Summary

George Ide Butler served the Seventh-day Adventist Church for thirty years (1865-1888; 1901-1908) as pastor and president of the Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, and Florida conferences, the Southern Union Conference, and the General Conference. Twice president of the General Conference, Butler is probably better known for his resistance to the message of righteousness by faith at the 1888 Minneapolis General Conference session. Yet his story is far more complex than that single episode suggests. He was an honest, dependable, and dedicated church leader who bore the weight of denominational responsibility during some of its most critical years, and whose later life demonstrated the refining power of trial and the grace of God.

Early Life

George Ide Butler was born in Waterbury, Vermont, November 12, 1834. He was the son of Ezra Pitt Butler (1796-1875) and Sarah Grow Butler (1799-1866). His grandfather, Ezra Butler (1763-1838), was governor of Vermont from 1826 to 1828.

Before becoming Adventist, George Butler’s family had deep roots in the Baptist religious heritage of Vermont and his father was involved in the abolitionist movement. Around 1839, the family joined the Millerite movement and like thousands of others were deeply disappointed in October 1844 when Jesus did not return as prophesied. While visiting former Millerite families in 1848 or 1849, Joseph Bates called on the Butler home and convinced Sarah Butler of observing the seventh-day Sabbath. Ezra Pitt Butler was persuaded concerning this message around 1850 and soon thereafter their home began to be a meeting place for Sabbatarian Adventists in central Vermont. They later received visits from James and Ellen White, and other early pioneers.

Joining a growing migration movement westward, the Butler family relocated to Waukon, Iowa, in 1856 where other Sabbatarian Adventist families had already moved. Waukon quickly became a center of influence paralleling Battle Creek, Michigan, attracting prominent families such as John and Angeline Andrews and his family, John Loughborough and his family, and the Butler family among others. But as a young man George was skeptical of their religious ideas, due in part to the fanaticism he had witnessed from people visiting his home in Vermont. At 21, he went to Wisconsin where he lived with an Indian settlement and joined a government surveying team laying out several new counties near Superior.

Conversion

In the summer of 1857, George sailed down the Mississippi River to Kansas City. During a stopover in Rock Island, Illinois, he walked around the city reflecting on a text of Scripture he had read and then experienced a moment of spiritual awakening that led to his conversion. After working some months in the vicinity of Kansas City, he returned to Waukon. There he publicly confessed his faith in Christ to the group of Sabbatarian Adventists who had known him since his youth and he was baptized by his friend and mentor, John Andrews. Following his conversion, he opted for a more settled life and taught school for two winters near his home.

During that time, George renewed contact with Lentha Lockwood in Round Grove, Illinois. The Lockwoods had lived close to the Butlers in the nearby village of Waitsfield, Vermont, until they also migrated west in 1854 or 1855. George, 24, married Lentha Lockwood, 33, in March 1859.

The new couple settled on a farm near Waukon, Iowa, where their three children were born: Annie, in 1861, and William Pitt and Hiland George, fraternal twins, in 1864. Later in life, William became a businessman in Chicago, and Hiland served as accountant and business manager for John Harvey Kellogg’s food factories in England and Battle Creek. Annie died at the age of 13 and was buried at Mount Pleasant, Iowa.

Early Ministry

Controversies in Iowa and in the broader church community reached a difficult moment in 1865 when both the president and the secretary of the Iowa Conference, B. F. Snook and W. H. Brinkerhoff, raised questions about the leadership of the newly-organized Seventh-day Adventist denomination based in Battle Creek. They ultimately broke away from the church. In response to these challenges, and to his great surprise, Butler was chosen president of the Iowa Conference. Having served as a local church elder for less than two years, the inexperienced Butler was thrown into church leadership in a conference sharply divided by conflicts. Despite his lack of experience, however, he succeeded in protecting the Iowa Conference from further loss of membership and two years later was ordained to the ministry by James White and Daniel Bourdeau.

For seven successive years (1865-1872), he served as president of the Iowa Conference, and his gift of evangelism helped make Iowa one of the strongest of Seventh-day Adventist conferences in the 1870s. In 1868, Butler relocated his family to Mount Pleasant, Iowa.

First Period as President of the General Conference

In December 1871 Butler, at age 37, was asked to take the presidency of the General Conference. For many weeks, he refused to take the position since he believed Ellen White had said in her testimonies that this position belonged only to her husband, James. After James White pleaded with him to take on the responsibility, Butler accepted only with the understanding that White would nonetheless remain the true leader of the church.

During the two and a half years Butler served as president of the General Conference (December 1871 to August 1874), he contributed to the establishment of many local conferences and the beginning of a training school that would later become Battle Creek College. In 1874, Butler made his first visit to California, and with the able assistance of John Loughborough, raised funds for a denominational publishing house on the Pacific coast (later the Pacific Press Publishing Association). That same year, 18 years after he was baptized by John Andrews, Butler presided at the session of the General Conference when it voted to send Andrews to Europe as the church’s first official missionary.

Leadership Conflicts

Although Butler was technically the president of the General Conference, James White continued to have a large influence in many of the decisions made by the church in its councils. Butler felt totally unfit for this role and always second guessed himself, fearing that his skeptical past as an infidel youth prevented him from having a proper knowledge of God’s will in leading the Adventist denomination. Given his feeling of inadequacy, Butler often asked for White’s wishes before making any major decisions and was happy to defer to him even when White took the initiative without consulting with him.

It is in this context that Butler wrote a tract on Leadership in 1873 in which he offered a biblical model of church leadership intended to support his conviction that only James White could be the president of the Seventh-day Adventist people. The tract articulated church leadership as Butler had experienced it under White. The model built a typology from the Old Testament leadership of Moses and supported a highly centralized form of governance, centered on one man (James White), and inviting humble submission of others to this leader.

Within a few months, however, James White rejected the pamphlet’s theology of leadership and Ellen White rebuked Butler severely in 1875 for this approach to leadership and management. But following James and Ellen White’s public rebuke in 1875, Butler refused for a few years to have any leadership responsibilities that would bring him in contact with James White. He returned to Iowa where he served again as pastor, evangelist, and president (1876-1877).

Second Period as President of the General Conference

By the time of the General Conference session in October 1880, Ellen White had convinced her husband to again step aside from the leadership of the General Conference and both she and James endorsed Butler to succeed him. A very different man this time accepted this nomination and role. Butler had matured as a person and as a church administrator. At 46, he was much more confident in his knowledge of the church and of his expertise as a churchman. Gone were the feelings of inadequacy because of his youthful period as an infidel.

James White died on August 6, 1881, leaving Butler as the primary church leader for the next seven years. Added to his duties as president of the General Conference, he was for a time president of the Michigan Conference (1886-1888), president of the Review and Herald Publishing Association (1881-1889), chairman of the Battle Creek College board, and a member of the Battle Creek Sanitarium board as well as many other boards. In these capacities, he exerted a profound influence on the building up and extension of many institutions in the interest of the denomination.

An International Church

By the early 1880s, the Seventh-day Adventist Church had become an international denomination. However, with the premature death of John Andrews in October 1883, the church in Europe desperately needed support and advice. From February to May 1884, Butler visited many European countries to study the conditions and needs of the various fields and develop plans to encourage growth and stability. His reports in the Review and Herald spoke of many gatherings of church members and the establishment of three publishing houses located in Basel, Switzerland; Christiania, Norway; and Great Grimsby, England.

The constant pressures of travel to annual camp meetings and regional meetings, the countless committees and business sessions, the numerous sermons he preached each year, and the large number of letters to read and respond to, along with Butler’s desire for efficiency and commitment to duty, undermined his health. Although he repeatedly asked to be relieved from the presidency after 1885, he was routinely reelected each year. Butler experienced a burnout that progressively worsened from 1886 to 1888. By December 1888, many colleagues despaired he would not live much longer. He recalled that in November and December 1888, he suffered from daily bouts of fever of 102 degrees F (38.9 C) and sometimes up to 105 degrees F (40.5 C).

The Controversy Over the Law in Galatians

It is in this overall context of administrative burdens and declining health that George Butler faced what he considered to be the most dangerous doctrinal controversy yet faced by the church. When in 1886, Ellet J. Waggoner and Alonzo T. Jones, co-editors of the Signs of the Times in California, began to publish their views on the meaning of the law in Galatians 3:24 and its relationship to salvation, Butler and other colleagues became very defensive of the view that James White and other pioneers had advocated for decades.

Between 1854 and 1857, Sabbatarian Adventists had debated the relationship of obedience to the Ten Commandments and salvation and reached the conclusion that the “added law” given through a mediator discussed in Galatians 3:19-24 referred to the Old Testament ceremonial laws given to Moses. A crucial distinction was made between the eternal and immutable Ten Commandments and the temporary ceremonial laws. For the next three decades Adventists taught that the law in Galatians was the ceremonial law.

In the 1880s, when E. J. Waggoner began to teach views similar to what his father had argued 30 years earlier, Butler and Uriah Smith, editor of the Review and Herald, were quick to point out that Ellen White had had a vision on the subject in 1854 and had written to Joseph Waggoner that the law in Galatians was the ceremonial law rather than the moral law. Now, however, when asked to produce this document, Ellen White was unable to find it.

The conflict became more prominent when Butler published in 1886 a small book defending the traditional position titled The Law in the Book of Galatians: Is It the Moral Law, or Does It Refer to that System of Laws Peculiarly Jewish? The book was published in time for the 1886 General Conference session and distributed only to delegates.

Two letters Ellen White wrote to the two sides of this debate in the winter and spring of 1887 added another twist to the story. First, in a letter to Waggoner and Jones in February 1887, she recalled that she had been shown that Joseph Waggoner’s position on the law was “incorrect,” but that she could not recall exactly what was incorrect about it. One thing was clear to her, however: the various positions on the law in Galatians were not vital points, and they should not be made an issue. Two months later, in a letter to Butler and Smith, she again referred to the lost letter to Joseph Waggoner and pointed out that since Butler had written a book arguing his view of the matter, it was only fair that Waggoner should be given the opportunity to express his views.

The 1888 General Conference

The intense discussion reached its climax at the General Conference session of 1888 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the absence of George Butler who remained in Battle Creek suffering from nervous exhaustion. Before the session began, he had written to Ellen White and others giving hints that he should not be reelected to the presidency. He was too exhausted to continue in this role and feared that the pressures of the office would destroy him. As the debates over these theological issues continued during the session, and reports reached him that Ellen White was taking a determined position contrary to his, Butler stated clearly that he would not accept reelection. Instead, Ole A. Olsen, at the time leader of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Scandinavia, and a former associate of Butler, was elected.

In the months following the session, Ellen White joined Waggoner and Jones in presenting to the Adventist membership their perspective on the law and the gospel. Ellen White eventually understood the law in Galatians to refer to both the ceremonial and moral law; the former as a “schoolmaster to bring sinful human agents to a consideration of Christ the Foundation of the whole Jewish economy” and the latter as the law that “reveals sin to us, and causes us to feel our need of Christ and to flee unto Him for pardon and peace.”

While Butler came to admit that this new emphasis on Christ’s righteousness had been very good for the church, he never changed his mind on the identity of the law in Galatians.

Retirement to Florida

Shortly after the Minneapolis conference, Irving and Altana Keck, farmers in Bowling Green, in central Florida, heard of Butler’s illness through an Adventist family member. Though strangers to Butler, and not themselves Adventists, the Kecks invited the Butlers to spend the winter months with their family at no expense. Both surprised and relieved, the Butlers accepted the invitation and traveled to Florida in mid-December 1888. This little village would become Butler’s primary residence until his death in 1918.

Butler was relieved to leave Battle Creek. He had been terribly upset by the controversy over the law in Galatians and the position taken by Ellen White. Rather than continuing to fight over this, and knowing it could bring about his death, he preferred to leave everything behind. After a few months of living with the Kecks, Butler baptized the family and decided to buy a piece of land nearby. They built a home and planted an orchard of orange trees. By the spring of 1890, the Butlers were comfortably settled in their new home and the farm work had greatly helped George slowly heal from his nervous breakdown and regain his physical strength.

But tragedy struck the family when Lentha suffered a stroke on March 14, 1890, permanently paralyzing her entire right side. She remained an invalid for the rest of her life with George patiently caring for her needs for more than a decade while still developing his farm. Given Lentha’s physical condition, it was impossible for George to leave her alone. While he would have loved to engage in soul-winning ministry again, he understood their limitations and resigned himself to stay at home. Instead, he devoted his energy to writing dozens of articles for the Review and Herald, some of them long series on biblical characters (Joseph, Elijah, and Elisha) or Bible prophecies.

Coming to Terms with 1888

In 1893, with the help of Stephen Haskell, Butler came to terms with the good influence the message of Christ’s righteousness had exerted on the church since 1888. In June 1893, Butler wrote a personal statement in the Review explaining his actions of the last few years and his determination to remain faithful to the Seventh-day Adventist faith. This statement was a turning point. Feeling the strong urge to engage in ministry once again, and with Lentha’s consent, he held a first series of evangelistic meetings in his village of Bowling Green, and then joined with other ministers in Asheville and Waynesville, North Carolina, in the summer and fall of 1894.

Painful Sorrows

The Butlers’ routine life on their Florida farm was disturbed a year later, in early July 1897, when they heard of the passing of Lentha’s brother, Ransom Lockwood, who was also the husband of George’s older sister Aurora. Following Ransom’s death, Aurora accepted George’s invitation to come live with them in Florida. Aurora’s presence provided some relief to George in caring for Lentha, a presence he gladly appreciated.

But then tragedy came in rapid succession. Lentha died on Friday, November 15, 1901. George and Lentha had been married for 42 years. Within a few weeks, on January 17, 1902, George’s sister Aurora died suddenly after coming back from a trip to Nashville, Tennessee. Within about five months, George had lost his spouse, Lentha, and two sisters, Martha and Aurora. Later, in the summer of 1902, his brother-in-law, John Whipple, husband of his older sister Sarah, also died in Battle Creek.

President of the Southern Union Conference

One week after Lentha Butler died, the annual session of the Florida Conference was held in conjunction with the annual camp meeting. No one was surprised when, in his absence, George Butler was elected president of the conference. A few weeks later, he was elected president of the Southern Union Conference at its first session, held in January 1902 in Nashville, Tennessee. Not a man to shrug from responsibilities, Butler served as president of both conferences for almost three years.

The response to the news that George Butler had returned to church leadership was overwhelmingly positive. There were few men with his vast experience in the denomination and few church members remained who had been part of the Millerite movement and the early beginning of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Between December 1901 and January 1908, Butler shouldered many responsibilities and faced difficult challenges as he oversaw and developed institutions in the conferences of the Southern Union. He had lived in Florida for 12 years and had done some evangelism in North Carolina and Florida. He was acquainted with southern culture and its peculiarities, and the perplexing racial segregation.

During his years of leadership, Butler was able to see the strengthening of the Southern Publishing Association in Nashville and the establishment of sanitariums in Nashville, Graysville, and Madison in Tennessee, and in Atlanta, Georgia. He played an essential role in developing the physical infrastructures and securing financial support of the school for colored youth in Huntsville, Alabama (today Oakwood University).

The Kellogg Crisis

Within a few weeks of George Butler’s election as president of the Southern Union Conference, the Battle Creek Sanitarium burned. To help raise funds to rebuild the sanitarium, John Harvey Kellogg published a book on health principles, The Living Temple. Even before its publication, the book raised concerns among church leaders who saw a form of pantheism in many of its passages.

Butler and Kellogg entertained a long correspondence with one another. They exchanged more than 150 letters. Butler and Kellogg were not strangers, as Butler’s son, Hiland, had married Kellogg’s younger sister, Clara. In many ways, Kellogg came to see Butler as a spiritual mentor. At first, they discussed extensively Kellogg’s views on God and his presence in nature. Butler chided Kellogg for his lack of theological precision but came to the conclusion that he was not a pantheist and should not be accused of being one. But the controversy did not die out. In the end, Butler refused to defend Kellogg’s actions when it came to the new branding scheme of the sanitarium, and by the spring of 1906, their long correspondence ended.

A Lonely Man

For six years, Butler labored untiringly in the Southern Union, from North Carolina to Louisiana and from Kentucky to Florida, along with many other trips to Washington, D.C., California, and elsewhere. Many times he wrote to his friends of how lonely he felt as an “old pilgrim” on this earth.

Butler remained a lonely widower for the next five years until he met Elizabeth Work Grainger, widow of William C. Grainger, former president of Healdsburg College and pioneering missionary to Japan where he died in 1899. Butler met Elizabeth during a trip to California and, after corresponding for a couple years, decided to get married. Born in 1845, she was nine years younger than George. They were married in early October 1907 by his nephew, Frank Washburn.

Final Retirement and Death

Once he retired from the presidency of the Southern Union Conference in January 1908, George and Elizabeth Butler, and her young son, Albert, returned to Bowling Green, Florida, where they cultivated their farm and attempted to make a living from it. Although advanced in age, Butler continued to be physically active on the farm until the last few months of his life.

During the last ten years of his life, Butler held no official responsibility, but continued to preach, write articles for periodicals, and attend some church councils and camp meetings. He attended the General Conference sessions of 1909, 1913, and 1918. His heart was still dedicated to the precious message he had supported all his life and he often bemoaned that he could not do more evangelism in his old age.

George and Elizabeth attended the General Conference session in San Francisco in April 1918 and remained in California at the home of friends in Healdsburg. Suffering from cancer, George’s health progressively declined and he died in Healdsburg on July 25, 1918, at the age of 83. A large funeral was held in Oakland, California, and he was buried beside his wife Lentha and sister Aurora in the Bowling Green cemetery.

Legacy

Milton Wilcox and William White in their obituary wrote a remarkable summary of this man:

“A strong, loyal-souled standard bearer has gone from us, but his work lives after him. He was a forceful preacher, a clear, virile writer, and an efficient and able executive. He was a steadfast friend, a strong but generous opponent. Behind the iron will beat a kind and loving heart, repentant under mistakes and sins, tender in sympathy, strong in its love for God and humanity. Elder Butler ever carried with him a deep sense of human unworthiness and the holiness of God.”

George Butler’s legacy has been difficult to ascertain given the pejorative adjectives used to describe him and his views of the movement on righteousness by faith in 1888. But beyond this troubling part of Adventist history and of his life, George Butler demonstrated remarkable attributes as a church leader. Although misunderstood, and admittedly too stubborn at times, he was an honest and exceptional church leader. His Yankee upbringing guaranteed that he would be a man of his word and true to duty. This attribute marked all his life. Convinced in his early adulthood of the truthfulness of the Seventh-day Adventist message, he remained a faithful believer in spite of ideological conflicts with some colleagues. Butler was a consistent and dependable leader, one who accepted responsibilities and shared the burdens of the church. Above all Butler was a churchman who believed in the integrity of the Seventh-day Adventist movement and its eschatological role in Christian history.

Today the Seventh-day Adventist Church owes much to this pioneer leader.