William Miller

Life

William Miller was born in 1782 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was raised on a farm in the Low Hampton area of New York. As a young man he was drawn to deism, the view that God created the world but does not afterward intervene in its affairs. He served as an officer in the War of 1812. After his conversion around 1816, he began attending a Baptist church, and he is reported to have spent roughly the next two years in intensive private study of the Bible. He died in Low Hampton in 1849.

Ministry and Work

Miller calculated the time of Christ's Second Coming by interpreting the "two thousand and three hundred days" of Daniel 8:14. His method was the so-called day-year principle, which reads a day in prophecy as a year. Taking as his starting point the decree to restore Jerusalem recorded in Ezra 7 (457 BC), he concluded that Christ would return literally and the millennium would begin around 1843.

Miller began giving public lectures in 1831 and was licensed to preach by the Baptist church in 1833. At the time, the United States was swept up in the fervor of the Second Great Awakening. The publisher Joshua V. Himes spread Miller's message widely through newspapers and large camp meetings, and his followers are reported to have numbered in the tens of thousands. This group is commonly called the Millerites, or the Advent movement.

Miller initially placed the event between March 1843 and March 1844. When that period passed, the date of October 22, 1844, proposed by Samuel S. Snow, gained wide acceptance within the movement, and Miller himself embraced it at the last moment. When that day also passed uneventfully, great confusion followed; this episode is known as the Great Disappointment. Miller publicly acknowledged that his calculation had been wrong, but he maintained to the end of his life that the Second Coming was near.

Influence on the Korean Church

After the Great Disappointment, the Millerites divided into several factions. One of these, which included Ellen G. White, reinterpreted 1844 as the year in which Christ entered the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary. Observing the seventh-day (Saturday) Sabbath, this group went on to form the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The denomination entered Korea in the early twentieth century and remains active there today.

Korean Protestant denominations have differed in their assessments of this church. The Adventist Church understands itself as a Protestant church in continuity with the Reformation.

In Korea, Miller's name is frequently invoked in discussions of date-setting eschatology, which predicts the end of the world on a specific date. When October 28, 1992, passed uneventfully after the Dami Mission had predicted the Rapture for that day, Miller's Great Disappointment was widely cited as the foremost historical precedent.

Assessment

Many churches regard Miller's case as an example of failed date-setting. The passages most often cited in support are Mark 13:32, "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man," and Acts 1:7.

Other assessments also note further aspects of his legacy: that he greatly stimulated interest in the Second Coming and in Bible study, and that, once his calculation failed, he did not conceal his error but openly acknowledged it. The Adventist Church remembers him as a pioneer who, though mistaken in setting a date, awakened faith in the Second Coming.