I. Two Historians, Two Integrities

Before 1970, Seventh-day Adventist “history” belonged in quotation marks. For about a century, Adventists told their story to themselves without the constraints of mundane cause and effect; history to them meant magical thinking. The prophet, Ellen G. White, occupied an even more revered place in Adventism's sacred past, a kind of “holy of holies.” The conventional tools of the historical craft were especially inadequate for exploring her “spiritual gifts” as she personified supernatural Otherness.Footnote ³ In the twentieth century, Adventists moved into apologetics, where none more skillfully than LeRoy Froom and Francis D. Nichol began telling their story to those outside the church. Both Adventist ministers, they were self-made historians who, in hoping to reach non-SDAs, built the faith of Adventists that, in all likelihood, made up the bulk of their readership.Footnote ⁴

Nichol's defenses of the church's more distinctive and misunderstood doctrines and his answers to Ellen White's critics were argued with considerable historical and theological sophistication, but they were, in many respects, the best defenses possible for a client that was not necessarily innocent of all charges. Nichol's books, like Froom's, if always parochial, are also now clearly dated, and their obsolescence seemed built in from the beginning. Before Nichol refuted caricatures of the Millerite movement in his book The Midnight Cry (1944), he and Froom imposed their clout as churchmen on a fledgling faculty member at Adventism's Union College in Nebraska. Quashing Everett Dick's effort to publish his doctoral dissertation on the Millerites (1930), Nichol then appropriated its contents for his own purposes in The Midnight Cry. Though Dick never fully forgave the affront, he went on to distinguish himself as a social historian of the American frontier. It turned out as well that the future of SDA historiography would look a lot more like Everett Dick than Francis Nichol.Footnote ⁵

In the 1970s and early 1980s, everything changed for SDAs. Their historiography underwent a profound transformation. Youthful PhDs in history, who flowered on Adventist college faculties, began looking on their tradition with fresh eyes, and a number of them would not be intimidated as Dick had been decades earlier. In their minds, this was not so much a case of historical revisionism; there had been, they might uncharitably have argued, no real history to revise. Without question, a new Adventist historical consciousness had dawned. Historians went “where angels fear to tread” within the Adventist past and, most significantly, in the life of Ellen White herself. Adventist church leaders had embraced a grand plan to nurture Adventism's liberal arts colleges and universities with a particular interest in upgrading the church's seminary as they had once done, in the 1930s, for its medical school. To that end, they hired the most highly qualified PhDs, trained outside the church.Footnote ⁶

But the churchmen came to feel betrayed by the Young Turks, especially the historians who published controversial histories of the church and its prophet in Spectrum, an independent journal launched by Adventist academics and professionals. By the 1990s, church leadership had begun to turn increasingly inward, favoring homegrown PhDs to staff the very programs made possible by the secularly educated academics. The new SDA scholarship, dating back to the 1970s, tends to draw on nondenominationally educated Adventists. It merits mention that a number of Chicago PhDs have contributed to the new scholarship, providing the “Chicago School's” critical but empathic take on their tradition. The new apologetics largely rely on denominationally trained academics, with PhDs in Adventist studies from the SDA Seminary at Andrews University.Footnote ⁷ Whatever churchmen may have hoped for the denomination's historiography, it would be too simplistic to assume that the new scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s was succeeded—and forgotten—by the new apologetics of the 1990s and after. The two continue to coexist but are acted upon by the conflicting forces of academia on the one hand and the church on the other. If this never results in more than a separate peace, there are remarkable instances of reciprocity between SDA scholars and apologists from which the historical community at large can learn by eavesdropping on their interactions.

In his perceptive review of Mormon historiography in the mid-1980s, Martin E. Marty describes the “two integrities” which, among historians of Mormonism, distinguish insiders from outsiders, church authorities from academics, and in the language of Paul Ricoeur, the “primitive naïveté” from a “second naïveté.” Marty's analysis is helpful for understanding Seventh-day Adventism, as a parallel universe to Mormonism, and the historiography it has produced. As with the Mormon historical community, its SDA counterpart highlights the divide between Marty's two integrities.Footnote ⁸ Two historians of Adventism—Ronald L. Numbers and George R. Knight—assume almost archetypal importance in any characterization of Adventist historical writing and personify the two approaches to the church's history. Both extraordinarily prolific writers, Numbers, a historian of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, has written for the academy, often to the consternation of the church, while Knight, a professor of church history in the SDA Seminary at Andrews University, has written popularly and pastorally for the edification of the church.Footnote ⁹ Though intending to be constructive, Knight too has raised hackles among the faithful. For good reason, his festschrift is entitled Adventist Maverick. Among Adventists, however, the criticism of Knight is not at all on a scale with that of Numbers. The Adventist “right” has blasted both historians, though for different reasons, while Knight has been challenged by the Adventist “left” but more gently.Footnote ¹⁰

Ricoeur's “primitive naïveté” marks the guileless belief of the faithful before historical consciousness has emerged. With the publication of his Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (1976), Numbers shattered such “primitive naïveté” for many Adventists.Footnote ¹¹ The French philosopher's “second naïveté” involves continuing to believe in the face of criticism, not by ignoring its existence but by reinterpreting it. Knight devoted himself to explaining Adventism's sacred history and its iconic White in the wake of the iconoclastic Numbers. Knight recognized that, after Numbers and other historians of his ilk, efforts to sustain the “primitive naïveté” were illusory. But he committed himself to the viability of a “second naïveté” in which the prophet could take the best punch of a historian and remain standing among the faithful.Footnote ¹² Parochial critics have faulted Numbers for his naturalism, but Knight does not enlist the supernatural in his historical explanations either. With respect to the supernatural, both historians have more in common with each other than they do with Adventist “historians” prior to the revisionist 1970s. The critical difference between them lies in the fact that Numbers is given more to a “hermeneutics of suspicion” than Knight. But each is a man of integrity who, though tracking his own trajectory as a historian, has made a significant contribution to SDA historiography. On a personal level, Numbers converted from Seventh-day Adventism to agnosticism; Knight abandoned agnosticism for Adventism. However, as historians, Numbers still looms as the Papa Hemingway of the new SDA scholarship, Knight the outsized Doctorvater of the new apologetics.Footnote ¹³

Numbers, from a blue-blood Adventist background, as the grandson of a General Conference president, nevertheless handled the “prophetess of health” with secular hands, as if she were a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. For such irreverence, he became persona non grata among Adventists, who invited him to leave Adventist employ at Loma Linda University and ultimately Adventism itself. It has taken decades for even pockets of historically informed Adventists to concede, and often grudgingly so, the substance of Numbers's argument on Ellen White's relationship to nineteenth-century American health reformers and its implications for so many aspects of her prophetic career. But much of Adventist thinking has now changed. For this reason, Benjamin McArthur, a distinguished historian of culture at Southern Adventist University, probably does not exaggerate when he identifies Prophetess of Health, on its fortieth anniversary, as “the most significant book ever written regarding Adventism.”Footnote ¹⁴ And it is now safe to weave his perspective into college-level textbooks on Adventist history, though without citing his book in the footnotes. Whether or not Numbers's contribution to it has been uniformly acknowledged, a tectonic shift occurred within the church's historical self-understanding, and Numbers played a major part in it.Footnote ¹⁵ In 2009, at a conference on White in Portland, Maine which led to the book Ellen Harmon White, American church historian Grant Wacker commented: “In the history of every religious community, there's that watershed historian who marks the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of how its history is written. For Pentecostalism, it is Robert Mapes Anderson; for Mormonism, it is Richard Bushman; and for Seventh-day Adventism, it is Ronald Numbers.”Footnote ¹⁶

Despite the furor over his departure from Seventh-day Adventism, Numbers has continued to exert a significant influence on the church as a historian. His book Prophetess of Health proved to be anything but a one-hit wonder. Published in three editions over more than three decades (1976, 1992, 2008), both the second and third editions offer something new in the way of provocative primary source documents and trenchant reflections on the state of the historiography of Ellen White. Moreover, Ronald and Janet Numbers, teaming up as historian and psychotherapist, publish an afterword on Ellen White's views of the mind and her own mental health that advances White studies in a significant way.Footnote ¹⁷ In addition to his own evolving work on White, Numbers has been of major importance as a writer, editor, or silent partner in groundbreaking SDA historical scholarship. He was a key figure in organizing three conferences, each resulting in a noteworthy collection of essays on Adventism: The Rise of Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century America, edited by Edwin S. Gaustad (1974); The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler (1987, 1992); and Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet, edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Gary Land, and Numbers (2014). In his prodigious The Creationists (1992, 2006), winner of the Albert C. Outler Prize from the American Society of Church History, Numbers traces the story of antievolutionism in America to Ellen White and her disciple, an autodidact turned science writer, George McCready Price. He is also under contract with Harvard University Press to write a biography of John Harvey Kellogg, Adventism's best-known apostate. In a sense, then, for Numbers the church has been the “Hotel California”: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”Footnote ¹⁸

George Knight has been the most widely read writer within Seventh-day Adventism since Ellen White herself. Given the good graces he has enjoyed among the rank and file, Knight most certainly has transformed Adventist thinking on its past and its prophet in a way that the stigmatized Numbers could never do. Knight's vivid, engaging historical narratives over a broad range of Adventist subjects are meant for a general church audience rather than narrower academic circles. As an apologist, he has had to steer his way through the inconvenient historical realities uncovered by the revisionists, but that has worked to his advantage too. In attempting to achieve a new historical orthodoxy for the church, he has addressed problems with a candor that might earlier have labeled him a heretic. As an example, Numbers was once ostracized for documenting White's social and literary debts on health reform, while Knight now admits that he rejects a “hagiographic” White. Without peril to his standing as the defender of a new faith, he writes: “After all, it does appear that she fudged on the truth in her denial of the awareness of/or use of certain documents in her early health reform writings.”Footnote ¹⁹ Knight does not shy away from the harder problems in Adventist history, but he seeks to palliate them for his Adventist readers. If the iconoclasts seem to have toppled Humpty Dumpty from the wall, Knight assures Adventists that it was, in reality, not such a “great fall,” and Humpty can be put back “together again,” if with a rather new look. Though more optimistic about this than the usual hard-nosed academic, Knight has also injected a measure of realism into his historical writing. Throughout his career, his modus operandi has been to lead Adventists away from their inherent exclusivism, inerrantist impulses, and triumphalism.Footnote ²⁰

To use a boxing metaphor for his Adventist writing, Knight has never delivered a single knockout punch with one weighty tome, but the collective effect of numerous smaller books has been a reminder that speed is power. His most skillfully crafted Adventist history is Millennial Fever and the End of the World: A Study of Millerite Adventism (1993). Long on lively, detailed description of the movement, if shorter on interpretation, Knight highlights the distinctiveness of Millerism without relegating it to the aberrant. His entrée into apologetics came earlier with Myths in Adventism: An Interpretive Study of Ellen White, Education, and Related Issues (1985, 2010). Here he identified numerous illustrations of conventional wisdom among Seventh-day Adventists on what Ellen White supposedly wrote, and to which Adventists tenaciously adhere, and he demythologized them. As widely read and as influential as anything he has written on the prophet are four slim volumes with the following, self-explanatory titles: Meeting Ellen White: A Fresh Look at Her Life, Writings, and Major Themes (1996); Reading Ellen White: How to Understand and Apply Her Writings (1997); Ellen White's World: A Fascinating Look at the Times in Which She Lived (1998); and Walking with Ellen White: Her Everyday Life as a Wife, Mother, and Friend (1999). The Adventist Pioneer Series, for which he serves as senior editor and has contributed two of the biographies, may prove as important as any part of his historical legacy. In a series marked by exhaustive research into primary sources and insightful interpretations, several of the entries hover on the line between academics and apologetics.Footnote ²¹

II. The “New” SDA History

An astonishing achievement of the new scholarship, Seeking a Sanctuary by Bull and Lockhart incorporates historical and sociological methods in a study for which the designation “denominational history” hardly does justice. For Bull, an Oxford professor, and Lockhart, a journalist, as Adventism has transformed itself into an alternative version of the American dream, it has not made the clichéd move from sect to denomination. The church's drag on denominationalizing, however, has not come easily or automatically. Ellen White, emblematic of Adventism's sectarianism, herself encouraged education—most notably medical education—that cultivated denominational elements within the sect as a result of the “medicalization” of Adventism.Footnote ²² For Bull and Lockhart, this prompted a “revolving door” phenomenon which suggests that converts join the church at lower economic and educational levels and, after social mobility, leave the church. Here the two scholars could meet with some resistance since Adventism appears to have been as notable for its retention of upwardly mobile members as for the loss of them. The professionalization of Adventists may have altered their faith but not necessarily caused them to leave. Taken as a subgroup, the SDA historians examined in this essay, whether critical or apologetic, in most cases have pursued a high level of professionalism in a wide range of historical fields without exiting through the revolving door. To be sure, more of the new scholars have exited than the new apologists, but from outside the church, they often have continued to contribute to SDA historiography.

Douglas Morgan, professor of church history at Washington Adventist University, earned his place among the new SDA historians by transforming his University of Chicago dissertation into the book Adventism and the American Republic (2001). Here Morgan explores the ways in which a marginal apocalyptic movement pursued social activism in the public sphere. In his foreword to the book, Martin Marty applauds the effort because it eschews both SDA apologetics and abrasive exit literature for an irenic “fair-mindedness.”Footnote ²³ Morgan's Lewis C. Sheafe: Apostle to Black America (2010), which appears in the Adventist Pioneer Series, provides a natural sequel to his earlier work. In his biography of Sheafe (1859–1938), a latecomer to the church who was first a Baptist preacher and later aligned himself with the Seventh Day Baptists, Morgan places the gifted Adventist minister in the vortex of racial conflict within Adventism and throughout American culture at large. Drawn to Adventism by its eschatology and its ideas of health, Sheafe maintained a prominence both within the church and beyond it during his twelve-year Adventist tenure around the turn of the century. Courted by John Harvey Kellogg, he was as comfortable with W. E. B. DuBois, with whom he shared speaking platforms and ideas on race relations. By contrast, he did not find Booker T. Washington a kindred spirit. A key to Sheafe's break with the SDA church politic—if not its theology—was his quarrel with the prophet over race. (Knight has been criticized for selecting, to this point in the series, four Adventists who left the church.) Morgan could not be more fair-minded and nuanced in explicating the impasse between the confrontational Sheafe and the accomodationist White, empathic to both if implicitly critical of them as well.Footnote ²⁴

Benjamin McArthur, another Chicago product, published a biography of the nineteenth-century American actor Joseph Jefferson and became an associate editor of Oxford's multi-volume American National Biography.Footnote ²⁵ A superb stylist, he also wrote the biography A. G. Daniells: Shaper of Twentieth-Century Adventism (2015) which underscores how the longest-serving General Conference president became the chief architect of the modern bureaucratic church. McArthur found that, for Daniells (1858–1935), nothing mattered more than the approval of the prophet, but almost nothing mattered as much as the social and cultural influences exerted on him and her from outside Adventism. In 1901, Ellen White placed her imprimatur on an ecclesiastical reorganization of the church with her “favorite son” Daniells at its head. White embraced the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American “search for order” through an elaborately rationalized bureaucratization and teamed up with Daniells to achieve it.Footnote ²⁶ If Daniells accepted White's Testimonies on reorganization as inspired directly by God, McArthur quite rightly hears in them the echoes of larger social developments in America which linked Adventism to Progressivism. Just as political and economic power were viewed pejoratively in her age, Adventist church power, White believed, had become too centralized in Battle Creek among a few clerical titans, who exercised “kingly power . . . over the consciences of others.” In effect, for White, God was a trust-busting Progressive.Footnote ²⁷

Gilbert M. Valentine, professor of education at La Sierra University who trained under Knight, has produced a string of books on Adventist history published by and for the church. Yet he contributes to the new SDA scholarship by increasingly chipping against the parochial mold. In fact, it is something of a surprise that his latest book, The Prophet and the Presidents (2011), was published by the Pacific Press and sold at Adventist Book Centers (where Bull and Lockhart's Seeking a Sanctuary or Numbers's Prophetess of Health are nowhere to be found).Footnote ²⁸ All of Valentine's books on Adventist history should receive scholarly attention, but his study of Ellen White vis-à-vis three General Conference presidents (between 1888 and 1913) proves especially revealing of how a complex charismatic figure could be difficult, manipulative, and combative in relation to the church's top bureaucrats. Valentine notes that during her marriage to James White, an obsessively autocratic churchman until his death in 1881, the “formal relationship” between Adventism's organizational leader and its only prophet was complicated by their “spousal relationship,” which led to an “inevitable blurring of roles.” Valentine's study makes clear that the death of Ellen White's husband resulted in changes in the contours of her charisma. She became an even more formidable force in the latter decades of her life than she had been earlier. But she fretted over the fact that the misuse of her writings diminished her political clout. Valentine shows that, when faced with mounting opposition, the prophet threatened to withdraw her support from “the brethren” and appealed directly to her people in the pew. As a matter of fact, she was never all that weakened. She almost single-handedly deposed General Conference presidents and handpicked their successors. She insisted on being kept in the loop regarding all political machinations, basing her divine pronouncements on such very human networking.Footnote ²⁹

Just as Seeking a Sanctuary has become the high watermark for Adventist historiography, Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet (2014) now “represents the tip of the historiographical spear in Ellen White studies,” according to Grant Wacker in his foreword to the book. Conscious of the fact that this fine collection of essays was authored by Adventists, ex-Adventists, and non-Adventists, Wacker suggests, “the reader will be hard-pressed to know which is which,” given the balance struck, among all the authors, between rigorous critical scholarship and an appreciation for the subject.Footnote ³⁰ In contrast to most in-house studies of the prophet, the White who emerges in Ellen Harmon White is anything but an insular, ahistorical figure. She may have believed that to be God's prophet in her times she needed to transcend her era, remaining impervious to cultural influences. But the historians in this collection know that, if White was more than a product of her times, she was far less than innocent of them. She was a Victorian woman. Her visions, both in style and substance, mirrored her surroundings. Her Testimonies were a culture-bound literary genre. Her failures as an “author” and her successes as a speaker evoked her era. Her flaws as a “theologian” strengthened her among followers. Her health and sex reforms included the crank ideas of contemporaries. Her social activism was a nineteenth-century American phenomenon as was her critique of popular culture. Her complicated perspective on a woman's role in her society, including her own role, must certainly be understood within her cultural context.Footnote ³¹

III. Revisiting Apologetics

Among the SDA apologists that should be of most value to academics at large, Gary Land, an intellectual and cultural historian at Andrews University (the History Department, not the Seminary) straddles the line between the new SDA apologetics and the new scholarship, as the better Adventist apologists do.Footnote ³² In his eponymous biography of Uriah Smith (1832–1903), Land proves too well-informed in his description of Adventism's premier editor and Bible commentator (including even the most parochial and reactionary aspects of his life) and too aware of Smith's cultural environs to be dismissed as a partisan Adventist historian. Yet he creates little critical distance between himself and Ellen White, who figured importantly enough in Smith's story to have been the “significant other” in the pioneer's life, aside from his wife Harriet. Land finds in Smith a man whose towering yet dour intellect gravitated toward the apocalyptic and legalistic, while personally he could be warm and kindly. He was most known for what he pitted himself against: Catholics, slavery, spiritualism, immigrants, labor unions, “apostate” Protestants, Sunday laws, and heretical Adventists. Strikingly, Smith underwent little, if any, intellectual growth; “he virtually never changed his mind.” In Smith's Adventist classic, Thoughts on Daniel and Revelation, he poured over the most inscrutable passages of scripture and confidently arrived at “the truth,” bolstered by appropriating Scottish Common Sense in support of his “proof” texts and “facts” of history. He remained just as sure of the prophetic gift of Ellen White and wrote the definitive contemporary defense of her. Ironically, she did not return the favor but openly turned her prophetic ire on him and his wife, and she did so repeatedly. Land could have done more to explain these rituals of public humiliation.Footnote ³³

Brian E. Strayer, an early modern European historian, spent his career as a colleague of Land's at Andrews University, where he, too, found Adventist history irresistible. His exhaustive biography of John Loughborough (1832–1924), “the last of the pioneers,” proves especially valuable as a means of accessing life among nineteenth-century Adventists, though a general reader may get bogged down in its extensive detail.Footnote ³⁴ Of Irish background, this diminutive, colorful, Leprechaun of a man served as an Adventist evangelist, administrator, and writer, pioneering church work from California to the British Isles. Handpicked by Ellen White as the church's first “historian,” he traced God's hand in The Rise and Progress of Seventh-day Adventists (1892) and The Great Second Advent Movement (1905), paving the way for Adventism's twentieth-century providential historians such as Arthur Spaulding and LeRoy Froom. Strayer exposes the “apocryphal Loughborough,” a man given to distorting the realities of Adventist history with myth. Deeply within Ellen White's inner circle, he became a major contributor to her elevation among Adventists in her time and for subsequent generations—this despite the fact that, though John and his wife Mary could not have been closer to the Whites, they invited the wrath of Ellen White much as the Smiths did. Strayer seems as content to report these outbursts against the Loughboroughs, as Land does with the Smiths, without accounting for them. He holds Loughborough's feet to the fire on several conspicuous examples of historical malpractice, but he does not take him on with respect to the prophet. Strayer allows Loughborough's magical realism regarding White to go largely uncontested where he needs to have done more in the way of cross-examining Adventism's first “historian.”Footnote ³⁵

The previously introduced Valentine identifies William Warren Prescott (1855–1944) as a “change agent” who, as an Adventist publisher, college president, church administrator, theologian, and reformer, “believed the church could change and should change.”Footnote ³⁶ Hoping to reshape Adventism for its second generation of believers, Prescott provoked opposition for doing so, including a cooling of once warm relations with the prophet. For Valentine, Prescott is Adventism's “forgotten giant,” and for its neglect of him the church has paid a price. The child of impassioned Millerites, he attended Dartmouth College and published a weekly journal in Maine before taking the position, at thirty years of age, as Battle Creek College president. His impressive intellect and education easily placed him within an emergent class of Adventist professionals whose progressivism pitted them against the traditionalists, who were theologically to their right and, perhaps, socially beneath them. In the late 1880s, White converted Prescott from legalism to righteousness by faith, and by the mid-1890s, he had persuaded her to abandon Arianism for a more orthodox view of the trinity. In the early 1900s, during the Kellogg controversy (see below), Prescott supported Daniells and White with theological arguments against Kellogg, even though the conflict with the doctor was less theological than bureaucratic. Prescott also did the lion's share of research into White's historically flawed 1888 edition of The Great Controversy. His thirty-nine pages of suggested corrections, which were supposedly confidential, hurt him among conservatives and antagonized the prophet who had asked for them. If Valentine finesses these highly charged historical moments as an apologist, he does so in defense of a more candid and complex understanding of Adventism.Footnote ³⁷

No one exited through Adventism's revolving door with more unrepentant panache than John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943). For Adventists, he was the dynamic, dapper, and high-profile protégée of Ellen and James White who implemented the prophet's health vision in a vast and celebrated health empire. But the Battle Creek Sanitarium and its subsidiaries grew too large and debt-ridden for the church to sustain, and Kellogg's philosophy in his “pantheistic” book The Living Temple, too heretical for Ellen White to tolerate. For non-Adventists, Kellogg created corn flakes and promoted both sexual abstinence and frequent bowel movements, for which he was as often mocked as he was lionized. In an effort to set the record straight, Richard Schwarz tells his story from inside the church, illuminating what led to the doctor's departure.Footnote ³⁸ In Schwarz's account, the doctor looked down on ministers as less professional than physicians. He also disliked the “meat-eaters” among them. A. G. Daniells, the lead cleric by 1901, further provoked Kellogg's anger by no longer allowing the medical work to run a deficit. Though both had been her spiritual “sons,” White increasingly supported Daniells and chastised Kellogg for his character flaws. She also agreed that The Living Temple was pantheist, which Kellogg rebutted by citing similar language in her own writings. Though Schwarz recognizes that the pantheism charge was somewhat contrived in the quarrel with Kellogg, he largely accepts that the doctor was a pantheist. It is more likely, however, that he had embraced the “New Theology” of divine immanence—not pantheism—based on what he read in Herbert Spencer, not Ellen White. Ultimately, Kellogg was disfellowshipped from the church less for his differences with Daniells than with White. In the mire of church politics, he had seen too many of the prophet's peccadilloes.Footnote ³⁹

White's imperfection is at issue in the 1,465-page Ellen G. White Encyclopedia edited by Denis Fortin and Jerry Moon, two Adventist Theological Seminary professors. Though they want to be “honest and candid” throughout this massive and, in many respects, important volume, Fortin and Moon approach White “from a faith-based perspective.” They hope to be “truthful” and “non-apologetic as far as possible,” but they have selected authors who “fit our philosophy”; White was “inspired of God.” The 182 contributors to the volume fit a profile. By and large, they are denominational teachers and administrators, including employees of the Ellen G. White Estate. A number of them are seminary-trained at Andrews University, mostly students of George Knight. Only thirteen of the authors are trained as historians at secular universities. Only one of them is non-SDA, an Advent Christian scholar. The fact that the encyclopedia is a believer's history by no means discredits it as a whole. This volume makes a valuable contribution to Adventist studies and particularly the study of Ellen White. It needs to be understood, however, for what it is and for what it chooses not to be. With respect to the paradigm-shifting Adventist history of the 1970s and early 1980s, the encyclopedia concedes as little as possible, ignores as much as possible, and reacts negatively to the rest. Well versed in her writings, the contributors are less engaged by her cultural context. Faced with profound changes in her thinking over a lifetime, they are more comfortable emphasizing her consistency rather than her contradictions. On the character issue, they show no interest in frankly dealing with questions regarding her integrity. They seem too close to her to see her blemishes.Footnote ⁴⁰

In distinguishing between historians and apologists, Marty removes any element of condescension. Both historians and apologists are writing history, but the fact that they do so as the embodiment of two different integrities means they adhere to their own morality, their own set of rules. It would be a mistake to assume, however, that there is too stark a line between these two kinds of historical consciousness. Among SDAs, one recent example of how the two integrities can seemingly blend together is the newly republished, annotated edition of White's most popular book, Steps to Christ (1892, 2017), which over the years has sold in the many millions. Fortin, after coediting The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, produced a version of Steps to Christ for general Adventist consumption, which would not have been possible in an earlier era. In a single book, he serves as both an academic and an apologist, at once exemplifying the “primitive” and “second naïvetés.” In his “historical introduction,” the historian in him explores “the world behind the text,” providing historical and literary criticism of the book. He deals with the controversy over its authorship and how its multiple sources were cobbled into one volume. At the same time, the apologist in him bears personal testimony to “the world in front of the text” of this Adventist classic. The gilt-edged, 125th anniversary edition, included in the Inspirational Classics series from Andrews University Press, was, as a homelier paperback, the first Adventist book he read and “the beginning of a spiritual journey that has now lasted four decades.” The apologist in him ultimately leads Fortin to the SDA default stance on Ellen White. He trusts her to explain, definitively and without cross-examination, the role of her literary assistants in her writing process.Footnote ⁴¹

If Fortin's annotated edition of Steps to Christ blurs the line between two kinds of history, in most cases SDA historians and apologists operate quite differently. SDA historians are more likely to collaborate with non-SDAs than the more insular apologists, who tend to confer among themselves. The historians are more deeply immersed in the secondary literature; they are able to work from outside in, as it were. The apologists, on the other hand, bury themselves in the primary sources but are less conversant with the secondary literature, less facile at working from the inside out. For the non-SDA outsider, the Adventist apologists are, in fact, more useful for the unearthing of primary source material than for their interpretation of it. In effect, the apologetic writings often function best as de facto primary sources. In the SDA historical community, the new historians are more committed to Ricoeur's “hermeneutics of suspicion,” even with respect to Ellen White. Their critics might say especially regarding White. The apologists are just the opposite. Suspicion does not come naturally to them, and with regard to White it appears almost nonexistent. For them, White can do nothing substantively wrong. Both the new historians and the new apologists exclude the supernatural from their historical explanations. But the precious handling of the prophet by apologists implies a tacit supernaturalism.

In sum, the new historians did the heavy lifting historiographically by unraveling the “primitive naïveté” in the 1970s and 1980s. The apologists integrated much of their criticism—and softened its edges—in seeking to affirm a historiographical “second naïveté” in the 1990s and after. In the long run, both types of historians have learned from each other, and historians beyond Seventh-day Adventism can learn from them too.