the theopolotics of adventist apocalypticism - ronald osborne

7/24/2019 The Theopolotics of Adventist Apocalypticism - Ronald Osborne

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THE THEOPOLITICS OF

ADVENTIST APOCALYPTICISM:

PROGRESSIVE OR DEGENERATING

RESEARCH PROGRAM?

RONALD E. OSBORN

Every five years, the Seventh-day Adventist Churchone of the worldsfastest growing denominations, which by 2020 is projected to have up to40 million adherents and regular attendees worldwideholds a weeklongseries of meetings in which elected officials and other delegates gather to

discuss and vote on matters of church policy, governance, mission, anddoctrine. These General Conference sessions have come to feature not onlyregular business proceedings, which now include more than 2,400 votingmembers, but also elaborate displays of pageantry, worship, evangelisticoutreach, and entrepreneurialism that attract tens of thousands of Adventistlaity and other observers. In 2010, the fifty-ninth General Conference sessionwas held in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta and its surrounding conventionhalls and hotels at an estimated direct cost to the church of $12 million.1 Theclimax of the event was a Sabbath worship service attended by more than70,000 people, followed by a festive Saturday night parade of nations akinto the closing ceremonies of the World Cup. Behind these exuberant displaysof Adventist institutional success and global unity, however, General Con-ference sessions are also, inevitably, scenes of tremendous political maneu-vering and private turmoil as delegates with very different visions for the

Ronald E. OsbornUniversity of Southern California, Department of Politics and International Relations, 3518Trousdale Parkway, Von KleinSmid Center 327, Los Angeles CA 90089-0044, USAEmail:[email protected]

1 Ansel Oliver, New Year, Big Budget, Adventist Review, January 28, 2010, on the webat: http://www.adventistreview.org/article/3101/archives/issue-2010-1503/03cn-new-year-

new-budget

Modern Theology 30:2 April 2014ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

DOI: 10.1111/moth.12077

2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
mailto:[email protected]://www.adventistreview.org/article/3101/archives/issue-2010-1503/03cn-new-year-new-budgethttp://www.adventistreview.org/article/3101/archives/issue-2010-1503/03cn-new-year-new-budgethttp://www.adventistreview.org/article/3101/archives/issue-2010-1503/03cn-new-year-new-budgethttp://www.adventistreview.org/article/3101/archives/issue-2010-1503/03cn-new-year-new-budgetmailto:[email protected]


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church elect new officials, vote others out of office, and seek to steer the

organization in different directions. In 2010, the Adventist church shifteddramatically in the direction of fundamentalism, voting to tighten the lan-guage of its doctrine of creation to rule out any interpretations other thanstrict literalism or young earth creationism and signaling an intensified com-mitment to preserving unmodified its apocalyptic worldview based uponhistoricist hermeneutical approaches to the book of Revelation that werewidely held when the church began some 150 years ago but that are todayrejected by most theologians and biblical scholars.

On July 3, 2010 newly elected General Conference president Ted N. C.Wilson (whose father, Neal C. Wilson, was president of the Adventist

church from 1979 to 1990) delivered an impassioned inaugural sermon in theGeorgia Dome in which he made clear that his top priority as leader wouldbe to reinvigorate Adventist commitment to the denominations apocalypticbeliefs tracing back to the nineteenth century. The speech marked an abruptdeparture both in style and substance from the ecclesiological vision of hispredecessor, Norwegian theologian Jan Paulsen. Signs of Christs comingare increasing in frequency and intensity every day, Wilson said. 2 Theyincluded natural catastrophes, political and economic upheavals, disintegra-tion of societal and family values, and the compromising activities ofecumenism. All such signs of the times, he continued, point unmistakablyto the climax of earths history and the Lords return to take us on the final

journey home to heaven. He then referred to a 1901 vision by the churchsfounding prophetess, Ellen White, in which she reported that Christs secondcoming had been delayed because of the sin of unbelief within the church.The church missed the opportunity of receiving the latter rain, Wilsonconcluded. It was one hundred and nine years ago. Let us not make Godwait any longer to begin the latter rain so that Jesus can come . . . Brothers andsisters, it is time . . . the Lord is coming soon! He wants to use His remnantchurch in a most powerful way.3

In the article that follows I will attempt to situate these recent Adventistmoves in the direction of rigidly prescribed hermeneutics and intensified

apocalypticism within a larger picture of Adventisms unique history fromits origins in the Millerite movement of the mid-nineteenth century. TheJournal of the American Academy of Religionhas published a single full-lengtharticle about Adventism (in 1996, dealing with the denominations interac-tions with the government). The Harvard Theological Review, History of Reli-gions, Journal of Religion, and Religious Studies (to name just a few otherimportant peer-reviewed journals in the study of religion) have meanwhile

2 Ted Wilson, Go Forward!, General Conference Sabbath Sermon, July 3, 2010, on the webat: http://www.adventistreview.org/article/3614/archives/issue-2010-1526/go-forward

3 Ibid.

220 Ronald E. Osborn

http://www.adventistreview.org/article/3614/archives/issue-2010-1526/go-forwardhttp://www.adventistreview.org/article/3614/archives/issue-2010-1526/go-forward


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not published any.4 This article therefore seeks to fill a major void in scholarly

literature by focusing attention on the history and theology of an increasinglyglobally significant yet rarely analyzed American-born apocalyptic move-ment. Building on a theoretical framework of Imre Lakatoss philosophy ofscience and Nancey Murphys application of Lakatoss categories to the fieldof theology, I will argue that Adventist apocalypticism has historically gonethrough both degenerating andperhaps to the surprise of some read-ersauthentically prophetic or progressive phases as a theopoliticalresearch program. Whether Adventism is able to recover the progressiveparts of its heritage without becoming permanently trapped in a fundamen-talist or enclave mentality remains an open question. Full disclosure requires

that I make clear from the outset my personal investment in the Adventiststory. My interests are not only scholarly. I want to hold a mirror up to thereligious tradition in which I was raised and continue to find Christiancommunity and to provide what I think has become a necessary critique ofaspects of that tradition.

In Part One, I will review some key terms from the philosophy of science,focusing on Thomas Kuhns account of the dilemma of adjudicating betweenthe knowledge claims of competing scientific paradigms and Lakatoss dis-tinction between progressive and degenerating research programs. Theproblem of rival or incommensurable paradigms can be detected not only inthe empirical sciences, however, but also in religious discourse. Murphy, I

will show in Part Two, has provided a helpful conceptual lens for thinkingabout conflicting theological visions, demonstrating that Lakatoss distinc-tion between progressive and degenerating research can be fruitfully appliedto religious traditions and truth claims as well. With this theoretical frame-work in mind, in Part Three, I trace the history of Adventism in the UnitedStates from its origins in the Millerite movement, which predicted the precisedate of Christs return and the end of history in 1844. In Part Four, I thensituate Adventist apocalyptic beliefs following the Great Disappointmentof Millerism within the social and historical context that gave those beliefsplausibility, and even authentically prophetic relevance for their time. In Part

Five, I will highlight some of the ways that early Adventism might be seen asa progressive theological research program as evidenced in its belief struc-ture as well as its creativity and dynamism as a social movement. Neverthe-less, contemporary Adventist eschatology has come to exhibit the marks of adegenerating theological paradigm that is making less and less sense ofhistorical realities and so can only be sustained through forms of conspiracy

4 One major peer-reviewed journal that has published a significant number of articles aboutAdventismalmost all written by Adventist scholars themselvesis theJournal for the ScientificStudy of Religion. The reason may be that Adventists have a much more centralized institutionaland political structure than most other denominations and this has enabled them to gather awealth of statistical data on their members that other churches cannot easily acquire.

The Theopolitics of Adventist Apocalypticism 221



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theorizing and ad hoc special pleading. In Part Six, I seek to explain why this

is the case. Finally, I will offer some notes on how Adventists might recoverthe progressive theopolitical vision of their pioneers and become an authen-tically prophetic movement once again.

I. Progressive vs. Degenerating Research Programs: Kuhn and Lakatos Revisited 5

The publication in 1962 of Thomas Kuhns now classic work, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions, itself marked a revolution in the philosophy of science.Five decades later, it remains perhaps the most widely read and cited text in

history about the nature of scientific inquiry. Kuhn challenged earlieraccounts of the scientific method that reflected notions of linear progress andrational objectivity, including the still highly influential ideas of his closecontemporary, Karl Popper. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing throughthe 1960s, Popper championed a definition of true science as a field ofsystematic knowledge acquisition that advances through rigorous empiricaltesting leading to definitive confirmation or falsification of theories.6 Kuhn,by contrast, emphasized the rarity of outright falsifications in normalscience, the persistence of conflicting evidence even in highly successfultheories, and the importance of scientific paradigms, that is, research pro-grams rooted in worldviews that might be stubbornly clung to in the face

of anomalies. All historically significant theories have agreed with the facts,but only more or less, Kuhn wrote. Instead of demanding absolute confir-mation or refutation of a theory it was therefore best to ask which of twoactual and competing theories fits the facts better.7

Only when empirical anomalies rise to intolerable levels, Kuhn suggested,do paradigm-shifts or scientific revolutions occur. Often, though, rivalparadigms exist simultaneously for long periods of time, providing equallycompelling accounts of phenomena based upon their own internal logics (notunlike competing political institutions8). Kuhns term for incompatiblescientific paradigms was incommensurability. The Ptolemaic and Coperni-

can models, to cite one example, existed as incommensurable theories along-side each other for approximately 200 years before the accumulating weightof empirical evidence led to a decisive shift away from the geocentric modelof the universe in favor of the heliocentric one. Strictly speaking, though, thegeocentric model was never falsified in the Popperian sense prior to its

5 This section is adapted from a chapter in my book, Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism andthe Problem of Animal Suffering (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014).

6 See, for example, Karl Popper,Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge(London: Routledge, 1963).

7 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 1962), p. 147.

8 Ibid., p. 94.




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rejection by virtually all astronomers.9 The Ptolemaic paradigm was perfectly

capable of positing new epicycles upon epicycles in an ad hoc way to accountfor anomalies. Yet its authoritative status was eroded by new astronomicaldata, which it was unable to account for in as intellectually satisfying a way asthe Copernican system.

One of the implications of Kuhns ideas about scientific inquiry beingmarked by contestation, crises, incommensurability, and shifts among com-peting paradigms is that science must now be seen as part of what sociolo-gists of knowledge have come to call the social construction of reality.Scientific truths are determined as much by historically and culturallyinscribed interpretive paradigms (and the array of theoretical and method-

ological rules that are developed to sustain them) as by their correspondencewith the objective facts of the universe. The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsis thus a key text in the rise of antirealist and postmodern philosophies ofscience (even if this was not Kuhns original intention and although he maywell have been reticent about some of the philosophical uses made of hisideas10). By bringing to light the paradigmatic nature of all scientific research,Kuhn raised the specter of epistemological relativism in the sciences. Hisinsights led to a seemingly insoluble riddle: given the theory-laden nature ofall science and the persistence of anomalies in most if not all scientificparadigms, how can we make value judgments between incommensurablebut internally consistent research programs? And how can we clearly distin-

guish between science and religion or other fields of knowledge?It was in part in response to this Kuhnian problematic of judging between

incommensurable paradigms and establishing lines of demarcation to tellscience from pseudoscience that Imre Lakatos proposed the concept ofprogressive vs. degenerating research programs. Lakatoss approach tothe problem, which in certain ways synthesizes even as it critiques bothKuhns and Poppers positions, was first published as a long chapter in thevolume Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge in 1970. Lakatos may be creditedwith introducing the following now widely used terms to the philosophy ofscience11:

1. Hard Core: The hard core of a scientific theory according to Lakatos isits ultimate explanatory principle, which cannot be changed without

9 If a scientific revolution lies in the refutation of a major theory and in its replacement by anunrefuted rival, Lakatos wrote, the Copernican Revolution took place (at best) in 1838. SeeImre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1,eds. John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978),pp. 17273.

10 Arkady Plotnitsky, Thomas Kuhn, inPostmodernism: The Major Thinkers(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), pp. 20111.

11 The remainder of this section has been adapted from Lakatos, Falsification and theMethodology of Scientific Research Programmes, in The Methodology of Scientific ResearchProgrammes, pp. 8101.




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modifying ones entire paradigm or research agenda. It is a negative

heuristic that forbids questioning, instead redirecting potentially falsify-ing challenges outward to other theories or doctrines that must bear thebrunt of tests and get adjusted and re-adjusted, or even completelyreplaced, to defend the thus-hardened core.12

2. Auxiliary Hypotheses: These second-level or auxiliary hypotheses can beboth theoretical and methodological in nature. Unlike the hard core, theymay undergo significant modification or even abandonment over timewithout calling into question the larger paradigm or research agenda. If anauxiliary hypothesis is deemed especially important in protecting the core,however, it will generate auxiliary hypotheses of its own. Defenders of the

core theory in this case might become deeply committed to defendingwhat was originally an auxiliary theory for fear that altering or abandon-ing it will expose the core to falsification. The relationship between thecore and its protective belt of satellite or auxiliary theories is therefore amutually defining and mutually reinforcing one with lines of demarcationat times becoming blurred.

3. Progressive Research Program: According to Lakatos, a progressiveresearch program must have a consistently generative or content-increasing power. It must a) yield a steady increase in both theoreticaland empirical understanding, and b) offer predictions that will at leastintermittently and retrospectively be corroborated by unanticipated

novel facts. If more and more such facts emerge that are elegantlyand parsimoniously explained by the paradigm it is a truly rigorous andconstructive research agenda.

4. Degenerating Research Program: A degenerating research program, bycontrast, is one in which all or almost all auxiliary hypotheses are purelyad hoc in nature, offered simply to protect the hard core in defensivereaction to challenging data. Degenerating theories are marked by a pro-liferation of theoretical components, which might be mistaken for theo-retical richness or vitality. But on closer examination it is apparent thatthese ad hoc theories cannot keep pace with empirical challenges and new

information. They are unable to predict surprising facts or to lead togenuine discoveries. Internal contradictions arise between the ever-multiplying ad hoc theories offered in defense of the core. What may haveonce appeared as a harmonious orbiting protective shield begins to lookmore and more like a dangerously cluttered field of debris.

It is important to note that a research program may be progressive for atime only at a later date to become degenerating. To illustrate, the hard coreof Newtons physics was his theory of the three laws of dynamics and the lawof gravitation. His positive heuristic was his plan to apply these laws to

12 Ibid., p. 48.




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account for all planetary motions. In the process of doing so, Newton encoun-

tered numerous facts that could not easily be reconciled with his theory. (Allresearch programs, Lakatos writes, grow in a permanent ocean of anoma-lies.13) Rather than abandoning his core, however, Newton developed achain of ever more complex models or auxiliary hypotheses to account forthe data, making frequent adjustments to these second-level theories as heproceeded. After initially positing a fixed-point sun and discovering thisviolated his law of dynamics, for example, he developed an alternative modelin which both the sun and the planets revolved around a common center ofgravity. Newtons auxiliary hypotheses in the end proved to be part of aprogressive research program rather than mere ad hoc theorizing, not

because they eliminated all anomalies, but because they led to a dramaticincrease in both theoretical and empirical understanding. Newtonian physicssteadily explained a host of new data. What is more, his ideas were confirmedthrough the discovery of novel facts, including unobserved planets thatNewton himself never anticipated. Using Newtons research program,Halley calculated, to the minute, the return of a comet as well as its preciselocation in the sky. Seventy-two years later, after both Newton and Halleywere dead, Halleys Comet returned exactly as he had predicted.

Yet despite the stunning success of Newtonian physics, which continues tocommand the awe and respect of scientists, it ultimately became a degenerat-ing research programthat was unable to keep pace with new theoretical as well

as empirical discoveries or resolve persistent problems. This led to theEinsteinian revolution and the research program of the new physics.

II. Murphy and Elliss Application of Lakatoss Theory to the Field of Theology

Lakatoss distinction between progressive and degenerating research pro-grams is helpful not only for thinking about the acquisition of knowledge inthe physical and life sciences. It has been productively applied to socialscientific theories as well.14 And there are good reasons, Nancey Murphyargues, to think of even theology as a scientific endeavor that pursues

systematic knowledge acquisition and includes (in Kuhnian terms) incom-mensurable paradigms and (in Lakatosian terms) both progressive anddegenerating research programs. One of the criticisms that have been leveledat Murphys thesis is that there is insufficient agreement about religious

13 Ibid., p. 6.14 Lakatos himself critiqued Marxs philosophy of history as an example of a degenerating

research program. When events stubbornly contradicted Marxs predictions of the timing andnature of socialist revolution (including his claims that the working class in Europe would fallinto absolute impoverishment, that revolution would first occur in the most industrializedcountries, and that socialist nations would not be in conflict with each other), Marxian theoristsemployed ever more elaborate auxiliary hypotheses to show why he was still right. However,these explanations were purely ad hoc, cooked up after the event to protect Marxian theoryfrom the facts, Lakatos wrote. Ibid., p. 6.




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beliefs to ever warrant calling them scientific.15 We need not concern ourselves

here with the question of whether or not theology is or can be a true scienceor achieve the same level of confirmation as empirical research. The moresignificant and to my mind thoroughly convincing part of Murphys work isher demonstration of conceptual similarities and family resemblances acrossfields of inquiry assumed by many scholars of both religion and science to becompletely different in kind.

A theological hard core, Murphy proposed in 1990 inTheology in the Age ofScientific Reasoning and again in 1996 with George Ellis in On the Moral Natureof the Universe, is a paradigmatic vision that grounds other theological claimsand provides the epistemological lens through which one approaches her-

meneutical and even empirical and historical problems. Theological auxiliaryhypotheses include both methodological and doctrinal propositionsdesigned to support, protect, and elaborate the core. The best way to inter-pret the epistemological status of doctrines, Murphy and Ellis write, is tosee them as auxiliary hypotheses contributing to a research program intheology.16

It is a great deal more difficult in theology than in geology or physics toconfirm discovery of a novel fact or new insight. Indeed, it is impossible toarrive at theological agreements with anything approaching a scientificconsensus. Nevertheless, a progressivetheologicalresearch agenda might bedistinguished from a degenerating one by its ever-expanding compass of

fresh insights and its ability to make surprising sense not only of long-standing difficulties but also of unforeseen challenges or new data as theyarise. Further, it will lead to the recognition or discovery of new theologicaltruths and provide vital inspiration and resources for their elaboration. Itsprimary mode is not one of defensive ad hoc apologetics but rather of fearlessexploration. To illustrate, Murphy and Ellis examine John Howard Yodersseminal 1972 work, The Politics of Jesus. The hard core or paradigmatic heartof Yoders theological research program, they suggest, is his claim a) that themoral character of God is revealed in Jesus renunciation of violence to thepoint of his own death at the hands of his enemies on the cross; and b) that

Jesus cruciform ethic is normative and central for the social and politicalwitness of his followers today. The positive heuristic emerging from thisparadigm is Yoders plan to interpret all traditional Christian doctrines,Scriptural evidence, and data from history in harmony with this understand-ing of the meaning of Christs life. Some auxiliary hypotheses that arise fromYoders research program include methodological theories about the needfor a more sociopolitical analysis of the biblical text, and doctrinal theories

15 Greg Peterson, The Scientific Status of Theology: Imre Lakatos, Method and Demarca-tion,Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, No. 50, March 1998, pp. 2231.

16 Nancey Murphy and George F. R. Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology,Cosmology, and Ethics(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), pp. 1823.




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such as the need to reinterpret the nature of the Trinity and Christs atone-

ment. The Trinity, for Yoder, must now be understood not as three differentrevelations of the divine but as God being most adequately and bindinglyknown in the historical person of Jesus. Justification or being set right withGod, Yoder seeks to show, is only accomplished when Christians are set rightwith their fellow human beings.

Yoders theological paradigm might fulfill the criterion of a progressiveresearch program in several ways. While his full thesis can ultimately only beconfirmed on an eschatological horizon that lies ahead (and so cannot tidilysupplant other readings in the meantime), we can still test his paradigm in thepresent against the weight of textual as well as historical evidence. In The

Politics of Jesus, Yoder provides sophisticated exegetical arguments for inter-preting obscure and often troubling passages. Many of his readings havesubsequently been embraced, refined, and expanded by New Testament schol-ars in surprising and innovative ways. Writing from a historically marginal-ized Anabaptist tradition, his research program has proven hugely influentialon several generations of scholars, pastors, and others from a wide range ofdenominational backgrounds (including perhaps the most influential theo-logical ethicist in the United States in the past several decades, StanleyHauerwas). In a post-Vietnam and now post-Iraq War era, Yoders insistence inthe early 1970s that Christians systematically re-interpret but also anticipate theviolence of the state or empire from a perspective of what we might call

prophetic realismalso seems to have been both prophetic and realistic indeed.Perhaps the greatest challenge to Yoders paradigm is the anomalous his-torical witness of deeply committed Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoefferwho have participated in forms of violence in situations of extremity thatappear to many to be morally legitimate and even profoundly Christian butthat Yoders position compels him to reject, as well as the challenge ofliberationist theologies that embrace the violence of the oppressed.

Yet if we compare Yoders research program with, for example, theincommensurable and still highly influential theopolitical paradigm ofReinhold Niebuhr, it appears to this reader that Yoders paradigm is pro-

gressing while Niebuhrs can no longer command the kind of authority itonce did and may in fact be suffering degenerating tendencies. Niebuhrspolitical ethics can certainly provide ample ad hoc and post hoc justificationsfor war. What they have failed to supply Christians are the critical resourcesto discern the actual character of violence and to know when and how toresist the states call to arms.17 The irony of history is that it is self-describedNiebuhrian realists who often appear the most naively idealistic about thenature of power in the modern world and their own abilities to manage

17 See, for example, George Weigel, Just War and Iraq Wars, First Things, April 2007,pp. 14ff; and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in aViolent World(New York: Basic Books, 2003).




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violence for noble or Christian ends.18 The debate between neo-Anabaptists

and Christian realists will no doubt continue. It is, though, perhaps somemeasure of the formers progressive character as a theological research para-digm that even critics of Yoders theopolitics acknowledge his appeal andworry about the power and spreading influence of his ideas. As a setof commitments for engaging the world, James Hunter writes, neo-Anabaptism is intellectually serious and that is one reason why it hasgrowing appeal among young Christian adults. It provides a credible, evencompelling, script for those who find the account offered by Christian con-servatives distasteful if not dangerous and the narrative by Christian progres-sives unconvincing and irrelevant.19

It is not within the scope of this article, however, to defend Murphy andElliss claim that Yoders theology illustrates an epistemologically progres-sive theological research program. My goal, rather, is to apply the frameworkof progressive vs. degenerating paradigms to the theopolitics of anAmerican-born millenarian movement. With the preceding theoretical back-ground in mind, we may now turn to the case of Seventh-day Adventistapocalypticism. What exactly is the paradigmatic hard core of the move-ments eschatology and apocalyptic identity? Does it have the qualitiesMurphy has described as progressive or rather degenerating theologicalresearch? Or is the case of Adventism in fact more complicated than this,reflecting both progressive and degenerating qualities that suggest the need

for a nuanced periodization of Adventist history and valuation of Advent-isms contributions to the larger Christian community?

III. Is All this But a Cunningly Devised Fable?: The Birth of anApocalyptic Movement

The doctrinal core of Seventh-day Adventism, church historian DouglasMorgan writes (without reference to Lakatoss or Murphys ideas), is adistinctive form of Christian millennialism.20 Adventists trace their roots tothe Millerite movement of the late 1830s and early 1840s, which was part of

the Second Great Awakening that swept much of America during the period.William Miller, a farmer and Baptist revivalist minister from upstate NewYork, developed an elaborate historicist interpretation of the books of Danieland Revelation to predict the timing of Christs return, settling upon some

18John Milbank, The Poverty of Niebuhrianism, in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Lan-guage, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 23356; and Stanley Hauerwas and MichaelBroadway, The Irony of Reinhold Niebuhr: The Ideological Character of Christian Realism, inWilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1997), pp. 4861.

19James Davison Hunter,To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianityin the Late Modern World(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1501.

20 Douglas Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic: The Public Involvement of a MajorApocalyptic Movement (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), p. 3.




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time between 1843 and 1844. His follower Samuel Snow worked out a precise

date of October 22, 1844. Miller devoted himself for several years to preach-ing the immanent second coming of Christ to congregations across NewEngland and attracted a following that historians estimate included any-where between 10,000 and one million believers from diverse denomina-tional backgrounds.21 Millerism also drew great scorn and derision frommany Christiansparticularly after Millers predictions spectacularly failedto materialize. The sense of bitter loss, the shame, and the shattered hopes ofthe Millerite experience were later poignantly expressed by Seventh-dayAdventist pioneer Hiram Edson. I mused in my heart saying, My adventexperience has been the richest and brightest of all my Christian experiences.

If this had proved a failure, what was the rest of my Christian experienceworth? Has the Bible proved a failure? Is there no God, no heaven, no goldenhome city, no paradise? Is all this but a cunningly devised fable?22

A small band of radical Millerites who had eagerly anticipated Christssecond coming and who underwent the humiliation of what historiansnow call the Great Disappointment as well as the existential crisis of theseeming absence of God continued to hold fast to Millers prophetic timelineby developing a new auxiliary hypothesis. The Millerites had been correct intheir calculation of the October 1844 date, they insisted, merely wrong aboutthe event. The autumn of 1844 marked not the end of human history butrather the beginning of Christs judgment of the earth from the most holy

place in the heavenly sanctuary. The event that appeared to all outsiders asdecisive falsification of Millers calculations thus came to be understood byAdventists, sub specie aeternitatis, as a triumphant moment in salvation historyfor those with eyes of faith to see. It was their task to continue to preach thegood news of Christs soon return based upon the Sanctuary Doctrine and tomaintain the patient endurance of the saints, no matter the unbelief andderision of the world, by keeping the commandments of God and the faithof Jesus (in fulfillment of Revelation 14:12). Obedience to the command-ments of God, the early Adventists soon became convinced, includedworshiping on Saturday rather than Sunday in keeping with the Sabbath-

commandment in the Decalogue of Hebrew Scripture and in faithfulimitation of the Christ of the New Testament. Out of the calamity of failedpredictions and collapsed millenarian dreams, Sabbatarian Adventism wasthus born, leading to the formal organization of the Seventh-day AdventistChurch in 1863.

Among the pioneers of the Adventist church was a young Methodistwoman named Ellen Harmon who was 17 years old at the time of the Great

21 David L. Rowe, Millerites: A Shadow Portrait, in The Disappointed: Millerism andMillenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler (Knoxville,TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), p. 2.

22 As cited in Morgan,Adventism and American Republic, p. 24.




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Disappointment (most Adventist leaders were very young at the start of the

movement). Harmon, who later married James White and so became EllenWhite, in many ways fits the description of a classic female Christian mystic.In the 1880s, White would describe the year 1844when she and the otherMillerites lived with an unshakable sense of Christsnearnessas the happi-est year in her life. Her exceptional religious propensities, Malcolm Bulland Keith Lockhart write, originated not in doctrinal concerns but in anintense desire for experience of the divine presence and a simple desire tofeel the love of Jesus.23 White had only a third-grade education, having beenforced to drop out of school when she was nine years old after being struckin the head by a rock thrown by a classmate that left her in a coma for nearly

three weeks. But she wrote prolifically and often profoundly, and herintensely devotional writings centered upon the theme of Gods character oflove continue to this day to be regarded by most Adventists as an authorita-tive guide to Biblical truth and manifestation of the spiritual gift of prophecy.

In 1845, during a prayer meeting with five other women in Portland,Maine, following the Great Disappointment, White received her first vision inwhich she saw the Millerites journeying along a path to the City of God, aswell as vivid scenes of the destruction of the wicked and the New Jerusalem.Her words are worth quoting at some length for what they convey of thetenor of early Adventism and of Whites prophetic imaginationher way oftelling truth so that, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, it will not be

readily coopted or domesticated by hegemonic interpretive power and sothat it confronts people with a vision that is urgently out beyond the ordi-nary and the reasonable.24 I seemed to be surrounded with light, and to berising higher and higher from the earth, White recalled:

I turned to look for the Advent people in the world, but could not findthem, when a voice said to me, Look again, and look a little higher. Atthis, I raised my eyes, and saw a straight and narrow path, cast up highabove the world. On this path the advent people were traveling to the citywhich was at the farther end of the path. They had a bright light set up

behind them at the beginning of the path, which an angel told me was themidnight cry. This light shone all along the path, and gave light for theirfeet, so that they might not stumble . . . Soon we heard the voice of Godlike many waters, which gave us the day and hour of Jesus coming. Theliving saints, 144,000 in number, knew and understood the voice, whilethe wicked thought it was thunder and an earthquake. When God spoke

23 Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and theAmerican Dream, second edition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 22.

24 It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, WalterBrueggemann writes, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single onethe king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. See Walter Brueggemann, The PropheticImagination(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), pp. xivxv, 40.




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the time, He poured upon us the Holy Ghost, and our faces began to light

up and shine with the glory of God, as Moses did when he came downfrom Mount Sinai. The 144,000 were all sealed, and perfectly united. Ontheir foreheads was written, God, New Jerusalem, and a glorious starcontaining Jesus new name. At our happy, holy state the wicked wereenraged, and would rush violently up to lay hands on us to thrust us intoprison, when we would stretch forth the hand in the name of the Lord, andthey would fall helpless to the ground. Then it was that the synagogue ofSatan knew that God had loved us who could wash one anothers feet, andsalute the brethren with a holy kiss, and they worshiped at our feet. 25

Hundreds of additional visions followed in which White would fall intotrance-like states, sometimes for hours at a time. Her intense religious expe-riences and vivid descriptions of the messages God conveyed to her, oftenthrough mediating angels, were accepted by the early Adventists as confirm-ing evidence of Gods abiding presence in their midst. Within a short time,Whites visions included increasingly elaborate warnings of a coming timeof trouble centered upon the eschatological significance of seventh daySabbath worship. In an 1847 letter she described an astounding vision inwhich she was transported by an angel into the Holy of Holies in theheavenly sanctuary where she gazed upon the Ten Commandments writtenwith the finger of God. I saw that God had not changed the Sabbath, forHe never changes. But the Pope had changed it from the seventh to the firstday of the week; for he was to change times and laws, White reported.26

During a Sabbath meeting on January 5, 1849, White was again transported invision to the most holy place in heaven where she saw Christ intercedingfor Israel. But the merciful High Priest in heaven, she warned, would soonassume the terrifying role of divine avenger upon those who rejected theSabbath:

Then I saw that Jesus would not leave the most holy place until every casewas decided either for salvation or destruction: and that the wrath of Godcould not come until Jesus had finished his work in the most holyplacelaid off his priestly attire and clothed himself with the garmentsof vengeance . . . Then I was shown a company who were howling inagony. On their garments was written in large charactersthou artweighed in the balance, and found wanting. I asked who this companywere. The angel said, these are they who have once kept the Sabbath andhave given it up.27

25 Ellen White, Early Writings of Ellen G. White (Hagerstown, MD: Review and HeraldPublishing, 2000), pp. 1415.

26 Ellen White,Life Sketches of Ellen White(Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1915), p. 101.27 Ibid., pp. 11617.




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Whites earliest visions served as essentially auxiliary hypotheses to

protect the hard core of Millerite belief in the eschatological importance of1844. But the church quickly developed a remnant theology according towhich Whites prophecies were themselves confirmation of the movementsunique election as Gods true church amid rampant Protestant apostasy.Whites prophetic authority thus itself came to be part of the hard core ofAdventist identity. Adventists up to the present have resisted any modifica-tion of William Millers timeline, not because Millerism represents the best ofcontemporary biblical or historical scholarship, but because doing so wouldrequire a significant paradigm shift regarding the nature of Whites inspira-tion and visionary claims. Arguably, what were originally core and auxiliary

in early Adventist theology thus effectively reversed roles; Adventists nolonger hold fast to the accuracy of Whites visions to support the core doc-trine of 1844 so much as they hold fast to the accuracy of Millerite date-settingin order to sustain the core belief in Ellen Whites prophetic authorityandby extension Adventisms own privileged status as Gods remnant people.

In the face of highly embarrassing revelations in the 1970s that Whitesinspiration included copying large amounts of material from other writerswithout acknowledgment, Adventists have developed complex psychologi-cal, historical, and theological auxiliary theories of how prophetic inspirationworks to account for what others have labeled plagiarism.28 Yet one may livewith a great deal of cognitive dissonance about White and the meaning of

1844 and still be a committed Adventist since the denomination has claimedfrom its start to be a people committed to a non-creedal and progressiveapproach to truth, as well as to the twin watchwords of the Protestant Ref-ormation:sola scriptura and sola fides.29 Whites pronouncements for Adven-tists, at least in theory, are fallible and must always be tested against thesupreme authority of Scripture (although for many conservative Adventists,reasoning in a perfectly closed and tautological hermeneutical circle, Scrip-ture can only be interpreted in harmony with Whites prophetic authority inharmony with Scripture). White did not originate church doctrines nor wereher visions seen by Adventists as superseding biblical teaching (in the

manner of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon). Rather, her role asprophet was one of confirming consensus and providing guidance to the

28 See, for example, Eric Anderson, Ellen White and Reformation Historians, Spectrum,Vol. 9, no. 3, (1978), pp. 236.

29 The concept of progressive truth or present truth in early Adventism was perhaps bestexpressed by White herself. There is no excuse for anyone taking the position that there is nomore truth to be revealed, and that all our expositions of Scripture are without an error, shewrote. The fact that certain doctrines have been held as truth for many years by our people, isnot a proof that our ideas are infallible. Age will not make error into truth, and truth can affordto be fair. No true doctrine will lose anything by close investigation; as cited in George Knight,

A Search for Identity: The Development of Adventist Beliefs (Hagerstown, MD: Review and HeraldPublishing, 2000), pp. 245.




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fledgling movement from outside the normal channels of interpretation,

tradition, reason, and experience. She was, as Morgan writes, Adventismsspiritual wild card.30

Adventist apocalypticism was first developed not by Ellen White,however, but by another pioneer, John N. Andrews, in a series of articlesbeginning in December 1851 in theSecond Advent Review and Sabbath Herald(now known simply as theAdventist Review). Andrews was 23 years old at thetime and like White had experienced the Great Disappointment while still ateenager. Like White, he lacked formal education beyond a few years ofelementary school, but he was a gifted autodidact who learned seven lan-guages and has been described as the foremost Adventist intellectual of the

19th

century and the architect of Adventist doctrines.31

Andrews was alsothe Adventist churchs first overseas missionary, starting a publishing housein Switzerland where he died in 1883. The denominations flagship institu-tion of higher learning, Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, isnamed in his honor. Like virtually all of the Adventist pioneersincludingJames White, Uriah Smith, J. N. Loughborough, R. F. Cottrell, and JosephBatesAndrews was a fervent anti-Trinitarian who denied the full divinityof Christ, in part on the grounds that the Council of Nicaea was an illegitimateimposition of papal authority.32 Adventism was born according to what otherChristians would classify as an Arian heresy and many if not most of itsearly founders went to their graves without a classically orthodox under-

standing of the nature of Christ.Following widely accepted hermeneutical methods and long-standing

Protestant tradition, as well as the teachings of William Miller, Andrewsidentified Roman Catholicism with Babylon, the anti-Christ, and thebeast symbolized in Revelation 13:18 due to the Catholic Churchs historicalsuppression of liberty of conscience and persecution of those who defiedRomes authority.33 There was nothing particularly original or (in the contextof their day) controversial in these Adventist beliefs, which had a long historytracing back to medieval Europe and which became the dominant view inpost-Reformation England and Puritan America. What set Andrews inter-

pretation of Revelation 13 apart from others was his innovative linking (build-ing on an article by his fellow Adventist, the abolitionist ship captain andrevivalist minister Joseph Bates) of the Catholic Church in dark alliance with

30 Morgan,Adventism and the American Republic, p. 24.31 As cited in Reinder Bruinsma, Seventh-day Adventist Attitudes Toward Roman Catholicism,

18441965(Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1994), pp. 1012.32 See Gerhard Pfandl, The Doctrine of the Trinity Among Seventh-day Adventists, Journal

of the Adventist Theological Society, Vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 16079.33 In an 1854 article, however, Andrews suggested that the meaning of Babylon in the book

of Revelation was not to be restricted to Catholicism alone but was an image of every corruptreligious organization that had ever existed, including Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant

bodies. See John Andrews, What is Babylon?, in Review and Herald, February 21, 1854, p. 36.




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a second beast that was also depicted in the book of Revelation. This creature

had two horns like a lamb but spake as a dragon. It caused fire to comedown from heaven and controlled the ability of people to buy and sell. Itforced people to worship the image of the [first] beast and ordered thatwhoever refused to worship the first beasts image should be killed(Revelation 13:1117). Other interpreters of the period argued that this crea-ture symbolized (variously) the Byzantine Empire, Napoleonic France, ormonarchical England. But in Andrews startling and deeply subversivereading, the second beast of Revelation 13, with its morally ambiguous quali-ties of both lamb and dragon, was one thing alone. It was none other than theUnited States of America.

The Republic had originated in principles of religious liberty and politicalequality, symbolized by the two lamb-like horns, Andrews declared, but itwas steadily betraying these principles as was most glaringly evident in themoral abomination of slavery:

If all men are born free and equal, how do we then hold three millionsof slaves in bondage? Why is it that the Negro race are reduced to therank of chattels personal, and bought and sold like brute beasts? If theright of private judgment be allowed, why then are men expelled fromthese religious bodies for no greater crime than that of attempting to

obey God in some thing wherein the word of God may not be in accor-dance with their creed?34

The intolerance that had led the Protestant establishment to persecute theQuakers, to expel the Millerites from their congregations, to support theFugitive Slave Law, to expend millions of dollars constructing beautifulchurches in the manner of impressive European cathedrals while neglectingmatters of social justice (monuments of popish pride that virtuallyexclude the poor, Andrews charged35), and to reject the truth of the biblicalSabbath would soon lead it to unite with the Catholic Church to trample

freedom of conscience and persecute the Adventists as Gods true church fortheir principled refusal to worship on Sunday. The climax of this persecution,Andrews concluded, would be the passing of a death edict by the UnitedStates government upon all Sabbath-keepers. At this harrowing moment,Christ would at last return to save and vindicate the Adventists and destroythose who followed after the beast of Rome with its profane Sundayworshipthe image formed by the Anti-Christ (Satan acting throughthe institution of the papacy) in blasphemous parody of Gods divine com-

34John Andrews, Thoughts on Revelation XIII and XIV, inReview and Herald, May 19, 1851,pp. 816.

35 As cited in Bruinsma,Seventh-day Adventist Attitudes Toward Roman Catholicism, p. 98.




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mandments in the Decalogue of Hebrew Scripture. Peace and safety is the

delusive dream in which men indulge whilst the wrath of God hangs overthem, Andrews thundered.36

IV. The Plausibility and Potency of the Early Adventist Prophetic Imagination

Early Adventist Sabbatarianism was therefore at its heart a radical theo-political critique of both secular political as well as traditional religiousauthorities. The early Adventist apocalyptic and prophetic imagination is bestseen as a principled rebellion against Americas civil religion with its claimsto be progressively ushering in the millennium.37 Andrews inverted the storyof the nations founding as a shining City on a Hill so that it now read as a taleof Babylon rising. The descendants of the persecuted pilgrims would becomethe persecutors. Americas precious civil liberties would not expand butsteadily contract as the country descended ever deeper into intolerance andinjustice, climaxing in a collapsing of the vital wall of separation of churchand state in a revived and oppressive Christendom project that would recallthe darkest days of the Catholic Inquisition. The early Adventistswho by1863 numbered no more than 3,500 members38were convinced that all ofthese events would unfold within their lifetimes.

While these beliefs will seem utterly fantastical to many readers today,it is important to recall the intense social and religious marginalization the

early Adventists felt after the Great Disappointment. These encounters withAmericas Protestant establishment and the civil authorities in an atmosphereof growing conflict between North and South led to a heightened sense offoreboding and fear of persecution among Adventistsand to a penetratingconsciousness of real intolerance in Americas social order. The historicisthermeneutical methods that Andrews used to interpret biblical apocalypticliterature were widely accepted at the time, giving his readings additionalplausibility. Devout evangelical William Lloyd Garrison was using similarapocalyptic and prophetic language to condemn the United States govern-ment on the slavery issue in the face of angry lynch mobs as far north asBoston. And nativist anti-Catholic conspiracy theoriesfuelled by ethnicxenophobia and social resentment at the willingness of poor Catholic immi-grants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy to work for very low wageswere awidespread phenomenon in America throughout the century. In his classic1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadterquotes from an 1855 Texas newspaper article that illustrates the social contextfor early Adventist attitudes toward the Catholic Church. It is a notoriousfact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very

36 Andrews, Thoughts on Revelation XIII and XIV, pp. 816.37 See Malcolm Bull, The Seventh-day Adventists: Heretics of American Civil Religion,

Sociological Analysis, Vol. 50, no. 2 (1989).38 Bruinsma,Seventh-day Adventist Attitudes Toward Roman Catholicism, p. 82.




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moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our politi-

cal, civil, and religious institutions, the article declared:

We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its wayinto our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted withthe infectious venom of Catholicism . . . The Pope has recently sent hisambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect ofwhich is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic Church throughoutthe United States . . . These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting ourSenators; reprimanding our statesmen; propagating the adulterous unionof Church and state . . .39

Such paranoia was unfortunately not eased by the words and actions of theCatholic Church itself, which, although weakened by the French revolution,behaved throughout the century in highly disturbing if not beastly ways inperfect keeping with the Adventist eschatological script. In his 1831 encycli-cal,Mirari vos, for example, Pope Gregory XVI denounced religious liberty,freedom of the press, and any separation of church and state. 40 The Papacy,Gregory declared, stood firmly opposed to that absurd and erroneousproposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintainedfor everyone, as well as to the never sufficiently denounced freedom topublish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people.41 TheCatholic Church, the letter continued, has always taken action to destroy theplague of bad books. The Waldensians and other such sons of Belial, whowere the sores and disgrace of the human race, Gregory inveighed, hadreceived a richly deserved anathema from the Holy See.

In fact, the Waldensians had not simply been anathematized but had beenpersecuted with genocidal ferocity by the Catholic Church to the verge ofextinction, and these stories of the Waldensians and other Protestant martyrswere vividly retold by the Adventists as a reminder of what the CatholicChurch might do again if given the kinds of secular political powers it onceheld and for which it apparently still longed. Mirari vos ends with what to

Adventists could only sound as a deeply ominous agenda for the future: Wepredict happier times for religion and government from the plans of thosewho desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to breakthe mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood.

The charge laid by Andrews, White, and others that the Catholic Churchidolatrously usurped divine authority was seemingly dramatically confirmed

39 As cited in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 8.

40 R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation(Lanthan, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), p. 43.

41 Pope Gregory XVI, Encyclical Letter, Mirari vos: On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism,August 15, 1831, on the web at: http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16mirar.htm


http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16mirar.htmhttp://www.papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16mirar.htm


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by unfolding historical events. In 1854, in the Papal Bull Ineffabilius Deus,

Pope Pius IX proclaimed as dogma the Immaculate Conception of the VirginMarya shocking affront, in the eyes of Protestants, to the teachings of theNew Testament about the uniquely sinless nature of Christ. It was the firsttime that a Pope had asserted a dogma ex cathedrain history. In 1870, duringVatican I, the teaching of Papal infallibility was formally defined anddefended for the first time.

Strident words from Rome were accompanied by oppressive actions inclear violation of basic principles of freedom of conscience, human rights,and religious liberty. In 1858, an international controversy erupted whenpapal police, acting under direct orders of Pius IX, seized a seven-year-old

Jewish boy in Bologna rumored to have been baptized as an infant by aChristian family servant and turned him into a ward of the Vatican to beraised a Sunday-worshiping Catholic. Edgardo Mortaras parents were toldthey could only have their son back if they converted to Roman Catholicism.They refused and the boy eventually became an Augustinian priest chargedwith the task of helping to convert the Jews. In 1859, the Review and Heraldpublished an article concerning the Mortara Case. The spirit of the Inqui-sition yet lives, it warned. The Papacy is a fearful tyranny over every manshousehold, the article continued, ready to trample at any moment upon thedearest rights of nature, the fondest pledges of affection.42 The article wasnot written by Adventists, however, but was republished by them from an

article that first appeared in the abolitionist press. Its conclusion was thatwhat had happened to Mortara was in fact already happening daily in theUnited States, with the children of slaves being violently separated from theirparents at their masters whims.

The article, having been circulated but not written by Adventists, illustratesthe non-uniqueness of Adventist views of the Catholic Church for theperiodalthough in one sense, as Reinder Bruinsma documents, Adventistanti-Catholicismwasunique: Adventist writers were, if anything, consider-ably more restrained than other Protestants in their theological polemicsagainst Catholics since their most immediate fear was not the Catholic

Church as such but rather the apostate Protestant establishment with itspersecuting tendencies in the beasts image.These fears too were not without some historical justification. In the 1890s,

more than 70 Adventists who worshipped on Saturday and ploughed theirfields on Sunday were arrested and thrown into jails in Southern states suchas Tennessee, Georgia, and Arkansas under so-called Sunday Blue lawswritten to enforce legislatively the values of a Christian nation. TheseAdventist dissenters for religious liberty and freedom of conscience werelevied stiff fines. Their property was confiscated. In some cases they were

42 The Mortara Case at Washington, Review and Herald, Vol. 13, no.24, May 5, 1859,pp. 18687.




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pressed into chain gangs for their refusal to adhere to dominant Protestant

religious understandings. All of these factsas well as Ellen Whites visionsconfirming and elaborating Andrews apocalyptic predictionsgo far toexplain why the early Adventists, as Yankee dissenters and champions ofpolitical and religious liberty, so resolutely opposed not only the CatholicChurch but even more significantly mainstream Protestant America and theUnited States government, which they now cast in the language of the beastlysymbolism of the book of Revelation. Nineteenth-century social and politicalrealitiesnot detached biblical exegesisexplain why Adventist eschatol-ogy took the peculiar shape it did.

Far more difficult to understand is the fact that official Adventist eschatol-

ogy has undergone literally no modifications in its broad outline since theearly 1850s.

V. Adventist Apocalypticism as Progressive Research Program

For a time, one might argue in Lakatosian perspective, Adventist apo-calypticism constituted a surprisingly progressive theological researchprogram. (Research paradigms, we should recall, have an evolving characterover time; they may be progressive at one stage only to become, at a laterphase, degenerating, or vice versa.) Whatever their shortcomings, the Adven-

tist pioneers were animated by commendable moral concerns for socialjustice. Many if not most early Adventists were pacifists in the Radical Ref-ormation and Garrisonian abolitionist traditions and thus staunchly opposedto violence and political tyranny of any kind. During the Spanish-AmericanWar, they emergedin sharp opposition to many mainline Christians, whoembraced the conflict as a civilizing crusadeas outspoken and propheticcritics of American imperialism.43 Their reading of Revelation also attunedthem in vital ways to both theological and historical realities that many otherProtestants had not yet grasped.

Politically, this translated into vigorous activism in the courts in defense ofthe rights of other minorities whose liberty of conscience was also threatened

by dominant Protestant America, including Jews, atheists, and Catholics.Ironically and somewhat paradoxically, Adventists opposed virulent mani-festations of anti-Catholicism on the grounds that bigoted discriminationtoward Catholic believers was itself paying homage to the European Catho-lic principle. As the dean of American religious studies Martin E. Martywrites, Adventists made major contributions to the American legal traditionby helping expand the liberties of all Americans, illustrating the creativerole of marginal and outsider groups.44 Adventists have remained (with

43 See Douglas Morgan, Apocalyptic Anti-Imperialists, Spectrum Magazine, Vol. 22 (January1993).

44 Martin E. Marty, Forward, to Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic, p. xii.




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some problematic exceptions) dedicated civil libertarians up to the present,

opposed to any union of church and state and far more likely to sidewith the ACLU than conservative evangelicals on matters such as prayer inpublic schools.

Sociologically, Adventist rejection of the American civil religion led thedenomination to imitate many of Americas social functions by developingan impressive parallel network of institutions including schools, hospitals,and publishing houses aimed at allowing Adventists to live as a faithfulremnant inside the belly of the beast without being completely absorbedby it. For being an apocalyptic movement anticipating the soon-coming endof the world, Adventists have in fact shown a remarkable zeal and talent

for long-term institution building. In consequence, it is possible for atwentieth-century Adventist to spend his entire life within the Adventistsubculture, Bull writes. He or she can be educated from nursery tograduate school entirely by Adventist teachers, receive medical attentiononly from Adventist doctors, work only for denominational institutions orbusinesses, travel all over the world as a guest of Adventist missions, retireto one of the churchs rest homes, and expect to die in the Adventist hos-pital in which he or she was born.45 Many Adventist church leaders, it cansafely be said, do not have a single close friend who is not a fellow Adven-tist. Yet the very institutionalism that allows for members to spend theirentire lives secure within the Adventist subculture has also continually

renewed that culture. Highly educated Adventist scholars and medical pro-fessionalswho typically earn their degrees from Americas and Europesmajor research universitieshave helped to translate the outside worldfor those inside the community while also presenting a non-sectarian sideof Adventism to non-members.46 While highly sectarian in some regards,Adventism thus does not have the kind of insularity of Amish or ultra-orthodox Jewish communities. It is a deviant subculture that remains criti-cally engaged with its surrounding culture. It is also largely invisible tomost non-members since Adventists have typically avoided entering intosocial and political controversies that would attract negative attention to

themselves and have tended to shun campaigning in partisan politics(while still actively participating in elections and in some cases running forpublic office47).

45 Bull, The Seventh-day Adventists, pp. 18485.46 For example, a 2010 documentary about Adventists entitled The Adventists directed by

award-winning non-Adventist filmmaker Martin Doblmeier was aired nationally on PBS sta-tions. The film offered a highly positive picture of Adventists focused on the churchs commit-ment to providing excellent medical care to non-members. Many if not most of the Adventistsfeatured in the film by Doblmeier to explain the church to outsiders were individuals whorepresent the most progressive or liberal wings of Adventist thought.

47 The most prominent recent Adventists in American political office have included: Con-gressional representatives Sheila Jackson Lee (D) of Texas and Roscoe Bartlett (R) of Maryland,and the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia, John Street (20002008). In 2012, the Adventist son of




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Doctrinally, Adventist concern for recovering the lost meaning of the

Sabbath led them to cultivate a rich theology and practice of Sabbath-keepingthat theologians of other traditions are only now beginning to discover.Although many of the churchs pioneers were Arians or semi-Ariansa factthat continues to be evident in many aspects of Adventist church life, includ-ing the intense preoccupation among many of its members with achievingdoctrinal as well as moral perfectionas a result of Whites prophetic inter-vention, Adventists unambiguously embraced the doctrine of the Trinity inthe 1890s and so today stand within the fold of classically orthodox NiceneChristianity.48 Their intense study of Scripture with a view toward cosmicconflict and theodicy themes led them to reject the almost universally held

doctrine of their day of eternal torment of the wicked in favor of a sophisti-cated hermeneutical defense of the seemingly more compassionate doctrineof annihilationism (the idea increasingly embraced by progressive andeven some conservative evangelicals that God will finally destroy the unre-pentant wicked so that they simply cease to exist). It also led them to arejection of dualistic anthropologies in favor of a metaphysical holism that fitswell with Nancey Murphys own research program of developing a theo-logical anthropology of non-reductive physicalism.

This understanding of the relationship between mind, body, and spiritfueled Adventist concern for health reform and medical care, so that thedenomination is today perhaps best known to the general public for its

healthy lifestyle practices (Adventists do not drink or smoke and have amongthe highest life expectancies in the world) and for its many state-of-the-arthospitals and clinics around the globe dedicated to alleviating physicalsuffering. Some of these hospitals have conducted cutting edge scientificresearch, perhaps the most famous example being the controversial 1984transplant operation at Loma Linda Hospital in California conducted byAdventist surgeons in which a baby received a baboon heart. Finally, onecannot help but add, every time someone pours a bowl of Kellogg cereal theyare enjoying an Adventist invention originally created by health reformerJohn Harvey Kellogg to promote vegetarianismanother distinctive Adven-

tist concern ahead of its time.

VI. Adventist Apocalypticism as Degenerating Research Program

Yet in the past 160 years official Adventist eschatology has undergone nosignificant changes either in its broad predictions or in its historicist methods;and with ever-increasing distance from 1844 and the original religious, social,and political milieu of the pioneers, the Adventist apocalyptic script has

migrant Mexican farm-workers and Harvard-trained medical doctor Raul Ruiz was elected as aDemocrat to Congress, representing Californias 36th congressional district.

48 See Gerhard Pfandl, The Doctrine of the Trinity Among Seventh-day Adventists, Journalof the Adventist Theological Society, Vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 16079.




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taken on an increasingly surreal and ad hoc quality in much Adventist

theological discourse. What has changed in Adventism since the middle ofthe nineteenth century is not the grand narrative of immanent catastropheand persecution of Sabbath-keepers leading to Christs return but rather therelative prominence now given to the differentdramatis personaein the script.Adventists in the United States today collectively exhibit little passion forprophetic modes of critique of the violence or structural injustices of theAmerican empire. They no longer boldly name the second beast of Rev-elation in the present tense as they once did in response to the evils of slaveryand U.S. imperialism in the Spanish-American War. Instead, they have byand large come to accept the conservative evangelical myth of America as an

essentially benign and God-led nation whose military serves as the guarantorof world peace and even of Adventist religious liberty. America willbecomethe persecuting beast of Revelation, to be surebut only in the future underdiabolical Catholic influence, making uncritical nationalism, flag veneration,and cheerful compliance in Americas wars (for God and country49)entirely permissible for most Adventists in the interim.50 The CatholicChurch, by contrast, remains the unquestionable temporal manifestation ofthe anti-Christ with no possibility of change in Adventist eschatology. Likethe prophet Jonah, it seems that Adventists will be bitterly disappointed ifGod does not smite the Romish Ninevites.

But Nineveh has clearly undergone some very significant changes over

the past century. As a result, Adventist apocalypticism is no longer authen-tically prophetic in tone as it was at the denominations founding so much asit is invidiously conspiratorial. A prominent Adventist evangelist holds aseries of meetings in Rome based upon Millerite timelines and nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism and returns to the United States suffering from anagging fatigue. Whispers begin to circulate among highly educated andotherwise rational church officials: Maybe he was poisoned by the Jesuits.An Adventist theologian invites two Catholic scholars to deliver a guestlecture at a major Adventist university. A student launches an online attack

49 For God and Country is the title of a magazine produced by the churchs North AmericaDivision to distribute among the thousands of Adventists currently serving in the U.S. militaryas full combatants. It features articles of spiritual and psychological uplift while studiouslyavoiding any mention of the churchs pacifist or apocalyptic heritage. Visually, however, thepublication is often an unabashed celebration of nationalistic symbolism and martial values thatwould have been unfathomable to the Adventist pioneers (including, for example, photographsof soldiers in heroic poses, armed with assault rifles as they stand before the American flag). SeeFor God and Country, No. 3 (2012), p. 29.

50 A striking illustration of this change in attitudes toward the United States in prophecy,Douglas Morgan shows, is the visual imagery used by Adventists to depict America in itspublications. In the 1850s, the American beast was shown in Adventist artwork as a trulyterrifying and ferocious monster. By the 1950s, America was often visually depicted as either arelatively unthreatening lamb (albeit with a disturbing glint in its eyes) or a buffalo exhalingsome slightly angry puffs of steam from its nostrils (symbolizing latent violent potential). SeeMorgan,Adventism and the American Republic, pp. 758.




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campaign denouncing the professor with reference to anti-Catholic state-

ments made by Ellen White. Soon the Adventist scholars mailbox is filledwith scores of angry letters, many of which, he reports, are simply hate mail,filled with animosity toward Catholics and me for inviting two Catholicpriests to feed the wine of Babylon to our students. 51 There have been somerigorous and sophisticated Adventist attempts to mine the churchs apoca-lyptic heritage for new moral and theological insights. At the level of mar-ginal or folk Adventism and various para-church ministries, though, claimsof Catholic infiltrators in Adventist colleges and universities, and even in thehalls of the General Conference, abound. Officials at the General Conferenceas well as conservative theologians for their part warn members to be vigilant

against Catholic thought infiltrating Adventist classrooms and churches, espe-cially cloaked in the garb of evangelical theology.52 Mainstream (though by nomeans monolithic) Adventist beliefs today include the view, taught as part ofthe officially approved curriculum in all Adventist high schools, that any daynow the Catholic Church will join forces with Protestant evangelicals to enacta mandatory Sunday worship law, leading to a death sentence upon Seventh-day Adventists, who alone among Americans will continue steadfastly toworship on Saturday in obedience to Gods commands.

Adventism thus often presents itself to the world (or arrives in the worldsmailboxes, as the case may be) in the form of tracts featuring lurid imageryof the beasts of Revelation along with sensational promises of initiation into

the Bibles hidden amazing facts or secret codes, the knowledge of whichwill enable an elect few to escape a doomed planet. Every latest news head-linefrom the election of John F. Kennedy, to the fall of the Soviet Union,to the rise of the European Union, to financial upheaval on Wall Street, totsunamis in Southeast Asiaprovides ample fodder for Adventist evange-lists skilled at continually reworking the familiar (and for many Adventistscomforting) tale of impending global calamity and nefarious Catholic designsto force every knee to bow to the Roman Pontiff. It takes no prophet to seethat the planet very wellmightbe doomed or to point out that through muchof its history the Catholic Church did indeed inflict great violence on reli-

gious dissenters. Nor is it difficult to convince many Americans or othersaround the world that the U.S. government is on the verge of exertingtyrannical control over their lives. For some struggling to make sense ofglobal instability and political, social, and ecological crises, this literaturetherefore has its appeal. And the Adventist apocalyptic scenariowhichwarns that internal contradictions in the American civil religion will finally

51 As cited by Bonnie Dwyer, Speaking of Babylon and Love in the City by the Bay,Spectrum Magazine, November 30, 2011, on the web at: http://spectrummagazine.org/blog/2011/11/30/speaking-babylon-and-love-city-bay

52 See, for example, Fernando Canale, The Emerging Church: What Does it Mean? AndWhy Should We Care?, Adventist Review, June 10, 2010, on the web at: http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383


http://spectrummagazine.org/blog/2011/11/30/speaking-babylon-and-love-city-bayhttp://spectrummagazine.org/blog/2011/11/30/speaking-babylon-and-love-city-bayhttp://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383http://spectrummagazine.org/blog/2011/11/30/speaking-babylon-and-love-city-bayhttp://spectrummagazine.org/blog/2011/11/30/speaking-babylon-and-love-city-bay


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lead it to abandon its democratic virtues and impose an oppressive theocratic

statemay not be so farfetched even in non-Adventist perspective. In theevent of massive and repeated terrorist strikes or an environmental catastro-phe, journalist Chris Hedges warns in words that read like an excerpt froman Adventist evangelistic tract, an authoritarian state church could riseascendant within American democracy.53

Meanwhile, however, anomalous data that severely challenges thehard core of the Adventist apocalyptic narrative and remnant self-understanding is quietly but resolutely pushed aside by the guardians of thefaith. Adventists have yet to wrestle seriously with the theological implica-tions of very significant changes not only within Americas social order since

the Civil War, but also within Catholicism in the past five decades, includingits official embrace of religious liberty and freedom of conscience and itsrepudiation of the death penalty in the name of a consistent ethic of protect-ing human life (at a time when many conservative Adventists support thedeath penalty).54 For most Adventists, Vatican II may as well have neveroccurred. There is little awareness among rank and file Adventists of Catholi-cisms significant contributions to religious liberty, social justice, and humanrights in the twentieth century. There is no sober reckoning by most Adven-tists with the fact that the Catholic Church is today severely weakened inmuch of the world, its ranks ravaged by scandals and the inroads of secular-ism in the West and Pentecostalism in the developing South. There is little if

any acknowledgement of the fact that countries with majority Catholic popu-lations are today among the most religiously tolerant in the world, manyhaving even fewer governmental restrictions on religious expression than theUnited States (according to recent studies by the Pew Forum).55 Today themost restrictive regimes in the world when it comes to matters of religiousliberty are overwhelmingly Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, or secular authoritar-ian states such as China and Vietnam. But these parts of the world were notincluded in Ellen Whites apocalyptic visions or in J. N. Andrews Eurocentricexposition of the book of Revelation, and so they barely figure in contempo-rary Adventist apocalypticism either.56

53 Chris Hedges,War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning(New York: Anchor Books, 2002), p. 148.54 During a 1999 visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II appealed to Protestant America

to follow the European Unions lead and abolish the death penalty entirely as both cruel andunnecessary. See Cardinal Renato R. Martino, Death Penalty is Cruel and Unnecessary, on theweb at: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=877

55 See Global Restrictions on Religion, a report of the Pew Forum on Religion and PublicLife, December 2009, on the web at: http://pewforum.org/Government/Global-Restrictions-on-Religion.aspx

56 Andrews mentions Islam in his 1851 reading of Revelation in a single sentence: Moham-medanism is introduced in this prophecy under the symbol of locusts, but its power departedwith the second woe. I have found a single reference to Islam in the corpus of Ellen Whiteswritings (which are contained in a searchable online database by the Ellen G. White Estate). In1892, she wrote, Mohammedanism has its converts in many lands, and its advocates deny thedivinity of Christ. Shall this faith be propagated, and the advocates of truth fail to manifest


http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=877http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=877http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=877http://pewforum.org/Government/Global-Restrictions-on-Religion.aspxhttp://pewforum.org/Government/Global-Restrictions-on-Religion.aspxhttp://pewforum.org/Government/Global-Restrictions-on-Religion.aspxhttp://pewforum.org/Government/Global-Restrictions-on-Religion.aspxhttp://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=877


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All such facts, which fly in the face of the millenarian predictions of the

pioneers, are understood by most Adventist members simply as the lullbefore the storm of Catholicisms final assault, with the connivance of theAmerican government and apostate Protestants, upon religious liberty andGods true Sabbath day. The beast may be silent but it is not sleeping and nonew evidence can falsify the Adventist apocalyptic script. For Adventists(insofar as one may generalize about what is in fact a diverse and increasinglypluralistic social movement that includes a small but significant liberal orprogressive wing), the Inquisition is perennially on the verge of beingrekindled, with Adventists cast for all time in the role of last heroes ofSalvation History and final scapegoats of the anti-Christs efforts to crush the

Protestant principles ofsola scriptura and sola fides. The signs of the times,Adventists insist, are just as clear today as they were when Edgardo Mortarawas seized by papal police in 1858, or in 1863 when the U.S. Constitution stillenshrined the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of human beings onAmerican soil, or in the 1870s when Adventist farmers were being seized andpressed into chain gangs by civil authorities for plowing their fields onSunday. Adventists continue to see themselves as being triumphantly vindi-cated at the end of time through the fact that they alone among Christians willcourageously stand for obedience to Gods commandments and freedom ofconscience when all others falter.

Yet when actual apocalyptic moments have occurred throughout the long

and bloody course of the twentieth century, the church as a whole hasrepeatedly proven indistinguishable from its surrounding cultures (the wit-nesses of some remarkably courageous individual Adventists notwithstand-ing).57 This also poses a severe challenge to the hard core of traditionalAdventist eschatology. There has been a steady increase of potentially falsi-fying anomalous data not only outside of the church but insideof it as well.During World War II, many German Adventists supported the Nazi party thesame as other Christians and prior to the outbreak of the war Adventists evenin the United States praised Hitler as a vegetarian concerned with matters ofbodily hygiene.58 Despite its early abolitionist connections, during the Civil

Rights era many Adventist churches in the South actively discriminatedagainst Blacks while church officials discouraged political activism for racialjustice as a distraction from the work of proclaiming the Gospel (the

intense zeal to overthrow the error, and teach men of the pre-existence of the only Saviour of theworld? O how we need men who will search and believe the word of God, who will present

Jesus to the world. As far as I know, White did not once mention Buddhism, Hinduism,Confucianism, or any other major non-Western religion by name in print in her entire life.The peoples of Asia and Africa are instead collectively referred to in her writings simply asheathens or those still living in pagan darkness.

57 See Zdravko Plantak, The Silent Church: Human Rights and Adventist Social Ethics (New York:Macmillan Press, 1998).

58 Roland Blaich, Health Reform and Race Hygiene: Adventists and the Biomedical Vision ofthe Third Reich,Church History, Vol. 65, no. 3 (September 1996), pp. 42540.




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Gospel now being understood as a purely spiritual matter having

nothing to do with concern for social justice).59 The cafeteria of the churchsGeneral Conference building in Takoma Park, Maryland, was racially segre-gated until almost 1960, while the churchs handbook to ministers advisedagainst interracial marriage until, incredibly, 1992, possibly based upon state-ments against interracial marriage made by Ellen White.60 The Adventistchurch was deeply complicit in apartheid in South Africa. In Rwanda in 1994,significant numbers of Hutu Adventists actively participated in the genocideof their countrymen. According to a high ranking Rwandese church officialand survivor with whom I spoke in Kigali in 2010, some of these Adventistgenocidairesare known to have abstained from killing on Sabbaths, such was

the depth of their Adventist commitment. A conservatively estimated 10,000Tutsi Adventists were killed in Rwanda, which at the time had one of thehighest concentrations of Adventists relative to population size of anycountry in the world.61 But one would be hard pressed to find sustainedtheological reflection on any of these facts in any official church publicationor from any Adventist church pulpit. There is no post-Holocaust or post-Rwanda Adventist eschatologyonly ad hoc auxiliary theorizing and ferventevangelism to sustain the hard core of the Adventist millenarianism firstadvanced by J. N. Andrews a decade prior to the American Civil War to givemeaning to the Sabbatarian Adventist experience of the Great Disappoint-ment in the shadow of the American empire.

Those scholars whodoopenly question the Sanctuary Doctrine of 1844, thechurchs remnant self-understanding, or the apocalyptic predictions of thepioneers concerning the United States government and the Catholic Church,can expect to be excoriated in official church publications based upon thefailsafe principle that those who doubt the received narrative, by the veryfact of their doubting, ironically confirm it. Angel Manuel Rodrguez ofthe churchs Biblical Research Institute, for example, warns against thetemptation to modify or re-negotiate our identity.62 He continues, Did not

59 See Samuel G. London, Jr.,Seventh-day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement( Jackson,MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), pp. 6690.

60 Bull a

the theopolotics of adventist apocalypticism - ronald osborne

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