Great Disappointment

Background

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the influence of the Second Great Awakening produced widespread interest in revival meetings and eschatology in the United States. During this period William Miller (1782–1849), a Baptist lay preacher in New York State, studied the Bible, particularly the prophecies of the book of Daniel. Following an interpretive method that counts a prophetic day as one year, he read the "two thousand and three hundred days" of Daniel 8:14 as 2,300 years. He placed the starting point in 457 BC, the year in which he believed the decree to rebuild Jerusalem had been issued. On the basis of this calculation, Miller identified the time when "the sanctuary be cleansed" with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and estimated that it would occur around 1843. He believed that the Second Coming would precede the millennium.

Development

• Around 1831: Miller began preaching publicly.
• From around 1839: Joshua V. Himes, a Boston minister, took charge of newspaper publishing and camp meetings, and the movement spread across several denominations. Its adherents are commonly called "Millerites."
• 1843–1844: Miller proposed that the Second Coming would occur between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. The period passed without the Second Coming.
• August 1844: At a camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, Samuel S. Snow put forward a new date. He argued that October 22 of that year, which corresponded to the Old Testament Day of Atonement (the tenth day of the seventh month), would be the day of the Second Coming. This gave rise to the so-called "seventh-month movement," and Miller himself accepted the date in early October.
• October 22, 1844: Many believers gathered to await the Second Coming, but nothing happened. According to surviving accounts, some believers had closed their businesses or left their crops unharvested. Estimates of the number of believers at the time vary by source, ranging from tens of thousands to about 100,000.

Consequences and Influence

After the disappointment, many believers left the movement, and the Millerites were ridiculed by the wider public. Miller acknowledged that his calculation of the date had been mistaken, but he held to the belief that the Second Coming was near until his death in 1849.

The remaining believers divided into several streams.

• The stream that abandoned date-setting: This group took shape through the Albany Conference of 1845, and bodies such as the Advent Christian Church emerged from it.
• The stream that reinterpreted 1844: Hiram Edson and others regarded October 22, 1844, not as the day of the Second Coming but as the day on which Christ entered the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary and began a new ministry. Joseph Bates's advocacy of Sabbath observance was joined to this interpretation, and under the leadership of James White, Ellen G. White, and others, the Seventh-day Adventist Church was formally organized in 1863.
• Other influences: Charles Taze Russell, whose work became the root of Jehovah's Witnesses, is also known to have been influenced by preachers of the Adventist movement.

Assessment

Most Protestant denominations and theologians regard the Great Disappointment as the result of setting a date for the Second Coming. In their view, date-setting contradicts the teaching of Mark 13:32–33 ("But of that day and that hour knoweth no man") and Acts 1:7. For this reason the Great Disappointment is frequently cited as a leading historical example of date-setting eschatology.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church takes a different view. It holds that the chronological calculation itself was correct but that the interpretation of the event expected to occur, namely an earthly Second Coming, was mistaken. It teaches that 1844 marked the beginning of the "investigative judgment" in the heavenly sanctuary. Some other Protestants have criticized this doctrine as having a weak biblical basis and as an after-the-fact explanation of a failed prophecy. Adventists respond that the doctrine is grounded in the teaching on the heavenly sanctuary found in Daniel and Hebrews.

In Korea, the Great Disappointment was repeatedly invoked as a point of comparison during the date-setting controversy surrounding groups such as the Dami Mission, which claimed that the Rapture would occur on October 28, 1992.