Ellen White and Literary Dependency

MINISTRY Editor J. R. Spangler interviews Robert W. Olson, secretary, and Ron Graybill, assistant secretary, of the White Estate.

J.R. Spangler is editor of Ministry
Ron Graybill is assistant secretary of the White Estate.
Robert W. Olson is secretary of the White Estate.

Spangler: To get right to the point, Bob, give us a little background on this problem that seems to be surfacing today in which Ellen White is accused of literary dependency on other sources and in which her inspiration is questioned.

Olson: We want to remember, first of all, that the main source for what Ellen White wrote was divine revelation, visions, or information that she received from the Lord in one way or another. But there were also other sources of information, and these have caused some questions lately.

We really need to go back to the 1800's, when it was first mentioned in print that Ellen White used the works of others to some extent. D. M. Canright pointed this out in connection with The Great Controversy. Ellen White herself acknowledged this fact in the introduction to that book, so she was quite free in stating what she was doing. Then in 1919, at a Bible conference held in Takoma Park, the issues of Ellen White's sources and the nature of her inspiration were rather extensively discussed. But this conference made little impact on the church. In the year 1951 Elder Francis D. Nichol, in his book Ellen G. White and Her Critics, discussed the issue of Ellen White's sources in some depth. You'll find in that book about 65 pages dealing with the question of plagiarism. He deals with her use of D'Aubigne, Wiley, and others in The Great Controversy. He also mentions the book Sketches From the Life of Paul. But this was pretty much the limit of F. D. Nichol's treatment of the subject. And I think that many people rather felt that Ellen White's borrowing had been limited to those two books, or maybe to one or two more.

I know that when I went to college this was my understanding. The thought that she had borrowed anything at all for her other books was something that hadn't entered my mind. I learned a few years later that a paragraph here and there in her writings had come from other books, but it didn't concern me too much. However, those who are currently do research in this area have demonstrated that Ellen White's borrowings are more extensive than previously realized. Some notice was given the situation recently in Christianity Today.

Graybill: I think that the issue has become prominent at this time, in part, because a pastor, Walter Rea, has made it known among church members and has brought it to the attention of a larger group of people than did those who have raised similar questions in an academic setting. For about ten years now these kinds of questions have been raised. A professor at Andrews University wrote articles that appeared back in the early seventies about Ellen White's use of sources in the chapter on the French Revolution in The Great Controversy. We have Ron Numbers' book Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White, which raised similar questions about her health writings. And then Dr. Don McAdams, president of Southwestern Adventist College, did a very thorough study of the chapter on John Huss in The Great Controversy.

Now these people didn't use all the same arguments or approaches to the questions, but basically they were all part of a recent reinvestigation of this issue. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the people who raised these questions were either critics out side the church or persons who apostatized. In recent times it's been a more internal thing. This brings it more to the attention of people within the church.

Spangler: Now that this question has been raised about her literary depend ency, can you tell me to what extent? Has she really borrowed quite a bit, or is this exaggerated?

Olson: No one knows the exact extent of the material Ellen White has used from other sources in any particular book because precise, careful studies that would satisfy everybody have not been done. For example, are you going to say that she has borrowed a Bible text from another author if she uses the same text that he does? One person might consider such use as borrowing because they used the same text and the other author wrote first. Someone else might assume that she has gotten her text from the Bible, just as the first author did.

If we look at the 66 books of the Bible in this light, I'm sure that in some, such as Genesis, we'll find very little that the author used from any other source. But in another book, such as Revelation, there is considerable. In fact, I have right here, before me, four typewritten pages of parallels between the book of 1 Enoch and the book of Revelation. First Enoch was written about 150 years be fore John wrote Revelation.

Graybill: By a writer that we don't accept as inspired.

Olson: That's right. So when we ask what percentage is borrowed, I'm sure that if we take all of Ellen White's some 25 million words, we'll have a pretty small percentage. But if we take the one book where the most borrowing appears, then it will be higher.

I rather think that in The Great Controversy, in the historical sections especially, we will find the greatest extent of her borrowing.

Spangler: And she acknowledges doing that in the introduction?

Olson: That's right. She doesn't say how much, but she says she does it. In fact, she even allowed her secretaries to help choose some of the historical mate rial at times. She trusted her secretary and W. C. White to get the right materials for her. Of course, she read every thing in the end to approve it.

Spangler: This question of the extent of her borrowings seems to bother quite a number of people, but how significant is that question? Is that really the question to ask?

Graybill: I think it can be a very misleading question,because a focus on individual words and phrases doesn't re ally handle the question of relationship and dependence. It's not so much a question of whether an author picked up a phrase here or there. It's a question, rather, of whether the author is really in control of the material. Into what kind of framework does Ellen White put this material?

Spangler: What do you men think about the relationship of borrowed material to the doctrine of inspiration? Can borrowed material really be inspired?

Olson: When I graduated from college I had a verbal concept of inspiration. I could not tolerate the idea that there was one word in the Bible that had not been supplied supernaturally by the Lord to the prophet. Then as I was studying at Baylor University, in 1966, I was working in R. H. Charles's book The Apochrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. Here I came across something that just stunned me. I didn't know what to do with it. I read these lines from 1 Enoch 1:9: "And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones to execute judgment upon all, and to destroy all the ungodly: and to convict all flesh of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him." Well, when I read that, all I could see was Jude 14 and 15, which was written 100 to 150 years later. Here was something that was in the Bible that obviously was not original with the author. I struggled with this for a long time. But I now have a concept of inspiration that can accommodate and account for such things.

Graybill: If a person feels that every thing the prophet writes has to come from Heaven directly in a stainless-steel pipe, then he is in trouble when he finds such things. But we need to think about the diverse means by which the Lord communicates to us—through special people, visions, impressions, and dreams. For example, it seems unlikely that the Proverbs were dictated in vision, and yet somehow the Lord impressed someone to gather together these bits of wisdom which had probably been enunciated by sages of the past. Under special inspiration a writer selects and is impressed to bring these things together.

Spangler: In other words, inspiration does not imply absolute originality.

Olson: That's right. I had earlier con fused originality with inspiration, but now I can see how a Bible writer, or Ellen White, can be impressed by the Lord to take a pre-existing document or information provided through some common source, and use it in an inspired book. When I look at the Bible now, I find quite a few such examples, and this satisfies me about the writing of Ellen White. Now maybe I don't like the idea of a prophet's copying from somebody else, or borrowing, or whatever you want to call it. But whether I like it or not, if the Bible writers did it, then I can't question Ellen White for being like the Bible writers in this respect.

Spangler: Some have said, "Don't drag the Bible down in order to build Ellen White up." How do you deal with that kind of response? What is implied in such a statement?

Olson: If a person takes that attitude, I think he is afraid to look at the facts. I want to know the facts, whatever they are, of how inspiration works. I think we owe it to ourselves to get all the information we can on the question of inspiration and then try to fit that into a proper concept.

Graybill: I think such a response also implies an underlying assumption that the inspiration of Ellen White is different from the inspiration of the Bible writers. Now the purpose of the inspiration may be different, but I think the quality of Ellen White's inspiration is the same as that of the Bible writers. The Holy Spirit was just as fully involved in inspiring Ellen White as He was in inspiring the writers of the Bible—for a different purpose and to be used in a different way, but the quality of the inspiration is the same.

Now, if you make that equation, then you can go to Ellen White and actually learn a good deal about how inspiration functioned. In the case of Ellen White we have the autographs, and we know these autographs are not inerrant. We find grammatical mistakes, we find misstatements, we find other problems, right in the autographs. We also know a good deal about how Ellen White worked. We know about her literary assistants. We don't know anything about who helped Peter to get his Epistle into such beautiful Greek—assuming that someone did. But we do know about the work of Ellen White's assistants. If, however, you suppose that Ellen White's inspiration is on a different level, then nothing you learn about the function of inspiration from studying how she worked can be applied to the Bible. That, I think, is why some people would like to deny that the quality of her inspiration was equal to that of the Biblical writers.

Spangler: While we're on this point, didn't Ellen White make statements that she wished she had the command of language to describe tremendous scenes as she saw them? Is there anything op posed to how inspiration works if she used some beautiful piece of descriptive literature?

Graybill: Ellen White's facility with language did improve over the course of her life. As a matter of fact, though, she always felt inadequate in expressing herself verbally in writing. She always had help from her husband and others. One of the most dramatic statements about this is found in her diary back in 1873. She said that she was very sad this particular morning; her husband was too feeble to help prepare her writings for the printer. She says, "Therefore I shall do no more with them at present. I am not a scholar. I cannot prepare my own writings for the press. Until I can do this I shall write no more. It is not my duty to tax others with my manuscript." The next morning she wrote: "My mind is coming to strange conclusions. I am thinking I must lay aside my writing I have taken so much pleasure in, and see if I cannot become a scholar. I am not a grammarian. I will try, if the Lord will help me, ... to become a scholar in the science [of grammar]. God will help me. I believe He will." —Manuscript 3, 1873.

But she never did this. She continued writing, and she had people who helped polish her writings. Yet in her handwritten materials we find very telling phrases, very graphic and beautiful writing here and there. But it all had to be polished, and then she went back over it to make sure it was the way she wanted it.

Olson: Twenty years later, when Ellen White was 64 years old, she wrote this: "I know not how to speak or trace with pen the large subject of the atoning sacrifice. I know not how to present subjects in the living power in which they stand before me. I tremble for fear lest I shall belittle the great plan of salvation by cheap words." —Letter 40, 1892.

She felt the power of the message that she wanted to get across, and felt that she was totally inadequate to do it. Two years later she lamented, "I am but a poor writer, and cannot with pen or voice express the great and deep mysteries of God." —Letter 67, 1894. Now when I read what she's written, I think it's marvelous. But she felt she was in adequate. So she was always seeking for something better.

Not all the beautiful things in her books come from some other writer by any means. Some of them do. But we have evidence that she really knew how to use the English language well. In 1887 she gave a report in Battle Creek on her trip to Europe. She did not use notes; it was her custom to speak without them. A reporter was there, and he wrote this about the talk that she gave: "This lady gave her audience a most eloquent dis course, which was listened to with marked interest and attention. Her talk was interspersed with instructive facts which she had gathered in her recent visit to foreign lands, and demonstrated that this gifted lady has, in addition to her many other rare qualifications, a great faculty for attentive, careful observation, and a remarkable memory of details. This, together with her fine delivery and her faculty of clothing her ideas in choice, beautiful, and appropriate language, made her lecture one of the best that has ever been delivered by any lady in our city." —Battle Creek Journal, Oct. 5, 1887, quoted in Review and Herald, Oct. 11, 1887.

I would be hesitant to say that every thing beautiful that appears in Ellen White's writings must have come from some other pen originally. Here she is, standing before that crowd, using not a note, and impressing her hearers with the eloquence of her discourse.

Spangler: Let's consider another question. You know there have been statements made that the legal or ethical standards in her day relative to borrowing were just as high as those we have today. What are the facts in this as you see them?

Olson: Elder Nichol has a page or two, in his book Ellen G. White and Her Critics, on the legal aspects of this matter. If you are going to consider the legal matter, then you have to show that the work of one author was an infringement on another to the point that the original writer was deprived of some income. I really don't know that anybody has ever made the claim that Mrs. White did this.

Now somebody said, once, that there was a threat of a lawsuit dealing with Sketches From the Life of Paul. I have dug down to the bottom to try to find any evidence of this, and I've never been able to find any.

Graybill: I think that rumor originally was floated by Dr. Kellogg in an inter view in 1907.

Olson: The problems that come are not legal ones. It's more an ethical question—Was it proper for her to do it? And then, Does it affect her inspiration?

Graybill: It has been often mentioned that Uriah Smith put a little note in the Review—it was titled "Plagiarism" and appeared in the September 6, 1864, issue—where he talked about someone taking one of his sister's poems, verbatim, putting their name on it, and publishing it as their own. Critics say, "Well, that shows the early Adventists knew what plagiarism was; they knew it was wrong, and yet Ellen White did it anyway."

Now my response is that Uriah Smith is the one who wrote that note, and yet he does the same sort of borrowing in his writings as did Ellen White! Is the man a hypocrite? What is going on here?

It seems to me that plagiarism was apparent to Smith and others when it was a clear case of a work of literature, a poem, say, which was obviously the exclusive creation of the person who did it, and someone just took his name and put it on it. But in the case of a prose work—and we're talking here about popular religious literature, not scholarly literature—Canright did it, Uriah Smith did it, Ellen White did it, and even some of the people that Ellen White used did it. So I think that on the moral question, we are looking at what, on the popular level, was a fairly common practice.

Olson: I would like to mention some thing that Elder Raymond Cottrell found. He did a study on the relationship between William Hanna's The Life of Christ and the first 400 pages in The Desire of Ages. Well, in the report of his research, he mentioned an experience he had when he was working on The SDA Bible Commentary. As he read one manuscript that was sent in, he thought that it sounded quite familiar. So he got out thirty commentaries on this particular book of the Bible. He laid them all out to see whether he could discover any relationship between the manuscript that had been sent to him and one of these commentaries. He says he soon discovered that practically all the commentators were copying from one another! "Nineteenth-century literary ethics," he wrote, "even among the best writers, approved of, or at least did not seriously question, generous literary borrowing without giving credit."

Spangler: There's something else that I have found, too. I read a manuscript that was castigating Ellen White for borrowing, and it lined up, side by side, what she wrote and the work she had quoted from. But when I compared the original book from which she borrowed, I found that it did not read just as it was given in the manuscript; sentences and paragraphs she hadn't used at all had been left out with no indication of that fact. She would go right down for a few sentences, and all at once there would be a whole section that she wouldn't use. And when you read it you can see why she left it out; it was teaching error. Now how did she know? Did God guide her in what to omit?

Olson: I believe that the Holy Spirit directed her in what to use and what not to use. Even Dr. John Harvey Kellogg made a statement on that order in the 1890's. He saw the hand of God leading her as she selected certain health mate rials but avoided the use of others, which were not trustworthy.

One of the best studies I know along this line was done by David Neff, a pas tor at Walla Walla College. He compared the E. G. White manuscript published in Selected Messages, book 1, pages 19-21, with C. E. Stowe's Origin and History of the Books of the Bible. Let me read you one paragraph from Stowe and then the parallel paragraph from Mrs. White in order to illustrate what you mentioned a minute ago—how she used what was right and avoided the use of what was wrong.

Here is what Stowe wrote: "It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired, it is not the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired; it is the men who wrote the Bible that were inspired. Inspiration acts not on the man's words, not on the man's thoughts, but on the man himself; so that he, by his own spontaneity, under the impulse of the Holy Ghost, conceives certain thoughts."

Ellen White wrote: "It is not the words of the Bible that are inspired, but the men that were inspired. Inspiration acts not on the man's words or his expressions but on the man himself, who, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, is imbued with thoughts." Ellen White was borrowing from Stowe, no question about it. But notice how she left out or rephrased certain expressions that were not dependable. She borrowed his language, but not his ideas.

Spangler: That's an excellent illustration. May I ask next, What is her own testimony regarding her writings? What role does she ascribe to her visions?

Olson: I'm glad you asked that question, because I want to bring this out in as positive a way as I possibly can. Even though she did use, frequently, the language of other authors, nevertheless she claimed that she was doing this for the purpose of making plain the things that God had shown her. She also obtained some information from these uninspired sources that the Lord had not revealed to her in vision or through any supernatural means. The apostle Paul had this experience. In 1 Corinthians 1:11, for example, he writes that the members of the household of Chloe had told him that there were dissensions and divisions over in the church in Corinth. He got that information from a human source, But, of course, he had visions and divine revelations at times, as well.

Let me read a striking statement from Ellen White regarding the source of her writings and the role played by divine inspiration: "How many have read care fully Patriarchs and Prophets, The Great Controversy, and The Desire of Ages? I wish all to understand that my confidence in the light that God has given stands firm, because I know that the Holy Spirit's power magnified the truth, and made it honorable, saying: 'This is the way, walk ye in it.' In my books, the truth is stated, barricaded by a 'Thus saith the Lord.' The Holy Spirit traced these truths upon my heart and mind as indelibly as the law was traced by the finger of God upon the tables of stone." —Colporteur Ministry, p. 126.

Spangler: How do we answer the charge that this literary dependency has been the subject of a cover-up through the years?

Olson: Well, I never heard any cover-up charges till the last year or so, and now people are asking, "Why didn't we know this before? Who has been hiding these things?" The publication of the 1919 Bible conference minutes of two meetings about the Spirit of Prophecy has seemed to give some credibility to accusations that there has been a cover-up, because it was known in 1919 that Ellen White used some writings of others and also that in some of the historical material that she used she was willing to make corrections.

But most of our people did not under stand all these things until just the past few years, and so they feel that maybe there has been a deliberate design on the part of the White Estate or on the part of the General Conference leadership, or on somebody's part, to build up an artificial view of Ellen White and of how her books were produced. Now that they are learning more about her work and about occasional discrepancies in her writings, some people are asking, "Why didn't we know this before? Has there been a cover-up?"

I don't believe there has been a deliberate design to keep this information from our people. Elder White passed something to me the other day that I had never noticed before—an address that W. C. White gave to the Advanced Bible School at Angwin, California, in 1935. Here is what he said: "The question may be asked, 'Can the descriptions of scenes and events copied from other writers, find a proper place in the inspired writings of a messenger of God?' We find that writers of the Bible not only copied from historical chronicles, but they sometimes used the exact language of other Bible writers, without giving credit. And, likewise, if in the writings of one today, who gives abundant evidence of being a chosen messenger of God, we find phrases or statements copied from other writers, why should this be an occasion for question more than the same circumstance when found in the Scriptures?"

So here in 1935 W. C. White is defending Ellen White's use of other writers. He's allowing that she did it. And it's a public statement. But it seems there wasn't much interest in the subject at that time. There was no discussion of it. So I can't believe that there was a cover-up.

Graybill: I think, too, that we're great on conspiracy theories. It's easy to believe that a little group somewhere has all the information or has all the control, has all the money, and that they're just sitting on it, when in fact these sorts of things have a lot to do with the whole church, and thus the interests and the emphasis, and the education and the orientation of the whole church and the society in which we live.

On the other hand, I think we need to be very candid, especially in this day and era, and not merely tell people what we know, but tell them what we know in such a way that they will understand it the way we understand it. And some times that involves giving them what some consider to be unsettling kinds of information. People have to have a problem before they want the solution to the problem. Now that they have the problem, we need to say things about inspiration today that weren't necessary ten or fifteen years ago.

Olson: Ron has raised the question of what we're doing to present candidly the facts as we know them to the church today. In 1969 Elder Arthur White wrote a forty-two-page chapter that appeared as a supplement in the back of Spirit of Prophecy, volume 4. In it he explained many of the things that we have been talking about, and that was more than a decade ago! Elder White has continued to publish articles both in the Review and in MINISTRY that have tried to bring out these facts.

But I feel that we should do more than this. I believe that we should do every thing we can today to establish a correct concept of inspiration among our people. We need to have some careful research done in this area of literary borrowing, and we're currently in the process of working with various committees and with the personnel at Andrews University to do work in this area. We hope to be able to lay all the facts out before our people after an in-depth study.

Spangler: I would like to give my own personal testimony as we draw this interview to a close. I've been a worker in this church for more than thirty-six years, and I have found in my own personal life the tremendous blessing of these writings. When I read what Ellen G. White has written, I feel like J. B. Phillips, who said when he translated the New Testament that he felt at times that he was rewiring an old house without turning off the main switch! An electric shock would surge through him as he would pick up some of these passages. Well I've had the same thing with the Spirit of Prophecy as well as with the Bible. There's a ring of truth there that's done so much for me, to help me, to guide me, to criticize me.

Graybill: On that point, if a person spends all his time focusing on problems in the Bible, discrepancies and so on, he can destroy his spiritual experience. It's the people who allow themselves to be blessed, allow themselves to be challenged, allow themselves to be helped by inspired writings, who are really the only people who can afford, spiritually, to dig into these problem areas. We need people who have that gift of faith.

Spangler: It becomes a mind-set, doesn't it—seeking for problems and places for doubt? I can't help remembering a story I heard years ago. A clergyman and an agnostic attorney were riding a train up the Hudson River, and they were eating fish. The agnostic attorney began to make fun of the preacher. "Now what do you do with all the problems in the Bible? There's discrepancies. How do you handle these problems?" The preacher remained silent and kept eating his fish. At last he said, "I'll tell you what I do. I do with these problems you mentioned just what I do with the bones of this fish." He pointed to a little pile of bones on his plate. "I eat the meat of the fish and put the bones over here, and if some fool wants to come along and choke on the bones, that's his business. I'm going to stay with the good meat!"


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J.R. Spangler is editor of Ministry
Ron Graybill is assistant secretary of the White Estate.
Robert W. Olson is secretary of the White Estate.

June 1980

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