Nichol, Francis David (1897–1966)

A prolific author and an editor of the denomination’s flagship periodical, Review and Herald, for close to 40 years (1927-1966), Francis D. Nichol was a leading 20th-century exponent of Adventist faith.

Early Life and Education

Francis David Nichol was born to John (1868-1954) and Mary Fearon Nichol (1870-1952) on February 14, 1897, in Thirlmere, 60 miles southwest of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. John, born near Londonderry, Ireland in 1868, was a Scots-Irish Presbyterian, and Mary an Irish Catholic born in 1870 in Birkenhead, England.¹ Both were fervent in their religious convictions, leading to conflict in the home when John refused to allow their firstborn, daughter Mary Jane, to be christened, and Mary feared their daughter would be lost as a result.² Reading a discarded copy of the Review and Herald that they picked up while out walking eventuated in John and Mary joining the Seventh-day Adventist church. An article by Ellen White particularly engaged their attention.³

After becoming an Adventist, John Nichol took up colporteur work, then moved the family to Wahroonga, near Sydney, to help with construction of a new sanitarium, a project managed by American John A. Burden. In 1905, Burden, who by then had returned to America to take charge of developing a sanitarium that would turn out to be the beginnings of Loma Linda University, invited the John Nichol family to emigrate to California as he needed John’s skills as a senior electrician. Francis was eight years old when his family made its trans-Pacific move in 1905. John Burden gave young Francis various tasks around the sanitarium grounds, and when Adventist prophet Ellen White, by then an octogenarian, visited as a patient, Francis was assigned the responsibility of pushing her wheel chair.⁴

At his own initiative, Francis started successfully selling Adventist health magazines to sanitarium patients. His canvass was direct and persuasive and the humble beginning of a career in salesmanship—one that later raised funds for church buildings and increased the circulation of denominational periodicals.⁵

After Mary Nichol completed nurses’ training at Loma Linda, the family moved to San Fernando, also in southern California, so Francis and his sisters could attend the Adventist academy there. Francis graduated from San Fernando Academy in 1914, spent a year as a bellhop at the Glendale Hospital, and then took training in stenography at Isaacs Woodbury Business College (1915-1916). The typing and shorthand skills he gained served him well the rest of his life, starting with work he took in June 1917 as office secretary to the Southern California Conference president, M. M. Hare. The job helped him pay for his studies at Pacific Union College (PUC), north of San Francisco, California, where he enrolled six months later, January 1918.⁶

Nichol married Rose Macklin (1894-1969) on August 11, 1919, with John Burden, conducting the ceremony. Rose, originally from Kansas, completed nurses’ training at Glendale Sanitarium earlier that year. She and Francis met when both were students at San Fernando Academy.⁷ Francis still had a year ahead of him at PUC but during that final year he taught full-time in the History Department while finishing his degree requirements, graduating with the highest academic honors.⁸

Rose nearly died with the birth of the Nichol’s only child, Virginia Marie, on November 27, 1920. Rose never fully recovered from the experience, much to the distress of her husband. Virginia Nichol Saxon (1920-2017) gave her parents four grandchildren, sons James, Lawrence, and David, and a daughter June (Longway).⁹

Pacific Press Years

After graduating with his degree in theology from PUC in 1920, Nichol accepted a pastoral appointment in the town of Vallejo in northern California, but his tenure there was brief. While in Vallejo he submitted an article to the Signs of the Times magazine which was published by the Pacific Press at Mountain View, California. Not only was it accepted, the editor, A. O. Tait, along with associate editor, Alonzo Baker, asked for more, and soon asked the young pastor to join the editorial staff. Nichol hesitated, considering himself a pastor at heart, but finally accepted and was employed by the Pacific Press for six years (1921-1927) as an associate editor of the periodical.¹⁰

Having been appointed to an important editorial role on a major church paper at only 24, another major responsibility was laid upon his shoulders the following year. Due to a last-minute turn of events, Nichol was called upon to edit the General Conference Bulletin for the 1922 session in San Francisco. He rose to the occasion and would fill that responsibility every four years at General Conference sessions through 1962.¹¹

One of the most remarkable events in Nichol’s career came in June 1925, a month before the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. That trial brought national attention to the leading issue in the decade’s fundamentalist vs. modernist culture war: teaching evolution as settled scientific understanding in the public schools. Adventists took the position that using the public schools to inculcate the evolutionist world view violated the separation of church and state as much as would using them to indoctrinate biblical teachings.

Signs of the Times became increasingly aggressive in publishing articles, including a Nichol editorial, attacking the credibility of evolution. The Signs articles came to the attention of Dr. Maynard Shipley, vice president of the Science League of America, who challenged the Signs editors to a public debate. It was agreed in April 1925 to hold two debates, one each on June 13 and 14 in Native Sons Hall in San Francisco. Nichol, 28, and his fellow associate editor of the Adventist evangelistic magazine, Alonzo Baker, 31, would face Dr. Shipley, who represented distinguished scientists from 48 colleges and universities throughout the nation. Nichol and Baker devoted the next two months to intensive preparation.¹²

The debates received extensive coverage in the San Francisco newspapers. On the first evening, Nichol and Shipley debated the proposition that “the earth and all life upon it are the result of evolution.” Shipley was rather condescending toward his opponent, but the burden was on him to prove the claim. In his account of the debates, Alonzo Baker described Nichol’s approach:

In his address Nichol surprised and astounded us all with his intimate knowledge of facts and arguments contradicting evolution. One would have thought he had long been a student of morphology (comparative anatomy), embryology, and geology – the sciences described by him as “the three-legged stool” supporting evolution. . . .

Nichol’s coup de grace to the evolutionary theory was his charge that its defenders espoused Darwin’s hypothesis as a matter of faith, not a proven scientific fact.

To win the debate, Nichol needed only to raise serious doubts about Shipley’s case for the sweeping claim about evolution under debate. The judges ruled 2-1 that Nichol succeeded. The judges ruled against Baker, also 2-1, in the June 14 debate, in part, the young editors realized too late, because the words “as fact” should have been placed after “evolution” in the proposition Baker was charged with defending: “That the teaching of evolution should be debarred from tax-supported schools.”¹³

Overall, though, the Adventists regarded the San Francisco debates as a big win. Nichol and Baker jointly authored Creation — Not Evolution, published the next year with a foreword by fellow Adventist George McCready Price, by then widely recognized as a leading defender of creationism.¹⁴

In 1927, F. M. Wilcox, editor of the Review and Herald (later renamed Adventist Review), Seventh-day Adventism’s leading and longest-running weekly periodical, invited Nichol to become an associate editor. After more than 20 years in California, F. D. Nichol and his family moved to the opposite coast, to Takoma Park, the denomination’s headquarters town straddling the border between Maryland and the District of Columbia.¹⁵

Review and Herald Years

In 1934, the Review and Herald Publishing Association (RHPA) asked Nichol to take on a major, additional assignment as editor of the monthly journal, Life and Health. With its circulation declining and the Great Depression straining available resources, the 49-year-old periodical’s future was in jeopardy. This assignment quickly introduced Nichol to the world of advertising and soon he was travelling 25,000 miles annually securing advertising accounts. The circulation increased from 26,000 in 1934 to 100,000 by 1936. During the same period, he increased the number of pages in the magazine by a third.¹⁶

For several years Nichol’s dual editorial responsibilities overlapped with a third major commitment as pastor of the Hyattsville, Maryland, church. Not wanting his pastoral-evangelistic calling completely submerged in the editorial office, Nichol organized a group of RHPA employees in 1929 who funded and conducted an evangelistic series on Sunday nights in nearby Alexandria, Virginia. The RHPA team found the experience rewarding and conducted a second effort in Cottage City, Maryland, the following year. A third effort led to a new church plant, the Review and Herald Memorial church in Hyattsville, Maryland, in 1932. RHPA workers who transferred their memberships from the Takoma Park church joined the small group recently formed in Cottage City and together with 13 new believers they formed the 60-member Hyattsville congregation. Nichol led out in the building and financing of a sanctuary as well as an adjacent health clinic for the community, and served as pastor for a decade, stepping aside from that role in 1942.¹⁷

When the final Life and Health editorial signed “F. D. N.” appeared in the April 1946 issue, the monthly circulation had surpassed 200,000. By that time, Nichol had also been serving as editor-in-chief of the Review for nearly a year as successor to the retired F. M. Wilcox, a position he would hold for the remainder of his life.

In his hundreds of editorials and numerous books, Nichol addressed virtually every theological, social, and ethical issue of concern to Adventists from the 1920s to the 1960s. A look at some of his leading works serves to illustrate the wide range of topics Nichol engaged, and the intellectual rigor and depth with which he did so.

Answers to Objections defended distinctive Adventist doctrines, countering the most frequent charges against them. Totalling 250 pages when first published in 1932, it was expanded to 895 pages in its 1952 edition. This volume was often used as a textbook in college ministerial training programs.

In The Answer to Modern Religious Thinking (1936), Nichol presented Adventism as fundamentalism in its truest form -- a Bible-based corrective to the theological drift of liberal Protestantism. He warned that the legislated social reforms advocated by Protestant modernists could easily become an instrument for suppressing dissenters. He also distinguished Adventism, with its commitment to separation of church and state, from the militaristic ultranationalism prominent among fundamentalists.

The Midnight Cry (1944) was a 560-page defense of William Miller and the Millerite movement, out of which Seventh-day Adventism arose. It received generally favorable reviews in academic journals and the secular press. In the Chicago Tribune, John Astley-Cook credited Nichol with showing that the oft-repeated and embellished tales ridiculing the Millerites for donning “ascension robes” and other extreme behaviors were “either fabrication or distortion and even malicious representation.”¹⁸ Mary H. Mitchell in the American Historical Review noted that Nichol’s refutation of charges that Millerism caused insanity was “so strong that hereafter if serious writers repeat the charge, it would seem to be only to illustrate the fear and hostility roused by the preaching of the end of the world.”¹⁹ In a subsequent article in the academic journal Church History – likely the journal’s first peer-reviewed article by an Adventist – Nichol showed how historians had for nearly a century uncritically accepted the tales about Millerites that he now showed to be fallacious.²⁰

Ellen G. White and Her Critics (1951) provided Nichol’s 703-page “answer to the major charges” brought against the Adventist prophet. Prior to its publication, in 1950, Nichol became a member of the Ellen G. White Estate Board of Trustees, and was asked to write a definitive, two-volume biography of Ellen White. ²¹ Extensive preparatory work for the biography was interrupted when Nichol was tapped for the largest and arguably most consequential project of his career – editing the seven-volume Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary (SDABC).

The most demanding years of Nichol’s already strenuous life were those devoted to producing the SDABC volumes, along with editing the Review. He worked 12 to 15 hours a day, six days a week, for the six years of the project, completed in 1957, according to an insider account published in 1985 by Raymond F. Cottrell, one of the SDABC associate editors. Cottrell’s narrative illuminates the scope and significance of the project, how Nichol shaped it, and why his leadership was indispensable to its success.²²

Not only was the SDABC the first church publication to attempt systematic exposition of the entire Bible, it represented an important shift in approach: “Prior to the Commentary Adventist books about the Bible usually assumed the dogmatic role of the teacher; the Commentary chose the more humble role of a student listening intently in order to hear what the Bible has to say,” Cottrell wrote.²³ To accomplish that, Nichol interviewed, selected, and recruited 37 Adventist scholars who had expertise in biblical languages and utilized archaeological and historical studies in order to understand each passage in its literary and historical contexts. He assembled a three-person editorial team to work closely with him. Cottrell, a Bible professor at Pacific Union College, arrived in 1952 as an associate editor. His fellow associate editor, Don F. Neufeld, Bible department chair at Canadian Union College (now Burman University), joined the team in 1953. Julia Neuffer, assistant editor, was the RHPA’s research specialist who upheld a rigorous standard for ensuring the accuracy of factual detail.

Cottrell identified several characteristics that facilitated Nichol’s success as “commander-in-chief” for the project. One was the “high esteem” accorded him from all sectors of the church, which enabled him to mobilize the participation of leading academics and writers and at the same time enjoy the full support of General Conference leaders. Another was “a passionate drive to carry the project through to completion within a relatively brief time period.” Nichol’s goal was to publish one volume every six months, and thus complete publication of the series over a five-year period. Some volumes ended up taking longer than six months to complete, but in the end all seven, together totaling 7,949 pages, were published over the five years of 1953 through 1957. That was all the more remarkable because Nichol also brought “an almost fanatical penchant for accuracy” to the work. He set up an elaborate system in which 22 pairs of eyes read “every word of every line” of manuscript copy by the time it was made into plates for printing.²⁴

Though his own convictions were deeply held and often sharply-expressed, Nichol demonstrated “open-mindedness and willingness to respect points of view with which he differed,” wrote Cottrell. This outlook was important for judicious handling of differences regarding the meaning of a passage, allowing for perspectives new to most Adventist readers and at times including more than one interpretation of difficult passages, thus showing readers that Adventist scholars equally committed to Scripture sometimes differed in understanding. This approach created space, for example, for Cottrell’s seminal essay in Volume 4 contending that Old Testament predictive prophecies about Israel’s destiny were conditional upon the nation’s faithfulness to the covenant.

On the other hand, Nichol was also sensitive to “the thinking and the mood of the church and its leaders.” He recognized that expositions that deviated from widely shared consensus about Adventist teachings, if included, would damage or destroy the SDABC’s usability. Thus, while both Cottrell and Neufeld had become convinced that the conditionality principle applied to the prophecies in Daniel, Nichol inserted a paragraph into Cottrell’s essay clarifying that it did not because of characteristics that made Daniel distinct from other prophetic books.²⁵

While sales figures do not come close to capturing the impact of the SDABC, they are a marker worth noting. RHPA set an initial goal of 5,000 complete sets sold within three years of the release of the last volume. But, by the time that Volume 7 came off the press, 23,000 sets had already been purchased at a pre-publication price. By 1984, the total number of complete sets sold surpassed 83,000.²⁶

The Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary (then part of Potomac University in Washington, D.C.), characterized the editor as “an ardent protagonist of an educated ministry” in conferring on him its first honorary doctor of divinity degree at a ceremony on May 22, 1958.²⁷ Building up a well-informed ministry was indeed a central goal of Nichol’s work, and in his response on May 22, he spoke out against the anti-intellectualism sometimes expressed in the ranks of Adventism:

There have been those among us, who, because of intellectual sloth or lack of willingness to sacrifice, have felt no need of higher schools among us. As if the evils of secular, godless education could be successfully met by ignorance and illiteracy. God gave us heads and he intended that we should use them. I believe that higher education may be sanctified to the glory of God.²⁸

In June 1966, several important events lay just ahead on Nichol’s schedule. The General Conference session at Detroit was just two weeks away. Everything necessary for the Daily Bulletin was organized as the temporary staff of 30 did their final planning with Nichol. He had four speaking appointments scheduled at Andrews University the next weekend, and he had his material organized for all of them. Walking his usual two miles home from work on Thursday, June 2, Nichol suddenly experienced severe chest pain and slowly made his way through the four blocks that remained to reach his home. Over his objections, his wife Rose had him transported by ambulance to the Washington Sanitarium and Hospital. Initially diagnosed as a heart attack, a ruptured aorta, probably damaged in a severe fall a few months before, took F. D. Nichol’s life on June 3.²⁹

An estimated 1,300 attended the funeral service at Sligo church in Takoma Park held on Monday, June 6, 1966. R. R. Figuhr, General Conference president, preached the sermon. Nichol was buried in the George Washington Cemetery in Adelphi, Maryland.

Contribution

Loma Linda University and Pacific Union College have both named buildings in Francis D. Nichol’s honor. Nichol Hall at Loma Linda houses the university’s Schools of Allied Health Professions and Public Health. At Pacific Union College the men’s residence is named Nichol Hall.

Francis Nichol “felt called upon to be one of God’s lawyers in a world where higher criticism and scientific discoveries had placed historic fundamental Christianity on trial for its life,” wrote Kenneth H. Wood, Nichol’s successor as Review editor.³⁰ In so doing, Nichol sought to bridge the gap between faith and reason. Yet his work went beyond apologetic polemics. He not only believed Adventism had the right answers to theological questions, but was driven by passionate conviction that those answers truly met the human predicament, and that the nearness of Christ’s return made it urgent that people throughout the world have a chance to hear about them.³¹

The middle decades of the 20^th century have been described as something of a “golden age” of confidence, achievement, and relative unity for Adventists, exemplified by Nichol’s “meticulous defense of the Millerites” and the multi-volume Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary produced under his editorship. Later Adventist scholars might critique aspects of Nichol’s apologetic writing such as his overly polemical style, but more than half a century later, it is still an important resource and cannot be overlooked by anyone undertaking in-depth study of the issues he addressed. Moreover, subsequent Adventist scholars have produced nothing of truly comparable “scale and breadth.”³²

Selected Works of Francis D. Nichol

The Answer to Modern Religious Thinking (Review and Herald, 1936)

Answers to Objections (Review and Herald, 1932, rev. 1952)

Behold, He cometh (Review and Herald, 1938)

The Case against Liquor (Review and Herald, 1944)

Certainty of My Faith (Review and Herald, 1948)

Creation — not Evolution, co-authored with Alonzo Baker (Pacific Press, 1926)

Ellen G. White and Her Critics (Review and Herald, 1951)

God’s Challenge to Modern Apostasy (Review and Herald, 1935)

Let’s Live Our Beliefs (Review and Herald, 1947)

The Midnight Cry (Review and Herald, 1944)

Reasons For Our Faith (Review and Herald, 1947)

San Francisco Debates on Evolution, by Maynard Shipley, Alonzo L. Baker, and Francis D. Nichol (Pacific Press, 1925)

The Wartime Contribution of Seventh-day Adventists (Review and Herald, 1943)

Why I Believe in Mrs. E. G. White (Review and Herald, 1964)

Audio Material 

See Related Content for audio recordings of F. D. Nichol's series on the three angels' message, "The Increasing Timeliness of the Three-fold Message," presented at the 1952 Bible Conference. Courtesy of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists Archives. 

Sources

Baker, Alonzo L. “The San Francisco Evolution Debates, June 13-14, 1925.” Adventist Heritage 2, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 23-31.

Baker, Alonzo Lafayette and Francis David Nichol. Creation – Not Evolution. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1926.

Cottrell, Raymond F. “Life Sketch of Francis David Nichol.” ARH, June 10, 1966.

Cottrell, Raymond F. “The Untold Story of the Bible Commentary.” Spectrum 16, no. 3 (August 1985): 35-51

“John Nichol obituary.” Pacific Union Recorder, May 25, 1954.

Johns, Warren L., editor. The Vision Bold. Takoma Park, MD: Review and Herald, 1977.

Knott, Ronald A. “Nichol, Francis David.” In Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, edited by Denis Fortin and Jerry Moon, 476. Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 2013.

“Mary Fearon Nichol obituary.” Pacific Union Recorder, April 21, 1952.

Mitchell, Mary H. Review of The Midnight Cry, by Francis D. Nichol. American Historical Review 51, no. 2 (January 1946): 331-332.

Nichol, Francis D. “The Growth of the Millerite Legend,” Church History 21, No. 4 (December 1952): 296-313.

“Rose Elizabeth Macklin Nichol obituary.” ARH, July 3, 1969.

White, Arthur L. “Service with the Ellen G. White Estate.” ARH, June 10, 1966.

Wood, Kenneth H. “A Tribute to Francis David Nichol.” ARH, June 10, 1966.

Wood, Miriam and Kenneth. His Initials Were F.D.N. Takoma Park, MD: Review and Herald, 1967.

Notes

1. “John Nichol obituary,” Pacific Union Recorder, May 25, 1954, 13; “Mary Fearon Nichol obituary,” Pacific Union Recorder, April 21, 1952, 13.↩

2. Miriam Wood and Kenneth Wood, His Initials Were F.D.N. (Takoma Park, MD: Review and Herald, 1967), 35-36.↩

3. Ronald A. Knott, “Nichol, Francis David,” in Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, ed. Denis Fortin and Jerry Moon (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2013, 476.↩

4. Wood and Wood, His Initials Were F.D.N., 40-43.↩

5. Ibid., 42-43.↩

6. Ibid., 43, 49, 54-55, 62-63.↩

7. Ibid., 61-63; “Rose Elizabeth Macklin Nichol obituary,” ARH, July 3, 1969, 24.↩

8. Wood and Wood, 59; Raymond F. Cottrell, “Life Sketch of Francis David Nichol,” ARH, June 10, 1966, 8.↩

9. Wood and Wood, His Initials Were F.D.N., 66-68; “Virginia Marie Nichol obituary,” North Pacific Union Gleaner, May 2017, 34.↩

10. Wood and Wood, His Initials Were F.D.N., 94-97.↩

11. Cottrell, “Life Sketch.”↩

12. Alonzo L. Baker, “The San Francisco Evolution Debates, June 13-14, 1925,” Adventist Heritage 2, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 24-26.↩

13. Baker, “The San Francisco Evolution Debates,” 27-30.↩

14. James L. Hayward, “Price, George McCready (1870–1963),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, accessed July 5, 2021. https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=79ZW.↩

15. Cottrell, “Life Sketch.”↩

16. Wood and Wood, His Initials Were F.D.N., 131-134.↩

17. Ibid., 115-130.↩

18. John Astley-Cook, “Prophet Who Stirred Men a Century Ago,” review of The Midnight Cry, by Francis D. Nichol, Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1945.↩

19. Mary H. Mitchell, Review of The Midnight Cry, by Francis D. Nichol, American Historical Review 51, no. 2 (January 1946): 331-332.↩

20. Francis D. Nichol, “The Growth of the Millerite Legend,” Church History 21, No. 4 (December 1952): 296-313.↩

21. Arthur L. White, “Service with the Ellen G. White Estate,” ARH, June 10, 1966, 3.↩

22. Raymond F. Cottrell, “The Untold Story of the Bible Commentary,” Spectrum 16, no. 3 (August 1985): 35-51.↩

23. Cottrell, “The Untold Story of the Bible Commentary,” 35.↩

24. Ibid., 35, 40-41, 46.↩

25. Ibid., 42, 46.↩

26. Ibid., 45-46.↩

27. “Citation of F.D. Nichol by Charles E. Weniger at the Conferring of the Doctor of Divinity Degree, May 22, 1958,” Appendix D in Wood and Wood, His Initials Were F.D.N., 235-236.↩

28. “Response of F.D. Nichol to the Citation by Dr. C.E. Weniger at the Giving of the Doctor of Divinity Degree,” Appendix F in Wood and Wood, His Initials Were F.D.N., 236-237.↩

29. Cottrell, “Life Sketch.”↩

30. Kenneth H. Wood, “A Tribute to Francis David Nichol,” ARH, June 10, 1966, 2.↩

31. Cottrell, “Life Sketch.”↩

32. Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream, 2^nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 105-106.↩