The Great Controversy Paradigm for History: Scholarship and Teaching Lisa Clark Diller, Ph.D

The Journal of Biblical Foundations of Faith and Learning Volume 1 Article 2 Issue 1 JBFFL 2016 The Great Controversy Paradigm for History: Scholarship and Teaching Lisa Clark Diller, Ph.D. Southern Adventist University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/jbffl Recommended Citation Diller, Ph.D., Lisa Clark (2016) "The Great Controversy Paradigm for History: Scholarship and Teaching," The Journal of Biblical Foundations of Faith and Learning: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/jbffl/vol1/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Peer Reviewed Journals at KnowledgeExchange@Southern. It has been accepted for inclusion in The ourJ nal of Biblical Foundations of Faith and Learning by an authorized editor of KnowledgeExchange@Southern. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Great Controversy Paradigm for History 1 The Great Controversy Paradigm for History: Scholarship and Teaching Lisa Clark Diller Southern Adventist University The Great Controversy Paradigm for History 2 Abstract Seventeenth century England was a time of profound Protestant faith. It was also the heyday of the Scientific Revolution and the early Enlightenment. The Scottish Anglican minister, Gilbert Burnet, was deeply committed to the scientific advances he was learning in mathematics and chemistry. He was just as deeply committed to promoting Protestantism against what he saw as a growing tide of Catholic power in England, Scotland, and, indeed, all of Europe. As part of his pastoral role, he wrote The History of the Reformation in England to remind his fellow Protestants, both Anglican and Nonconformists of all kinds, of how God had led them in the previous 200 years. He did so from a Providentialist perspective but also using some of the new practices that were developing in the academic profession of history writing— citing sources, explaining human motivations, and looking at context for activity. This paper assesses Burnet as an example of a devout Christian attempting to study history in a way that honored God while also using increasingly professional tools. These are the same skills devout Adventist professional historians can use today, both in our scholarship with our peers and in the classroom with our students. Historical knowledge can shape our classrooms by teaching our students about people who are very different from them. As they learn about historical trajectories outside their own time and geography, and the cause and effect of human actions, students can use biblical principles to evaluate the activities of the past. They will also, hopefully, develop understanding about them and perhaps practice the same skills that will teach them in the present to “love their neighbor as themselves” (Mark 12:31). They can draw lessons from the past to inform their choices as they follow God in their day to day lives. Historians can then become part of the ministry of reconciliation by teaching people how to understand those who are far off in time and space (2 Cor. 5:18). Keywords: Great Controversy, history, Adventist, modernity, scholarship, Gilbert Burnet, Reformation, Providential, paradigm, students, biblical The Great Controversy Paradigm for History 3 The Great Controversy Paradigm for History: Scholarship and Teaching My first realization that I wanted to be a historian was as a 9-year-old, paging through the photos and their captions in my parents’ copy of Triumph of God’s Love, one of the many editions of Ellen White’s Great Controversy text. My father told me that if and when I read it, he would give it to me. I finished it before I turned 12. I knew then that I both loved history and I loved how White’s revelation of God’s work in history played out across time and space. Since then I have read The Great Controversy many more times, but I have also, as a scholar, learned to articulate what that view of the universe, that understanding of how history relates to prophecy, might mean for me as a professional historian and for Adventists who study history in particular. For Ellen White, history was vital to her understanding of the church. “We need to study the working out of God’s purpose in the history of nations and in the revelation of things to come, that we may estimate the true value of things seen and unseen and may learn the true aim of life. Learning here the principles of His kingdom and becoming its subjects and citizens, we may be prepare to possess it at His coming.”1 In stark contrast to this view, the historical profession as it developed in the 19th century took on the assumptions of the modern, materialist world. This was an assumption that history was an unfolding of the accomplishments of man, that progress meant that the past could and should be rejected as inferior, that what mattered was measurability, data, and efficiency. The authority of the Bible, the assumptions of tradition and the possibility of supernatural/miraculous intervention into human experience--these were all distractions from the purpose of the “high road to modernity.” Not only liberal theorists but Marxists, Anarchists, and Positivists also held these same values.2 They all presumed that true knowledge was found by studying that which was material and understood through sensory experience. 1 Ellen White, Education (Boise, Idaho: Pacific Press, 2000), 110. 2 R.G. Collingwood has famously laid out these assumptions in his The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 135, 136. He also criticized these theorists as being too optimistic about how science reveals the laws of nature. The Great Controversy Paradigm for History 4 Historians also contributed to this, often blaming belief in God and submission to the Bible as causing the troubles of the past. Liberal as well as Marxist historians believed their job was to show the progress of man as they moved into a better, more productive modernity. Conservative Nationalist historians were also victims of this ideology as they looked for the progress and triumph of a particular ethnicity. These historians contributed to the rise and prominence of such ideologies as Nazism and the practices of genetic determinism and sterilization of “undesirables.” They all saw themselves as part of the great, scientific modernization process.3 As Adventist historians, whose view of the world (its history, nature and future) is rooted in the Bible, we see the Great Controversy between God and Satan, God’s unfolding revelation of Himself, rolling out in history, as God’s plan and disclosing of truth break out into brighter and brighter rays. Ellen White describes it this way: “Satan’s efforts to misrepresent the character of God, to cause men to cherish a false conception of the Creator and to regard Him with fear and hate rather than with love ... have been steadfastly pursued in all ages.” Yet, she hastens to remind us that “The Bible itself relates how, through the Holy Spirit, men received warning, reproof, counsel, and instruction…. The great controversy between good and evil will increase in intensity to the very close of time.4” This, rather than the triumphalism of materialist modernity, is the framework or paradigm through which we study the past. Of course, not all Christians, or even Protestants, had the light that would break out in nineteenth century Adventism in North America, but Christian historians can still see God working to reveal Himself, His character of love, in all times and places. Like Ellen White, Adventist historians see history as vital to the practice of the church, and we celebrate how God has brought us to where we are, in spite of the brokenness of humanity in accomplishing God’s work. We work as professional historians and we attempt to be salt and light in bringing our biblically-based paradigm to bear on our academic disciplines and in the classroom. This paper is divided into two parts: In the first I lay out my own attempt to use the Great Controversy 3 This high road to modernity is often labeled “Whig history” and was classically critiqued by Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 1-8, 129-32. 4 Ellen White. The Great Controversy (Mountainview, California: Pacific Press, 1950), x, viii, ix. The Great Controversy Paradigm for History 5 paradigm in doing scholarship, with a secular audience for my work; in the second, I look at the Great Controversy principles in Scripture for deriving meaning from the past. The Great Controversy Paradigm in Research and Scholarship In the world of early modern studies, which is my area of expertise, we can see a certain kind of Great Controversy thinking in some of the Protestant leaders of the day, even if they didn’t use that terminology. As I recognize that kind of commitment in the figures I study, I can both call attention to it and demonstrate the strength and value of that paradigm in my scholarship. In the fall of 2014 I did this when presenting research on the Anglican Bishop, Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715) at a conference at Cambridge University. Burnet was one of the first English Protestant historians. He wrote a hugely popular History of the Reformation in England as a response to French Catholic histories criticizing Protestantism in general and supporting the suppression of the Huguenots in France in particular. Scholars of 17th century England see him as part of the liberal modernizing of the Church of England and primarily study him because of his long and detailed autobiography, History of My Life and Times. He was indeed hugely influential at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and helped contribute to the Act of Toleration in 1689 and oversaw much of the transformation in the Church of England and the politics of the burgeoning liberal British nation-state.5 So Burnet is a vital character to scholars of the late 17th century, and we draw on his prolific political writing and his autobiography to understand the politics of the times.

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