Adventist

History

It was during the religious revival that swept the American frontier in the early 19th century that William Miller (1782–1849), whose speculations launched the Adventist movement, began to preach. Miller, while an officer in the U.S. Army in the War of 1812, had become a skeptic. Converted to the Baptist faith during the 1820s, he began to study the Bible, especially the prophetic books of Daniel and the Revelation to John. Primarily on the basis of his interpretation of Daniel 8:14, which spoke of 2,300 days, he concluded that Christ would return about 1843. He began to preach in 1831 and soon emerged as the leader of a popular movement. As the year 1843 approached, Miller predicted more specifically that Christ would return between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.

Miller and his followers faced heavy derision because of his predictions. Although expectations were heightened when a comet suddenly appeared in the night sky in March 1843, they felt the brunt of the disappointment when the predicted Second Coming did not occur in March 1844. After Miller confessed his error and left the movement, his follower Samuel Snow suggested a new date, Oct. 22, 1844. Christ’s failure to return at that time has since been known in Adventist circles as the Great Disappointment. The following year, those who still believed in Miller’s prophetic scheme convened the Mutual Conference of Adventists to sort out problems. The main body formed a loosely knit fellowship, the Evangelical Adventists, which became the foundation of all modern Adventist churches.

Among those who continued to accept Miller’s prophecy were Joseph Bates, James White, and White’s wife, Ellen Harmon White. They believed that Miller had set the right date but had interpreted events incorrectly. From their reading of Daniel, chapters 8 and 9, they concluded that God had begun the “cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary”—i.e., an investigative judgment (an action invisible to the human eye) that would then be followed by the pronouncing and execution of the sentence of judgment (a future visible event). In 1844, in their view, God had begun an examination of all the names in the Book of Life, and only after this was completed would Christ appear and begin his millennial reign. They refrained from setting a new date for that visible appearance, but they insisted that Christ’s advent was imminent. They also came to believe that worship on the seventh day, Saturday, was proper for Christians. The practice of Saturday worship gave the denomination (established in 1863) a new name, the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Seventh-day Adventists also believed that Ellen White had the gift of prophecy, and her lectures and writings shaped the later beliefs and practices of the church.

Other Adventist bodies emerged in the 19th century. Some, such as the Advent Christian Church and the Life and Advent Union (which merged into the Advent Christian Church in 1964), rejected both the prophetic status of Ellen White and seventh-day worship. Another group, the International Bible Students Association, inspired by Miller and Adventist teachings, was founded by the preacher Charles Taze Russell in 1872. Changing its name to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1930s, it became the second successful group to emerge from the original Millerite movement. Another Sabbatarian church, the Worldwide Church of God, emerged in the 1930s; at its height in the 1980s, it claimed more than 100,000 members. During the 1990s the Worldwide Church of God engaged in a process of doctrinal reevaluation that led it to renounce the beliefs it had inherited from Adventism and join the larger Evangelical movement.

Belief in Sabbath observance brought with it a new appreciation of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). The Seventh-day Adventists accepted Old Testament dietary regulations, from which their present-day emphasis on health developed. In 1900 two members of the church, John Harvey Kellogg and his brother W.K. Kellogg, founded the Sanitas Food Company, later called the Kellogg Company, to market a healthy breakfast cereal that had been served at a church sanatorium run by John Harvey Kellogg. (The sanatorium’s many prominent patients included C.W. Post, later the founder of the Postum Cereal Company.) The church’s emphasis on healthy living and preventive medicine was augmented by the founding in 1908 of a chain of outstanding medical institutions. The church became a pioneer of medical missions, establishing hundreds of hospitals, medical centres, clinics, and sanatoriums across the United States and throughout the world.