We believe God called Ellen White to a special ministry from an early age--a ministry she carried out faithfully throughout her life. This included writing, speaking, and bearing messages she had received from God for specific people. We do not question her inspiration.

It is our position that believing Ellen White was inspired by the Holy Spirit does not excuse us from studying the Bible for ourselves for the purpose of gaining understanding that can be substantiated wholly independently of her writings. We are to regard the Bible, and the Bible alone, as our authority. We respect Ellen White's writings; but if we find that the Bible clearly supports a particular understanding of scripture that God had not yet revealed to his people during the time of her ministry, we do not therefore reject the light from the Holy Spirit.

Here are a couple of examples of where we have arrived at a different understanding than is put forth in The Great Controversy.

Revelation 11 - The Two Witnesses. Ellen White understood the two witnesses to be the Old and New Testaments, the 1,260 days of their prophesying to be the 1,260 years of papal supremacy from 538 to 1798, and the beast from the Abyss that attacked and killed them to be France (The Great Controversy, chapter 15: The Bible and the French Revolution).

Using the Bible as its own interpreter, we find that Jesus' two witnesses are the Holy Spirit and the apostles (John 15:26; Matthew 10:18-20; Acts 1:8; Acts 5:32). The passage describes the special work the Holy Spirit will accomplish through his end-time apostles in the last days, just before the close of probation. This will result in the final harvest--foreshadowed by the Old Testament Feast of Tabernacles--just as the work the Holy Spirit through the apostles at the time of Pentecost resulted in the harvest foretold by the Old Testament Feast of Weeks. We study this in depth elsewhere on the web site.

Revelation 13 - The beast from the sea and from the earth. Ellen White understood these beasts to represent, respectively, the papacy and the United States and the 42 months during which the beast from the sea would persecute the saints to refer to the 1,260 years of papal supremacy from 538 to 1798 (The Great Controversy, chapter 25: God's Law Immutable).

We believe that the beast from the sea represents not only the papacy but a system of false religions--of which the papacy is the most prominent--and corrupt governments. (It has, after all, six heads in addition to the one that had the fatal wound; and there are the ten horns and the bodily composition to consider as well.) We believe the Bible provides solid ground for understanding that the beast from the earth is not a nation at all but the Antichrist--Satan appearing physically in the guise of the Lamb of God: Jesus Christ. This, too, we will study in depth on this web site.

Many Seventh-day Adventists may disagree with our understanding of these two passages, but notice that in neither case is the understanding contrary to what God showed Ellen White concerning the closing events of earth's history. While it is true that she understood the two witnesses of Revelation 11 to refer to the Old and New Testaments, God also showed her that the Holy Spirit would be poured out on his people during the time of the Latter Rain and that they would then have a work that would parallel Pentecost; and although she believed that the beast from the earth represented the United States, God also showed her that Satan himself would appear on earth to personate Jesus Christ. In fact, we find that she uses portions of the very passage that talks about the beast from the earth to describe the work of Satan (3SM 393).