Thursday, September 29, 2011

Book Review: The Great Controversy

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: The Great Controversy


Author: Ellen G. White

Date: 1884, 1998

Publisher: Harvestime Books

ISBN: none

Length: 424 pages of text with indices

Quote: "Wherever they sought refuge, the followers of Christ were hunted like beasts."

The Great Controversy was Ellen White's summary of the history of the Christian church. Three editions were published. The 1911 edition, The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan, is the one Seventh-Day Adventist students often distribute door-to-door to explain how the different Christian denominations came to exist and how theirs is like and different from the others. Although the 1911 edition contains a much higher proportion of factual details to rhetorical flourishes than this 1884 edition does, that's because it contains all those long quotes that (acceptably by contemporary standards) were identified as quotes only by the use of quotation marks--no credits. This is the book Ellen White wrote, before she instructed assistants to go back and pad it with quotations from other books.

This edition is shorter than the familiar one by a few hundred pages. Substantial parts of the historical facts are printed in the form of terse charts and tables of data, rather than narrative. Some readers feel that the charts and tables provide valuable resting places in a long slog through Victorian prose. On the other hand, some readers complain that the effect of the text is less like a history book and more like a sermon than the 1911 edition.

If you're not familiar with any edition of The Great Controversy, there's another thing you need to know about it: Victorian Christians were incredibly insensitive, monstrously politically incorrect. I've not found another book from this period that compared different denominations without bashing all but the author's own. Ellen White wrote about other denominations the way people did at the time. It wasn't that she disliked Jews or Catholics; it was that she didn't know any of them well enough to anticipate that their feelings might be hurt by long expositions on themes like, "Prophets had wept over the apostasy of Israel," or "Corrupt and blasphemous priests and popes were doing the work which Satan applointed them."

When I first read The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan, which was given to me for my tenth birthday, I remember that the dominant impression I picked up was of harsh condemnation. (I don't recommend this book for ten-year-olds, no matter how advanced their reading skills may be.) On our last long road trip we'd visited some Catholic relatives; I wondered whether, if my parents kept going to that Adventist church, I'd ever be allowed to see them again. Duh. I would probably have been encouraged to visit them...but that's the way The Great Controversy comes across to people who read it without a mature historical perspective.

To my surprise, later on, the Adventists I met did not seem to have a problem dissociating Ellen White's condemnations of the corrupt priests and popes from the idea of good will toward, and even cooperation with, their Catholic neighbors. While attending an Adventist college I volunteered at Catholic-run missions and went to classes with guest students from a nearby Catholic college. I observed no phobia of other denominations.

Adventists who attend church meetings get guidance on how to dissociate historical judgments from present-time relationships there. For non-Adventists, I recommend The Great Controversy to those who are sincerely liberal (as I use the word) enough to read it with tolerance for a previous generation's intolerant language.

Even the subtitle of the 1911 edition has been controversial. C.S. Lewis later wrote, much more patiently (to suit his historical period), that Satan was usually understood to be the opposite not to Christ but to Michael as chief of the good angels. Ellen White seems to have made less study of the evil angels than, say, Martin Luther did, so perhaps she can be forgiven for seeming to promote Satan a little higher in the scheme of things than he ought to be.

During the twentieth century I read a couple of other books outlining the way the major denominations in the United States were, but I don't remember another book giving as complete a history of how they came to exist. If you want a less biased historical study of this topic, it's possible that you'll have to go back to the primary texts and write one...and I say the sooner the better.

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