Millerite Movement

Background

In the early nineteenth century, revival meetings and new religious movements flourished in the northeastern United States under the influence of the Second Great Awakening. The dominant Protestant eschatology of the period was postmillennialism, the view that the world would gradually improve, the millennium would arrive, and Christ would return afterward. William Miller (1782–1849), a New York farmer and Baptist layman, studied the Bible after turning from deism (the belief that God created the world but does not intervene in it) to the Christian faith. He adopted the premillennial position that the Second Coming would occur before the millennium.

Miller focused on Daniel 8:14: "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." He applied the "day-year principle," which treats a prophetic day as one year (based on Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel 4:6). Counting 2,300 years from 457 BC, which he took to be the year of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in the time of Ezra, he concluded that Christ would return around 1843 and cleanse the earth by fire.

Development

• Around 1831: Miller began preaching publicly.
• 1839–1840: The publisher Joshua V. Himes joined the movement and launched the periodical Signs of the Times. The movement then spread widely through large tent meetings and the distribution of literature.
• 1842: The "1843 Chart," a pictorial summary of the prophetic chronology, was produced and came into wide use at meetings.
• 1843–1844: Following the Jewish calendar, Miller narrowed the time of the Second Coming to "between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844." As conflict with the established churches intensified, a considerable number of believers left their churches or were expelled.
• Summer 1844: After that deadline passed, Samuel S. Snow proposed October 22, 1844, as a new date, aligning it with the Old Testament Day of Atonement. The so-called "seventh-month movement" spread rapidly, and Miller himself accepted this date near the end.

The movement is reported to have had between tens of thousands and about 100,000 followers.

Outcome and Influence

The uneventful passing of October 22, 1844, is known as the Great Disappointment. The movement subsequently dispersed. Many abandoned their faith or returned to their former churches, while those who remained divided into various Adventist groups.

• Those who acknowledged an error in calculating the date while continuing to hold to belief in the Second Coming later formed bodies such as the Advent Christian Church.
• Another group reinterpreted the events of 1844 not as the cleansing of the earth but as the moment when Christ entered the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary and began a work of judgment. This interpretation developed into the doctrine of the "investigative judgment." This group also adopted Saturday Sabbath observance and organized the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863.
• The later Bible Student movement associated with Charles Taze Russell and others is also said to have been indirectly influenced by Adventist preachers. That movement became the root of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Assessment

The Seventh-day Adventist Church regards the Millerite movement as its point of origin. While acknowledging that the date calculation was wrong, it holds that the broad framework of prophetic interpretation and the reawakening of faith in the Second Coming were significant. By contrast, many Protestant denominations, including Presbyterians and Methodists, as well as other critics, cite the movement as a prime example of date-setting eschatology, which fixes the time of the Second Coming. They point to biblical passages such as Mark 13:32–33 and Acts 1:7, which teach that no one knows the day or the hour. The reinterpretation of 1844 has likewise been contested: critics regard it as an after-the-fact justification of a failed prophecy, while Adventists respond that it reflects a biblical understanding of the sanctuary.

Later research has suggested that anecdotes such as believers donning ascension robes and climbing hills have been considerably exaggerated. Historians treat the movement as an illustration of the religious fervor of nineteenth-century America. In Korea, it is frequently cited for comparison whenever date-setting end-times incidents occur, such as the 1992 rapture controversy.