Note: This composition has been moved to the FaithSaves website.
The bottom of the completed work has updated links to the various parts that were originally posted here for those who wish to comment. This post originally contained the material from "Once you are saved ... Ellen White was not inerrant."
Another post related to this topic is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://kentbrandenburg.blogspot.com/2015/05/questions-for-seventh-day-adventists.html
An SDA argued that 1 Thess 4:17 shows that Paul was errant by the same standard that I applied above to EGW. His argument was based on 1 Thess 4:17:
ReplyDeleteThen we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
Supposedly this verse proves that Paul taught, under inspiration, that he would be alive until the second coming. Since he was not, therefore all the false prophecies by Ellen White, such as those above, can be excused or explained away. However, this SDA argument is very poor.
First, I must remark that it is sad that anyone who professes to be a Christian, as the SDAs profess Christianity, would attempt to prove Scripture errant in order to defend someone else, namely, their allegedly inspired prophetess Ellen G. White.
1.) The argument from 1 Thess 4:17 proves too much. If one really must press the "we which are alive and remain" to mean that Paul was asserting that he would, without doubt, be alive until Christ's second coming, then he would also be "proving" that not a single living member of the Thessalonian congregation would die before Christ's coming. After all, if the "we" means Paul knew that he would not die, then he also would know that not a single member of the audience of the epistle would die either.
ReplyDelete2.) There are uses of "we" in Scripture that clearly explain 1 Thess 4:17 without any proof of errancy. "We" in Scripture does not always have to include the speaker, just as in modern English if I say "if we do not repent of the heresies of Seventh-Day Adventism, we will be damned" I am not including myself, as I am not an SDA. For example, Romans 1:5: “By whom we have received grace and apostleship [cf. Acts 1:25; 1 Corinthians 9:2; Galatians 2:8].” The church at Rome was not composed of apostles. 1 Corinthians 10:22: “Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? are we stronger than he?” Paul was not having fellowship with devils and provoking the Lord to jealousy (v. 20-21)—only segments of his audience were. 1 Corinthians 11:31: “For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.” This seems to be something his audience was doing; Paul was not sickly and dying from taking the Lord’s Supper unworthily. Hebrews 2:1: “Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.” Paul was not going to let slip what he had heard about the gospel and go back to Judaism. Hebrews 2:3: “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him;” Paul was not including himself in the “we” who would be damned for neglecting the great salvation. Other examples in the rest of Scripture are found of a similar use of we; e. g., in Acts 2:8, “And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?” (Acts 2:8), the people hearing the preaching at Pentecost did not all have the same native tongue, nor were they all from the same country. Daniel Wallace supports the possibility of the Greek first person pronoun being “used in an exclusive way . . . [meaning] ‘others, but not myself’” (pg. 391, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics).
Thus, 1 Thess 4:17 by no means justifies the egregious false prophecies of Ellen G. White. Re-read the false prophecies listed above. They are wildly beyond anything anyone could even pretend to get from 1 Thess 4:17.
Scripture is inerrant, and Ellen White is errant. My SDA friend, you should recognize that what was written to EGW's son was true:
“[T]here are serious errors in our authorized books . . . but we let . . . [t]he people and our average ministers . . . go on year after year asserting things we know to be untrue. . . . [W]e are betraying our trust and deceiving the ministers and the people. . . . [W]hat amounts to deception . . . has been practiced in making some of her [Ellen White’s] books.” [Letter of W. W. Prescott to W. C. White, April 6, 1915. Prescott was the founder of two SDA colleges, the president of three, and an SDA General Conference Vice President. W. C. White was Ellen White’s son.]
An SDA told me that all prophecies are conditional; therefore, so it seems, EGW's false prophecies are not really false. However, there is no verse anywhere that says that all prophecies are conditional. There are many prophecies that are absolutely unconditional--for instance, the day and hour of Christ's return has been eternally decreed by the Father, so it could not have been in 1844 but then gotten postponed over and over again. Christ's resurrection was prophesied but was hardly conditional. That the gates of hell will not prevail against the church is not conditional--it is certain, a promise by God. I can imagine what Hezekiah would have thought if Isaiah had prophecied that Assyria would not take Jerusalem but then told Hezekiah that his prophecy was conditional so maybe they would. I could go on in this regard, but the fact is that EGW made clear false prophecies and there is not a jot or tittle like such a thing in the Bible, God's actual Word.
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