.
• Stand by the old landmarks — an objection about continuity.
• The ten kingdoms — an objection about established authority.
• The law in Galatians — an objection about consequences: what this teaching might be used to justify.

Procedure, continuity, authority, consequences. Four serious concerns, held by serious men — and not one of them is an argument about whether Christ is our righteousness.

That is the shape of the whole resistance, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The objections cluster entirely around the circumstances of the message: who brought it, when, with what authority, and what might follow from it. They never engage the thing itself.

The Objection Nobody Made

Read the record looking for the argument you would most expect, and it is not there.

Nobody at Minneapolis stood up and said that a man is justified by his obedience. Nobody argued that the commandments earn acceptance with God, or that Christ’s righteousness is insufficient, or that a sinner contributes something of his own. No one defended legalism, because no one there believed in it. Every man in that hall would have said, and meant, that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone.

This is why Ellen White could say the Galatians question was not the vital one. The vital question was never a proposition anyone was prepared to deny. It was whether a people who already believed the gospel would let it be preached to them as though they needed it — now, at this meeting, by these two men.

That is a far more searching test than a doctrinal one, and it is the reason this history keeps its edge. A wrong opinion can be corrected by a better argument. What was on trial at Minneapolis was not an opinion.

Verily Doing God Service

Her verdict on the men who organized the resistance is the hardest sentence in the whole correspondence, and it is hard in a direction most readers do not expect:

“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.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 187

She grants them the motive. You may have thought that you were verily doing God service — and there is no reason to doubt they did. These were not cynics. They were men defending a movement they had given their lives to, on behalf of a sick friend, against what they had been told was a coordinated drive.

And it served the enemy anyway.

That is the sentence to carry out of this study, because sincerity is the defense every one of us reaches for first, and here it is granted in full and it settles nothing. The question is never only did I mean well. It is also what did my meaning well actually do — to the person I resisted, to the truth I delayed, and to the people who were watching me do it.

Four good men with four reasonable objections, every one of them about something other than the gospel, can between them keep a message out of a church for a generation. None of them has to be a villain for that to happen. That is what makes it worth studying, and what makes it worth being afraid of.