Saturday, September 23, 2017

SDA History: Lewis Root of Kellogg Heresy

Lewis
"John Harvey Kellogg--Physician, Author, Director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the first of many more Adventist health institutions, hospitals, and medical centers around the world, Kellogg was a major force within the Advent Movement. In 1879 he married 26 year old Ella Ervilla Eaton, a Seventh-day Baptist who was attending her church’s Alfred University in New York and from which she graduated in 1885.

It was that year she invited her Pastor, teacher, and editor of The Sabbath Recorder, Abram Herbert Lewis to her home. 
 Lewis admitted that in his younger years he had been “under [a spiritualist physician’s] influence” and “became a medium after the rude manner of those times.” Because of this, he confessed, “my faith in the Bible and in orthodox Christianity was much shaken.” Thus “his standpoint on some questions was somewhat changed.”

     Kellogg’s exposure to Lewis through his wife was also changing. Ellen White, far away in Australia, wrote to John Harvey, “Dr. Kellogg, it is not safe for us to employ as instructors in our institutions those who are not believers in the present truth. They advance ideas and theories that take hold of the mind with a bewitching power...” Letter 18, 1892. She already had concerns shortly after his marriage.
     “Before my husband's death (in 1881), Dr. Kellogg came to my room to tell me that he had great light.“He sat down and told me what it was. I said, ‘Those theories are wrong. I have met them before.’”
  T12
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:
1 Peter 5:8