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Theology. History. Psychology.
If you haven't already listened to the trailer, go ahead and give it a listen because we laid down some groundwork as to what the podcast is gonna be about and some of the things that we wanna talk about. But what Orlando and I were talking about for this episode is we figured we would start by laying down some, context for the early days, Ellen White and the birth of Adventism, and how the church got started. And I'm kinda talking about laying some groundwork, some foundation before we get into the meat and potatoes of the series. So the first series that we're doing that we wanna kick off the podcast with is talking about Ellen White and the Adventist Church and church history. This has been a pretty big topic of conversation for us over the past two years.
Nick:A lot of what we've talked about in our own personal conversations has been regarding this topic, so we thought this would be a good place to start the podcast. But before we really get into the nitty gritty and start discussing Ellen White and, you know, more modern Seventh day Adventist Church things, we wanted to lay that foundation. So I'll hand it over to Orlando, so we can kind of talk about the history and theology of the Adventist church, how it got started with the early days in the Millerite movement and all that.
Orlando:Yeah, to really understand the Adventist church and where it came from, you really have to look at Millerite movement, right? Because that provides the religious and cultural milieu that really influenced where we would go as a future institution. So let's begin. William Miller was the one that really inspired the entire Millerite movement. He was born in 1782, raised in Upstate New York, and he did a lot of different things.
Orlando:He served in a lot of different capacities in his life. He was a farmer, a constable in his town. He even served in the army. He even, I think this is back in the War of 1812 he gathered a few of the guys that were in his town and they went out to join in battle with the army. And then eventually
Nick:A few of the boys. He got the boys together.
Orlando:they eventually joined the army. And it was there that Miller had one of his first divine experiences, to say the least. And so, there's a quote attributed to Miller where he describes being in the battle, like being in midst of gunfire and cannon fire. And he says, It seemed to me that the Supreme Being must have watched over the interests of this country in a special manner and delivered us from the hands of our enemies. So surprising result against such odds did seem to me like the work of a mightier power than man.
Orlando:And the the context of that quote was during the, I think, battle of let's see, battle of Plattsburgh, where the fort that he was at was being besieged by the British. And he and his comrades had come under fire, and some of his fellow soldiers were shot, and one of them was even killed. And all this happened right next to Miller, and Miller came away completely unscathed. Physically speaking, he may have came out of that with some form of trauma, but physically he was unscathed and for him, he believed that there was some sort of divine intervention that occurred. So that was one of the big stepping stones that led him away from Deism into believing that there is a God out there that is more than willing to engage and intervene in the affairs of humanity.
Orlando:There was another experience that Miller had where he was asked to read a sermon. So back then, there would be like these big sermon compilation books. And so the preacher, the minister would open up the book and they would just read the sermon out verbatim. And Miller was asked to step in and to read one of the sermons. And there's a quote from Miller where he says, as he was reading the sermon, Suddenly, the character of a savior was vividly impressed upon my mind.
Orlando:It seemed that there might be a being so good and compassionate as to himself to atone for our transgressions and thereby save us from suffering the penalty of sin. I immediately felt how lovely such a being must be and imagined that I could cast myself into the arms of and trust in the mercy of such a one. And so that was another impressionable moment that really convinced Miller that there is a God out there that loved him deeply and that wanted the best, the best for him. And so from there, he set out to study the Bible. He had been told that there were supposed contradictions in the Bible, and because of those contradictions, the Bible could not be trusted.
Orlando:So he took matters into his own hands and began to just go through the Bible. And he even set out a list of rules that governed his approach to Bible study. And I think there are like a good 15 to 20 rules or propositions that he even set up, and we're not going to go through those. But, but they're out there. You can look it up for yourself.
Nick:At some point, he thought, I can't just sit on this, right? I got to do something with this information.
Orlando:Well, he did sit on it for a little bit. So he spent a good four to five years studying this out from like 1818 to 1823. So 1818 was when he first started this journey. He discovered God for himself, not the deist God where God is not involved in the world. He began to believe in a God that could be involved in the world, that wanted to be involved.
Orlando:And so he studied for about five years and that's when he came across the Day-Year Principle, the 2300 day prophecy. And so by 1823, he had pretty much most of the ideas that would be encapsulated in the Millerite movement pretty much fleshed out. But he sat on those ideas up until 1832, when he published a series of 16 articles in the Vermont Telegraph. So it's quite a period of time that he kind of sat on those ideas. I think it's interesting to note, as an aside, that William Miller was a Freemason, and a year before he began to go public with his ideas about the 2300 day prophecy, he resigned his Freemason membership, stating that he believed that the Freemason organization was not based on Christian principles, and because they were not based on Christian principles, he felt like he had to leave the movement or leave the organization.
Nick:I just wonder what caused him to wait so long. I mean, I'm thinking some of the things that we're going to talk about, especially in future episodes, we were definitely hesitant to share at the very beginning of our of our conversations. Right? I know that our motivation was we want to make sure that we thoroughly research this, that we study this, that we look at it from every angle possible. And then once we, you know, once we finally have something solid, we can start sharing it.
Nick:So I wonder if that's some of the things that he was facing too, right, with with the theological component of what became the Millerite movement.
Orlando:Yeah, I know in Miller's biography, it states that Miller felt nervous, or he felt insecure in his ability to convey this information that he may have not been the right person for this. Sure, he discovered it, but I think he stated that he felt inadequate in regard to wanting to being able to share this information with others. And that's what partially contributed to not going public with his information up until 1832. I think we could start with the 2300 day prophecy, because that's really like the crux of what Miller focused on, right? Because that is what led him up to the time of around 1844.
Orlando:Because William Miller, he never set a specific date. He set a window of time from March 1843 to March 1844. That was the original timetable. The specific day, 10/22/1844, I believe that was posited by Samuel Snow. Yeah, well, we can talk about him later.
Orlando:So yeah, so let's dive into the 2300 day prophecy. So the 2300 day prophecy comes from the book of Daniel, chapter eight verse 13, to be specific. And the verse is rendered like this. Unto 2300 days, then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. And that's pretty much the verse in a nutshell.
Orlando:And he utilized a principle known as the day year principle, and that is what allowed him to interpret the prophecy as such. So William Miller stated that the beginning of the 2300 day prophecy began in 457 B.C. And what what made 457 B.C. significant was that there was a decree to rebuild Jerusalem. So that is the event that kick started the 2300 day prophecy. Right, and then from there, the terminus point would have been sometime in 1844.
Orlando:Now, you can go online and you'll find some very fancy and complicated charts that explain the 2300 day prophecy in great detail, because you have sub components within the 2300 days. You've got the 69 weeks from the time that Jerusalem is decreed to be rebuilt. Yeah, so a lot subcomponents to this larger prophecy.
Nick:So another thing that we can mention here, like you said, there's a lot of different components in the 2300 day prophecy that William Miller was studying. But really, where we landed on or should I say where the Millerites landed on, there's a lot of different points in time in this prophetic timeline that that we could focus on. But, really, I think what's what's important within the context of the Adventist church and what's important within the context of the Millerite movement is the very end of the 2300 day prophecy.
Orlando:Oh, for sure. That's definitely the most relevant part.
Nick:Yeah, exactly. So what I'm thinking as I'm looking at the chart is, you know, the end of the 2300 day prophecy, if you wanna talk about how they got to the date, but I believe that they got to the interpretation of it as to what was gonna happen at the end of the 2300 days before they got to an exact date as to when that was gonna happen. Right? Because like you read in in Daniel, Daniel 8:14 it said after the 2300 days, then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.
Nick:So when William Miller is studying the bible and he sees the words, then the sanctuary shall be cleansed, because this is a huge point in early Adventist history. Right? How did they interpret that? How did he you know, what did he think when he saw the phrase, then the sanctuary shall be cleansed?
Orlando:Yeah, a few different interpretations there. The one that was most common was that the earth was believed to be the sanctuary, right? And so by virtue of the earth being cleansed, they believe that that was Jesus coming back, right? Because, you know, God was going to use fire to purify the earth, and so they believed, okay, cleansing of the sanctuary means cleansing of the earth, which means God is coming back to set things right. This is the second advent that will occur.
Orlando:That was their assumption.
Nick:So they basically interpreted the sanctuary being cleansed as after 2300 days or after 2300 years, Jesus would return, basically.
Orlando:That was the idea.
Nick:So once they get to this point, the Millerites really start to catch on at this point. Right. They start moving. They start growing because they have a message at this point. And that message is Christ's imminent return.
Nick:This is it's around the corner. So tell us a little bit about when that time frame came into the mix and, you know, how they finally got around to October 1844.
Orlando:Miller starts sharing these ideas publicly in 1832. He publishes a series of articles in the Vermont Telegraph that really started to take off. A lot of people began to ask questions. They started to write to the paper, asking Miller, hey, how did you come to your ideas? Is this really true?
Orlando:What are we to do? And there are some other figures that also came into the mix that helped popularize it. It wasn't just Miller. There were other people that began to take those ideas and kind of run with them. Really popularizing this idea that, Hey, Jesus is about to come back.
Orlando:Get ready, get your affairs in order. Don't plan to be around for another twenty years.
Nick:And that became the main message of the Millerite movement at the time. It was prepare for the second coming, repent. But then we get some pretty interesting byproducts of how they how they executed that belief. Right? Because they kinda went from Jesus' second coming is right around the corner.
Nick:It's imminent to let's start sharing the word. Let's start preaching to we're not gonna be on around on Earth anymore to because we're not gonna be around for much longer. Let's start selling all our earthly possessions. Let's, you know, let's start selling our homes, our land, anything that we own so that we can use the proceeds to continue growing this Millerite movement to continue to spread the word that Jesus is coming soon.
Orlando:Yeah, no, I think a person's belief in end time events will definitely influence how they conduct themselves in the present moment. Right? So if you believe that God is coming back in five to seven years' time, that's definitely gonna influence how you live your life, how you plan things out. So for them, yeah, many of them began to sell possessions, to some of them, you know, abandoned their occupations and just went, you know, full time preaching this, you know, circuit preaching all that going around. And I think it's interesting to note that, the idea of Christ coming back soon was a countercultural idea in the fact that many Christians at that time, believed in post millennialism, which means that there would be a thousand years of peace, and then at the end of those thousand years, then the judgment would occur and then Jesus would come back.
Orlando:But what William Miller and his associates were saying is, No, no, no. The judgment and the second coming of Christ are about to happen, and then the thousand years are gonna happen. That idea is known as premillennialism, which is a pessimistic view of humanity and the history of humanity, because it essentially says that, yeah, the world's about to collapse. Jesus is about to come back. And for Christians who were post millennialists, they're like, No, things are getting better.
Orlando:And those ideas were mainly conditioned by people who were landowners in America, so mainly white individuals, who because of by virtue of their privilege and their affluence, for them, it was easy to believe that things were getting better, that humanity was progressing. So Miller's ideas were countercultural. They went against the grain of the common understanding. So I think that's really important to keep in mind.
Nick:So at which point does Samuel Snow come into the picture? Like, does he kinda just come out of left field? Or who is this guy, and how did he get involved with the actual, you know, time calculation of when Jesus was gonna come back according to the Millerites?
Orlando:Yeah. So he comes into the picture, toward the end of the the Millerite movement. So Samuel Snow was a former atheist turned Millerite preacher. And he he really got involved with with the Millerite movement. And there's a campmeeting in August 1844, and he preached a message that became known as the the seventh month or, the True Midnight Cry.
Orlando:So his ideas regarding the 2300 day prophecy concluded that Christ would return on the tenth day of the seventh month. Essentially, that pointed to the Day of Atonement. So his ideas were based on the Karaite Jewish calendar, which corresponded with the date 10/22/1844.
Nick:So he really came out of there with, you know, really little little notice. Right? Very short notice. So he goes into this campmeeting in August of the same year, August 1844, and says, here are the receipts. I've done the math. And it checks out that just two months from now, eight weeks from now, on in October 1844, Jesus will come back. I'm just trying to imagine going to, you know, a church function today. And somebody's preaching from the pulpit and saying, hey. I did the math.
Orlando:Mhmm.
Nick:And in two months, that's all she wrote. We have, like, two months left on earth. You know, I wonder how that was well, I guess we know how it was perceived back then. Right?
Nick:Because we know what happened after that. They kind of got whipped into a frenzy and started selling off all their earthly possessions, and that's when things got crazy because they're like, well, what's the point in showing up to work on Monday if we have eight weeks on Earth? What's the point?
Orlando:In addition to that, August was a crucial time because, this was more of an agrarian period. So many of these individuals were farmers and they planted food for themselves, which meant that
Nick:so what's the point of planting next season's harvest? If we only have two months left on Earth.
Orlando:Exactly. And so many of them, not many, most of them, if not all, neglected the summer planting, which meant that there would be no fall harvest. Yeah, but for them, it was an indicator of faith. Right? Because if they were to have planted those crops, that would mean that, this is kinda like a backup plan just in case Jesus doesn't come back.
Orlando:And so for them, you know, they you know, it's like the whole idea of, like, putting your hand to the plow, but looking back, like that, that was the sort of idea that was thrown around. So if they wanted to really have faith that Jesus was coming back, then, you know, they wouldn't, they wouldn't plant the crops that they would need to harvest in the fall.
Nick:So what have you read, if anything, about how the people around them so non Millerites, right, responded to this message? Because I'm just thinking there's a bunch of people telling us that the world is going end in two months and their movement is growing. They're growing in numbers. I see them selling off all their earthly possessions. It's at this point in the late stages of the miller movement.
Nick:Is it still growing? Like, how are people reacting to all this?
Orlando:Yeah. The the Millerite movement definitely grew, especially toward the end. Right? Because, you know, they were just a lot closer to this window of time, that Miller had set. But there definitely was a negative reaction to the Millerite movement.
Orlando:Again, one of the reasons was that many Christians were post millennialists as opposed to pre millennial. And the Millerite movement was essentially taking individuals away from their previous denominations. Right? So, one could say that they were sheep stealing, so to speak. But then those same individuals, some of them were also forced out of their denominations, which I believe is something that happened to Ellen White's family, because they were members of the Methodist denomination.
Orlando:And I believe that they were forced out because of their belief in William Miller's ideas. So definitely a very negative reaction. And I mean, it's understandable because you have that verse, no man knows the day nor the hour. And yet here we have this public figure saying, hey, we've got an idea of when Jesus is coming back. You know, that kind of flies in the face of that particular Bible verse.
Orlando:So I can understand why there might be some animosity toward the Millerites.
Nick:And I wanna read that verse because in a couple episodes, that verse is gonna be real interesting for us. Like I said, the the point of this episode is we're just trying to lay the groundwork of the early very early on Adventist Church, how it got started. Right? But this verse is gonna come back in a couple episodes, and it's gonna it's gonna make an appearance. So Matthew 24:36 is where it's found.
Nick:And the context is it's talking about the second coming. Right? And it says, but of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the heavens, not even the angels of heaven, but my father only. So, literally, Matthew 24:36 Jesus is saying nobody knows the exact day or the hour. That's that's what the bible says. And Willie Miller and the Millerites are preaching October 1844. Right?
Orlando:Initially, were preaching a window of time between March 1843 to March 1844. And then after that window of time elapsed, and nothing happened, then 10/22/1844 starts to get mentioned. And that that gets initiated by by Snow.
Nick:So 10/22/1844 comes around. What happens? What happens on the actual day where the second coming is supposed to happen? What does that do to the Millerite movement?
Orlando:Oh, it was absolutely devastating. Yeah, most of the Millerites in the movement either abandoned Christianity entirely or went back to their respective denominations that they had left.
Nick:We're talking about a group of people here who are just waiting for the second coming and are now unemployed. They're they have they don't have anywhere to live because they sold their homes. Right? They sold their earthly possessions in the name of the message.
Nick:They don't have the hope of a quick turnaround in future earnings because they didn't plant to harvest. There was there was no point in in planting and getting everything ready to harvest later on because there was gonna be no harvest. So I'm assuming that all these decisions that they made in the past couple of months start to really hit home at this point. So that's why in in the Adventist church, and and in church history, we referred to 10/22/1844 as The Great Disappointment. I think the great disappointment is an understatement for what they must have felt at that time.
Orlando:Yeah. And, I mean, imagine being in the shoes of of these Millerite believers. Right? Like, imagine what life was like in the 1800s. You know, they didn't have the modern amenities of life that we have today.
Orlando:Right? So everything has to be done by hand. There's just a lot of menial work. And for them, it's like, wow, Jesus is is about to come back. Our way of living is gonna be forever changed.
Orlando:We're not gonna have to have a scarcity mindset anymore. We we won't have to work in order to eat or to, you know, provide a living for ourselves and our children, those worries are just gonna be gone. And in addition to that, we'll be living with Jesus. We won't be separated by this large chasm of space anymore. We'll be with Jesus forever.
Orlando:And then for that not to happen, I mean, that's gotta be devastating, especially for individuals that believed for years that Jesus was about to come back. And I believe there were reports that there were some individuals that were committed to back then, were known as insane asylums because they just went to such a psychotic episode. And their mental health just deteriorated. Yeah.
Nick:So up to this point, this is pretty much the end of what we would consider the Millerite movement. What happens to the Millerite movement after that point, right? After they realized that October 22 came and went and Jesus still wasn't there. Do a lot of people just abandon the movement altogether, right, and starts to fizzle out? Or what became of those people?
Orlando:Yeah, so post Great Disappointment, you could pretty much split it up into two initial groups, mainline Adventists and then bridegroom Adventists. Most of the Millerites fell into the mainline Adventist camp, meaning that many of them abandoned Christianity entirely. They went back to their old denominations. Yeah, so those are really the two main groups. But from there, let's talk about the bridegroom Adventists because that's where things really get interesting.
Orlando:Let's talk about the word bridegroom. Where did that word come from? Well, the term bridegroom gets inspired from the parable of, believe it's Matthew 25, where it talks about the 10 virgins. So you have the 10 virgins waiting for the bridegroom to arrive, but then the bridegroom takes a really long time, and the 10 virgins, they all fall asleep. And then the 10 virgins are awoken from their sleep, and someone tells them, hey, the bridegroom is here, the bridegroom is here.
Orlando:And five of the virgins were like, Oh, man, I've run out of oil in my lamp. We got to go into town and get our oil. But then there were five other virgins that they had enough oil in order to get them through. And so the five wise virgins are able to go into the house where the wedding ceremony is occurring, while the five quote unquote foolish virgins go out into the town and they're looking for oil. But then by the time that they come back, the doors are locked, and they aren't able to go in.
Orlando:And they essentially miss out on being able to see the bridegroom.
Nick:The doors are shut, you you mean?
Orlando:Yeah. I I guess you could say that the the doors were shut. There was a shut door.
Nick:Got it. Yeah. We can talk about that more later too.
Orlando:Oh, yeah. That that's a discussion for another time. That phrase merits an episode of its own, to say the least.
Nick:And so and just to interrupt you real quick, this is found in Matthew 25 verses one through 13 is the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. And what I think is really interesting and almost ironic about this branch of the Millerite movement, right, that became to be known as the bridegroom Adventists. What I think is really ironic is Matthew this is the same parable, the same parable of the wise and foolish virgins. It ends in verse 13. Matthew 25 verse 13.
Nick:And that says, watch therefore for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the son of man is coming. So they literally just had the great disappointment in which they calculated the day and the hour in which the son of man was coming, and now they're taking their name from the parable in which that Bible verses in. I just I just had to mention the irony in it all.
Orlando:Yeah, that that is some heavy irony right there, man. So this is like the Millerite or not the Millerite, the bridegroom Adventist understanding of of the bridegroom parable. So since Christ had not come as king at the second coming or October 22, they proposed that he had instead come as a bridegroom to a heavenly wedding. And with Jesus as the bridegroom, they identified the heavenly new Jerusalem as the bride and the marriage as the act of Christ receiving his kingdom in heaven, and the advent believers as the virgins of the story.
Nick:So it's almost like the stage by which this was happening was changed. Right. So it's not like we got the date wrong altogether or we were wrong about everything in this verse. But they shifted their viewpoint from this is going to be a physical thing that happens on Earth. Right.
Nick:To they shifted their focus to something is still happening during this date. Our study wasn't completely useless. Right. But what's happening is now in the heavenly realm, right? This is happening in heaven, not on Earth.
Orlando:It's the the nature of the event. Is what is what changed. Right? Going from the second coming to Christ receiving his bride.
Orlando:And so it's the nature of the event. So they still believe, oh, yes, something happened on October 22. We just got the event wrong, but we got the date right.
Nick:What did the mainline Adventist group believe as far as what had happened on that date? I mean, how do you even move forward from that if you don't believe that, oh, we're changing the angle, right? How did the mainline Adventists handle that?
Orlando:Well, most of the mainline Adventists completely rejected the 2300 day prophecy. Like he got it wrong, we got fooled. Okay, now we got to go back to our normal lives again. And so the bridegroom Adventists, they remained relatively united up until I believe it was March 1845. And that's when a split occurred because some of them believed that there was a Jubilee year that allowed for Christ to still come even into the year 1845.
Orlando:But after the month of March passed, then there's a split, a schism within the bridegroom Adventist group. And these two groups that came out of bridegroom Adventism were the literalists and the spiritualizers. So you had the spiritualizing bridegroom Adventists, and then you had the literalizing bridegroom Adventists. And the spiritualizing view, like I said, began March 1845 by an individual by the name of Orlando Squires. So he started a paper known as Voice of the Shepherd.
Orlando:And in this paper, he essentially spiritualized every aspect of Christian belief. So this included rejecting a literal heaven, rejecting a literal destruction of the world by fire, rejecting a literal resurrection, rejecting a literal body of Jesus, and it also rejected a literal second coming. And the paper, Voice of the Shepherd, proposed that all of these were accomplished in a spiritual sense within the Christian's own experience. So this introduces an element of subjectivity to all of these events because they occur within a subjective sense within the believer's own experience. And this causes a great degree of confusion.
Orlando:But then you have the the literalizers who, by contrast, believe or still believe in a literal second coming. They they still believe in a literal body of Jesus, a literal resurrection. And suffice it to say, tension grew between these two groups because they had two different worldviews in how they viewed spiritual things.
Nick:I'm assuming that the spiritualizers didn't last very long after they started fighting with each other.
Orlando:Yeah, that movement definitely started to fizzle out, to say the least. So it was definitely a short lived movement. And at this period of time, there would have been maybe a few 100 people that congregated toward the spiritualized view. Many of them, I think some of them ended up joining the shakers movement that had started back in the 1700s.
Nick:Another interesting thing to note, as a side note, is the context in world history that all of this was happening. Right? Because you're you're saying that all of these branches and divisions started happening in the Millerite movement. Some of them went on and joined other movements. But as far as religious movements are concerned, this was a period of huge growth.
Nick:Like, lot of religious movements that are still around started around this time period. So I just think that that's really interesting that the the Seventh day Adventist Church is just one of these groups that emerged during this time frame.
Orlando:It's interesting in context of of time, but also in location. The area that we're talking about that these groups started in was Upstate New York. You had the Church of Latter day Saints that started in Upstate New York with Joseph Smith. Then you have, I believe, the Jehovah's Witnesses movement that I believe also started in Upstate New York with Charles Taze. I'm trying to remember the specific time.
Orlando:I don't remember it offhand. It's probably either the 1860s or 1870s, I want to say.
Nick:Basically, in the late 1800s is where a bunch of these groups started popping up. And I just find it interesting that Adventism was one of them. But, yeah, so we talked about the spiritualize our group. What happened to the literalist group? Right.
Nick:The ones that believe that Jesus is still literally going to come to Earth. And, you know, that's still how they interpreted scripture. Is this literal group what eventually became mainline Adventism today?
Orlando:Yes. So the Seventh day Adventist Church as a denomination comes out of the literalist bridegroom branch of post millerism, and this was the smallest faction. So the literalist group was smaller than the spiritualizing group. So at this point, we're talking maybe potentially less than 100 people that were in this original, literalist group. So it was just a minority, of people.
Nick:And the reason why I bring this up is because to segue into what will become our next episode, we've mainly focused on one character in Seventh day Adventist history, which was William Miller. Right? He's he's the one that started it all, that started the Millerite movement, which we explained what they were into, what they believed, what they preached, eventually started splitting into different movements, which then at the very end of all this became what eventually became the Seventh day Adventist church. Right? So at this point, more people are in the movement, but it's a very small amount of people.
Nick:You said it's probably less than a 100 people who are part of this minority group that will eventually become the modern Seventh day Adventist church. Now who else comes into the scene? What other character do we wanna introduce at this point that comes onto the scene in the very early Adventist movement at this point?
Orlando:So Ellen White becomes a very important figure within the literalist bridegroom camp. She quickly rose to prominence, especially after her first vision in December 1844.
Nick:Perfect. And I think this is a great place to stop because the next part, the now that we've kind of laid some groundwork in the context of early Adventist church history and how the Adventist church came to be, we really wanna shift our focus from this just timeline picture of the Adventist movement to Ellen White. And I wanna start the next episode talking about that first vision because we have some really interesting things to share about the nature of that first vision, how it was published, how it was edited, and then also wanna talk about Ellen White during her lifetime. Because the the big picture of this series is we wanna talk about how we got from early early Adventist church history to the emergence of Ellen White to the canonization of Ellen White as a spiritual figurehead within the Adventist church to the weaponization of Ellen White in the Adventist church to modern its 2023. What kind of relationship does the Adventist Church have with Ellen White?
Nick:So that's kind of where we're headed. That's the big picture of where we want this discussion to go. So definitely stick around because we wanna shift our attention to that. So our next episode, like I said, will be about Ellen White's lifetime. How did people react to her during her lifetime?
Nick:What kind of impact did she have in the early Adventist church?