The Scriptures First

The pioneers of the Seventh-day Adventist church were a profoundly Bible-oriented group. There was a reason for this. They had gone through a disappointment that had resulted from an unnoticed intermingling of scriptural truth and human opinion and interpretation in the prophetic expositions of William Miller. Having thus been taught a bitter lesson about the results of such an intermingling, they proceeded with great caution in the development of their own theological platform, through a series of intensive Bible conferences that lasted several years. They were determined to follow the scriptures with the greatest of care, and avoid all human opinion and interpretations to the utmost of their ability.
This methodology brought them to a view of the nature and work of Christ (Christology and Soteriology) that was distinguished by its literal acceptance of certain words of Jesus that some might have viewed as rhetorical devices not intended to be taken seriously. Our pioneers accepted the words of Jesus at their literal face value, mind-stretching though they undeniably were.
In our previous volume, The Word Was Made Flesh, we dealt primarily with the nature of Christ as understood by the pioneers of the Seventh-day Adventist church, including Ellen White, and secondarily with His saving work. In this present volume we plan to deal primarily with our Lord’s saving work and secondarily with His nature. But, as you will observe, in discussing one of these two subjects we are never very far from the other. They are inseparably united and interwoven one with another. As one writer has observed, Christology and Soteriology are the two feet with which the gospel walks. Like our own two feet, they must of necessity stay in close proximity to one another. We cannot move one foot very far without being required to move the other.
In our next chapter we will set forth a brief synopsis of the New Testament view of Christ in order to show that Ellen White and other Seventh-day Adventist pioneers were in their Christology following with meticulous care the words of Christ and the apostles. For a more detailed

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exposition of that subject, we refer the reader to our volume, The Word Was Made Flesh, available from The Cherrystone Press, whose address is in the introductory pages of this volume.
In this volume we will set forth a more comprehensive view of the saving work of Jesus Christ as described by Ellen White, and again take note of her meticulous adherence to the precise wording of the relevant scriptures, with which she was extraordinarily conversant. In a random sampling of one hundred pages at the exact center of her well-known five volume The Conflict of the Ages series we found 220 quotations from the scriptures plus a number of unquoted references. Her mind was saturated with scripture to an extent seldom equalled among other writers.
We are therefore not able to agree with those who propose that we must choose between Ellen White and the Bible. We concede that a person might reasonably say that he/she prefers someone else’s understanding of scripture to that of Ellen White, but to say that we must choose between Ellen White and the Bible is to set up, we believe, a totally false dichotomy. Her writings are Bible centered, and her opinions are Bible derived to an extent not commonly observed among modern theologians. We will therefore try to follow her example in setting forth the testimony of the scriptures first in our present study.

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