1888 Minneapolis General Conference (Adventist) - Open Confrontation

Open Confrontation

E.J. Waggoner was selected as a delegate from California to attend the 1886 General Conference session held that year at Battle Creek, Michigan. When he arrived he found that church leaders such as Butler strongly opposed his emphasis on Christ as the sole source of righteousness, especially in light of Waggoner’s teaching on the law in Galatians. Butler prepared a small booklet titled “The Law in the Book of Galatians” that was handed out to all the delegates at that conference, countering Waggoner’s position.(Read a PDF of this document online) In this document, Butler presented his position on the law in Galatians, and stated that Waggoner's view would lead the antinomian Christians who opposed Sabbath-keeping to find a reason to claim that the moral law (especially the fourth commandment) was “nailed to the cross” and therefore was “no longer binding” on New Testament Christians.

“The Westerners had reverted to the early Seventh-day Adventist position that the law Paul here referred to as the ‘schoolmaster to bring us to Christ’ (verse 24) was the whole body of the moral law including the Ten Commandments. This position the Adventists had almost entirely abandoned during the 1860s and 1870s; the ‘schoolmaster’ was reinterpreted to mean the ceremonial and sacrificial laws of Moses which pointed forward to the Messiah. This reinterpretation had developed largely as a reaction to Protestant clergymen who interpreted Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:25 (‘we are no longer under the schoolmaster’) to mean that the Ten Commandment law had been abrogated; thus, the seventh-day Sabbath was no longer viable.”

Ellen White initially saw the conflict as a small diversionary topic but quickly realized the danger and that it was counter-productive to the real issue of the fulfillment of Adventist message of Christ's return and moved to resolve the uncomfortable situation.