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Prophet or Plagiarist: A False Dichotomy

Spectrum magazine, vol. 12, no. 4 (June 1982), pages 44–48.

© 2003 Spectrum/AAF. All rights reserved.

Walter T. Rea. The White Lie. Foreward by Jerry Wiley. 409 pp. Turlock, Calif.: M&R Publications, 1982. $15.95; $12.50 (paper).

Reviewed by Jonathan Butler

Jonathan Butler is an associate professor of church history at Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California.

In The White Lie, Walter Rea argues—exclaims, really—that much of Ellen White’s writings are the words and ideas of others, used as if they were her own, or God’s. By claiming not only a deep literary indebtedness but a lack of integrity on the part of Mrs. White, Rea strikes at the root of her prophetic authority.

The charge of fakery, charlatanry, or dishonesty is the most serious of indictments against any prophet. Laying no claim to traditional, legal, or professional status, prophets answer to a personal, charismatic calling. Unlike other positions of authority, prophetic authority relies almost exclusively on individual ethos and credibility. Prophets "bear fruit" only as they are believed. There is no such thing as a prophet without honor from someone, somewhere. Prophetic writings are printed and circulated and preserved because someone has found them inspiring. Prophetic predictions succeed as people that believe them set about to fulfill them. To lose trust in the prophets, then, is to lose them as prophets. For this reason, while they may be unembarrassed by their obscure origins, poor education, or lowly station, prophets cannot tolerate an assault on their "good name." In Shakespeare’s words, it is "the immediate jewel of their souls." As any prophet might say to a detractor, he "who steals my purse steals trash. … But he that filches from me my good name, Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed."1

If the loss of credibility damages a prophet, it is the charge of plagiarism that has particularly hurt nineteenth-century prophets. Not only Ellen White but Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy have been the objects of literary debunking, because they assumed a fundamentally literary identity. The Victorian period was an age of mass print. Magazines, novels, newspapers, and tracts proliferated as never before. Victorian women in particular found access to the age by a seemingly ceaseless literary outpouring. In a society that denied them direct political, ecclesiastical, and economic power, women exerted a vicarious "influence" from the writing lapboards of their bedrooms. In her own remarkably influential career, then, Mrs. White was not so much an ecclesiastical personna as a "pen of inspiration." For Victorians, inspired writing came "from the heart," which implied a kind of originality, extemporaneousness, prolixity, and, by the standards [45] of the day, elegance. For several generations of Adventists, Mrs. White has more than satisfied this Victorian index of inspiration. But a literary analysis that faults her according to any of these criteria is "bound to call for a basic reexamination of either the inspired writer or the nature of inspiration.

All this is to say that Rea deserves credit for raising highly important questions. However, ineptly or cruelly he has framed them, or however baffled he remains personally in the face of them, his questions require careful consideration. It would be too easy and ultimately too costly to Seventh-day Adventism to dismiss Rea ad hominem. This would be to retaliate in kind to the unfortunate personal innuendo in his own argument. For just as psycho-history is commonly considered inappropriate among Adventists as a method of understanding their pioneers, it is as well a dubious method of accounting for the contemporary critics of Adventism. Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the strident personal tone throughout the book. Rea appears to be a man who has been emotionally hurt, perhaps tortured, by what he has uncovered. His book is a manifest effort to get others to experience what he has experienced, to share his pain, and thereby ease its burden for him. Nothing disturbs Rea more than the churchmen and theologians who reconcile themselves to evidence that they have found either less compelling or overwhelming than it has been for him. He reacts with the harshness of a man who feels not only misunderstood but abused. Unfortunately, his pain displays itself as anger—and an angry man attracts less sympathy than hostility.

Standing upon his exhibits of literary dependence as if they were a soapbox, he pontificates on the nature of God, man, sin, theology, the church, and even fiscal mismanagement. But what in his discovery of literary indebtedness or plagiarism equips Rea to speak on such a range of unrelated topics? Clearly nothing. Source criticism by itself is a conceptually narrow enterprise. Reading primarily Ellen White’s writings and, subsequently, titles listed in her personal library, Rea came upon literary parallels. Establishing ties between one author and others is a long, laborious, and tiresome process. Rea should be thanked for having undertaken this necessary and significant task. But the limited scope of his reading—and analysis—which especially qualified him as a source critic, left him decidedly unqualified to explore the significance of the parallels he found. Rea’s footnotes expose a soft underbelly to his work. Aside from references to Ellen White and the authors from whom she borrowed, Rea relies mostly on in-house Adventist writings, tapes, minutes of meetings, and telephone conversations. Had he produced simply an anthology of his literary exhibits, with a brief introduction which adhered modestly to the topic at hand, the importance and impact of his study might have been enhanced considerably.

Instead, Rea erects a rather precarious model of interpretation on the literary material he has unearthed. He proposes that Ellen White’s "lie" is only one example of the "white lies" perpetuated as myths, legends, and falsehoods by all institutions, especially religious ones. Drawing upon Sam M. Baker’s The Permissible Lie and Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, Rea indicts all organized religion as a "con game" whose leaders are "supersalesmen of the psychic," peddling their wares to naive and credulous "buyers." The real issue of religion is "who is going to control the concessions in the here and in the hereafter" (p. 30). (Certainly Rea will not ingratiate himself to evangelicals with this line of argument.) But if [46] organized religion is an emperor without clothes, and if saints are hucksters, how does this explain the Reformers or the martyrs, Mother Teresa or Jesus Christ? Indeed, for Rea, Christ is in a category by himself, the "Saint of all saints." And yet why? Because there is still a spiritual dimension for Rea, however cynical he has become, which cannot be explained away in terms of power or greed. Turning his own argument back on him, someone might say Rea only wrote The White Lie for royalties. But this would be patent nonsense. Only the most spiritually insensitive of readers would fail to sense the passion and spiritual turmoil in Rea’s book. Rea, like the object of his study, does not lend himself to an utterly crass and reductionist explanation.

What proves most unsatisfying about Rea’s interpretation is that it betrays the same rigid fundamentalism of his earlier years, albeit now a naughty fundamentalism. Rea still can accept only an all-or-nothing solution. Either Ellen White is infallible or a fake. Either her writings are the immaculate conception of the Holy Spirit or they are a literary hoax. Even more absurdly, if Mrs. White is not an angel, then all religion is a deception. Like other fundamentalists, Rea is piqued by any suggestion of a solution that threads itself somewhere between these extremes.2 The passion by which he now rejects Mrs. White reveals the absolute hold on him of his fundamentalist understanding of inspiration. If Mrs. White lacked originality, or was influenced by contemporaries, or was not a great literary stylist, then she could not have been inspired. Rea offers no new model of inspiration because he entirely embraces the old one. He agrees with Arthur L. White and quotes him approvingly on page 118 as follows:

If the messages borne by Ellen G. White had their origin in surrounding minds or influences; if the messages on organization can be traced to the ideas of James White or George I. Butler; if the counsels on health had their origin in the minds of Drs. Jackson, Trail or Kellogg; if the instruction on education was based upon ideas of G. H. Bell or W. W. Pres-cott; if the high standards upheld in the Ellen G. White articles and books were inspired by the strong men of the cause—then the Spirit of Prophecy counsels can mean no more to us than some very good ideas and helpful advice!3

When Rea adds "How true" he expresses everything about his disenchantment with Mrs. White. She falls short of his unrealistic expectations. He reminds us of Othello who, in that tragic moment after killing the woman he loved, asks to be remembered as "one that loved not wisely but too well. . . ."4

In so many ways, Rea has become his uncharitable caricature of Ellen White, transforming himself into his own uglier image of the prophet. He interprets historical developments as the conspiracy of an elite and immoral minority of people—in this case "the White boys." He eschews the academic argument for the jeremiad. He short-circuits historical explanations by casting moral blame. He slights issues in favor of personal gossip. In a perversely ironic way, he must be one of the few people in our time who has spent a "thoughtful hour each day on the life of Christ," though in his instance as a source critic of The Desire of Ages. And certainly he could have benefited from the literary assistants that he begrudges Mrs. White; his book is a tangle of unruly organization and unhappy style.

That Rea’s book is an easy target for critics, however, should not truncate this line of inquiry into Mrs. White’s literary sources. Nor should Rea’s failure to offer an adequate interpretative paradigm of his own suggest that previous paradigms are any longer satisfactory in light of his discoveries.

How then might Ellen White’s prophetic writings be understood? One characteristic of prophets which is evident here is their own realization that truth can never be fully communicated in words. Prophets experience truth more deeply and profoundly than their followers, and the effort to convey their insights inevitably involves distortion. Lesser minds expect prophets to provide the whole truth, and yet prophets themselves understand, at times painfully, that their message inevitably falls short of a higher [47] truth. Every prophet is to a degree a charlatan in the sense that he promises more than he can deliver. The writing process, then, difficult under any circumstances, may be agonizingly difficult for a prophet. In Truman Capote’s words on writing, "When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip. . . ."

If Mrs. White’s expressions of insecurity as a writer, her literary dependence first on her husband and then on a staff of assistants, and her borrowing from other authors are evidence of her human limitations, they indicate as well that common experience of prophets who seek as weak, earthen vessels to brim with as much of the truth as possible. Prophets can be expected to reach for literary assistance, not out of ill-motive or fraud, but out of the highest of spiritual motives and the securest sense of their own spiritual calling. Ellen White was so saturated with the consciousness that God was leading in a special way in her life that she looked for—and "was shown"—His hand everywhere: in her day visions, her night dreams, her personal readings, and her conversations with others. God was the fountainhead, and these were the streams of His communication. For her to concede to critics that her human "sources" were anything less than links to the divine Source itself would have been to deny something so fundamental to her self-understanding as to make her indeed a liar.

In this regard, the relationship of a prophet to a people brings to mind the analogy of a mother’s relationship to her children. The mother who has been through the births of her children knows them beyond any doubt to be her own. Yet a six-year-old may have his own definition of a mother—she wears perfume, fixes him lunches, knows absolutely everything, and never uses profanity. His mother may try to fulfill these six-year-old expectations, even when they are unrealistic, not because of any insecurity in her own mind about the fact that she is his mother, nor certainly to mislead the child regarding what is in fact essentially true. The child may expect too much of mother, and mother may, at times, mistakenly though innocently fulfill her child’s illusions. But here the image of mother requires changing—as it invariably does over time—not the unalterable fact of her motherhood. So it is with prophets. The perception of them may require a dramatic maturation process that still acknowledges them as prophets.

As a result of Rea’s indefatigable efforts, we have learned lately of the extent to which Ellen White’s writings are part of a vast genre of Victorian devotional literature, much as Daniel and Revelation are the Scriptural remnants of a whole tapestry of non-canonical apocalyptic literature. The reason that Daniel or John of Patmos or Mrs. White are still known to us while their contemporaries have receded from the church’s collective memory is because the church considered their writings, from the outset, special and worth preserving. An historical naiveté about their immediate literary surroundings was bound to develop with the authority they assumed. An ill effect of this is the artificial and misplaced sense of uniqueness that can occur over time, as well as the outright misunderstandings of texts that result when read in cultural and literary isolation. Rea’s work should help free future Adventist generations from just this snare. The point here, however, is that inspired texts are with us at all, not due to some sort of dark conspiracy, but by means of canonization (not of course formally in Ellen White’s case). God’s hand in this process is not simply in the origins of the texts but in the preservation of them. One key difference between Henry Melvill’s sermons and Ellen White’s writings is that we remember her writings. Her impact on our [48] memory is one mark of her inspiration for us.

My own view is that the source and redaction criticism of Mrs. White’s literary contribution cannot discredit her. She produced religious classics for a large, dynamic community of people. Higher criticism cannot possibly plumb the meaning of them. Like the phenomenologists tell us, it is not so much the text but what is "in front" of the text that engages us. Mrs. White’s writings hold rich significance for the Adventist people. The whole is more than the sum of its parts for us. Why texts take on this religious authority for people is itself a fascinating—and inspiring—story, more so even than where they came from. Why people continue to reinterpret them from generation to generation without ever wearing them out. Why in fact an Adventist pastor should devote almost 20 years to an exhaustive literary analysis of them. That in itself speaks of their significance.

Without Rea’s extensive literary revelations, of course, much less of the really creative opportunities for the re-thinking of our doctrine of inspiration would be open to us in this generation of Adventism. And no doubt the next generation of Adventists will grow up at the knee of a different Ellen White than this one. Indeed, I look forward to the day that the church would no longer spawn either an early or a later Walter Rea. My hunch is that Rea himself shares the same hope.

Notes and References

1. William Shakespeare, Othello, III, iii.

2. For example, Jack Provonsha’s, "Was Ellen White a Fraud?" Collegiate Quarterly, July-Sept., 1981.

3. Review and Herald, May 1, 1959, as quoted in The White Lie, p. 118.

4. Othello, V. ii.