The Spirit of Prophecy

Norman McNulty

Ouachita Hills College

The Testimony of Jesus

There is a God in Israel

Proper Use of the Spirit of Prophecy

Answers to Objections About the Spirit of Prophecy

So it's been a privilege to be with you this weekend and I'm thankful for the opportunity that I've had to get to know some of you who I have not met before and my wife and I have certainly enjoyed renewing acquaintances and it's a homecoming for her and it feels like coming home for me too.

I know so many of you so we've had a good time and I pray that what we've talked about this weekend will be a blessing to you as you seek to gain a deeper walk with God.

Before I have prayer, I'm just going to remind you that we are going to have a question and answer session and a number of you have asked a lot of excellent questions.

I have a whole stack of them here and feel free when we come towards the end if some of you haven't had a chance to write out a question there's some yellow sticky notes down up front here that you can come and write questions.

And we'll get to as many of them as we can before the end of our meeting this evening.

So let's go ahead and bow our heads for a word of prayer and we will begin.

Father in heaven We thank you for this opportunity to come together 1 more time.

I thank you for this weekend that we've had, to have an emphasis on the spirit of prophecy.

And I pray that you will guide us in a special way.

Sometimes when we deal with objections to belief, when we deal with questions, we have to walk a fine line between placing ourselves on the devil's vantage ground and being honestly open in seeking truth.

And so I pray that we would be able to walk that line and that we would be able to deal with these issues without creating doubt.

So I thank you again for this opportunity and bless us now, I pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

You know, 1 thing I will say as we start this last presentation, you have to be careful in how you ask questions.

It is good to ask questions, but when you say, I'm gonna play devil's advocate, you are placing yourself on the devil's ground.

Because when you start to think from the other side, you're placing yourself on ground where you're looking at things strictly from a human perspective rather than from a spiritual perspective.

If you have questions about things, it's like, well, how do I explain this as opposed to intentionally playing the other side when you know that the side you're playing is wrong.

But we're going to deal now with answers to objections about the spirit of prophecy and I'm going to deal with 2 or 3 main areas depending on how much time we have.

And then there's a number of excellent questions that I want to make sure we have time to get through.

So we're definitely going to spend some time with the questions and you're going to want to hear the questions, some well thought out questions from students and from perhaps others.

And so we'll deal with a few areas that are common objections to the spirit of prophecy and then we'll deal with some of the questions.

Let me say this, most of the resources I used for this last presentation comes from the book by Frances D.

Nickel entitled LNG, Why and her critics.

If you have questions, that is the book to read.

And it's very objective and it goes through all of the issues.

And If I had known of that book before I found that website 20 years ago when I was in college, it would have saved me a few troublesome days of wondering what is going on here.

And all of those questions have already been answered.

So the first, well, so the, for sure we're going to deal with the issue of plagiarism where people claim that she plagiarized.

And then we also may spend a little bit of time on the shut door theory and also perhaps on the issue of amalgamation of man and beast.

There's so many other things people will pick at, but those are some of the big areas that people talk about.

And perhaps I'm dealing with these issues because it goes back to my experience of being a college student, and those were 3 of the main areas that that particular individual was picking on.

Let me read to you, and this is from F.D.

Nichols' book, and this is the charge as it relates to plagiarism in the writings of Ellen White.

And I think it's helpful for you to have answers for this because you may run across this if you haven't before.

White copied extensively from other authors without giving credit, generally without even using quotation marks.

And this, she pretends, was all revealed to her directly from heaven.

In 1883, she published her work Sketches from the Life of Paul.

She used large portions from an 1852 book by Coney Barron-Houson.

And then they go on to say, The Great Controversy is her most popular book.

And yet, much of it is taken from Andrew's history of the Sabbath, Wiley's history of the Waldenseys, and D'Aubigny's history of the Reformation, along with parts of Uriah Smith's book, The Sanctuary, and James White's book, Life of William Miller.

And there's a few other things that are mentioned.

So there are perhaps other books that some people pick out a little bit, but the 2 main books that get most of the attention where charges of plagiarism are leveled towards Ellen White are the book Sketches from the Life of Paul and also the book Great Converse.

You know, it's interesting, and this doesn't disprove this theory, but 1 of the first persons who took the lead in making these charges was a former Adventist pastor at the time of his death.

He was an Adventist pastor and then left the faith by the name of D.M.

Canwright wrote a book entitled, The Bible from Heaven, which was the exact same title of a book written years earlier by an Adventist minister by the name of Moses Hull.

And if you look at the books, there are large sections where Canwright copies Moses Hull's book extensively without giving credit and uses word for word verbatim.

So then Canwright goes after Ellen White for doing the same thing.

So that's interesting, just as a side point.

So Canwright's blasting Ellen White for doing such and such, yet he himself clearly did that which he was accusing her of.

And you can see that in the book that F.D.

However, let's look at this charge more carefully.

We're going to start with great controversy.

So, they're saying, okay, she copied large portions from Jan Andrews' book, History of the Sabbath, D'Aubigny's History of the Reformation, Wiley's History of the Walden Seas.

And by the way, if you haven't read those books, you should read those books.

I've read large portions of Wiley's book and some of D'Aubigny's and some of Andrew's.

I haven't finished all of them, but excellent reading.

Seventh-day Adventists at the time that Ellen White wrote the book Great Controversy were clearly familiar with all of these books, especially J.

And Andrew's book, History of the Sabbath, which was widely read along with Uriah Smith's book The Sanctuary and James White's book Life of William Miller.

So on those books alone if Ellen White is trying to pull a fast 1 on Adventists by quoting extensively and I put that in quotation marks, extensively, from books that were widely read by Seventh-day Adventists, I mean, they would have immediately recognized that she was quoting from these books and if there was something wrong with it people would have recognized this pretty quickly.

So it's not like she was pulling, if she was referencing these books it's not like she was quoting from obscure sources that nobody would know about.

No, she's, they're basically leveling charges against her towards books that were widely known within the Adventist church.

Jan Andres, Uriah Smith, and James White were Seventh Day Adventists, obviously.

Now, Daubigny and Wiley were not Adventists, but these history books are excellent.

Now, Ellen White had actually encouraged people to read from D'Aubigny and also from Wiley.

This is Review and Herald, December 26, 1882, where she says, provide something to be read during these long winter evenings.

For those who can procure it, Daubigny's history of the Reformation will be both interesting and profitable.

From this work, we may gain some knowledge of what has been accomplished in the past and the great work of reform.

Now, if Ellen White is trying to copy from a book and hoping that people won't notice that she's copied from it while at the same time encouraging people to read from it.

Like if you're trying to hide that you're copying from a book but then you're encouraging people to read from it.

And then she also knew that, I mean, Adventists were very familiar with Wiley's History of the Walden Seas.

Adventist leadership offered it as a premium with Review and Herald subscriptions.

And so this was a widely read book among Adventists as well, Not to mention the other books that were mentioned.

Nichols says, and I think this is worth quoting from him.

White must have known that her readers, preachers and laity alike in the denomination, would see immediately that certain passages in the great controversy were not original with her.

In other words, that she could not have thought that she was going to deceive them into thinking that the writing was wholly hers.

And that leads on to another equally obvious conclusion.

White must have felt that she had nothing dishonorable to hide in the matter of this literary borrowing and that her borrowings could be harmonized with her claims to inspiration to draw any other conclusions than these would be equivalent to saying that in publishing The Great Controversy, Mrs.

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The Spirit of Prophecy

Answers to Objections About the Spirit of Prophecy

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Recorded

The Spirit of Prophecy

The Testimony of Jesus

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The Spirit of Prophecy

There is a God in Israel

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The Abomination and Desolation

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The Most Crucial Gift

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17. Prophetic Movement at End Time

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Apologetics

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Jesus’ Apologetics on Prophets: EGW Outside Adventism

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The Spirit of Prophecy Matters

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The Bible or Ellen White?

Part 2: How Inspiration Works

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Ellen White Under Fire

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