Ellen White's two thousand visions, revered by her twenty million disciples, were doctrinally inspired by William Miller, who fathered the largest millennial movement in US history. He and Samuel Snow, during the movement's climax, the "Midnight Cry," predicted Christ's Second Coming for exactly October 22, 1844, on the basis of fifteen proof-texts. Ellen was twelve, suffering from severe brain trauma and the conviction that she was hell-bound, when Miller converted her. By sixteen she became convicted that she was having divine dreams and visions confirming Miller's prophetic role and message. When Miller's predictions failed and he repudiated his own predictions, Ellen announced that God had commanded her to endorse Miller's failed "Midnight Cry" as divinely inspired, and her authority replaced Miller's in the "shut-door" faction of ex-Millerites who evolved into the Seventh-day Adventist church. Miller claimed that his dogmas were the result of merely allowing the Bible to interpret itself and that his method was literal commonsense. White seconded this claim and said God's angels routinely guided Miller's interpretations. However, not only were his interpretations falsified, but examination reveals them to be farfetched allegorical treatments of parables. Nonetheless, White's visions and SDA theology still retain many of Miller's falsified predictions.
Donald Edward Casebolt, who attended Seventh-day Adventist schools, including an MDiv Program at Andrews University, studied Semitic languages and Protestant theology one year at Karl Eberhard Universität Tübingen, Germany, and spent two years in a doctoral program at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. He published three articles in Spectrum relating to Ellen White’s authority and interpretation of Scripture. He is a retired nurse practitioner.
“Few individuals I know . . . are better informed on this period of the Advent Movement than Donald Casebolt. He has made it his lifetime work to research every possible original literary source that has anything to do with the topic so thoroughly explicated in this book, which will be of special interest to church historians and scholars of religion who want to get to the bottom of what was going on in mid-nineteenth-century New England.”
—Lawrence T. Geraty, President Emeritus, Executive Director, La Sierra University Foundation
“Casebolt shows how William Miller’s complex and convoluted proofs that Christ would return in 1844 were well beyond the ability of twelve-year-old Ellen Harmon to comprehend. Suffering the debilitating effects of severe brain trauma, she was swinging from darkest depression to soaring flights of cataleptic ecstasy. She was so debilitated she could not continue her education. Yet she found assurance of her own salvation in acceptance of Miller’s arguments.”
—Ron Graybill, author of Visions and Revisions: A Textual History of Ellen G. White’s Writings
“In his well-researched book Child of the Apocalypse, Casebolt examines Ellen G. White’s ‘I saw’ endorsements of Millerism’s now-discredited and largely forgotten multiple prophetic periods and celestial signs. Did Miller’s historicist ‘predictions’ originate from angelic guidance or from disconfirmed Reformation-era speculations? As time would quickly crush Millerism, young and impressionable White was forced to ‘re-envision’ herself. Would her writings now stand the test of time?”
—Scott A. LeMert, retired SDA Pastor and Conference Administrator
“Casebolt provides a deeply researched and highly revisionist look at Ellen Harmon’s Millerite years before she became Ellen G. White, the Seventh-day Adventist prophet. In this slim, provocative monograph, Casebolt covers unfamiliar ground and may unsettle readers who know only the later White and assume she sprang into existence fully formed and everything her devoted adherents claimed her to be. But that is all the more reason to enter Ellen Harmon’s world as Casebolt reconstructs it and ponder his findings.”
—Jonathan M. Butler, American church historian
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