When Ellen was twelve, she and her family attended a Methodist camp meeting in Buxton, Maine, and there she had a formative religious experience in which she professed faith in Jesus Christ. In 1840 and 1842 she and her family attended Adventist meetings and become devotees of William Miller. Miller had dedicated himself to the study of biblical prophecy and was convinced that Christ would return on October 22, 1844. When Christ did not return, a non-event that would become known as The Great Disappointment, most people abandoned Adventism. But in the resulting confusion, Ellen claimed to have received visions that were soon accepted as God-given revelation. The small Adventist movement that remained was split by many rifts and much infighting, but Ellen was believed to have a gift that could reunite and guide the movement. Her dreams and visions continued and she quickly became a leader among them.
In 1846, Ellen married a young Adventist preacher named James White and together they traveled extensively, spreading the Adventist faith to New England and beyond. Twelve months later she gave birth to a son, one of four children she would bear, but soon left the child with friends so she could carry on traveling, preaching, and writing.
In many respects Ellen G. White appeared to hold to the historic Christian faith. She believed in Christ’s imminent bodily return, she held to the inspiration and authority of the Bible, and she taught that we are saved by Christ’s righteousness rather than our own. But amid that truth were some dangerous false teachings. I will focus on only two.The most obvious false teaching was the one that gave the Seventh-day Adventists their name: the view that the proper day of worship is Saturday rather than Sunday. Shortly after James and Ellen married, they studied a tract written by Joseph Bates titled Seventh-day Sabbath and became convinced that they were to keep Saturday as the sabbath. Six months later, Ellen had a vision in which she saw the law of God with a halo of light surrounding the fourth commandment. She and her husband took this as proof that their newfound understanding was correct. They elevated this to a doctrine of first importance.
So I'm not saying 'everything' she taught was wrong or anything like that but people should know about those they follow IMO. As for eschatology from what I've seen over the last 40 years or so is that it is mostly wild speculation. No one has EVER (to my knowledge) correctly predicted how Biblical prophecy would play out and only see it in hindsight. The coup de ta in that area was Jesus Christ himself. If the scripture experts of that time couldn't even recognise when the single biggest event prophesied in what we now call the Old Testament was taking place then what hope do we have of figuring out incidentals? And those guys were WAY smarter that our top experts are today.
