Herbert Douglass
Ellen Harmon was a reluctant seventeen-year-old when she experienced her first vision in December 1844. Over the next seventy years she had hundreds of visions and dreams. Her last recorded vision was on March 3, 1915. 1Arthur L. White suggested that Ellen White had about two thousand visions during her lifetime. He arrived at this conclusion based on what James White wrote in 1868 (Life Incidents [Battle Creek, MI: Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, 1868], 272) that Ellen “had during the past twenty-three years between one and two hundred visions,” an average of one every six weeks. Because her night visions appear more frequent in the later years, he estimated that she had an average of two or three visions per week. Thus the overall average was estimated at a vision once every two weeks. See Arthur L. White, “Variation and Frequency of the Ellen G. White Visions” (Center for Adventist Research [CAR], Berrien Springs, MI, April 5, 1982). The purpose of this chapter is to describe how Ellen White’s visions happened and to explore resulting interpretive issues. 2Sections of this chapter were drawn largely from the detailed outlines for the Issues in Ellen G. White Studies class taught by Merlin D. Burt at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University. UEGW 83.1