In 2011 the author of this book, who now heads the Ellen G. White Estate Branch Office at Loma Linda University, submitted this manuscript as his dissertation for a doctorate awarded by the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University. Except for five new lines (of minor importance), this published monograph follows the dissertation word for word, note for note. ‘I assume’, writes Levterov optimistically, ‘that the reader is generally familiar with the history and the beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the prophetic role of Ellen White in that church’ (p. xi). Perhaps this was true of his dissertation committee, but I doubt that the assumption is still warranted. For the uninitiated, Ellen G. White was the founding prophet of the now eighteen-million-strong Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Unfortunately, readers familiar with the history of Seventh-day Adventism will learn little new from this numbingly repetitious and unsophisticated work, which from beginning to end consists almost entirely of lists, even lists within lists. Since Levterov neglected to revise or update his dissertation, he passed on the opportunity to engage with such post-dissertation publications as David F. Holland's hugely relevant Sacred borders: continuing revelation and canonical restraint in early America (Oxford 2011), which devotes a number of pages to White, or Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Gary Land and Ronald L. Numbers (eds), Ellen Harmon White: American prophet (Oxford 2014), a major reappraisal by some twenty scholars.

Although Levterov on a couple of occasions grants that critics acted ‘logically’ (p. 97) or that their charges were ‘valid’ (p. 146), he rarely deviates from an apologetical posture. This is especially true with what he neglects to reveal. He asserts, for example, that White's early visions, from 1844 to 1849, ‘helped in the fight against fanaticism that was spreading among some former Millerites’ (p. 44). He does not share with readers the discovery in the 1980s that less than four months after the Great Disappointment, Israel Dammon, a Millerite elder, went on trial in Maine for vagrancy and disturbing the peace. During the trial some three dozen witnesses testified about the activities of Dammon and his Millerite friends, which included kissing, touching, crawling and shouting. The trial record portrays Ellen Harmon and her future husband, James White, as enthusiastic participants. Ellen appears as a young trance medium called ‘Imitation of Christ’, who for hours lay on the floor with a pillow under her head, receiving and relating her visions. It is true that she later denounced ‘fanaticism’, but for mainstream Millerites her visions and behaviour epitomised fanaticism.

Referring to James White's decision in the early 1850s to refrain from publishing his wife's visions in the Second Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, which he edited, Levterov asserts that ‘It is an unquestionable fact that James White's underlying objective was to defend the prophetic gift of Ellen White’ (p. 57). To both contemporaries and current readers, it is anything but unquestionable; indeed, the claim borders on the risible. From 1851 through 1855 James, embarrassed by accusations that the Whites were making the visions a ‘test’, published no visions in the church paper, leaving Ellen, in her words, ‘discouraged’, ‘much depressed’ and suffering from ‘anguish of spirit’. The visions occurred less and less frequently -- until a group of Battle Creek Adventists assumed publication of the paper, and pressured James into publicly apologising for his low valuation of his wife's gift.

In 1863 Ellen White experienced her first major vision on health, which prompted her to publish a booklet titled An appeal to mothers (1864) and several pamphlets bound together as Health; or, How to live (1865). ‘These publications’, Levterov tells us, ‘gave practical advice on Christian living and faith’ (p. 107). The subtitle to An appeal to mothers, withheld by Levterov, was The great cause of the physical, mental and moral ruin of many of the children of our time. It focused on the horrors of ‘solitary vice’ or masturbation, as did her follow-up book, A solemn appeal relative to the solitary vice and abuses and excesses of the marriage relation (1870), which added the avoidance of excessive marital sex to the list of divinely revealed ‘practical advice on Christian living and faith’.

When critics emerge in Iowa in the 1860s, Levterov dismisses their criticisms of White as ‘false reports’ (p. 132). Some may have been; others, such as the suppression of the ‘shut door’ doctrine (that no more sinners could be converted after the Great Disappointment in 1844), were spot on. Another criticism, which Levterov never brings up, related to White's bitterly contested statements from 1864 regarding the ‘base crime of amalgamation of man and beast’:

Such statements immediately raised questions as to which ‘races of men’ White had in mind. Was she implying that Negroes were nonhuman? In 1868, in what Levterov described as ‘the first Seventh-day Adventist apologetical work exclusively defending Ellen White's gift’, Uriah Smith, then editor of the Review and Herald, rose to vindicate the prophet, including her views on amalgamation. Smith casuistically argued that the mere possession of some animal blood did not strip one of humanity, because individuals were human if they had ‘any of the original Adamic blood in their veins’. No one familiar with ‘the wild Bushmen of Africa, some tribes of the Hottentots, and perhaps the Digger Indians of our own country, &c.’, Smith argued, could reasonably doubt the validity of Mrs White's view. James White warmly endorsed Smith's rationalisation; Ellen White remained silent.

No theme emerges more forcefully from Levterov's work than that Ellen White ‘never believed or claimed to be verbally inspired’ (p. 98) and that ‘Adventists believed in thought or dynamic inspiration’ (p. 155), which allowed them to sidestep the evidence-based charges of sporadic suppression and frequent plagiarism. Overlooking the testimonies of numerous faithful Adventists (down to the present) who have endorsed verbal or quasi-verbal inspiration, Levterov repeatedly charges ‘critics’ with promoting this erroneous view. It is easy to see from White's own pen how confusion could have arisen. ‘Although I am as dependent upon the Spirit of the Lord in writing my views as I am in receiving them’, she wrote in 1867, ‘yet the words I employ in describing what I have seen are my own, unless they be those spoken to me by an angel, which I always enclose in marks of quotation.’ Fifteen years later she insisted:

Finally, a word about the Swiss publisher, Peter Lang. At the front of this book the publisher professes that ‘Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.’ What went wrong here? What peer reviewer would recommend republication of a work already freely available online? In meeting the ‘highest quality standards for content and production’, why did the publisher provide no assistance to the author with grammar, style or structure, as a comparison with the dissertation readily demonstrates?