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Inspiration/Revelation: What It Is and How It Works

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    The Analogy of the Telescope

    Apart from the “greater light”/“lesser light” metaphors, another analogy, also drawn from the world of nature, has been particularly helpful in defining the relationship between the writings of Ellen White and those of Scripture. It was developed by Mrs. S.M.I. Henry, an “evangelist” for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the mid-nineteenth century and a convert to Seventh-day Adventism while a patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1896. (She subsequently found divine healing through prayer.) 32“Sarepta Myrenda (Irish) Henry,” Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, p. 581. Mrs. Henry is credited with conceiving a plan for what she called “woman ministry,” and with being the first in the Seventh-day Adventist church to present an organized plan to train mothers and fathers in the art and science of parenting (ibid.).IRWHW 77.11

    Mrs. Henry wrote, in an extended and fascinating autobiographical account, about her initial misunderstanding of the role of the Testimonies, her further disillusionment at discovering that many Adventists in Battle Creek gave only lip-service to belief, her personal struggle to understand the function of the spiritual gift of prophecy in modern times, and her subsequent enlightenment as a result of a season of special prayer. Her study led her initially to view Ellen G. White’s writings as a lens—and subsequently, as a telescope—through which to look at the Bible.IRWHW 77.12

    Developing the analogy, she said that these writings were also “subject to all telescopic conditions and limitations“:IRWHW 77.13

    Clouds may intervene between it and a heaven full of stars,—clouds of unbelief, of contention; Satan may blow tempests all about it; it may be blurred by the breath of our own selfishness; the dust of superstition may gather upon it; we may meddle with it, and turn it aside from the field; it may be pointed away toward empty space; it may be turned end for end, so that everything is so diminished that we can recognize nothing. We may change the focus so that everything is distorted out of all harmonious proportions, and made hideous. It may be so shortened that nothing but a great piece of opaque glass shall appear to our gaze. If the lens is mistaken for the field we can receive but a very narrow conception of the most magnificent spectacle with which the heavens ever invited our gaze, but in its proper office as a medium of enlarged and clearer vision, as a telescope, the Testimony has a wonderfully beautiful and holy office.

    Everything depends upon our relation to it and the use which we make of it. In itself it is only a glass through which to look; but in the hand of the Divine Director, properly mounted, set at the right angle and adjusted to the eye of the observer, with a field, clear of clouds, it will reveal truth such as will quicken the blood, gladden the heart, and open a wide door of expectation. It will reduce nebulae to constellations; faraway points of light to planets of the first magnitude; and to suns burning with glory.

    The failure has been in understanding what the Testimonies are and how to use them. They are not the heavens, palpitating with countless orbs of truth, but they do lead the eye and give it power to penetrate into the glories of the mysterious living word of God. 33Originally published in The Gospel of Health, January 1898, pp. 25-28, cited in Rebok, pp. 180, 181.

    Denton Rebok attests that “Sister White herself said that Mrs. S.M.I. Henry had caught the relationship between the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy and the Bible as clearly and as accurately as anyone could ever put into words.” 34Ibid., p. 181.IRWHW 78.1

    A telescope doesn’t put more stars into the heavens; it simply reveals more clearly the stars that are already there. And Ellen White’s writings, to change the figure, may also be seen as a microscope that helps “to magnify and make clear the details of the truths of the Word” of God. 35Ibid., p. 182. Likewise, the writings of Ellen White add detail and make clear the teachings of the Scriptures.IRWHW 78.2

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