On Ellen G. White, Anakin Skywalker, and My Dad: What Does It Mean To Be "Predestined"?
On Ellen G. White, Anakin Skywalker, and My Dad: What Does It Mean To Be "Predestined"?
A Commentary on the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide for July 8, 2023.
My father led the lesson study, “God's Grand, Christ-centered Plan,” on July 8 at his church — the one in which I primarily grew up. He typically does this, from week to week, and has for nearly 50 years.
However, this Sabbath was also his birthday. (He won’t let me print his age, but admits he is “beyond 80.”) So, when my wife forwarded me a YouTube clip of that morning’s service, I eagerly looked in to see how he was doing.
After viewing the clip, I decided to reach out to him, not only to congratulate him on overseeing the lesson study in such a cogent way, but to also wish him a “Happy Birthday!”, which I’d not yet done.
However, mostly due to my statements, our exchange soon became one about Ellen G. White, accounting, and Star Wars.
My dad and I have these debates from time to time; ones where I’ll send him something by me I’m sure he’ll deem outrageous. Lately, it’s been posts from here, on HERETIC. Sometimes, it’s things I’ve written on Spectrum’s comments boards. (Of course, from time to time, these are the same thing.)
This time, however, I decided my conversation might be worth sharing. You’ll decide if I was correct or not.
Hey, Dad: Happy Birthday!
Good lesson, today! You sounded relaxed yet authoritative; sharp as ever for a man, unbelievably, closing in on the 9th decade of his life.
Then, I narrowed in on a comment one of the Sabbath School members had made which had annoyed me.
“Satan was the next in line, next to God”?
I think statements like these — which seem to appear nowhere else in Christianity except for Adventism — are part of the detritus one must swallow when they accept Ellen G. White’s origin myth for the devil.
It’s a narrative which seems to describe a Satan who is actually competitive with God — “paradivine” — as opposed to a cunning, bothersome, noisy, albeit beloved, created being.
Simply weird. This is part of the problem when Adventists discuss EGW’s writings as though they are part of the biblical corpus — a lesser light attached to the greater light. The results are anti-biblical and confusing.
Happy Birthday, Dad!!
Then, another thought:
The lesson had made this point: “Note carefully that the idea that God pays the price of redemption to Satan is a medieval, not a biblical, one. God neither owes nor pays Satan anything.”
During dad’s class, he’d attempted to raise the issue of who God actually pays, but I’d thought he’d not made it clear.
As for your question, I thought that a person who used to work for Chase Manhattan Bank in Income Processing would have another answer:
Through Christ’s sacrifice, God “pays Himself”!
Said another way, God balances His own books by Christ paying the debt owed by sinful human beings.
In this sense, God is like a business owner whose ledger has a hole He cannot balance.
This is the meaning of the beautiful accounting word Paul uses in this week’s lesson, anakephalaiosasthai.
In other words, Jesus’s death balances the books. He pays the debt He, Himself, is owed.
At this point, Dad wrote back.
Thank you.
What do you think of Ellen White's writings?
Do you think God was pleased with the totality of her life's work?
This hadn’t been what I was expecting, or necessarily wanted to talk about.
I’d raised the subject of E.G. White, mostly because someone in Dad’s class had alluded to her origin myth for Satan. (“Satan was the next in line, next to God!”)
If you’re a lifelong SDA, you’ll recall the source of this idea: Lucifer was the highest angel in heaven. A master of music, he’d led the angelic chorus. He could sing SATB harmonies by himself. And he was second only to God.
However, he became jealous when God the Father rolled out the Son, like a new Buick, before the angels. The cherub who’d become the devil was incensed he would not be consulted on the creation of Earth, that being the reason, in some part, for Christ’s debut.
Much of this is documented in White’s books: The Story of Redemption, The Spirit of Prophecy, Early Writings, and perhaps others. However, this narrative is not found anywhere in the Bible.
Even more, however, many Adventists do not know it wasn’t until roughly the mid-20th century — the era of Happy Days — that Adventists mostly coalesced around the conviction Christ was part of the Godhead, or Trinity.
This EGW story, thus, strikes me as bearing the taint of pre-trinitarian conviction. It speaks of Christ, not as God — co-omnipotent, co-omniscient, co-temporal and co-equal in every way with the Father & Holy Spirit — but as some interloping, out-of-town cousin, at the table with the Father, Holy Spirit, and Lucifer, so they’ll have four hands for poker. It seems to trivialize the profound and ineffable nature of trinitarianism.
Most of all, though, it has the precise texture and tone whereby, if it wasn’t something Ellen G. White, herself, had advanced — if this story had come from, say, the Lutherans — SDAs would mock it, much as we mock infant baptism, human-angel offspring, or purgatory.
But, to my dad’s questions, what did I think of Ellen White's writings? Did I think God was pleased with the totality of her life's work?
I responded:
Thank you for the questions.
Second one, first:
I would have to say, in my frail opinion, YES, God was pleased with the totality of her work, because, in her work, she centers and uplifts Christ. This is the point of the entire Christian enterprise.
Also, here, I am talking about her writing as a construct; as a set of interlinked ideas. I’m talking about it in general. I’m not talking about the effects of her work. I’m not talking about her, as a person; i.e., whether God approved of her life, or whether she “will be saved,” for example.
My issue is not Ellen G. White’s writing, as such.
Problematic issues, like my distaste for the Satanic origin myth, or even the charges against her of plagiarism, to me, do not outweigh the intense spiritual dedication for which she relentlessly calls, or the, often, startling beauty of her prose.
The Great Controversy is a book even she acknowledged had problems. Yet, I hold its closing paragraph to be one of the most symphonic I have ever read:
“The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more. The entire universe is clean. One pulse of harmony and gladness beats through the vast creation. From Him who created all, flow life and light and gladness, throughout the realms of illimitable space. From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love.”
Ellen G. White was not confused about her role, in my opinion. She is consistent and hardcore.
My issue is, and the gravitational mass of my repugnance is aimed at, the way she is used by Adventists.
What has happened to her, culturally, is something akin to a common time-travel trope.
It’s one where the traveler, an ordinary person, accidentally leaves something behind in a less sophisticated time period, goes traveling into the future, and finds out, centuries later, due to their earlier error, they are being worshipped as a god.
For example, watch this recap from TV show The Orville’s “Mad Idolatry” episode; S1E13.
In it, Orville First Officer Kelly Grayson uses an advanced device to heal an alien child. However, visiting the same planet three-quarters of a millennium in the future, she finds out an entire religion has sprung up around the mythology of her act:
The rest of the episode concerns Grayson and her crew, working to try and unwind and eliminate these highly undesirable and unintended effects.
Something similar, in my opinion, has happened in Adventism, through the near-deification of Ellen G. White.
I have to believe, that were she to come back to life today, EGW would be aghast that, to become an SDA, one has to testify to the authenticity of her inspiration; that, as doctrine, we hold her ministry marks us as “the remnant church”; or that many non-SDAs disdain us, because they credibly charge we use her writings as a 2nd Bible.
Were EGW to come back, she would see, like Kelly, a spiritual system had sprung up around her work.
What has not happened, however, is, for the most part, no one is working to try and unwind and eliminate these highly undesirable and unintended effects.
Dad replied.
Don't worry, Harold. l can see your intentions are good, and l am proud of you. But you have got to realize this: God is regarding her with supreme regard, despite her defects. And if the Bible is true, she will come out victorious in the end. THAT, l think, is the bottom line.
So my advice would be don't act as one that only points out her faults (God already knows what they are) otherwise you will be perceived as a detractor. There are enough of those already.
PS--- I am amazed at your intuition. Certainly wish you had gone on to parlay that into something that could put you on the world stage.
Reading this again, I’m kind of taken aback at how tender my father’s response was. It is not his typical style, I admit, but that it isn’t, perhaps, is what makes it stand out to me. I’m actually a little embarrassed: Even though I do acknowledge his reply, I go back in on him immediately afterward.
Thanks for the kind words, Dad. I could have gone farther, but I have a lot of bad habits.
• I’m not sure how you can speak of God’s approval of specific individuals, except in the most generic way, or as sort of a formal posture; e.g., the way politicians refer to their colleagues as “honorable,” or “my good friend.”
• I hope I’ve made clear, and thought I did, that I really don’t have a problem w/ EGW. I think she was an honest, sober woman. Her writing shows this. Her faults and shortcomings are, I’m sure, like any other human’s.
• My key issue, to reduce it to a single, solitary act, is the way SDA pastors will make statements, like, “It’s true, as long as it agrees with the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy.” I consider such statements to be political, not theological. EGW spoke against this kind of false equivalence. More SDAs should follow her example.
There was someone else in Dad’s class, though, who I thought had made a really good point.
I meant to add, Dad:
I think the person in your Sabbath School — who compared predestination to what parents do when they set up a nursery for an unborn child — had it spot-on.
I’ve concluded the same thing, using the same metaphor: Predestination merely means it was God’s plan that everyone join Him in eternity. He created a “nursery,” through Christ, big enough to hold all of humanity. We are “predestined” in the sense that God had great plans for everyone.
In 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi engages in a final, kinetic duel, on the hellish planet, Mustafar, with his padawan, or pupil, Anakin Skywalker:
After Obi-Wan defeats Anakin by brutally mutilating him — he severs both of his legs — he cries to him in anguish, “You were the Chosen One!”
In other words, Anakin, you were predestined to become the greatest Jedi who ever lived. Instead, he becomes an enemy: the most evil, powerful Sith Lord of all time. He’s even given a new name: Darth Vader.
The point is, in both narratives, predestination is not promise.
God predestined us, in the sense He, like the Jedi, set out everything which was needed to make champions.
The one thing He could not do for us, however, much as Obi-Wan could not for Anakin, was choose.
