Michael Campbell 1919: The Untold Story of Adventism’s Struggle with Fundamentalism (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 2019).

For the one hundredth anniversary of the 1919 Adventist Bible Conference, Pacific Press published a short volume written by Southwestern Adventist University professor Michael W. Campbell, entitled 1919: The Untold Story of Adventism’s Struggle with Fundamentalism.¹

In a little more than one hundred pages, plus eight pages of historical photographs and pamphlets, Campbell examines the proceedings and perceived significance of the 1919 Bible Conference, held from July 1 to August 9 on the campus of Washington Missionary College (now Washington Adventist University). The conference addressed various issues in Adventist theology, including the nature of inspiration as exercised by the Adventist self-described “messenger of the Lord,” Ellen G. White.

Summary

In this volume, Campbell argues that the 1919 conference was a pivotal event that shaped Seventh-day Adventist theology after the death of Ellen White.

In the first two chapters, Campbell begins his exposition explaining the context in which the 1919 Bible Conference took place. The early twentieth century saw a consolidation of the evangelical fundamentalist movement that opposed the rise of modernism and historical criticism within Christianity. While fundamentalists stressed, among other points of concern, the Bible’s inerrant reliability, modernists attempted to reinterpret and/or relativize the text of the Bible to better fit the culture and science of the time. Campbell argues that in this context, Adventists were much closer to fundamentalists than to modernists.²

In chapters 3 and 4, Campbell discusses the logistical details of the 1919 conference—namely, the dates, the venue, the topics, and the participants. Campbell reports sixty-five participants and eleven major topics for the conference. Neither the alleged verbal inspiration of the Bible nor Ellen White were actually on the list of topics for the conference (p. 47).

Due to heated discussion and divergences, stenographers were asked not to record the entire conference. Hence, it is difficult to fully assess the collective arguments of either perspective at the symposium. Especially was this the case with the parallel conference, the Bible and History Teacher’s Council, which took place in the evenings from July 1 to August 9, 1919, with only twenty-nine participants.

According to Campbell and his sources, it was the Bible and History Teacher’s Council that actually addressed the issue of White’s inspiration the most, though only 15% of the council is actually on stenographic record (pp. 47–48). In spite of the fact that 85% of the discussion is missing, Campbell believes we can fully reconstruct the major gist of the debates and their implications for us today.

Due to the controversial nature of the various deliberations, the transcript files of the 1919 conference were placed in the General Conference archives in Silver Spring, Maryland,³ and were forgotten along with other records of denominational minutes and proceedings until half a century later, when in 1974 a researcher by the name of F. Donald Yost found them while compiling documents for the SDA Encyclopedia.

Reading Campbell’s description, it is not clear how long the actual 1919 conference lasted. On page 47 Campbell states, “The conference began on July 1 and continued through August 9, 1919.” However, on page 48 Campbell writes that “the Bible conference (July 1–19) was held concurrently with the Bible and History Teacher’s Council which continued for another three weeks until August 9.” So it appears that Campbell is combining two different conferences into one, as he says on page 53, “The 1919 Bible conference covered a wide array of topics during the course of six weeks of presentations and discussions.”

Chapters 5 and 6 of Campbell’s book describe various issues of Adventist interpretation discussed at the 1919 conference (e.g., the ten horns of Daniel 7, the “King of the North” in Daniel 11, the AD 538 date, the “daily,” the Trinity). While these two chapters are insightful for tracing the development of Adventist scholarship, it is chapters 7–10 that appear to be the crux of the book.

In chapter 7, Campbell describes various discussions during both the 1919 conference and the parallel held Bible and History Teachers Council regarding potential historical inaccuracies in Ellen White’s books, specifically in The Great Controversy. Certain conference participants expressed their view that Ellen White was inspired but not infallible. Others were uneasy with such an assessment and wondered as to the extent of the historical inaccuracies God allowed in her books. Are her errors limited only to grammar and historical facts, or might they include doctrine, eschatology, and other major categories? How might her writings remain useful for instruction if they include major errors?

Administrators and scholars such as W. W. Prescott, Arthur Daniells, and E. F. Albertsworth, accompanied by William Clarence White (Ellen White’s son who was not present in 1919), favored a “thought inspiration” model of Ellen White and the Bible. They pointed to certain historical and grammatical inaccuracies that God allowed in Ellen White’s writings and also in the Bible. Confronted with the prospect of Ellen White’s loss of authority, some of the 1919 participants seem to have resorted to the denial of these observations, thus retreating toward a more limited verbal model of inspiration (e.g., Wilkinson, Washburn, Holmes).

After praising the efforts made at the 1919 conference to professionalize Adventist scholarship in chapter 8 of his work, Campbell investigates the aftermath of the conference in chapters nine and ten. Campbell concludes that Adventist leaders were not able to resolve the issues surrounding verbal versus thought inspiration at the 1919 conferences. Instead, the 1919 conference participants pushed the issue of inspiration “under the rug,” recorded only a fraction of the discussion through stenographs, and buried the records of the conference in hardly accessible denominational vaults.

This, according to Campbell, made the denomination vulnerable and unprepared for the future crises and membership defections that occurred when Ellen White’s literary borrowings⁴ and (potential) historical errors⁵ were “uncovered” and publicized by Ronald Numbers, Walter Rea, Desmond Ford, Spectrum magazine, and others during the 1970s and thereafter.

Reflections

Overall, 1919: The Untold Story is helpful in shedding light on an important yet largely forgotten conference that offered an opportunity for Adventists to better define their major eschatological views and to examine their position on the Bible’s and Ellen White’s inspiration. Unfortunately, Adventists did not have any other major theological conferences until 1952. Campbell correctly notes a principal lesson of this episode—that issues placed under wraps tend to resurface and cause problems sooner or later.

While helpful in shedding light on this controversial episode in Adventist history, some chapters of Campbell’s volume could be more balanced and precise.

In the first two chapters, which discuss Adventism in a cultural war between the fundamentalist and the liberal modernist movements, Campbell appears to consider the threat of fundamentalism to be a much more serious danger than liberal modernism. While fundamentalism certainly has some serious deficiencies, Campbell does not discuss positive aspects of the conservative Christian resistance to secularism and biblical relativism at the time.

Instead, Campbell portrays “fundamentalism” as a completely negative ideology. Any relationship twentieth-century Adventists might have had with fundamentalist thought is depicted as a “dangerous flirtation” (p. 17). On the other hand, modernism receives little if any criticism in Campbell’s short volume. This lack of balance is rather unfortunate and seems to express certain theological biases of his own.

Another problem in Campbell’s volume is that the author appears to conflate fundamentalism with contemporary mainstream Adventist hermeneutics. Campbell attempts on several occasions to identify the verbal-mechanical view of inspiration and a literalistic hermeneutic with contemporary Adventist hermeneutics in general. Unfortunately, Campbell offers no attempts to make a distinction between the established Adventist approach to Bible study⁶ and classical fundamentalist hermeneutics. Yet, fundamentalism and conservative Adventist theology are significantly different.⁷

For example, when some fundamentalists see passages such as “Women should keep silence in the churches” (1 Cor 14:34a),⁸ they often tend to take an over-literalistic approach, concluding that women can never sing, talk, share, preach, or teach in the congregations—not even teach children’s classes at church.⁹ However, mainstream Adventists, rather than following a restricted and literalistic interpretation, tend to consider everything the Bible has to say on a topic in a balanced way that takes into consideration the context in which things were written.¹⁰

Besides hyper-literalism, another important difference between fundamentalism and Adventist systematic hermeneutics concerns the concept of the verbal inerrancy of Scripture. Some fundamentalist concepts of an absolute inerrancy of Scripture seem to be influenced by certain philosophical presuppositions that are rooted in the Greek idea of God’s timelessness and unchangeable perfection. These concepts spill over into the theological understanding of God’s sovereign predestination that also includes the perfect divine inspiration of Scripture. Both Ellen White and contemporary Adventism reject such a Calvinistic understanding of rigorous predestination that ultimately even denies human freedom. Ellen White and Seventh-day Adventists affirm the divine-human dimension of inspiration and believe in the full trustworthiness and reliability of the Bible as God’s written Word to us, which accomplishes what God intended it to accomplish.¹¹

Isaiah the prophet expresses it this way: “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please” (Isa 55:11). Ellen White affirms the same, writing, “If God reproves His people through an individual He does not leave the one corrected to guess at matters and the message to become corrupted in reaching the person it is designed to correct. God gives the message and then takes especial care that it is not corrupted.”¹²

Unfortunately, while Campbell asserts Ellen White’s “errancy” throughout the entire volume, nowhere in the book does he qualify what that means. What is the extent of Ellen White’s errancy, and how much does it affect the actual message from God she is trying to communicate? The reader is left to wonder if Ellen White’s errancy means that she is not a reliable messenger of God. Unfortunately, this feeds into the modernism and relativism that Campbell does not critique in his book.

Reading Campbell’s conclusion, some readers might be left thinking that the church at large is still following “fundamentalist tendencies” that were present with some of the 1919 ministers. In one of his concluding statements, Campbell argues that, at present, the rise of liberalism has “caused some conservatives to retreat to the comforting, if intellectually and spiritually moribund, enclave of Fundamentalism” and concludes, “In this way, the same dynamic of polarization evident in 1919 continues to exist within Adventism today” (p. 115).

Campbell seems here to be equating the situation in 1919 with the Adventist theological situation today. The reality is that most mainstream Adventist theologians and institutions today have accepted the reasonably “progressive” position of Prescott, Willie White, and Daniells—many indeed going far beyond it—and few if any Adventist professionals today adhere to verbal inspiration or hyperliteralism.¹³

A more differentiated and balanced interaction— not just with some fundamentalist tenets in the past, but also with more recent liberal thoughts and trends that have significantly affected Adventist theology— would have helped give a fairer description of pertinent factors and would have helped avoid some short-circuited conclusions.

Campbell is correct that polarization still exists today in Adventism, but the polarization we face today is of a different quality from the controversies back then. While in 1919 virtually all Seventh-day Adventists could unreservedly affirm a literal creation, the high priestly ministry of Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary, and the full trustworthiness and infallibility of Scripture, today several Fundamental Beliefs are questioned outright by an increasing number of liberal-minded Adventists. One reason for such a radically different understanding of what is essential for Adventist theology are that new methods of biblical interpretation have crept in.¹⁴

Campbell is probably correct in his assertion that after the 1919 disagreements, Adventists needed more Bible conferences—not less—to iron out differences, to pray and seek for the Holy Spirit, and to facilitate unity. Unfortunately, this did not happen. The result was an eventual confusion and lack of clarity among ministers and lay members about the true nature of inspiration. Unfortunately post-1919, many Adventists adopted some deficient form of verbal inspiration that almost bordered on a mechanical understanding that would be easily challenged by liberal representatives in Adventism in the 1970s.

Campbell’s book attempts to throw the blame for our contemporary theological crisis upon the old pioneers and their presumed lack of spiritual discernment. The younger generations are portrayed by him as “victims” of the mistakes of their forefathers committed more than a century ago. If history can teach us anything, it is that the “victim mentality” only leads to a sense of entitlement and further alienation. Speaking as an early millennial myself, I believe that what the new generation needs is to be educated not to see itself as a victim, but to be taught to see itself as a “repairer of the broken walls” (Isa 58:12).

In conclusion, 1919: The Untold Story contributes to the world of Adventist history research. We can learn much from our past and Campbell is to be commended for his thought-provoking analysis, examination, and reporting of the conference. However, the book lacks clarity on the exact nature and extent of Ellen White’s “errancy.” Additionally, the virtual absence of a critique of modernism, together with Campbell’s conflation of fundamentalism with mainstream Adventist hermeneutics, suggests that his book might reflect a “dangerous flirtation” with liberal thoughts on inspiration. What is needed is a proper balance in reading God’s inspired writings and a clearer assessment of the present state of Adventist theology in relation to the issues addressed.