A Unique Contribution
While Mrs. White’s views have been further corroborated to an amazing degree by scientific research conducted as recently as the decade of the 1980s, which because of limited space must remain undocumented here, 82See Roger W. Coon, “E. G. White, M.D.? Current Research Evaluates Her Counsels on Health,” Dialogue 3, No. 1: 11-13, 28, 29. it was perhaps in her concept of linking man’s physical condition with his religious experience that Mrs. White made her most unique contribution.GVEGW 99.5
Virtually none of the Christian bodies in the 1860s felt that physical health had anything to do with Christian theology. Had any minister presumed to raise the issue in the pulpit, he would quickly have been put in his place.GVEGW 100.1
Yet Ellen White clearly linked the two: “The health of the body is to be regarded as essential for growth in grace and the acquirement of an even temper,” 83Testimonies for the Church 9:160. For a more extensive exposition of the crucial significance of the relation of the brain to Christianity, see the new compilation, Counsels for the Church (1989), which condenses the nine-volume Testimonies series in one book, chapter 16 (pp. 117-123). The very first three statements are taken, respectively, from Testimonies for the Church 2:347; Testimonies for the Church 3:50, 51; and Temperance, 13, 14. she told the delegates to the 1909 General Conference session.GVEGW 100.2
As early as 1866 J. H. Waggoner recognized the uniqueness of this concept. He wrote in the pages of the Review and Herald: “We do not profess to be pioneers in the general principles of the health reform. The facts on which this movement is based have been elaborated, in a great measure, by reformers, physicians, and writers on physiology and hygiene, and so may be found scattered through the land. But we do claim that by the method of God’s choice it has been more clearly and powerfully unfolded, and is thereby producing an effect which we could not have looked for from any other means.GVEGW 100.3
“As mere physiological and hygienic truths, they might be studied by some at their leisure, and by others laid aside as of little consequence; but when placed on a level with the great truths of the third angel’s message by the sanction and authority of God’s Spirit, and so declared to be the means whereby a weak people may be made strong to overcome, and our diseased bodies cleansed and fitted for translation, then it comes to us as an essential part of present truth, to be received with the blessing of God, or rejected at our peril.” 84The Review and Herald, August 7, 1866; cited in Robinson, pp. 79, 80.GVEGW 100.4
The uniqueness still obtained 107 years after Waggoner wrote those lines. In 1973 psychiatrist Karl Menninger, in his perceptive seminal work, Whatever Became of Sin? singled out Seventh-day Adventists, together with the Latter-day Saints and the followers of Islam, as being virtually the only major exponents of the view that “the taking of coffee and tea and tobacco [is] harmful and hence sinful.” 85New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973, p. 142. (Italics supplied.)GVEGW 100.5