Ellen G. White (née Harmon; November 26, 1827 – July 16, 1915) was an American author, religious leader, and co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Born in Gorham, Maine, she experienced a severe injury at age nine that left her disfigured and prompted a deep engagement with religion. She was converted to the Adventist movement following the teachings of William Miller, a preacher who predicted Christ’s return in 1844, though the prophecy failed to materialize. Shortly after this disappointment, in December 1844, she reported receiving her first vision, which she described as a journey of Adventists to the city of God, marking the beginning of her prophetic ministry.
She married James S. White, an Adventist preacher, in 1846, and together they played a central role in shaping the church’s doctrines, including the observance of the Saturday Sabbath and the importance of healthful living. White claimed to have received approximately 2,000 visions and dreams throughout her life, many of which she described as involving bright lights, heavenly beings, and revelations of historical and future events, including the cosmic conflict between Christ and Satan. These visions were documented in her writings, which cover a wide range of topics such as religion, education, nutrition, family life, and prophecy.
She authored over 40 books and more than 5,000 articles, with her most influential works including Steps to Christ, which has sold over 20 million copies and been translated into more than 140 languages. Her writings are considered by Seventh-day Adventists to carry divine authority and are seen as a source of guidance and inspiration, though they are not placed on the same level as the Bible, which remains the ultimate standard of faith and practice. She is recognized as the most translated woman writer in history and the most translated American author of either gender.
White was also a key advocate for health reform, promoting vegetarianism and the “gospel of health,” and her influence extended to the founding of schools, sanitariums, and publishing houses. She traveled extensively, including to Europe and Australia, to support the church’s global outreach. Her life and work continue to impact millions worldwide, and her legacy remains central to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
False Teaching
In many respects Ellen G. White appeared to hold to the historic Christian faith. She believed in Christ’s imminent bodily return, she held to the inspiration and authority of the Bible, and she taught that we are saved by Christ’s righteousness rather than our own. But amid that truth were some dangerous false teachings. I will focus on only two.
The most obvious false teaching was the one that gave the Seventh-day Adventists their name: the view that the proper day of worship is Saturday rather than Sunday. Shortly after James and Ellen married, they studied a tract written by Joseph Bates titled Seventh-day Sabbath and became convinced that they were to keep Saturday as the sabbath. Six months later, Ellen had a vision in which she saw the law of God with a halo of light surrounding the fourth commandment. She and her husband took this as proof that their newfound understanding was correct. They elevated this to a doctrine of first importance.
Of far more concern was White’s aberrant view of death, hell, and eternal punishment. Adventists adopted several key tenets including one stating that God does not eternally torment sinners, but that the dead enter into soul-sleep until the second coming and last judgment. At that time the punishment for sinners will be that they cease to exist.
White held that a God of eternal wrath must be incompatible with a God of love and kindness. In The Great Controversy she wrote, “How repugnant to every emotion of love and mercy, and even to our sense of justice, is the doctrine that the wicked dead are tormented with fire and brimstone in an eternally burning hell; that for the sins of a brief, earthly life they are to suffer torture as long as God shall live.”
She also believed that God would simply annihilate the souls of those who did not follow him. “But I saw that God would not shut them up in hell to endure endless misery, neither will He take them to heaven; for to bring them into the company of the pure and holy would make them exceedingly miserable. But He will destroy them utterly and cause them to be as if they had not been; then His justice will be satisfied. He formed man out of the dust of the earth, and the disobedient and unholy will be consumed by fire and return to dust again.”
Followers and Modern Adherents
Adventism nearly came to an end in the days following The Great Disappointment. But Ellen G. White gave the movement new life and a new voice. Through constant preaching, teaching, and evangelism, she and her followers had grown the movement to nearly 140,000 by the time of her death in 1915. Today there are an estimated 18 million Seventh-day Adventists in the world. Their individual beliefs vary so widely that some Christians consider them a cult while others do not.
Seventh-day Adventism has continued to evolve. They continue to regard Ellen G. White as having a unique, God-given gift of prophecy. They continue to hold to the sabbath and to their emphasis on healthy eating and living. They continue to deny both the immortality of the soul and the reality of hell as eternal, conscious torment. Successors to Ellen G. White have also developed the distinctive and troubling doctrine of Investigative Judgment. (CARM helpfully lists their affirmations, denials, and most troubling teachings and provides this counsel: “There are too many problems within Seventh-day Adventism to recommend it as a safe church. Though there are Seventh-day Adventist groups that are within orthodoxy, there are too many of them that are not.”)
What the Bible Says
The Bible counters much of what Ellen G. White taught and what her church teaches today.
In the matter of the sabbath, the New Testament clearly shows Christians worshiping together on Sunday rather than Saturday. Not only that, but Romans 14 teaches that each person must be convinced in his own mind about the day they observe as the Lord’s Day; if the sabbath was binding on all Christians today, this passage would be meaningless.
In contrast to White’s teaching on the eternal destiny of those who do not know the Lord, the Bible teaches that hell is real, that it is eternal, and that in hell God’s wrath is poured out in conscious, everlasting punishment. John the Baptist spoke of Jesus, saying, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). Jesus himself spoke of hell saying, “if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire” and “these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Mark 9:43, Matthew 25:46). And in the epistles, Paul warned, “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Only by deliberately twisting the Scriptures can anyone deny the terrifying reality that hell is real and that those who do not know the Lord will be there to face his wrath forever.
