“Our fondest hopes…were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before… We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.”

That was Hiram Edson’s commentary on the early hours of Oct. 23, 1844. He spoke those words 160 years ago. Do they ring any bells at all for Adventists in 2004?

If you’re new in these parts you need to know that the roots of Adventism go back to that Great Disappointment of 1844, when thousands of devout Christians believed that Jesus was going to return on Oct. 22. Daniel 8:14 was the key verse: “Unto two thousand three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” The “sanctuary” was the earth; the cleansing was Jesus’s second coming; and the 2,300 days were actually years, taking them to 1843-44. They set the date, waited until midnight, then wept until the sun rose again on the same old earth.

Let’s look at all that: the pain and embarrassment, picking up the pieces; and sharpening the focus.

Pain and Embarrassment

If the survivors of the Great Disappointment itself had to weather the mockery of unbelievers, those who have followed them in Adventism have faced quite a different kind of pain: fear and shuddering in the presence of a holy God. But that too is the experience of an older generation. It’s foreign territory to most of their children. Can I tell you what it’s like? Probably not. But at least I should try.

Realizing that the earth itself was not the sanctuary to be cleansed, our Adventist pioneers focused on the only sanctuary left, the one in heaven. And the angel Gabriel himself had told Daniel that the vision of the cleansed sanctuary was for the “time of the end” (Daniel 8:17). That would mean it’s for us. Now.

And what happens in God’s sanctuary at the end of time? “The hour of his judgment is come,” announced the first angel in Revelation 14. That’s sobering—or should be. If you’re young with roots in Adventism, I suggest you talk with your parents or grandparents. You will hear echoes of their pain—even terror—in words such as “investigative judgment,” standing “in the sight of a holy God without a mediator,” sins recorded with “terrible exactness.”

If you could sense the pain, you might understand the intense reaction at that Adventist Forum meeting in 1979 at Pacific Union College when Adventist theologian Desmond Ford announced to a crowd of some 1,000 Adventists that it was “impossible” to prove the investigative judgment from the Bible. Roughly half the crowd called Ford a saint; the other half believed something quite different. Adventism has not been the same since.

Unless older Adventists have shared their pain with you, you probably won’t get it. But from that pain flows a fair bit of embarrassment and mockery. Check the Web. You’ll find plenty of scorn directed at William Miller and his rules for Bible study; at Josiah Litch and his predictions about Turkey; at Hiram Edson for his cornfield glimpse of the heavenly sanctuary, and at Ellen White and her visions. You’ll hear snickers about “historicism” and “shut door.” It’s not pretty.

But pain doesn’t have to lead to embarrassment and scorn. It can point to growth and renewed enthusiasm. Besides, I believe there are really good solutions to all that is painful. I won’t go into detail here. But those solutions help explain how someone like me—who knows at least something of the pain—can be really excited about the Adventist vision. And it’s an excitement that I am eager to share with you.

Picking Up the Pieces

First, let’s admit that even if our Adventist heritage leaves us neither ashamed nor embarrassed, parts of early Adventism really are puzzling for us. In particular, how could they not hear Jesus’ words that no one knows the “day nor the hour”?

Given our puzzlements, how do we put the pieces together so that Adventism can be a dynamic community of believers, one that touches hearts and minds in our day, 160 years after the Great Disappointment? Here are some points to ponder:

1. Changing logic, changing methods of Bible study

It’s tough getting inside the mind of an earlier era. That’s why we should be modest about our ways of thinking. Methods of Bible study are often heavily conditioned by time and culture. Those who come after us may be

as puzzled by our logic as we are by the logic of our pioneers.

One of the best examples of changing logic and methods involves the historicist approach to Bible prophecy. “Historicism?” you ask, “What’s that?”

Martin Luther could tell you. So could Sir Isaac Newton. Newton wasn’t just a mathematician and physicist, you see, and he was that—”the most eminent physicist of his day,” says the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church—he also wrote a book on Daniel and Revelation. That’s partly why he found his way into the ODCC!

For devout believers like Luther and Newton, “historicism” was the way to read Daniel. And it makes some sense, too: You simply plot biblical events along a line of “history” until you come to the end. For the image of Daniel 2, Babylon comes first, then Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, the divisions of Rome, and finally, the kingdom of God, symbolized by the great stone. In Daniel 7, one beast follows another until the saints “receive the kingdom.” Simple. Perfectly reasonable. All Protestants thought so.

But check the dates: Luther died in 1546, Newton in 1727. Historicism’s days were numbered. But no one knew that yet. Adventists are now virtually alone in defending historicism, but that’s now, not then. In the early 19th century it was still in vogue. As historian Whitney Cross puts it: “All Protestants expected some grand event about 1843, and no critic from the orthodox side took any serious issue on basic principles with Miller’s calculations.”1 In other words, 1844 made good sense then.

But what most ordinary people don’t realize and many scholars often forget, is what one scholar put in words to justify the reprinting of a 1928 book in 1955: “Books of biblical exposition tend to date very rapidly, and eventually to become almost unreadable; so close is the connection between such writing and the contemporary climate of thought.”2

So let’s be gentle with the 1844 people. They were gripped by their culture, we by ours.

2. Biblical parallels

For unique Adventist wrinkles such as the “shut door” theory and our understanding of the heavenly sanctuary, seeing biblical parallels can often be helpful. Micaiah’s vision of the heavenly court (1 Kings 22), for example, is at least as curious as anything Ellen White ever saw.

And the dusty road to Emmaus was at least as offbeat as Hiram Edson’s cornfield. But handsome buildings and fine cars make it harder for us to remember that Jesus was despised and rejected by his own people and had no place to lay his head.

3. Disappointment and growth

I marvel at how many people admit to me sheepishly and after dark that the really important things they have learned in life have come through the tough times. Jesus’s disciples faced their dark night, and so did our Adventist pioneers. Why should we escape?

Sharpening the Focus

For most Adventists now, 1844 is in the dim and distant past and makes little difference in the way we live our faith today. Perhaps we could draw a parallel with our own births. Our mothers will know whether it was c-section or natural childbirth. But we don’t remember and probably don’t care. Life goes on regardless of the circumstances of our birth. Births are usually painful, but only the mother remembers.

For us, what counts is how we live today. And in that connection our Adventist pioneers pointed us in the right direction with a simple covenant that they used when they first began organizing local churches in 1861: “We, the undersigned, hereby associate ourselves together, as a church, taking the name Seventh-day Adventists, covenanting to keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus Christ.” That was it: brief, simple, straightforward. I’d love to see that covenant at the head of our current statement of beliefs. That would preserve our focus. And everything else could then be seen as commentary on those things that really count. I think even Jesus would like that.

Alden Thompson teaches at Walla Walla College, College Place, Washington.

Notes

1 Whitney R. Ross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 321. Cited by Rolf Poehler, Continuity and Change in Adventist Teaching (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 23.

2 Norman W. Porteous, “Foreword” to Adam Welch’s Jeremiah: His Time and Work (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), vi.