Chapter 128. Counting the Days: Millerites, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science

The religious ferment of nineteenth-century America produced two kinds of movement that went on to become worldwide denominations. One kind counted the days: it read the prophetic numbers of Daniel and Revelation as a timetable and announced when Christ would return. The other kind healed: it said that sickness was a product of mind and could be undone by right belief. The first line runs from William Miller through Ellen G. White’s Seventh-day Adventism, and from there to Victor Houteff’s Davidians and Waco. The Bible Student movement of Charles Taze Russell, later the Jehovah’s Witnesses, belongs to it as well. The second line runs from the mesmerist Phineas Quimby to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and the New Thought churches. Both lines grew out of a Protestant culture that, in Negru’s analysis, was under strong pressure from revivalism, from science and from social crisis [Catalin Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, “The Third Great Awakening”]. Both also became entangled with the American state, through conscientious objection, flag-salute litigation and medical exemptions.

William Miller and the Great Disappointment

Negru reconstructs Miller’s system as a chronology built on Daniel 8:14 (“unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed”), counted from Artaxerxes I’s decree to Ezra, which Miller dated to 457 BC. Miller concluded that 1843 would be the year of the “cleansing of the sanctuary”, that is, the purification of the earth by fire and the Second Coming. His first calculations fixed the date at 21 March 1843 [Negru, #62383]. Miller went public in 1831 with eight articles in the Vermont Telegraph, lectured from 1834 to 1839, and published Evidence from the Scripture of the Second Coming of Christ, about the year 1843 (1836) [Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, “Second Great Awakening”]. Negru’s picture of Miller is unusually sympathetic. In his account Miller claimed no revelations, invited people to check his figures, and printed arguments for and against him in Joshua Himes’s Signs of the Times. Millerism “was not a sect in the real sense of the word” because it had no hierarchy, rituals or required lifestyle [Negru, #62383].

The chronology then failed four times in a row. The first failure was 21 March 1843. The second was the window “between March 21st, 1843, and March 21st, 1844, according to the Jewish mode of computation”. The third was 18 April 1844, reached after the Millerites blamed the Rabbinic calendar and switched to the Karaite one. In May 1844 Miller wrote: “I confess my error, and acknowledge my disappointment; yet I still believe that the day of the Lord is near, even at the door.” In August 1844, at a camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, Samuel Snow’s “seventh-month message” set the return on the Day of Atonement. By the Karaite reckoning that fell on 22 October 1844. Negru writes that converts gave away their property, left their jobs and fields, and closed their shops, and that “around 50,000 believers scrutinized the sky for a sign” that morning [Negru, #62383].

The day “remained known in history as the ‘Great Disappointment.'” Negru lists a range of internal reactions. Some believers “continued to watch daily for Parousia, or they made plans for different future dates: April, July or October 1845. Others said that the world entered the seventh millennium, of the Great Sabbath, and from that point on those saved no longer had to work.” Others imitated children (Mark 10:15), or held, like O. J. D. Pickands, that Christ sat on a white cloud and had to be implored to descend. Most abandoned the cause, joined the Shakers, or returned to the churches they had called “synagogues of Satan.” Outsiders responded with mockery and violence. A meeting place was burned in Ithaca, a group was tarred and feathered in Toronto, and children shouted “Have you a ticket to go up?” Negru adds that, theologically, the Disappointment “caused a shock to historicism, it favored postmillenarism and prepared the ground for the spreading of dispensationalism” [Negru, #62383, “Great Disappointment”].

Ellen G. White and Seventh-day Adventism

Two theories turned the failure into doctrine. In January 1845 Joseph Turner proposed the “shut-door” theory: the heavenly door had closed on 22 October and the period of probation was over. Hiram Edson, working with O. R. L. Crosier and F. B. Hahn, concluded that the “sanctuary” of Daniel 8:14 was in heaven, so something real had happened on 22 October, only in the heavenly realm. Both ideas were published in Day Dawn in early 1845 and were “validated through the revelations of Ellen White” [Negru, #62383, “Ellen White and the Adventist Vision of the End”]. Joseph Bates brought Sabbath-keeping into the group. Negru reports that the Whites “quickly accepted to keep the Sabbath as Bates advised them”. He also reports that Bates came to accept White’s visions after an 1846 trance at Topsham, Maine, in which she described the moons of Jupiter and Saturn [Negru, #62383]. The Seventh-day Adventist Church was formally organised in 1863 and, according to Browne, has “more than twelve million” members worldwide [Sylvia Browne, End of Days, #42246].

The sources assess White very differently. Willis gives the denominational outline. White (1827–1915) was disfigured in an accident at the age of nine, and from the age of seventeen had “some 2,000 recorded dreams and visions” which she believed came from God. Adventists accept her writings as inspired but not equal to the Bible. Willis identifies four distinctive Adventist doctrines: the authority of White’s writings, a literal heavenly sanctuary in which Christ ministers as high priest, the seventh-day Sabbath (“God’s commandment to the Jews to keep the seventh day… was never rescinded”), and the imminent Advent [Jim Willis, American Cults, #63203, “David Koresh and the Branch Davidians”]. Negru, by contrast, follows the ex-Adventist critic Dudley Canright. He suggests that the stone that broke White’s nose damaged her temporal lobe and that her trances may have been epileptic. He lists failed predictions: a coming in June and then September 1845, the shut-door end in October 1851, and Civil War visions. He also repeats charges of plagiarism and calls her one of the “cheap prophets of the American religious awakenings” [Negru, #62383]. Negru points out a contradiction in Adventist teaching. The church now condemns date-setting, yet White called Millerism a “glorious manifestation of the power of God” and said that the Lord’s hand “hid a mistake” in the 1843 chart [Negru, #62383].

Adventist apologetic literature explains the Sabbath itself. The tracts appended to Vance Ferrell’s health publications argue that the Sabbath was given “when our world was first created (Genesis 2:1-3) 2,000 years before the first Jew (Abraham) was born” and so is not “Jewish”. They also argue that Sunday observance is a later ecclesiastical imposition. To support this they quote Arthur Weigall: “The Church made a sacred day of Sunday… largely because it was the weekly festival of the sun”. They also quote a Catholic challenge: “Prove to me from the Bible alone that I am bound to keep Sunday holy… It is a law of the holy Catholic Church alone” [Vance Ferrell, Gerson Therapy Cancer Remedies, #62233, appended Sabbath tracts]. White’s health visions turned into a dietary code. A standard nutrition textbook summarises it as follows: many members are lacto-ovo vegetarians; they “avoid pork and shellfish”, “prohibit coffee, tea, and alcohol”, drink water before and after meals but not during them, and avoid highly seasoned foods and eating between meals [Karen Eich Drummond & Lisa M. Brefere, Nutrition for Foodservice and Culinary Professionals, #69952, ch. 13].

The Davidian Offshoot: Toward Waco

The road to Waco started inside Adventism. The sources disagree on the year: Browne says that “in 1919, a man named Victor Houteff joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” while Willis says that in 1918 the Bulgarian Houteff (1885–1955) left the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for Adventism [Browne, End of Days, #42246; Willis, American Cults, #63203]. Willis continues the story. Houteff taught Sabbath classes in Los Angeles and issued the Shepherd’s Rod tracts. At the 1929 annual meeting he denounced worldliness in the denomination, and he taught that 144,000 purified believers had to gather before Christ would return. After his message was rejected, he founded Mount Carmel near Waco in 1935 with 37 members. In 1942 he named the group the General Association of Davidian Seventh-day Adventists and later used the “Davidian Seventh-day Adventists” name to secure conscientious-objector status. After his death his widow Florence predicted the kingdom for 22 April 1959; some 900 people sold their property and gathered, and “nothing happened.” Vernon Howell (David Koresh) emerged from what was left of the group [Willis, #63203]. The Branch Davidian siege is treated in Chapter 133.

The Watch Tower: Russell, Rutherford and Moving Dates

Willis dates the movement to shortly before 1872, when Russell, “a Congregationalist by religion and haberdasher by trade,” began meeting with a Bible-study group after an Adventist preacher revived his faith. Willis says Russell published Food for Thinking Christians in 1879 and that his followers had formed the Zion’s Watchtower Society by 1884 [Willis, #63203, “The Watchtower Society and Jehovah’s Witnesses”]. Browne describes the Watchtower Society as “founded in the early 1870s by Charles Taze Russell”. In her account Russell never claimed to found a religion but believed he had been given divine permission to understand the Bible. She says he combined Daniel 4 with the Great Pyramid: “Using 607 BCE as a start date and adding 2,520 years, Pastor Russell arrived at the conclusion that TEOTWAWKI would happen in October of 1914” [Browne, End of Days, #42246].

Negru gives the full sequence of dates. Russell “stripped” 1844 of its meaning and moved it to 1874, which he counted as 6,000 years from the expulsion from Paradise. When 1874 passed, he said the return had been invisible, and that a forty-year harvest would end with Christ’s visible appearance in 1914 [Negru, #62383]. Russell died in 1916 according to Browne and Negru, and in 1917 according to Willis. Browne says his successor J. F. Rutherford “decided to make a few adjustments in Pastor Russell’s calculations”; the movement had accepted it as fact “beyond a doubt” that Christ appeared in 1874 [Browne, #42246]. According to Negru, Rutherford’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1920) predicted that 1925 would see “the return of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob”. After that failure the presence of Christ was moved to 1914, and the “generation of 1914” became the limit for the end. Negru lists further dates that carried expectation: 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1935, 1941, 1957, 1975 and 1994. The 1975 expectation was based on Nathan Knorr’s 1966 chart showing “6,000 years of man’s existence end in 1975” [Negru, #62383]. Willis credits Rutherford with coining the name “Jehovah’s Witnesses” in 1931 [Willis, #63203].

Neutrality, the Flag and the Supreme Court

The Witnesses’ politics consists of refusing to take part. Willis writes that they “don’t stand for the national anthem or salute the American flag—or any flag… They don’t vote in elections or serve in the military,” because “their actual government is in heaven.” The early message, he notes, cast Satan’s power as “the religious, commercial and political combine” [Willis, #63203]. When municipalities “passed laws to constrict what were considered challenges to American ideals… the Supreme Court tended to strike down such laws”. The movement’s door-to-door work ended in a final victory: “In June 2002 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that, irrespective of local bylaws, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have the right to ring every doorbell in the country” [Willis, #63203]. The reference shelf records the flag cases. In 1935 Rutherford told a convention that saluting an earthly emblem was unfaithfulness to God, and expulsions of Witness children followed. In Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940) the Court upheld compulsory salutes, a decision that “led to increased persecution of Witnesses”. The Court reversed itself in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) [Wikipedia: Minersville School District v. Gobitis]. Witness litigation strengthened, among other things, “the right to abstain from patriotic rituals and military service” and “the right of patients to refuse medical treatment” [Wikipedia: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States].

On the name, Willis explains that YHVH, vocalised with the vowels “a, o, e,” gives “Yahoveh”. The Hebrew “Y” became “J” and the vowels shifted, so that “Christian academics coined the spelling ‘Jehovah’ long ago”. The name “Witnesses” comes from Isaiah’s “Ye are my witnesses, saith Jehovah” [Willis, #63203].

The Romanian Confessional Critique

Romanian-language confessional literature rejects the Witnesses as a heresy; the two works below write as Christian critics, not as neutral describers. Şerban Constantinescu’s Năzbâtii teologice (1990) is subtitled “the false witness of the so-called Jehovah’s Witnesses”. It opposes the Witness teaching that “the man Jesus Christ died and remains dead as a man” and criticises their refusal of blood transfusions, which rests on the belief that “the soul of man is his blood”. It also reports a Witness telling him that Armageddon “should have happened in 1975, when 6,000 years were completed from Adam, who… was created in 4026 BC.” Against the Witness hope of a battle, the author sets Titus 2:13: the believer’s hope “is a Person, not a battle”. He closes with the question “Whom do you believe, Jesus or Russell?” [Şerban Constantinescu, Năzbâtii teologice, #21647]. Fritz Ridenour gives three reasons the Witnesses are “a challenge for Christians”: “they have registered a phenomenal growth”; “their teachings stand in clear opposition to the Gospel”; and “they are declared enemies of the Christian Church.” He also notes Knorr’s New World Translation, which he says was made to “serve the society’s doctrines better”, and the Witness reading of Armageddon as a “worldwide thermonuclear devastation” [Fritz Ridenour, De Fapt Care Este Diferenta?, #13640, ch. “Martorii lui Iehova”].

Quimby, Eddy and the Mind-Cure Churches

The healing line began with mesmerism. Whorton describes Phineas Quimby working with the entranced youth Lucius Burkmar from 1843 to 1847. He then gave up magnetism, concluding that “the cure is not in the medicine, but in the confidence of the doctor,” and finally called his method the “Science of Health” and even “Christian Science” [J. Whorton, Nature Cures, #29919, “Magnetism and Mind: From Mesmerism to Christian Science”]. In October 1862 Mary Baker Patterson, aged forty-one and a chronic invalid, came to him in Portland. After Quimby’s death, Whorton writes, “she first disavowed any debt to her mentor,” called his views “scribblings,” and even claimed to have written his manuscripts. By her own account she discovered “the Christ Science” in February 1866, two weeks after his death, when she recovered from a fall on the ice while reading of Christ’s healings [Whorton, #29919, “Mary Baker Patterson and the Development of Christian Science”]. Regardie accepts that Quimby “played a tremendous part in the subsequent shaping of her creed”. He also observes: “Had there not been this furore about the possible antecedents of Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy, no one to-day I am sure would even know of the former existence of Quimby” [Israel Regardie, The Romance of Metaphysics, #44119, Quimby/Eddy chapters]. Harrington calls Eddy the most visible woman leader in mind-cure, “born on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire, in 1821,” and “raised in the strict Congregationalist Church” before rebelling against it [Anne Harrington, The Cure Within, #65907, “The Power of Positive Thinking”].

The doctrine, as Whorton summarises Science and Health (1875), went beyond Quimby. Since “God is All” and “Mind is All-in-all,” matter and the body are illusions of “mortal mind”. Since God is good, “evil is but an illusion,” and “what is termed disease does not exist”. Eddy charged $100 and later $300 for twelve lessons. She founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879. Membership was about 9,000 by 1890 and over 200,000 by about 1925, when it was the “fastest-growing denomination in the United States,” with nearly two-thirds of members women. She left over two million dollars at her death in 1910 [Whorton, #29919, “Growth of Christian Science”]. Negru places Eddy’s “complete, coherent, verifiable and demonstrable science” in the Third Great Awakening’s answer to Darwin [Negru, #62383]. The dissident mind-healers of New Thought, Unity and Religious Science acknowledged Quimby openly. Shealy writes that William James classed them as “mind-cure” religions, the product of religion as “a cry for help” [C. Norman Shealy, Sacred Healing, #62835, “New Thought and Mind-Cure Religions”]. Kugelmann treats them as part of an American “shadow culture” or “unchurched spirituality”. In his account this current runs from Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism and mesmerism to New Thought and Christian Science, and on into today’s New Age, with an unconscious understood as a “higher self” rather than Freudian drives [R. Kugelmann, Psychology and Catholicism, #32134, sections 58–59].

Key points

• Negru reconstructs the Millerite chronology from Daniel 8:14 and 457 BC. It failed four times (March 1843, March 1844, April 1844, 22 October 1844). After the “Great Disappointment” some believers set new dates in 1845, and others declared that the Great Sabbath millennium had begun [Negru, #62383].
• Seventh-day Adventism arose from Turner’s shut-door theory, Edson’s heavenly-sanctuary reading and Bates’s Sabbath, all confirmed by Ellen White’s visions. Willis presents her as a prolific visionary; Negru, following Canright, presents her as a failed prophet [Willis, #63203; Negru, #62383].
• Adventist tracts argue that Saturday is the Sabbath and that Sunday is a later Roman-Catholic institution. Adventist diet avoids meat, pork, shellfish, coffee, tea and alcohol [Ferrell, #62233; Drummond & Brefere, #69952].
• Houteff’s Shepherd’s Rod split (he converted in 1918 or 1919, depending on the source) produced Mount Carmel and, in time, the Branch Davidians [Willis, #63203; Browne, #42246].
• Russell’s dates (1874, 1914) were revised by Rutherford (1925) and later leaders (1975). Negru counts at least nine charged years between 1914 and 2000 [Negru, #62383; Browne, #42246].
• Witness refusal of flag salutes, voting and military service led to landmark Supreme Court cases, from Gobitis/Barnette to the June 2002 doorbell ruling [Willis, #63203; Wikipedia: Minersville School District v. Gobitis].
• Christian Science came out of Quimby’s post-mesmeric mind-healing. Eddy denied the debt and claimed an 1866 revelation; her doctrine holds that disease and evil are illusions of mortal mind [Whorton, #29919; Regardie, #44119].
• Kugelmann’s “shadow culture” connects mind-cure and New Thought to the modern New Age, and Romanian-language confessional authors judge the Witnesses by Christ’s divinity and failed prophecy [Kugelmann, #32134; Constantinescu, #21647; Ridenour, #13640].