Adventism is a nineteenth-century Christian movement built around the expectation of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In that sense, there is nothing particularly unusual about it. Christians have been expecting Christ to return since the first century, and periodically someone becomes convinced that he has figured out when it’s going to happen. That’s where the Adventist story gets interesting.
The movement began with William Miller, an American farmer, Baptist lay preacher and veteran of the War of 1812 who became convinced that biblical prophecy contained enough information to calculate approximately when Christ would return. His followers eventually became known as Millerites, and during the 1830s and 1840s they attracted considerable attention by proclaiming that the Second Coming was near.
Only it didn’t happen.
What followed became known as the Great Disappointment, one of the most famous failed prophetic expectations in American religious history. But instead of simply disappearing, the Millerite movement fragmented. Some followers admitted that the calculations had been wrong and returned to their former churches. Others reconsidered what Miller’s calculations meant. From those attempts came several religious movements, most importantly the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The story also eventually intersects with movements as different as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Branch Davidians. That’s quite a family tree.
William Miller
William Miller wasn’t originally a religious fanatic wandering around predicting the end of the world. In his younger years he had embraced deism, but following his service in the War of 1812 he returned to Christianity and began an intensive study of the Bible. Prophecy in particular fascinated him.
Miller eventually focused on Daniel 8:14: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” Like a number of prophetic interpreters before him, Miller used what is commonly called the year-day principle, interpreting prophetic days as years. Working from his understanding of biblical chronology, he concluded that the 2,300-year period would end somewhere around 1843.
Miller was initially reluctant to preach his conclusions publicly. Eventually he became convinced that he had an obligation to warn others, and in the 1830s he began preaching that Christ’s return was approaching, and the message spread.
This was America during the Second Great Awakening, when revivals, new denominations and religious movements were flourishing. Miller’s preaching attracted ministers and followers from several Protestant traditions. Newspapers and publications spread the message much farther than Miller could have done himself. Soon thousands of people were expecting the return of Christ.
Setting the Date
Miller originally expected Christ’s return sometime between the spring of 1843 and the spring of 1844 rather than identifying one specific day. When that period passed, the movement had a problem.
Samuel Snow, another Millerite preacher, subsequently argued that the prophetic calculations pointed specifically to October 22, 1844. The date was connected with the Jewish Day of Atonement and an interpretation of the “tenth day of the seventh month” in the biblical calendar. The expectation became intense.
Stories about Millerites selling everything they owned and waiting on hilltops in white robes have become part of American folklore, and some of those stories have been exaggerated considerably. But there is no question that many believers sincerely expected Christ to return.
October 22 arrived.
Then October 23.
Christ hadn’t returned.
The Great Disappointment
The failure became known as the Great Disappointment. For people who had reorganized their lives around the expectation of Christ’s immediate return, this wasn’t simply an embarrassing mistake in biblical interpretation. It was a spiritual crisis. Some abandoned the movement immediately. Some abandoned Christianity altogether. Others concluded that the mistake had been in the date calculations.
But another possibility emerged. What if the date had been correct but the expected event had been wrong? That idea became enormously important.
Some former Millerites concluded that something significant really had happened on October 22, 1844, but that it had occurred in heaven rather than on earth. This eventually contributed to the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of Christ entering a final phase of His heavenly ministry associated with the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary. In other words, the failed prediction wasn’t simply discarded. It was reinterpreted.
That reinterpretation allowed one branch of the Millerite movement to survive the Great Disappointment and eventually develop an elaborate theological explanation for 1844.
Ellen G. White and Seventh-day Adventism
The most important movement to emerge from the Millerite aftermath was the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Several people contributed to its development, including Joseph Bates and James White, but Ellen G. White became its most influential figure. White reported receiving visions and came to be regarded within the developing Adventist movement as possessing a prophetic gift.
The group also adopted observance of the seventh-day Sabbath—Saturday—rather than Sunday. That belief wasn’t originally the central teaching of Millerism. It entered the developing movement through interaction with Seventh Day Baptists and became one of the defining characteristics of Seventh-day Adventism.
Over time, a distinctive system of Adventist theology emerged involving the Sabbath, the heavenly sanctuary, the significance of 1844, the writings and prophetic ministry of Ellen White, conditional immortality and a strong emphasis on health and lifestyle. The Seventh-day Adventist Church was formally organized in 1863. It would eventually become vastly larger and more influential than the movement from which it emerged.
We’ll deal with all of that separately in the Seventh-day Adventist article because there is a lot to unpack.
Not Everybody Became a Seventh-day Adventist
It’s easy to tell the story as though Millerism failed in 1844 and then simply turned into the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but it didn’t. The Great Disappointment produced a collection of different Adventist groups. Some accepted the seventh-day Sabbath and some didn’t. Some accepted Ellen White and some didn’t. Some retained different interpretations of prophecy, death, resurrection and the final judgment.
One surviving body is the Advent Christian Church, which developed among Adventists who rejected some of the doctrines that eventually distinguished Seventh-day Adventism. Other groups appeared and disappeared over time. This is one reason “Adventist” and “Seventh-day Adventist” aren’t technically interchangeable terms. Seventh-day Adventists are Adventists, but the Adventist tradition is historically larger than the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The Jehovah’s Witness Connection
The story also intersects with the movement that became the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Charles Taze Russell wasn’t a Seventh-day Adventist, and Jehovah’s Witnesses shouldn’t simply be described as an Adventist denomination. But Russell was influenced by people and ideas circulating within the nineteenth-century Adventist world.
Particularly important was Nelson H. Barbour, an Adventist preacher who developed prophetic chronological schemes concerning Christ’s return. Russell worked with Barbour for a period before the two separated over theological disagreements. Russell subsequently developed the Bible Student movement, from which the Jehovah’s Witnesses eventually emerged.
The theological distance between modern Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists is enormous. Their doctrines of Christ, the Trinity, salvation and other subjects are very different. But historically, the movements occupy some of the same nineteenth-century prophetic landscape. We’ll follow that branch of the family tree separately in our article on Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And Then There Are the Branch Davidians
The Branch Davidians have a much more direct connection to Seventh-day Adventism. Their history runs through a movement founded by Victor Houteff, who had been a Seventh-day Adventist. Houteff developed teachings that were rejected by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and his followers eventually became known as the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists.
A later split produced the Branch Davidian movement. Decades later, David Koresh gained control of one faction of the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas. The 1993 confrontation between Koresh’s community and federal authorities ended with the deaths of Koresh and many of his followers and made the Branch Davidians internationally notorious.
By that point, however, we are a long way from William Miller. It would be misleading to draw a straight theological line from Miller to Koresh as though Branch Davidian beliefs were simply the logical result of Adventism. Religious movements split, change and sometimes develop ideas their founders would never have recognized.
But historically there is a traceable organizational lineage: Millerite Adventism → Seventh-day Adventism → Davidian Seventh-day Adventism → Branch Davidians.
We’ll deal with the Branch Davidians separately in our section on cults.
Why Saturday?
Because Seventh-day Adventism became the dominant Adventist tradition, many people associate Adventism primarily with worship on Saturday. But that’s actually a later development in the story. William Miller wasn’t preaching a Saturday Sabbath movement. The original issue was the Second Coming. The word “Advent” refers to the coming or arrival of Christ.
Sabbath observance became prominent among one group of Millerite survivors after 1844 and eventually became so closely associated with Seventh-day Adventism that it can overshadow the reason the movement was called Adventist in the first place.
The movement began with a question about prophecy: When will Jesus return? Everything else came later.
The Problem With Date Setting
There is an obvious lesson in the Millerite experience, and Christians have had plenty of opportunities to relearn it. Jesus said that no one knows the day or hour of His return. Nevertheless, Christians have repeatedly constructed elaborate prophetic systems that somehow end with a date on a calendar.
The calculations can be impressive. The charts can be complicated. The biblical connections can seem convincing. And then the date arrives.
William Miller was hardly the first Christian to make that mistake, and he certainly wasn’t the last. Failed predictions of Christ’s return have appeared repeatedly in church history, sometimes followed by an admission that the interpretation was wrong and sometimes by a new explanation for why the prediction was actually fulfilled in a way nobody could see.
That’s one reason the Great Disappointment matters beyond Adventist history. It provides a remarkable case study in what happens when sincere faith becomes attached to a prophetic timetable.
The Adventist Legacy
Today, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is by far the largest institution to emerge from the Adventist tradition. It operates churches, schools, universities, hospitals, publishing ministries and missionary organizations around the world.
Most people who encounter Adventism today will encounter it through Seventh-day Adventists rather than through William Miller or one of the smaller Adventist bodies. But understanding Miller and the Great Disappointment changes the way the later movement looks.
Saturday worship didn’t create Adventism. Ellen White didn’t create the original movement. Health reform didn’t create it either. It began with people studying biblical prophecy and becoming convinced that Jesus was about to return. They were wrong about the date.
What happened after they discovered that may be the most interesting part of the story.