The Great Controversy Cult, Part 1: A Message Out of Context

by Reinder Bruinsma  |  26 September 2024  |

There were not many books in the home in which I grew up, but we did have a small library that was more or less standard in Adventist homes in the Netherlands. Seventh-day Adventists could be expected to have some quite voluminous, blue-gray tomes in a Dutch translation. They included Thoughts on Daniel and the Revelation, by Uriah Smith; a similar work on these prophetic Bible books by the German pioneer-leader Louis R. Conradi; The Coming King by James White; Bible Readings for the Home Circle; and, of course, there was also The Desire of Ages and The Great Controversy, both by Ellen G. White. 

The extent to which these books were read varied greatly, but The Great Controversy was probably more popular than the other volumes of the series. I was familiar with these books and understood that they somehow were connected with our Adventist faith, but I never opened them—not even when at age fourteen I decided to be baptized. 

The first time I actually handled a copy of The Great Controversy was a number of years later, when I worked as a student-colporteur in Sweden. Among the books I sold was Den Stora Striden—the Swedish translation of The Great Controversy. 

I admit I was somewhat stingy with information about the content of the book. I told my prospective customers that this was a fascinating book about church history, pointing to the chapter about the Reformation in Scandinavia—but remaining silent about the rest of the book.

From student to publisher

More than a decade later I was the editor and manager of our small publishing house in the Netherlands. The Dutch Adventist Church charged me with arranging for a new translation and publishing of the entire Conflict of the Ages series. This forced me to read the new Dutch translation of these five books several times. 

I confess that I have never read the conflict series in its entity since! And although I had been responsible for the republication of the Dutch version of The Great Controversy, I began to have serious misgivings about the suitability of parts of this book for the broader public, while also wondering whether most church members would spiritually benefit from its content.

Some years later again I worked in the publishing branch of the church in Africa, first as the manager of the publishing house in Cameroon, and then as a consultant for the publishing work on the entire African continent. I noticed that many of the traditional colporteur books in Africa needed a drastic contextualization. In those days most of the books were imported from Europe in either French, English, or Portuguese. 

A popular (English) health book focused solely on European health threats and a French-language book on medicinal herbs described many herbs that could not be found anywhere in Africa. This bothered me greatly. 

But I became especially uneasy about the Euro-centeredness of The Great Controversy. How useful was a description of the European Reformation and of the 19th-century religious scene in North America for an African audience? Where was Africa (and, for that matter, where were also the other continents) in Mrs. White’s narrative? 

In many African countries, Islam is the prominent religion or at least the religion of a significant part of the population. There is, however, not a single mention of Muslims in the book, nor the nature religions that are such a major aspect of African life. Whatever value the book might have, I concluded, it was not about a kind of “controversy” the people in Africa could identify with.

Exploring the 19th century

After getting my master’s degree from Andrews University and my BD (Hons) from the University of London, I wanted to work on a PhD. But my life was very full and at times complicated, and it was not until the early 1990s that I could pursue this dream. As I was thinking about a suitable dissertation topic, I received valuable counsel. A friend with the relevant expertise was adamant that someone who is determined to go for a PhD, while in the midst of a career, should make sure that his/her research does not require learning another language, and that he/she must make sure that most of his/her sources can be found in one nearby location. 

Nowadays, in our digital world, this latter consideration carries less weight. But 30-35 years ago this was still important. It was a main factor in my decision to temporarily move to the campus of Andrews University, where I would be close to the James White Library and the library of the nearby (Catholic) Notre Dame University. This was the ideal place for working on a historical survey of Seventh-day Adventist attitudes towards Roman Catholicism during the 1844-1965 period. 

In this context The Great Controversy played a significant role, and to say that this book has sections that are stridently anti-Catholic would be a profound understatement. As I focused on the role of this Adventist classic, it became exceedingly clear to me that its anti-Catholic rhetoric can only be properly understood against its 19th-century North American background. 

Around the year 1800 the number of Catholics in North America was estimated to be no more than 50.000. As the nineteenth century progressed, huge waves of Catholic immigrants arrived from Europe. By the end of the century, Catholics in North America numbered over thirteen million. No wonder Protestants were alarmed, and a strong anti-Catholic climate emerged in many places, and climaxed from time to time when certain events heightened the sense of a Catholic “threat.” 

Adventists in general, and Ellen G. White in particular, were certainly not the most aggressive anti-Catholic voices of that time. But because of her prophetic status, the views of Ellen White on Catholicism were gradually encased in concrete. When most other Protestant denominations considerably softened their stance on the Catholic Church, the Adventist Church was unable to do so, because of our unmitigated fear of the Catholics in the related end-time scenario that was enshrined in this book of Ellen White—which by now had ascended to semi-canonical authority. 

My conclusion was that The Great Controversy belongs to an age that was very different from the times in which we now live, and that the church must acknowledge and reflect the enormous temporal and cultural distance between Ellen White’s time and ours.

Tomorrow: How inspired was The Great Controversy?