C U R R E N T I S S U E S
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BY LESLIE
N. POLLARD
White's
Challenge
On Sabbath, March 21, 1891, Ellen White delivered a staggering challenge to 30 leaders of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. She had addressed and would address the issue of race in her writings,1 but the March 21 presentation signaled a comprehensive call to both repentance and action by the leaders of the church. Leaders and laity were standing face-to-face with the unavoidable challenge of applying the claims of the cross to the racially polarized United States. Modern Adventists are often surprised to learn that Ellen White's address is so comprehensive in its application of scriptural teaching and social insight. Her principle-centered approach to racial harmony provides the basis for the creation of a cross-centered culture in which the values of service, mission, and mutuality prevail. The creation of this transcendent cross-culture will enable us to experience and sustain a satisfying and effective unity in the Seventh-day Adventist fellowship. The Social
Context In the nineteenth-century world in which the Seventh-day Adventist Church was born this social hierarchy was fueled by "scientific" racism, that body of racial description and categorization informed by the biological and social research of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scientific racism emerged out of European and American attempts to analyze, understand, and classify the world within the recently created domain called science. Exploration, analysis, and investigation of the natural world required methods based on hypothesis, testing observation, and analysis.2 The empirical pursuit of knowledge that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century appealed to the so-called ra-tional mind. Between 1700 and 1900 science played an important role in convincing the world that "savages" were biologically inferior to the members of civilized societies. The first major scientist to attempt racial classification was Carolus Linnaeus, whose Systamae Naturae in 1735 divided humanity into Homo Europaeus, Homo Asiaticus, Homo Africanus, and Homo Americanus. By the nineteenth century Georges Cuvier postulated a tripartite division of humanity into Caucasians, Mongolians, and Negroes.3 Anthropologists such as Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and George Gliddon influenced public opinion about race by publicizing the results of their "research." Morton, a Philadelphia physician, amassed the largest collection of human skulls known at that time. While early Adventists were focusing on the intercessory ministry of Jesus Christ, Morton was publishing Crania Americana; or a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (1839) and Crania Aegyptica; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography; Derived From Anatomy, History and the Monuments (1844).
Scientific racism also became codified in certain legal decisions the most significant being the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, detailed how "far below" Negroes were "in the scale of created beings" and that the Constitution guaranteed them no rights. Out of these "scientific" and "legal" findings were created racial hierarchies, a societal "chain of being" and other notions of racial inferiority that attempted to justify existing color-based social stratification. Higher criticism of the Bible also undermined the Genesis account of Creation by proposing hierarchical concepts of polygenesis (multiple creation acts for the various races), providing a religious rationale for the preservation of racial hierarchy. Thus the social acceptability of scientific racism, along with the economic demands of a society in need of cheap labor, provided the basis for a specific thinking about the Negro. Chancellor William Harper said in 1837, "If there are sordid, servile and laborious offices to be performed, is it not better that there should be sordid, servile, and laborious beings to fill them?"4 James Hammond spoke to the U.S. Senate: "In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. This is a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. . . . Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose. We call them slaves."5 In 1861 Alexander Stephens, a proslavery writer, declared, "With us, all the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eyes of the law. Not so with the Negro. Subordination is his place."6 Stephen Douglas, presidential contender against Abraham Lincoln, argued that "the civilized world has always held that when any race of men have shown themselves to be so degraded by ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and barbarism, as to be utterly incapable of governing themselves, they must, in the nature of things, be governed by others, by such laws as are deemed to be applicable to their condition."7 Thomas Huxley, philosopher, scientist, and defender of Charles Darwin, wrote, "No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man."8 Such social constructs provided the nineteenth-century basis for the social and legal separation of the races: the subjugation of the Negro, laws against interracial marriage, a lack of national commitment to the education of the colored people, and the refusal to regard the Negro as an equal, despite the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.9 This is the social context of Ellen White's sermon. Race and the Church White became a part of the Millerite Movement in the 1840s, and with the Millerites experienced the Great Disappointment on October 22, 1844. She took up her prophetic ministry in 1844 at the age of 17 while popular notions regarding the biological, social, and civilizational inferiority of the Negro were commonly accepted. By 1860, fully 15 years after Mrs. White had begun her ministry, the total number of slaves in the United States numbered more than 4 million.11 While the Civil War ended slavery as an institution, it did not end the social servitude of Black persons. As one writer has said: "The North may have won the war, but the South won the peace." By the time of the Battle Creek General Conference session of 1891 it is safe to say that the Seventh-day Adventist Church was at best ambivalent concerning its responsibility to Black persons. At worst, the church was recalcitrant.
Ellen White's sermon can be divided into three sections: the cross-centered basis for a new direction, the recent actions and present condition of the church, and the challenge of Christ-centered, grace-filled mission. Analyzing the
Sermon Ellen White opened her sermon with a hermeneutical announcement. She would not rely on the "science" of her day; instead she identified the principles in Scripture that make the creation of a new culture of service, mission, and mutuality imperative. Her appeal was biblically and morally grounded. But this scriptural appeal is not a fundamentalist's interpretation of Scripture; otherwise she could not have supported resistance to slavery.13 She called for a principle-centered approach to the problems of race, prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination. She was keenly aware that this approach is transformative. It is instructive to consider her sermonic assertions to the General Conference leadership and the principles she used to disable the discrimination in her nineteenth-century church. Note how these principles apply to the contemporary church: Our Challenge White's sermon made it clear that she rejected the conclusions of social "science" of her day. Clearly, racial differences did not denote inferiority or superiority, but opportunities for witness, service, and love. In 2000 the North American church faces the wonderful challenge of organizing its mission and fellowship around the same principles that actuated Ellen White. Practical questions to be answered are: * How will ethnic groups (i.e., Anglo, Asian, Latino, African, etc.) balance the need for same-race particularity in mission with the biblical mandate to be cross-cultural in outreach? * Will spiritual gifts be primary or subordinate to ethnicity in making pastoral assignments? * How much diversity of structure will be acceptable, and how will the effectiveness of structural diversity be measured? The answers to these and other questions will require courageous leadership and above all else, principle-centered decision-making. 1 See Ellen G.
White, Testimonies for the Church (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific
Press Pub. Assn., 1948), vol. 1, pp. 253-260, 264-268; vol. 7, pp.
220-230; vol. 9, pp. 199-226. _________________________________________________________ Local
Resources Print, audio, and video materials and presentations from October's race summit are available, as well as practical ideas and instructions about improving race relations on both personal and corporate levels. For prices and ordering information from AdventSource, call 1-800-328-0525 (fax: 402-486-2572); or visit their website at www.adventsource.org. MORE INFORMATION |
In these works on
craniology, Morton linked cranial capacity to intellectual and moral
aptitude. He placed the Caucasian at the top of a pyramid of
intelligence and capability, and the Negro at the bottom of the
pyramid. Josiah Nott, an understudy of Morton's, asserted the natural
inferiority of the Negro in an effort to assist the proslavery forces
of the nineteenth century. He argued that Negroes were like children,
best served by American enslavement. In 1854 Nott and Gliddon, both
close disciples of Morton, published Types of Mankind, a
"scientific" book that documented variations among human
species. Its findings were used to support pro-slavery arguments.
Types of Mankind went through 10 editions by the end of the nineteenth
century and became one of that century's most influential texts on
anthropology.
By 1891 somewhere
between 4 and 5 million unreached "colored" people sat in
the living room of Seventh-day Adventist mission like the proverbial
"white elephant." White concluded that the collective
refusal of leadership to address the racial situation in the
Seventh-day Adventist Church could not continue. Sixty-four years old
and recently weakened by sickness, she nonetheless decided to speak to
the issue in a forthright, uncompromising manner.
