The 1888 Minneapolis General Conference Debates Righteousness by Faith

Fourteen years after John Andrews opened Adventism's first overseas mission in Switzerland in 1874, already recorded here, and thirteen years before the 1901 General Conference reorganized Adventism into union conferences, also recorded here, the Seventh-day Adventist Church held the session historians most often name as its defining internal crisis. From 17 October to 4 November 1888, delegates gathered at the denomination's newly built church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for a session called principally to settle tariff policy on denominational literature, but two young editors of The Signs of the Times, Ellet J. Waggoner and Alonzo T. Jones, used the platform to press a message of righteousness by faith in Jesus Christ against what they judged a legalistic emphasis on law and works among the church's established leadership, led by General Conference president George I. Butler and Review and Herald editor Uriah Smith. Ellen G. White, the church's co-founder, backed Waggoner and Jones's emphasis, though she distanced herself from disputed details of their argument, and pressed delegates for years afterward to receive the message rather than resist it. The Adventist Church's own historical encyclopedia records the session as contested in the room and only slowly accepted afterward, Butler and Smith's resistance easing over the following years while a minority never reconciled to it. George R. Knight's academic history of the controversy reads 1888 Minneapolis as the moment Adventism's internal argument over grace and law became explicit, an argument the church continued to revisit for over a century.