Cottrell, Raymond Forrest (1911–2003)

Raymond F. Cottrell,¹ a largely self-taught Biblical scholar who served as pastor, missionary, professor, writer, editor, and consultant, was one of the most influential theologians in twentieth-century Adventism, writing thousands of pages in mostly unpublished documents.²

Early Life in China

Ray was born on April 21, 1911 in Los Angeles, California, to Charles and Georgia Wright Cottrell. He was the first of their four sons, followed by Leland (1913-2007), Elwood (1916-1934), and Grayson (1925-1991).³ The family moved to Shanghai, China, in 1919, where his father had been encouraged by Roy Franklin Cottrell, Ray’s missionary uncle, to come and sell cars for the American manufacturer of Hupmobiles. Ray’s diligent work and study habits became obvious during his first two years at the American high school in Shanghai. He was so taken by the Latin classics that he translated Caesar’s Gallic Wars longhand into English, early evidence of the scholarly potential of this future educator-editor-writer. “It filled four handwritten notebooks,” his younger brother, Leland, recalled.⁴

Ray’s education at the mission and American school was supplemented by correspondence courses. As a boy in church school, he completed at least eighteen reading courses with certificates signed by Le Roy E. Froom, then a missionary in the denomination’s China Division and later an influential Adventist historian and writer.⁵

Leland Cottrell’s most significant memory from their childhood in Shanghai was of an evening when Ray, as an early teen, approached the dinner table where his parents were dining alone. “He looked at Father and Mother at the table, only he was seeing something farther away. And . . . he held up his hands, just like somebody [trying] to get their attention. But he was looking past them. ‘Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears. I have decided to give my life to Jesus.’ And he just broke out crying. And, of course, Dad and Mom jumped up from the table and came to comfort him.”⁶

Ray followed this commitment with action. He would ride his bicycle or take the bus through Shanghai to the jetty along the Huangpu River where American, British, and French warships frequently stood at anchor. For a few pennies he would hire a skiff that would take him out to the destroyer, cruiser, or battleship of his choice. There he would climb the gangway to the main deck and provide the sailors with Adventist literature.⁷

It was also in Shanghai that he began his lifelong love of astronomy and cosmology. His father bought him a very high-quality telescope that he used at one point to focus the sun on a drawing board across which he plotted the movement of sunspots over a period of weeks—an early indication of Ray’s inquisitive, methodical mind.⁸

Education, Marriage, and Mission Service

A few months after the birth of Ray’s third brother, Grayson, in December 1925, the Charles Cottrell family returned to the United States, settling in Riverside, California, about halfway between Loma Linda and the La Sierra school where Ray continued his education. Through farm, maintenance, dormitory monitor, and cafeteria jobs, Ray worked his way through the last two years of high school at La Sierra Academy and two years of junior college at Southern California Junior College, now La Sierra University. In 1997 Cottrell recalled La Sierra as “a great deal of sand, sagebrush, and jack rabbits (with a few rattlesnakes thrown in) which we tried to stay clear of. Palm trees had just been set out . . . but they were no taller than my head. A lawn had been planted. There were no cement sidewalks; that was an artifact of civilization that hadn’t come into being yet.”⁹

At La Sierra, Ray learned Spanish well enough to hold Bible studies in the home of a Mexican family in nearby Mira Loma, where Ray’s effort resulted in one of the earliest Spanish-speaking Adventist congregations in southern California. Ray and his theology-major classmates also participated in various outreach efforts in the Riverside area towns of Pedley, Norco, Sunnymead, and Corona, all of which resulted in Adventist churches.

In college Ray displayed an early interest in ideas and a felicity with words. A voracious reader, he compiled a list of difficult words encountered in scores of books. Around 1930 he wrote an essay on simplicity using almost exclusively the “simple” words from his vocabulary notebook. Three months before his death in 2003, he recited the first sentence of that essay during an interview: “Transcending the meticulous austerity among the genus homo, I descry an inscrutable resilience permeating the fortuitous prescience of adamantine anthropomorphism.”¹⁰

In his final year at Southern California Junior College, Ray became the founding editor of its student newspaper, the College Criterion. He graduated with a theology major and was one major piano recital short of a second major in music.

It was Ray’s intention at the completion of junior college to attend Pacific Union College (PUC) in northern California, but partly out of financial concerns he accepted instead an invitation to serve as principal of the nearby Adventist school in San Bernardino. The following year he embarked on a pastoral internship in Arizona where he met a young nursing student named Elizabeth Landis who shared her flashlight with him while Christmas caroling. Ray and Elizabeth were married in Phoenix on December 16, 1932, a union that endured four months shy of 70 years. The young pastor nurtured churches in Arizona and Utah until late 1934, when he and Elizabeth accepted a call to mission service in Manchuria, China.

After a year of immersion in the study of Mandarin along with other duties, Cottrell’s titles accumulated: director, Kirin Mission; principal, Manchuria Union Training School; educational secretary, Manchuria Union Mission; and director, Central Manchuria Mission. For several of their Manchuria years, Ray and Elizabeth lived in Hsingking,¹¹ literally next door to Pu Yi―the last emperor—installed there in 1934 by the Japanese as the puppet leader of Manchukuo.

By 1940, six years into the Cottrells’ seven-year commitment, hostilities involving the Japanese occupation made mission work politically treacherous. Along with the other missionary women and children, Elizabeth returned to the States; and in early 1941, Ray and the other remaining missionary men were forced to evacuate.¹²

The Cottrells repatriated to Angwin, California, where the returned missionary taught fulltime at PUC Preparatory School, and then in the PUC religion department, while completing his bachelor of arts degree and graduating with a master’s degree in history, along with longtime friend and colleague, Graham Maxwell, in 1944.¹³ And it was at PUC in the late 1940s that Ray and Elizabeth adopted their two children, Peggy and Richard.

Professor, Editor, Scholar, and Pastor

Beginning in 1948, Cottrell devised and directed PUC’s Personal Evangelism Crusade that involved more than 550 students and faculty once each month in highly organized visitation and literature dissemination to thousands of homes in a 160-by-80-mile corridor between San Francisco and Sacramento. The endeavor lasted several years and resulted in the establishment of several new Adventist churches.¹⁴

Cottrell taught in PUC’s religion department for over ten years, with no summer breaks. During that decade he served as founding secretary of and primary advocate for the Bible Research Fellowship (the first professional association of Adventist Bible scholars), formed in 1943. The fellowship continued until 1952 when it was disbanded due to conflicts with General Conference President William Henry Branson over Biblical interpretation, in particular the identity of the King of the North in Daniel 11, and over the appropriateness of an international organization of Adventist scholars functioning without administrative oversight from the General Conference. Churchman Cottrell, ever committed to institutional Biblical scholarship, proposed that the Bible Research Fellowship be replaced by what became in 1952 the General Conference’s Biblical Research Committee (BRC), with Cottrell voted a charter member (later the BRC was reconfigured as the Biblical Research Institute).¹⁵

Also in 1952 Review and Herald editor Francis D. Nichol invited the PUC religion teacher to join him, along with Don Neufeld, in the Herculean task of creating a Seventh-day Adventist Bible commentary. For the next five years Cottrell and Neufeld, the duo that called themselves the “galley slaves,”¹⁶ worked six days a week—beginning at 4:30 each morning—on the largest publishing project in the denomination’s history. In 1957, their “long march” resulted in a monumental, practical, eight-volume achievement. In addition to editing thousands of pages from multiple authors, Cottrell wrote about 2,000 pages for the Commentary series.¹⁷

Beyond the myriad tasks of research, consultation, writing, and editing, Cottrell and Neufeld were resident theologians. For example, Cottrell perceived the need for an article on prophetic interpretation, and Nichol invited him to write what became the influential essay on “The Role of Israel in Old Testament Prophecy.” In it, Cottrell argued that in biblical prophecy “God’s promises are made conditional upon man's cooperation and obedience,” and that prophesied promises “not already fulfilled to literal Israel either would never be fulfilled at all or would be fulfilled to the Christian church as spiritual Israel.” Editor Nichol did not change a word in Cottrell’s essay, only adding a parenthetical caveat about the book of Daniel as an exception due to its distinctive qualities.¹⁸

Cottrell and Neufeld had just completed volume five of the Commentary series in 1955 when they were called upon to provide support for Adventist representatives in a series of consultations with influential figures in American evangelicalism. Walter Martin, who, as director of “cult apologetics” for the Zondervan publishing house, critiqued various modern religious movements such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Christian Scientists, and Eternity magazine editor/publisher Donald Barnhouse, initiated what became nearly two years of colloquia conducted behind closed doors. The foremost Adventist representatives were Le Roy Froom, in the fifth year of his retirement from heading the GC Ministerial Association and editorship of Ministry magazine, his successor and Australian compatriot, Roy Allan Anderson, and General Conference field secretary W. E. Read.

The “positions and experience of the administrative trio” and the approval of General Conference President Reuben Figuhr “made them the most appropriate persons in the General Conference to participate in the doctrinal discussion” with the evangelicals, Cottrell later wrote. “Their need for assistance in research-level biblical exegesis, however, led them to confer with Neufeld and me for help in that area, often almost daily.” The Commentary editors were, Cottrell wrote, “in effect, behind-the-scenes participants.”¹⁹ Since they had been wrestling in the Bible’s original three languages with every passage that pertained to the particular complications involved with Adventist doctrinal defense, Cottrell and Neufeld were exceptionally well-positioned to provide the assistance needed.

The General Conference discussion with evangelical leaders culminated in 1957 with what would become one of the most controversial volumes to emerge from an Adventist press: Seventh-day Adventists Answer Questions On Doctrine. It was a controversy that Cottrell had anticipated. In January 1957 he wrote in an unpublished manuscript:

Almost certainly there will also arise a storm of opposition when our ministry and laity discover the real meaning of the actual terms on which we have achieved a rapprochement with Martin and other evangelicals. We should not close our eyes to the possibility of a serious division in our own ranks as a result of the certain refusal of a great many Adventist to go along with the interpretation of Adventism set forth in the documents now being prepared for publication.²⁰

A dialogue that began with Adventism being accused of legalism resulted in Questions on Doctrine, which portrays the church as holding a mainstream evangelical position on salvation while maintaining certain peculiar beliefs. Consequently, Keld J. Reynolds contends that the church’s in-depth grappling with biblical and theological issues throughout the 1950s resulted in a “sharply defined” body of beliefs.²¹

After the SDA Bible Commentary was completed in 1957, Nichol invited Cottrell to become an associate editor of the Review and Herald, the denomination’s flagship periodical (renamed Adventist Review in 1978). A decade later, Cottrell exchanged roles with Don Neufeld, his editing partner for the Commentary project: Cottrell moved down the hall of the Review and Herald Publishing Association (then adjacent to General Conference headquarters in Takoma Park on the D.C.-Maryland border) to replace Neufeld as associate book editor while Neufeld replaced Cottrell as an associate editor of the Review. Cottrell was appointed chief book editor for the publishing association in 1970 and served in that capacity until 1976.²²

Along with his editorial work, Cottrell remained personally involved in pastoral and evangelistic work on a voluntary basis. In 1959 he helped plant a new church in the growing neighborhood of Wheaton, Maryland, and served there as an associate pastor for many years.

Cottrell’s book Beyond Tomorrow, a 380-page volume on the books of Daniel and Revelation, targeted for a popular readership, was published by Southern Publishing Association in 1963. Cottrell held that the Bible deserves our “supreme trust and confidence” as it “supernaturally” prophesies a “world beyond tomorrow.”

The Cottrell youngsters, Richard and Peggy, grew up in Takoma Park. Although Ray enjoyed traveling and giving lectures on a variety of topics, until the children began boarding school at Blue Mountain Academy he traveled minimally, and then only when he could take his family with him. Both Peggy and Richard recall how their father regularly took the effort to make Sabbaths special—with trips to zoos, parks, museums, historic sites, or weekends camping in nature where God’s creation was on display.²³

Although sometimes distracted, he was always kind to them, and looking back both felt they could always rely on his word. And neither will forget the image of their dad in his missionary (pith) helmet towing Richard and friends behind their ski boat.²⁴

Like his allegedly Albigensian and later Seventh Day Baptist forebears, Cottrell was a reformer, albeit generally a gentle one. He encouraged, in his routinely modest demeanor, a reform in the denomination’s methods of corporate Bible study, including a revision of its sanctuary doctrine, in harmony with the consensus statement issued by the Sanctuary Review Committee in 1980.²⁵ Further, through voice and pen, he advocated a consistent and well-grounded use of Ellen White’s writings, a more reasoned understanding of the relationship between science and theology, a reform in church structure and governance, and a greater appreciation for the place of women in the institutional church.

Cottrell played by all of the church’s explicit―as well as many implicit―institutional rules, sometimes at the cost of realizing his personal goals. For example, although he desired to earn a Ph.D. in Biblical studies and ancient languages to strengthen his professorial duties at PUC, and although he had been accepted into a graduate program at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, this dream was never realized.²⁶ Had Cottrell been more politically motivated he might have devised a way to attend Chicago, as some of his Adventist colleagues did in arranging for their doctoral programs. Regardless, working as a largely self-taught Biblical scholar, his academic accomplishments exceeded that of many of his more formally trained religion colleagues.

Working with a favorite theme, “Faith and Reason as Coordinates,”²⁷ Cottrell delivered the commencement address at Andrews University in 1972 for at least the third time and on this occasion he was awarded an honorary doctorate for the many ways he had contributed his scholarly gifts to Adventist higher education: his facility in six languages (three living and three dead), his significant Commentary contribution, his books and hundreds of reports and editorials for the Adventist Review, and his shepherding of many other manuscripts to publication as book editor for the Review and Herald Publishing Association.²⁸

Post-Retirement Service

Although Cottrell had reached retirement age in 1976, Review editor-in-chief Kenneth Wood persuaded him to return to the magazine to fill a vacancy for one additional year. In 1977, after 47 years of denominational employment, the Cottrells moved back to southern California where Ray continued his life of service for another quarter of a century—teaching at Loma Linda University’s School of Religion, writing, editing, and lecturing well into 2002, his 90th year.

In 1980 Cottrell was confronted with an opportunity to engage more broadly the dialogue that for 30 years he had limited to a select group of his scholarly peers regarding the legitimacy of the interpretation of the several biblical texts on which rested the one uniquely Adventist doctrine—commencement of an investigative judgment on October 22, 1844, in an antitypical sanctuary in heaven.²⁹ Along with 115 other Bible scholars and administrators, Cottrell was invited by the General Conference to meet at Glacier View Ranch (Colorado) to evaluate Australian theologian Desmond Ford’s 992-page review and assessment of the Sanctuary doctrine. Cottrell contributed two officially distributed documents—“Report of a Poll of Adventist Bible Scholars Concerning Daniel 8:14 and Hebrews 9,”³⁰ and “A Hermeneutic for Daniel 8:14.”³¹ Cottrell wrote at least another half dozen papers related to the Ford-sanctuary issue, but most important was his commissioned report on Glacier View written for Spectrum magazine. Based on his shorthand notes, Cottrell wrote the most comprehensive analysis of that watershed Adventist meeting that exists to date.³²

During his retirement, Cottrell provided a number of significant services to the church at local, conference, division, and world church levels. He taught a variety of classes, beginning in 1977, for both La Sierra and Loma Linda Universities. In 1979, with theologian Walter Specht, he co-authored a report for the White Estate, “The Literary Relationship between The Desire of Ages, by Ellen G. White, and The Life of Christ, by William Hanna.”³³ This was the first General Conference-sponsored effort to evaluate Ellen G. White’s use of sources in The Desire of Ages.

For the Association of Adventist Forums’ first national congress in 1984, Cottrell produced a comprehensive, multi-factored analysis of the structure and governance of Adventism that compared it with eleven other North American Christian denominations.³⁴ In 1992, more than six decades after his founding editorship of the College Criterion at La Sierra, Cottrell, along with Loma Linda University professor of religion, Jim Walters and others, co-founded Adventist Today, an extra-denominational source of news and analysis of current issues. This was the same year that Cottrell produced for the Southeastern California Conference Constitution Committee a draft revised constitution, along with other support documents, in anticipation of the Conference’s triennial session revision of its organizing documents.³⁵ He also played a central role on the Southeastern California Conference’s Gender Inclusiveness Task Force in 1996, providing support monographs that explicated the Bible passages that are sometimes interpreted to ban women from being ordained to the gospel ministry.³⁶

Throughout his retirement years Cottrell had scores of speaking engagements on biblical and theological issues, as well as those relating to his continued study of astronomy, cosmology, and geology. He gave sixteen addresses to the Association of Adventist Forums’ San Diego chapter over a period of 22 years, presenting his last paper on February 9, 2002—“The ‘Sanctuary Doctrine’: Asset or Liability?”³⁷

Contribution

The lifelong concern of Raymond F. Cottrell―and his most ardent desire―was that his church would adopt and utilize consistent, generally-recognized hermeneutical principles in its study of the Bible. In later life, his view of what this entailed was, increasingly, not always the same as those of other Adventist theologians and biblical scholars, or church leaders, but this should not mask the extent to which earlier in his career he was representative of mainstream Adventist biblical theology. He was one of the earliest Adventists to engage in critical analysis of biblical texts in their original language and historical context and helped to establish the Biblical Research Fellowship (1943-1952), an association of Adventist college religion teachers. Cottrell cast a wide influence on Adventist biblical interpretation and theology in his roles as an associate editor of the Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary and of the church’s official news magazine, the Adventist Review, and his role in retirement as founding editor of Adventist Today, an independent publication of news and commentary.

Shortly before his death on January 12, 2003, in Calimesa, California, Ray said that an accurate understanding of scripture was his life’s “unending quest”—a quest that led him to believe that “God will take to heaven anyone who would be happy there.”³⁸

Sources

“A Tradition of Progress.” La Sierra Today (75^th Anniversary Issue), Fall 1997.

Cottrell File. Adventist Today, Milton-Freewater, Oregon.

Cottrell, Raymond F. Beyond Tomorrow (Nashville: Southern Publishing Association, 1963).

Cottrell, Raymond F. Reason and Faith. Washington D.C.: Review and Herald, 1966.

Cottrell, Raymond F. “The Bible Research Fellowship: A Pioneering Seventh-day Adventist Organization in Retrospect.” Adventist Heritage 5, no. 1 (Summer 1978): 39-52.

Cottrell, Raymond F. “The Role of Israel in Old Testament Prophecy.” In Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, the Holy Bible with Exegetical and Expository Comment, Vol. 4, edited by Francis D. Nichol, 25-38. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1953-1957.

Cottrell, Raymond F. “The Sanctuary Review Committee and its New Consensus.” Spectrum 11, no. 2 (November 1980): 2-26.

Cottrell, Raymond F. “The Varieties of Church Structure.” Spectrum 14, no. 4 (March 1984): 40-53.

“Leland Horton Cottrell.” FamilySearch. Accessed February 26, 2021. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LCZ5-1JG/leland-horton-cottrell-1913-2007.

“PUC Students are Beginning Active Missionary Campaign.” The Campus Chronicle, April 8, 1948.

Raymond F. Cottrell Collection (Collection 238). Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, U.S.A.

“Raymond Cottrell: A Historical Biography.” Adventist Today 11, No. 1 (January/February 2003).

Reynolds, Keld J. “The Church Under Stress, 1931-1960.” In Adventism in America: A History, rev. ed. Edited by Gary Land. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1998.

Notes

1. Douglas Hackleman contributed to the writing of this article along with James Walters.↩

2. Introduction, Raymond F. Cottrell Collection (Collection 238), Center for Adventist Research (hereafter cited as CAR), James White Library, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan. In or close to 1996 Cottrell donated his annotated files of manuscripts to the Loma Linda University Department of Archives and Special Collections. The Andrews University’s CAR in 2005 requested and received photocopies of Cottrell’s approximately 10,000 manuscript pages of mostly unpublished material which it organized and catalogued. The catalog of Cottrell’s work is available at the CAR website: https://www.centerforadventistresearch.org/mdocs-posts/c0238-raymond-f-cottrell/.↩

3. “Leland Horton Cottrell,” FamilySearch, accessed February 26, 2021, https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LCZ5-1JG/leland-horton-cottrell-1913-2007.↩

4. Leland Cottrell interview, July 28, 2002; Cottrell File, Adventist Today, Milton-Freewater, Oregon.↩

5. Raymond F. Cottrell to William G. Johnsson, February 10, 1994.↩

6. Leland Cottrell interview; Cottrell File, Adventist Today.↩

7. Ibid.↩

8. Ibid.↩

9. “A Tradition of Progress,” La Sierra Today (75^th Anniversary Issue), Fall 1997, 6.↩

10. Raymond F. Cottrell interview, October 18, 2002, Cottrell File, Adventist Today.↩

11. The city of Changchun was given the name Hsingking between 1932 and 1945 when it was capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.↩

12. Biographical Information file 012161, CAR.↩

13. Walter Utt, A Mountain, A Pickax, A College: Walter Utt’s History of Pacific Union College, 3^rd ed. (Pacific Union College, 1996), 133; “Official Transcript of Record” issued to Raymond F. Cottrell, January 4, 1945, Pacific Union College.↩

14. “PUC Students are Beginning Active Missionary Campaign,” The Campus Chronicle, April 8, 1948; The Crusader, April 28, 1950), 1; E. W. Dunbar, “Personal Evangelism Crusade,” ARH, January 4, 1951, 24. Eight branch Sabbath Schools spawned by the campaign met in Shipyard Acres, Vallejo, Cordelia, North Napa, Enterprise, Sonoma, Novato, Vacaville, and Crockett.↩

15. Raymond F. Cottrell, “The Bible Research Fellowship: A Pioneering Seventh-day Adventist Organization in Retrospect,” Adventist Heritage, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Summer 1978): 39-52.↩

16. Printers up to the late 20th century used “galley proofs”, pages of hand-set lead type for the preliminary version of a published text. .↩

17. Introduction, Raymond F. Cottrell Collection (Collection 238), CAR.↩

18. Raymond F. Cottrell, “The Role of Israel in Old Testament Prophecy,” in Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, the Holy Bible with Exegetical and Expository Comment, Vol. 4, ed. Francis D. Nichol (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1953-1957), 25-38. In an introductory paragraph to CAR folder (#024088) containing the manuscript he submitted, Cottrell relates Nichol’s handing of the article.↩

19. Raymond F. Cottrell, “Questions on Doctrine: Footnotes to History,” unpublished manuscript, January 26, 1989, 1, Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

20. Raymond F. Cottrell, “An Evaluation of Certain Aspects of the Martin Articles,” unpublished manuscript, January 13, 1957, 13-14, Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

21. Keld J. Reynolds, “The Church under Stress, 1931-1960,” in Adventism in America: A History, rev. ed., ed. Gary Land (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1998), 153.↩

22. “This Week,” ARH, June 30, 1977, 3.↩

23. Douglas Hackleman, personal knowledge as friend of Richard Cottrell beginning early in high school when both were attending the Wheaton Adventist Church with their parents.↩

24. Douglas Hackleman, personal knowledge.↩

25. Raymond F. Cottrell, “The Sanctuary Review Committee and its New Consensus,” Spectrum 11, no. 2 (November 1980): 19-20, 24-25.↩

26. Raymond F. Cottrell diary and written correspondence, Cottrell File, Adventist Today.↩

27. Raymond F. Cottrell, Reason and Faith (Washington DC: Review and Herald, 1966).↩

28. “Raymond Cottrell: A Historical Biography,” Adventist Today, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January/February 2003): 9.↩

29. Perhaps Cottrell’s most significant single research project was his 725-page “The Eschatology of Daniel,” which he never published, noting that “the manuscript awaits a climate of openness and objectivity in the church, which is essential for a fair examination of the facts”; Cottrell Collection, CAR file.↩

30. “Report of a Poll of Adventist Bible Scholars Concerning Daniel 8:14 and Hebrews 9,” Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

31. “A Hermeneutic for Daniel 8:14,” Cottrell Collection, Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

32. “The Sanctuary Review Committee and Its New Consensus.”↩

33. “The Literary Relationship between The Desire of Ages, by Ellen G. White, and The Life of Christ, by William Hanna,” Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

34. Raymond F. Cottrell, “The Varieties of Church Structure,” Spectrum 14, no. 4 (March 1984): 40-53.↩

35. “Constitution of the Southeastern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, ” Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

36. See, e.g., “Bible Passages Related to the Ordination of Women,” Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

37. “The ‘Sanctuary Doctrine’: Asset or Liability?,” Cottrell Collection, CAR.↩

38. Raymond F. Cottrell interview, July 17, 2002, Cottrell File, Adventist Today.↩