March 1, 2002 - 12:00pm - James Walters

 

An Ethical Analysis of Literary Dependency

 

EDITORIAL NOTE: From the AT Archive; Mar/Apr 1998

As this article illustrates, we refuse to hide from the truth or run from the church.

 

The great majority of Adventists through the years have sincerely believed that the words they read in the writings of Ellen G. White were her own, or even God’s words spoken to her. In reality, however, some direct passages and many ideas and words were taken originally from the works of other people. Was she plagiarizing in doing this? James Walters cites dictionary definitions of plagiarism to say she was: “The appropriation or imitation of the language, ideas, and thoughts of another author, and representation of them as one’s own work.” (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged edition, 1966.)

As an ethicist, Walters approaches the question not to disparage her as a person, nor to excuse or condone her literary practices, but to examine the problem from a mature and honest perspective. Others have publicly denounced Ellen White for what they had discovered in comparing her works with those of other writers before and during her time, and they have produced evidence to support their claims. Adventist historians and scholars have documented such instances as well.

Is it enough to say she was borrowing or merely following conventions of “literary dependency” in excusing her actions? Walters says that to do so is to dodge the real issue. Is there any way by which we can separate her practice of plagiarism from her person and character?

Can we, in the name of objective reality, acknowledge that she did plagiarize in the full sense of the term, yet remain an authentic prophetess?

Motive Counts

Walters thinks it is possible, and that it makes a difference in how we regard her work. He cites examples of people who have committed “wrong” acts for reasons which seemed morally defensible to them.

Further, he says that such an act could be committed for at least two very different reasons—1) for legitimate and morally compelling reasons, or 2) mere human weakness. As an example of the first case he cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s participation in an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was deeply committed to the biblical commandment against killing and to a nonviolent approach to questions of state policy and authority, but because he realized that Hitler posed a threat to millions of people he felt compelled to override lesser conventions of faith. In prison Bonhoeffer later reflected on his decision:

“The extraordinary necessity appeals to the freedom of the men who are responsible. There is now no law behind which the responsible man can seek cover… in this situation there can only be a complete renunciation of every law, together with the knowledge that here one must make one’s decision as a free venture, together also with the open admission that the law is being infringed and violated… Precisely in this breaking of the law the validity of the law is acknowledged.” (Letters and Papers From Prison, New York, Macmillan, 1962, pp. 207 ff.)

Bonhoeffer was not evasive about his part in the attempted murder of Hitler, but he acknowledged it and explained that he did it to try to avert the mass extermination of innocent Jews and others. The world would later understand and condone and even praise him for his efforts.

Ellen White, Walters says, similarly saw her mission as involving the saving, indeed the eternal salvation, of millions of lives. Yet she differed markedly from Bonhoeffer in her attitude toward what she had done. She never admitted, in fact denied, her abnormal literary practices. She bridled at every suggestion of literary dependence. Since she did not advance higher moral principles as justification of her literary practices, this particular avenue for clearing her integrity is unavailable.

The second category of wrongdoing is human weakness. An example of this in the Bible is King David, who first committed adultery with Bathsheba, wife of Uriah, then put Uriah’s life in jeopardy. But when confronted by the prophet, David did not try to dodge the issue; he acknowledged his sin. And he was later called “a man after God’s own heart,” because he showed his character in admitting that the common morality applied to himself as well.

Once when Ellen White’s literary practices were questioned she was indignant and accused a basically innocent and talented young literary assistant of being proud, ambitious, a “traitor,” and at times “verily possessed by demons.” (The Fannie Bolton Story—a Collection of Source Documents, compiled by the Ellen G. White Estate, Washington, D.C., 1982, pp. 41 ff.) Bolton was a recent convert who had worked as a journalist and was perplexed by the practices carried out in the production of Ellen White’s inspired materials. She sought counsel from Merritt Kellogg, who later recalled Bolton saying: “‘Dr. Kellogg, I am in great distress of mind. I come to you for advice for I do not know what to do. I have told Elder Starr (George B.) what I am going to tell you, but he gives me no satisfactory advice.’ ‘You know,’ said Fannie, ‘that I am writing all the time for Sister White. Most of what I write is published in the Review and Herald as having come from the pen of Sister White, and is sent out as having been written by Sister White under the inspiration of God. I want to tell you that I am greatly distressed over this matter for I feel that I am acting a deceptive part. The people are being deceived about the inspiration of what I write. I feel that it is a great wrong that anything which I write should go out as under Sister White’s name as an article specially inspired of God. What I write should go out over my own signature. Then credit would be given where credit belongs.’” (Merritt Kellogg, “Merritt Kellogg Statement,” March 1908, quoted in The Fannie Bolton Story, pp. 106, 107.)

Fannie Bolton knew firsthand what researcher Ron Graybill would discover years later: “The visions simply did not provide all the information and ideas necessary for books spanning Christian history, outlining health principles, advising on child rearing and education, and handling the myriad individual and organizational problems of a growing church.” (The Power of Prophecy: Ellen G. White and the Women Religious Founders of the Nineteenth Century, unpublished dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1983, pp. 203, 204.) How was Fannie Bolton to square her dawning knowledge of heavy source dependence, to say nothing of weighty personal involvement in article rewriting, with the prophetess’ claims for her inspired writings? As an example of these claims, Ellen White wrote that she wanted her readers to know that she did not have “any understanding of anyone’s ideas and views, and that not a mold of any man’s theories should have any connection with that which I write.”

Societal vs. Religious Values

But what about the religious dimension of Ellen White’s literary dependency? Where general ethical norms serve to promote the larger society’s well-being, there can be times when such standards conflict with practices which promote the well-being of a societal subgroup. Walters suggests that such a subgroup was the fledgling prophetic movement of which Ellen White was the dynamic center. She became their prophet; she had a message from God for the world, and especially for the church.

Visions were a special but not exceptional form of ecstatic worship in early nineteenth century New York. Early Adventist believers accepted Ellen White’s visions, in part, because they were part of a known phenomenon. Others, including Joseph Smith, had experienced visionary states of ecstasy. Ellen White found the experience of a vision to be “powerful,” and it especially impressed her as a youth of 17. With the passage of time she felt a strong religious compulsion to write her views. She wrote, “Write, write, write, I feel I must, and not delay. Great things are before us, and we want to call the people from their indifference to get ready.” She attributed her views to her visions: “The words I employ in describing what I have seen are my own unless they be those spoken to me by an angel, which I always enclose in marks of quotation” (Review and Herald, Oct. 8, 1867). Her son Willie White spoke of her “habit of using parts of sentences found in writings of others and filling in a part of her own composition” (Selected Messages, book 3, p. 460).

Ellen White was not a scofflaw; she exhorted her followers to be law-abiding citizens and opposed falsehood and deceit. However, it appears that her first alle-giance was to her divinely founded church and to her prophetic role in it. Her prophetic mindset may have been such that the ethical dilemma of truth-in-writing vs. outright deception was not the issue. God had called her to be a “messenger” to his remnant people who were themselves called to warn a hell-bent world. Strict truth-telling was important for general Christian discipleship, but the Advent movement would not flounder for want of needed volumes of divinely inspired messages. And this special calling entailed writing, much writing. Surely, at least at a subconscious level, Ellen White’s visions melded diverse information into compelling impressions. The information had come from church discussions, personal thinking, and wide reading. And these general divinely imparted impressions took further concrete form as Mrs. White continued to study her source material. She was obviously self-conscious, defensive and regrettably deceptive about her source dependence. But if she didn’t use her sources, how could she be true to her prophetic writing role, a role she saw as so crucial?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while in prison, addressed what is a highly instructive question in our inquiry: “What is meant by ‘Telling the Truth’?” He criticizes a notion of truth-telling which is abstract and unbending and “solely a matter of moral character.” Truth-telling, he says, is directly related to one’s role in various relationships. Bonhoefer gives an illustration of how the different spheres in which one lives can create conflicting demands on truth-telling:

“A teacher asks a child in front of the class whether it is true that his father often comes home drunk. It is true, but the child denies it. The teacher’s question has placed him in a situation for which he is not yet prepared. He feels only that what is taking place is an unjustified interference in the order of the family and that he must oppose it. What goes on in the famlly is not for the ears of the class in school. The family has its own secret and must preserve it. The teacher has failed to respect the reality of this institution. The child ought now to find a way of answering which would comply with both the rule of the family and the rule of the school. But he is not yet able to do this. He lacks experience, knowledge, and the ability to express himself in the right way. As a simple no to the teacher’s question the child’s answer is certainly untrue, yet at the same time it nevertheless gives expression to the truth that the family is an institution sui generis and that the teacher had no right to interfere in it. The child’s answer can indeed be called a lie; yet this lie contains more truth, that is to say, it is more in accordance with reality than would have been the case if the child had betrayed his father’s weakness in front of the class.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, New York, Macmillan, 1968, pp. 363 ff.)

Religious Justification Inadequate

Ellen White was 57 years old when accusations of source-indebtedness were first made, and a woman who had built a prophetic career in skillfully arbitrating between factions and in building church consensus. She was a churchly-wise woman who surely was conscious of what she was doing in her literary work. Her early paraphrasing may have begun quite innocently, but when later accusations arose, she was overtly confronted with the issue of deception. Her earlier and simpler options had vanished. Should she admit source dependence and thus thwart the finishing of God’s work—a work she closely identified with herself? Evidently the compelling end of finishing God’s work justified the increasingly dubious means.

The vehement behavior displayed in the Fannie Bolton case seems to betray Ellen White’s deep ambivalence and perhaps guilt in utilizing sources as she did. However, even a sense of guilt is understandable if one is choosing a worthy option which involves specific wrongdoing, over another option which is totally unacceptable. On these grounds, speaking from the standpoint of a narrowly religious ethic, Ellen White’s plagiarism might be justified.

However, any ethical solution which finds its parameters exclusively in the religious sphere is inadequate. The sphere of general ethics must always be considered as well. Many people are so firmly planted in the purely ethical sphere that they are unable to comprehend uniquely religious claims and the moral seriousness attached to them. Other persons are so embedded in the religious realm that societal norms are quite secondary. Fortunately, religious persons generally recognize a considerable overlapping of the two spheres. Had Ellen White made her decision on literary practices in the area of religious-societal overlap, rather than merely in the religious realm, two benefits would have been realized: 1) both church and society would have profited, and 2) Ellen White’s conception of truth itself would have been more adequate.

Had Ellen White been straightforward in her literary practices, the church surely would have profited over the long haul. Further, her apparent belief that literary candor would have had devastating consequences on the church is itself quite dubious in light of the loss of such leaders as J.H. Kellogg and L. R. Conradi, both of whom left the church in part over questions on Ellen White’s prophetic gift.

Regardless, society at large is the great beneficiary of subgroup integrity, for society’s moral fabric is but the collective morality of its parts. Because of Ellen White’s moral lapse, the church and hence even the larger society is the poorer, Walters says.

Limited Conception of Truth

A second consequence of Ellen White’s primary loyalty to the strictly religious realm was her limited conception of truth. Thought leaders in the broader society have long understood the preeminently ethical nature of truth. A truthful person is a truth-telling individual. Truth-telling is not an arbitrary rule conceived by the gods or God himself in some ancient past, but is a norm which makes societal life possible. The underlying rationale for all truth-telling is the principle of trust. An undergirding trust in one another as human beings is the glue of all human relationships in society, church, and or for that matter—heaven itself. Ellen White’s expediency in serving the prophetic movement might have been different had she considered truth’s deeper dimensions. Possibly her conception of truth was so heavily prepositional that she failed to grasp its undergirding ethical basis. Regardless, the deeper dimensions of truth failed to inform her methodology in the production of “truth-filled” literature.

In the final analysis, Ellen White is not so much at fault personally as is the corporate church. And perhaps Adventism is not so much to be morally blamed as empathetically understood—as a maturing religious child searching for divine security. Ellen White did provide divine, dogmatic answers to hundreds of greater and lesser issues, but she was God’s answer to this movement’s basically deep need for detailed, authoritative “Thus saith the Lord.”

Walters thinks that Ellen White was clearly wrong in her plagiarism and further compromised her integrity by denying it. On the other hand, she was being basically true to the unique view of religious reality which she and her movement possessed. But because even the religious sphere of life can never be the primary basis for ethical decisions, Ellen White’s deceptive literary practices must not be countenanced, although they can be comprehended. Unless Ellen White is seen as totally self-deluded, her literary practices do detract from her personal integrity. However, Walters does not believe they destroy it. She was an insightful and courageous woman who did have a special and genuine relationship with her God. Further, Ellen White’s prophetic gift for the Adventist church is authentic. Her self-understanding of the gift may not be totally ours, and her exercise of the gift was in crucial points questionable, but Walters believes that God still used this prophetic gift among other gifts for the upbuilding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.