MAKING WAVES IN 1888
A.T Jones and E.J. Waggoner made waves in Adventism and earned their place in Adventist History in the mid-1880s. They were both young, Jones was 38 at the time of the Minneapolis General Conference Session and Waggoner was 33. They were also polar opposites. Jones was tall, lanky, impulsive and prone to bouts of spontaneous combustion. He had very little formal education and had been a soldier based at Fort Walla Walla. He was self-educated, brilliant and possessed a photographic memory with a near-perfect recall. Waggoner, on the other hand, was short, stocky, somewhat less charismatic than Jones and formally educated in medicine with an M.D. from the prestigious Bellevue Medical College.
Though they were polar opposites they worked extremely well together. In the early 1880s, they found themselves thrown together as co-editors of the Signs of the Times and The American Sentinel of Religious Liberty and Bible Instructors at Healdsburg College. While writing for the signs and teaching at the College they began to openly dispute some of the established views held by Seventh-Day Adventists at the time.
Jones questioned the inclusion of the Huns as one of the ten tribes of Western Europe mentioned in Daniel 2 and 7, he thought the Alemanni were a better fit. Meanwhile, Waggoner began to see that the law mentioned in the book of Galatians was the moral law and not the ceremonial law as was generally accepted by Seventh-Day Adventists at the time.
Their articles and teaching on these subjects attracted the attention of George Butler, then General Conference President and Uriah Smith, who was serving as Secretary of the General Conference. Both Smith and Butler began to actively work to counteract the influence of Jones and Waggoner by publishing tracts and a series of articles in The Review and Herald which defended the existing views regarding the issues.
This pitted the two main publications of the church against each other and called down a rebuke from Ellen White who was shown by God that the way both parties were handling the situation was less than desirable.
The situation began to simmer during the General Conference session of 1886 when George Butler prepared and distributed a tract titled “The Law in Galatians” Is It The Moral Law or Doest It Refer To That System Of The Law Peculiarly Jewish”. It was an obvious refutation of Waggoner’s views but without the direct use of his name. The gloves seemed to be coming off at this point.
The General Conference appointed a nine-member committee to review the subject of the law in Galatians. Ellen White repeatedly told them all that they were majoring in the minors and that the law in Galatians wasn’t as important an issue as they were making it out to be.
No one was really willing to listen. No one was willing to back down. They had all found a hill they were prepared to die on.
