The Theopolotics of Adventist Apocalypticism - Ronald Osborne

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

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
DOI: 10.1111/moth.12077
THE THEOPOLITICS OF
ADVENTIST APOCALYPTICISM:
PROGRESSIVE OR DEGENERATING
RESEARCH PROGRAM?
RONALD E. OSBORN
Every five years, the Seventh-day Adventist Churchone of the worlds
fastest growing denominations, which by 2020 is projected to have up to
40 million adherents and regular attendees worldwideholds a weeklong
series of meetings in which elected officials and other delegates gather to
discuss and vote on matters of church policy, governance, mission, and
doctrine. These General Conference sessions have come to feature not only
regular business proceedings, which now include more than 2,400 voting
members, but also elaborate displays of pageantry, worship, evangelistic
outreach, and entrepreneurialism that attract tens of thousands of Adventist
laity and other observers. In 2010, the fifty-ninth General Conference session
was held in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta and its surrounding convention
halls and hotels at an estimated direct cost to the church of $12 million.1 The
climax of the event was a Sabbath worship service attended by more than
70,000 people, followed by a festive Saturday night parade of nations akin
to the closing ceremonies of the World Cup. Behind these exuberant displays
of Adventist institutional success and global unity, however, General Conference sessions are also, inevitably, scenes of tremendous political maneuvering and private turmoil as delegates with very different visions for the
Ronald E. Osborn
University of Southern California, Department of Politics and International Relations, 3518
Trousdale Parkway, Von KleinSmid Center 327, Los Angeles CA 90089-0044, USA
Email: ronaldosborn@gmail.com
1
Ansel Oliver, New Year, Big Budget, Adventist Review, January 28, 2010, on the web
at: http://www.adventistreview.org/article/3101/archives/issue-2010-1503/03cn-new-yearnew-budget
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
220 Ronald E. Osborn

church elect new officials, vote others out of office, and seek to steer the
organization in different directions. In 2010, the Adventist church shifted
dramatically in the direction of fundamentalism, voting to tighten the language of its doctrine of creation to rule out any interpretations other than
strict literalism or young earth creationism and signaling an intensified commitment to preserving unmodified its apocalyptic worldview based upon
historicist hermeneutical approaches to the book of Revelation that were
widely held when the church began some 150 years ago but that are today
rejected 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 the
Georgia Dome in which he made clear that his top priority as leader would
be to reinvigorate Adventist commitment to the denominations apocalyptic
beliefs tracing back to the nineteenth century. The speech marked an abrupt
departure both in style and substance from the ecclesiological vision of his
predecessor, Norwegian theologian Jan Paulsen. Signs of Christs coming
are increasing in frequency and intensity every day, Wilson said.2 They
included natural catastrophes, political and economic upheavals, disintegration of societal and family values, and the compromising activities of
ecumenism. All such signs of the times, he continued, point unmistakably
to 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 churchs
founding prophetess, Ellen White, in which she reported that Christs second
coming had been delayed because of the sin of unbelief within the church.
The church missed the opportunity of receiving the latter rain, Wilson
concluded. It was one hundred and nine years ago. Let us not make God
wait any longer to begin the latter rain so that Jesus can come . . . Brothers and
sisters, it is time . . . the Lord is coming soon! He wants to use His remnant
church in a most powerful way.3
In the article that follows I will attempt to situate these recent Adventist
moves in the direction of rigidly prescribed hermeneutics and intensified
apocalypticism within a larger picture of Adventisms unique history from
its origins in the Millerite movement of the mid-nineteenth century. The
Journal of the American Academy of Religion has published a single full-length
article about Adventism (in 1996, dealing with the denominations interactions with the government). The Harvard Theological Review, History of Religions, Journal of Religion, and Religious Studies (to name just a few other
important peer-reviewed journals in the study of religion) have meanwhile
2
Ted Wilson, Go Forward!, General Conference Sabbath Sermon, July 3, 2010, on the web
at: http://www.adventistreview.org/article/3614/archives/issue-2010-1526/go-forward
3
Ibid.
The Theopolitics of Adventist Apocalypticism
221
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 increasingly
globally significant yet rarely analyzed American-born apocalyptic movement. Building on a theoretical framework of Imre Lakatoss philosophy of
science and Nancey Murphys application of Lakatoss categories to the field
of theology, I will argue that Adventist apocalypticism has historically gone
through both degenerating andperhaps to the surprise of some readersauthentically prophetic or progressive phases as a theopolitical
research program. Whether Adventism is able to recover the progressive
parts of its heritage without becoming permanently trapped in a fundamentalist or enclave mentality remains an open question. Full disclosure requires
that I make clear from the outset my personal investment in the Adventist
story. My interests are not only scholarly. I want to hold a mirror up to the
religious tradition in which I was raised and continue to find Christian
community and to provide what I think has become a necessary critique of
aspects 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 between
the knowledge claims of competing scientific paradigms and Lakatoss distinction between progressive and degenerating research programs. The
problem of rival or incommensurable paradigms can be detected not only in
the empirical sciences, however, but also in religious discourse. Murphy, I
will show in Part Two, has provided a helpful conceptual lens for thinking
about conflicting theological visions, demonstrating that Lakatoss distinction between progressive and degenerating research can be fruitfully applied
to religious traditions and truth claims as well. With this theoretical framework in mind, in Part Three, I trace the history of Adventism in the United
States from its origins in the Millerite movement, which predicted the precise
date of Christs return and the end of history in 1844. In Part Four, I then
situate Adventist apocalyptic beliefs following the Great Disappointment
of Millerism within the social and historical context that gave those beliefs
plausibility, and even authentically prophetic relevance for their time. In Part
Five, I will highlight some of the ways that early Adventism might be seen as
a progressive theological research program as evidenced in its belief structure as well as its creativity and dynamism as a social movement. Nevertheless, contemporary Adventist eschatology has come to exhibit the marks of a
degenerating theological paradigm that is making less and less sense of
historical 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 about
Adventismalmost all written by Adventist scholars themselvesis the Journal for the Scientific
Study of Religion. The reason may be that Adventists have a much more centralized institutional
and political structure than most other denominations and this has enabled them to gather a
wealth of statistical data on their members that other churches cannot easily acquire.

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 recover
the progressive theopolitical vision of their pioneers and become an authentically 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 of
Scientific 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 earlier
accounts of the scientific method that reflected notions of linear progress and
rational objectivity, including the still highly influential ideas of his close
contemporary, Karl Popper. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing through
the 1960s, Popper championed a definition of true science as a field of
systematic knowledge acquisition that advances through rigorous empirical
testing leading to definitive confirmation or falsification of theories.6 Kuhn,
by contrast, emphasized the rarity of outright falsifications in normal
science, the persistence of conflicting evidence even in highly successful
theories, and the importance of scientific paradigms, that is, research programs 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 confirmation or refutation of a theory it was therefore best to ask which of two
actual 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, rival
paradigms exist simultaneously for long periods of time, providing equally
compelling accounts of phenomena based upon their own internal logics (not
unlike competing political institutions8). Kuhns term for incompatible
scientific paradigms was incommensurability. The Ptolemaic and Copernican models, to cite one example, existed as incommensurable theories alongside each other for approximately 200 years before the accumulating weight
of empirical evidence led to a decisive shift away from the geocentric model
of the universe in favor of the heliocentric one. Strictly speaking, though, the
geocentric 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 and
the 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 Chicago
Press, 1962), p. 147.
8
Ibid., p. 94.
223
rejection by virtually all astronomers.9 The Ptolemaic paradigm was perfectly

capable of positing new epicycles upon epicycles in an ad hoc way to account
for anomalies. Yet its authoritative status was eroded by new astronomical
data, which it was unable to account for in as intellectually satisfying a way as
the Copernican system.
One of the implications of Kuhns ideas about scientific inquiry being
marked by contestation, crises, incommensurability, and shifts among competing paradigms is that science must now be seen as part of what sociologists of knowledge have come to call the social construction of reality.
Scientific truths are determined as much by historically and culturally
inscribed interpretive paradigms (and the array of theoretical and methodological rules that are developed to sustain them) as by their correspondence
with the objective facts of the universe. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
is thus a key text in the rise of antirealist and postmodern philosophies of
science (even if this was not Kuhns original intention and although he may
well have been reticent about some of the philosophical uses made of his
ideas10). By bringing to light the paradigmatic nature of all scientific research,
Kuhn raised the specter of epistemological relativism in the sciences. His
insights led to a seemingly insoluble riddle: given the theory-laden nature of
all science and the persistence of anomalies in most if not all scientific
paradigms, how can we make value judgments between incommensurable
but internally consistent research programs? And how can we clearly distinguish 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 tell
science from pseudoscience that Imre Lakatos proposed the concept of
progressive vs. degenerating research programs. Lakatoss approach to
the problem, which in certain ways synthesizes even as it critiques both
Kuhns and Poppers positions, was first published as a long chapter in the
volume Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge in 1970. Lakatos may be credited
with introducing the following now widely used terms to the philosophy of
science11:
1. Hard Core: The hard core of a scientific theory according to Lakatos is
its 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 an
unrefuted rival, Lakatos wrote, the Copernican Revolution took place (at best) in 1838. See
Imre 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, in Postmodernism: The Major Thinkers (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2002), pp. 20111.
11
The remainder of this section has been adapted from Lakatos, Falsification and the
Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, in The Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes, pp. 8101.

modifying ones entire paradigm or research agenda. It is a negative
heuristic that forbids questioning, instead redirecting potentially falsifying challenges outward to other theories or doctrines that must bear the
brunt of tests and get adjusted and re-adjusted, or even completely
replaced, to defend the thus-hardened core.12
2. Auxiliary Hypotheses: These second-level or auxiliary hypotheses can be
both theoretical and methodological in nature. Unlike the hard core, they
may undergo significant modification or even abandonment over time
without calling into question the larger paradigm or research agenda. If an
auxiliary 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 defending
what was originally an auxiliary theory for fear that altering or abandoning it will expose the core to falsification. The relationship between the
core and its protective belt of satellite or auxiliary theories is therefore a
mutually defining and mutually reinforcing one with lines of demarcation
at times becoming blurred.
3. Progressive Research Program: According to Lakatos, a progressive
research program must have a consistently generative or contentincreasing power. It must a) yield a steady increase in both theoretical
and empirical understanding, and b) offer predictions that will at least
intermittently and retrospectively be corroborated by unanticipated
novel facts. If more and more such facts emerge that are elegantly
and parsimoniously explained by the paradigm it is a truly rigorous and
constructive research agenda.
4. Degenerating Research Program: A degenerating research program, by
contrast, is one in which all or almost all auxiliary hypotheses are purely
ad hoc in nature, offered simply to protect the hard core in defensive
reaction to challenging data. Degenerating theories are marked by a proliferation of theoretical components, which might be mistaken for theoretical richness or vitality. But on closer examination it is apparent that
these ad hoc theories cannot keep pace with empirical challenges and new
information. They are unable to predict surprising facts or to lead to
genuine discoveries. Internal contradictions arise between the evermultiplying ad hoc theories offered in defense of the core. What may have
once appeared as a harmonious orbiting protective shield begins to look
more and more like a dangerously cluttered field of debris.
It is important to note that a research program may be progressive for a
time only at a later date to become degenerating. To illustrate, the hard core
of Newtons physics was his theory of the three laws of dynamics and the law
of gravitation. His positive heuristic was his plan to apply these laws to
12
Ibid., p. 48.
225
account for all planetary motions. In the process of doing so, Newton encountered numerous facts that could not easily be reconciled with his theory. (All
research programs, Lakatos writes, grow in a permanent ocean of anomalies.13) Rather than abandoning his core, however, Newton developed a
chain of ever more complex models or auxiliary hypotheses to account for
the data, making frequent adjustments to these second-level theories as he
proceeded. After initially positing a fixed-point sun and discovering this
violated his law of dynamics, for example, he developed an alternative model
in which both the sun and the planets revolved around a common center of
gravity. Newtons auxiliary hypotheses in the end proved to be part of a
progressive research program rather than mere ad hoc theorizing, not
because they eliminated all anomalies, but because they led to a dramatic
increase in both theoretical and empirical understanding. Newtonian physics
steadily explained a host of new data. What is more, his ideas were confirmed
through the discovery of novel facts, including unobserved planets that
Newton himself never anticipated. Using Newtons research program,
Halley calculated, to the minute, the return of a comet as well as its precise
location in the sky. Seventy-two years later, after both Newton and Halley
were dead, Halleys Comet returned exactly as he had predicted.
Yet despite the stunning success of Newtonian physics, which continues to
command the awe and respect of scientists, it ultimately became a degenerating research program that was unable to keep pace with new theoretical as well
as empirical discoveries or resolve persistent problems. This led to the
Einsteinian 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 programs is helpful not only for thinking about the acquisition of knowledge in
the physical and life sciences. It has been productively applied to social
scientific theories as well.14 And there are good reasons, Nancey Murphy
argues, to think of even theology as a scientific endeavor that pursues
systematic knowledge acquisition and includes (in Kuhnian terms) incommensurable paradigms and (in Lakatosian terms) both progressive and
degenerating research programs. One of the criticisms that have been leveled
at Murphys thesis is that there is insufficient agreement about religious
13
Ibid., p. 6.
Lakatos himself critiqued Marxs philosophy of history as an example of a degenerating
research program. When events stubbornly contradicted Marxs predictions of the timing and
nature of socialist revolution (including his claims that the working class in Europe would fall
into absolute impoverishment, that revolution would first occur in the most industrialized
countries, and that socialist nations would not be in conflict with each other), Marxian theorists
employed 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 theory
from the facts, Lakatos wrote. Ibid., p. 6.
14

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 science
or achieve the same level of confirmation as empirical research. The more
significant and to my mind thoroughly convincing part of Murphys work is
her demonstration of conceptual similarities and family resemblances across
fields of inquiry assumed by many scholars of both religion and science to be
completely different in kind.
A theological hard core, Murphy proposed in 1990 in Theology in the Age of
Scientific Reasoning and again in 1996 with George Ellis in On the Moral Nature
of the Universe, is a paradigmatic vision that grounds other theological claims
and provides the epistemological lens through which one approaches hermeneutical and even empirical and historical problems. Theological auxiliary
hypotheses include both methodological and doctrinal propositions
designed to support, protect, and elaborate the core. The best way to interpret the epistemological status of doctrines, Murphy and Ellis write, is to
see them as auxiliary hypotheses contributing to a research program in
theology.16
It is a great deal more difficult in theology than in geology or physics to
confirm discovery of a novel fact or new insight. Indeed, it is impossible to
arrive at theological agreements with anything approaching a scientific
consensus. Nevertheless, a progressive theological research agenda might be
distinguished from a degenerating one by its ever-expanding compass of
fresh insights and its ability to make surprising sense not only of longstanding difficulties but also of unforeseen challenges or new data as they
arise. Further, it will lead to the recognition or discovery of new theological
truths and provide vital inspiration and resources for their elaboration. Its
primary mode is not one of defensive ad hoc apologetics but rather of fearless
exploration. To illustrate, Murphy and Ellis examine John Howard Yoders
seminal 1972 work, The Politics of Jesus. The hard core or paradigmatic heart
of Yoders theological research program, they suggest, is his claim a) that the
moral character of God is revealed in Jesus renunciation of violence to the
point 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 political
witness of his followers today. The positive heuristic emerging from this
paradigm is Yoders plan to interpret all traditional Christian doctrines,
Scriptural evidence, and data from history in harmony with this understanding of the meaning of Christs life. Some auxiliary hypotheses that arise from
Yoders research program include methodological theories about the need
for a more sociopolitical analysis of the biblical text, and doctrinal theories
15
Greg Peterson, The Scientific Status of Theology: Imre Lakatos, Method and Demarcation, 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.
227
such as the need to reinterpret the nature of the Trinity and Christs atonement. The Trinity, for Yoder, must now be understood not as three different
revelations of the divine but as God being most adequately and bindingly
known in the historical person of Jesus. Justification or being set right with
God, Yoder seeks to show, is only accomplished when Christians are set right
with their fellow human beings.
Yoders theological paradigm might fulfill the criterion of a progressive
research program in several ways. While his full thesis can ultimately only be
confirmed on an eschatological horizon that lies ahead (and so cannot tidily
supplant other readings in the meantime), we can still test his paradigm in the
present against the weight of textual as well as historical evidence. In The
Politics of Jesus, Yoder provides sophisticated exegetical arguments for interpreting obscure and often troubling passages. Many of his readings have
subsequently been embraced, refined, and expanded by New Testament scholars in surprising and innovative ways. Writing from a historically marginalized Anabaptist tradition, his research program has proven hugely influential
on several generations of scholars, pastors, and others from a wide range of
denominational backgrounds (including perhaps the most influential theological ethicist in the United States in the past several decades, Stanley
Hauerwas). In a post-Vietnam and now post-Iraq War era, Yoders insistence in
the early 1970s that Christians systematically re-interpret but also anticipate the
violence of the state or empire from a perspective of what we might call
prophetic realism also seems to have been both prophetic and realistic indeed.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to Yoders paradigm is the anomalous historical witness of deeply committed Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer
who have participated in forms of violence in situations of extremity that
appear to many to be morally legitimate and even profoundly Christian but
that Yoders position compels him to reject, as well as the challenge of
liberationist theologies that embrace the violence of the oppressed.
Yet if we compare Yoders research program with, for example, the
incommensurable and still highly influential theopolitical paradigm of
Reinhold Niebuhr, it appears to this reader that Yoders paradigm is progressing while Niebuhrs can no longer command the kind of authority it
once did and may in fact be suffering degenerating tendencies. Niebuhrs
political ethics can certainly provide ample ad hoc and post hoc justifications
for war. What they have failed to supply Christians are the critical resources
to discern the actual character of violence and to know when and how to
resist the states call to arms.17 The irony of history is that it is self-described
Niebuhrian realists who often appear the most naively idealistic about the
nature 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 a
Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

violence for noble or Christian ends.18 The debate between neo-Anabaptists
and Christian realists will no doubt continue. It is, though, perhaps some
measure of the formers progressive character as a theological research paradigm that even critics of Yoders theopolitics acknowledge his appeal and
worry about the power and spreading influence of his ideas. As a set
of commitments for engaging the world, James Hunter writes, neoAnabaptism is intellectually serious and that is one reason why it has
growing appeal among young Christian adults. It provides a credible, even
compelling, script for those who find the account offered by Christian conservatives distasteful if not dangerous and the narrative by Christian progressives unconvincing and irrelevant.19
It is not within the scope of this article, however, to defend Murphy and
Elliss claim that Yoders theology illustrates an epistemologically progressive theological research program. My goal, rather, is to apply the framework
of progressive vs. degenerating paradigms to the theopolitics of an
American-born millenarian movement. With the preceding theoretical background in mind, we may now turn to the case of Seventh-day Adventist
apocalypticism. What exactly is the paradigmatic hard core of the movements eschatology and apocalyptic identity? Does it have the qualities
Murphy has described as progressive or rather degenerating theological
research? 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 Adventisms contributions to the larger Christian community?
III. Is All this But a Cunningly Devised Fable?: The Birth of an
Apocalyptic Movement
The doctrinal core of Seventh-day Adventism, church historian Douglas
Morgan writes (without reference to Lakatoss or Murphys ideas), is a
distinctive form of Christian millennialism.20 Adventists trace their roots to
the 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 New
York, developed an elaborate historicist interpretation of the books of Daniel
and Revelation to predict the timing of Christs return, settling upon some
18
John Milbank, The Poverty of Niebuhrianism, in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 23356; and Stanley Hauerwas and Michael
Broadway, The Irony of Reinhold Niebuhr: The Ideological Character of Christian Realism, in
Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997), pp. 4861.
19
James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity
in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1501.
20
Douglas Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic: The Public Involvement of a Major
Apocalyptic Movement (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), p. 3.
229
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 preaching the immanent second coming of Christ to congregations across New
England and attracted a following that historians estimate included anywhere between 10,000 and one million believers from diverse denominational backgrounds.21 Millerism also drew great scorn and derision from
many Christiansparticularly after Millers predictions spectacularly failed
to materialize. The sense of bitter loss, the shame, and the shattered hopes of
the Millerite experience were later poignantly expressed by Seventh-day
Adventist pioneer Hiram Edson. I mused in my heart saying, My advent
experience has been the richest and brightest of all my Christian experiences.
If this had proved a failure, what was the rest of my Christian experience
worth? Has the Bible proved a failure? Is there no God, no heaven, no golden
home city, no paradise? Is all this but a cunningly devised fable?22
A small band of radical Millerites who had eagerly anticipated Christs
second coming and who underwent the humiliation of what historians
now call the Great Disappointment as well as the existential crisis of the
seeming absence of God continued to hold fast to Millers prophetic timeline
by developing a new auxiliary hypothesis. The Millerites had been correct in
their calculation of the October 1844 date, they insisted, merely wrong about
the event. The autumn of 1844 marked not the end of human history but
rather the beginning of Christs judgment of the earth from the most holy
place in the heavenly sanctuary. The event that appeared to all outsiders as
decisive falsification of Millers calculations thus came to be understood by
Adventists, sub specie aeternitatis, as a triumphant moment in salvation history
for those with eyes of faith to see. It was their task to continue to preach the
good news of Christs soon return based upon the Sanctuary Doctrine and to
maintain the patient endurance of the saints, no matter the unbelief and
derision of the world, by keeping the commandments of God and the faith
of Jesus (in fulfillment of Revelation 14:12). Obedience to the commandments of God, the early Adventists soon became convinced, included
worshiping on Saturday rather than Sunday in keeping with the Sabbathcommandment in the Decalogue of Hebrew Scripture and in faithful
imitation of the Christ of the New Testament. Out of the calamity of failed
predictions and collapsed millenarian dreams, Sabbatarian Adventism was
thus born, leading to the formal organization of the Seventh-day Adventist
Church in 1863.
Among the pioneers of the Adventist church was a young Methodist
woman 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 and
Millenarianism 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.

Disappointment (most Adventist leaders were very young at the start of the
movement). Harmon, who later married James White and so became Ellen
White, in many ways fits the description of a classic female Christian mystic.
In the 1880s, White would describe the year 1844when she and the other
Millerites lived with an unshakable sense of Christs nearnessas the happiest year in her life. Her exceptional religious propensities, Malcolm Bull
and Keith Lockhart write, originated not in doctrinal concerns but in an
intense desire for experience of the divine presence and a simple desire to
feel the love of Jesus.23 White had only a third-grade education, having been
forced to drop out of school when she was nine years old after being struck
in 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 her
intensely devotional writings centered upon the theme of Gods character of
love continue to this day to be regarded by most Adventists as an authoritative 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 in
which she saw the Millerites journeying along a path to the City of God, as
well 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 the
tenor of early Adventism and of Whites prophetic imaginationher way of
telling truth so that, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, it will not be
readily coopted or domesticated by hegemonic interpretive power and so
that it confronts people with a vision that is urgently out beyond the ordinary and the reasonable.24 I seemed to be surrounded with light, and to be
rising higher and higher from the earth, White recalled:
I turned to look for the Advent people in the world, but could not find
them, when a voice said to me, Look again, and look a little higher. At
this, I raised my eyes, and saw a straight and narrow path, cast up high
above the world. On this path the advent people were traveling to the city
which 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 the
midnight cry. This light shone all along the path, and gave light for their
feet, so that they might not stumble . . . Soon we heard the voice of God
like many waters, which gave us the day and hour of Jesus coming. The
living saints, 144,000 in number, knew and understood the voice, while
the wicked thought it was thunder and an earthquake. When God spoke
23
Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the
American 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, Walter
Brueggemann writes, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one
the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. See Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic
Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), pp. xivxv, 40.
231
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 down
from Mount Sinai. The 144,000 were all sealed, and perfectly united. On
their foreheads was written, God, New Jerusalem, and a glorious star
containing Jesus new name. At our happy, holy state the wicked were
enraged, and would rush violently up to lay hands on us to thrust us into
prison, when we would stretch forth the hand in the name of the Lord, and
they would fall helpless to the ground. Then it was that the synagogue of
Satan knew that God had loved us who could wash one anothers feet, and
salute the brethren with a holy kiss, and they worshiped at our feet.25
Hundreds of additional visions followed in which White would fall into
trance-like states, sometimes for hours at a time. Her intense religious experiences and vivid descriptions of the messages God conveyed to her, often
through mediating angels, were accepted by the early Adventists as confirming evidence of Gods abiding presence in their midst. Within a short time,
Whites visions included increasingly elaborate warnings of a coming time
of trouble centered upon the eschatological significance of seventh day
Sabbath worship. In an 1847 letter she described an astounding vision in
which she was transported by an angel into the Holy of Holies in the
heavenly sanctuary where she gazed upon the Ten Commandments written
with the finger of God. I saw that God had not changed the Sabbath, for
He never changes. But the Pope had changed it from the seventh to the first
day 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 in
vision to the most holy place in heaven where she saw Christ interceding
for Israel. But the merciful High Priest in heaven, she warned, would soon
assume the terrifying role of divine avenger upon those who rejected the
Sabbath:
Then I saw that Jesus would not leave the most holy place until every case
was decided either for salvation or destruction: and that the wrath of God
could not come until Jesus had finished his work in the most holy
placelaid off his priestly attire and clothed himself with the garments
of vengeance . . . Then I was shown a company who were howling in
agony. On their garments was written in large charactersthou art
weighed in the balance, and found wanting. I asked who this company
were. The angel said, these are they who have once kept the Sabbath and
have given it up.27
25
Ellen White, Early Writings of Ellen G. White (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald
Publishing, 2000), pp. 1415.
26
Ellen White, Life Sketches of Ellen White (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1915), p. 101.
27
Ibid., pp. 11617.

Whites earliest visions served as essentially auxiliary hypotheses to
protect the hard core of Millerite belief in the eschatological importance of
1844. But the church quickly developed a remnant theology according to
which Whites prophecies were themselves confirmation of the movements
unique election as Gods true church amid rampant Protestant apostasy.
Whites prophetic authority thus itself came to be part of the hard core of
Adventist identity. Adventists up to the present have resisted any modification of William Millers timeline, not because Millerism represents the best of
contemporary biblical or historical scholarship, but because doing so would
require a significant paradigm shift regarding the nature of Whites inspiration and visionary claims. Arguably, what were originally core and auxiliary
in early Adventist theology thus effectively reversed roles; Adventists no
longer hold fast to the accuracy of Whites visions to support the core doctrine of 1844 so much as they hold fast to the accuracy of Millerite date-setting
in order to sustain the core belief in Ellen Whites prophetic authorityand
by extension Adventisms own privileged status as Gods remnant people.
In the face of highly embarrassing revelations in the 1970s that Whites
inspiration included copying large amounts of material from other writers
without acknowledgment, Adventists have developed complex psychological, historical, and theological auxiliary theories of how prophetic inspiration
works to account for what others have labeled plagiarism.28 Yet one may live
with a great deal of cognitive dissonance about White and the meaning of
1844 and still be a committed Adventist since the denomination has claimed
from its start to be a people committed to a non-creedal and progressive
approach to truth, as well as to the twin watchwords of the Protestant Reformation: sola scriptura and sola fides.29 Whites pronouncements for Adventists, at least in theory, are fallible and must always be tested against the
supreme authority of Scripture (although for many conservative Adventists,
reasoning in a perfectly closed and tautological hermeneutical circle, Scripture can only be interpreted in harmony with Whites prophetic authority in
harmony with Scripture). White did not originate church doctrines nor were
her visions seen by Adventists as superseding biblical teaching (in the
manner of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon). Rather, her role as
prophet 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 best
expressed by White herself. There is no excuse for anyone taking the position that there is no
more truth to be revealed, and that all our expositions of Scripture are without an error, she
wrote. The fact that certain doctrines have been held as truth for many years by our people, is
not a proof that our ideas are infallible. Age will not make error into truth, and truth can afford
to 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 Herald
Publishing, 2000), pp. 245.
233
fledgling movement from outside the normal channels of interpretation,

tradition, reason, and experience. She was, as Morgan writes, Adventisms
spiritual wild card.30
Adventist apocalypticism was first developed not by Ellen White,
however, but by another pioneer, John N. Andrews, in a series of articles
beginning in December 1851 in the Second Advent Review and Sabbath Herald
(now known simply as the Adventist Review). Andrews was 23 years old at the
time and like White had experienced the Great Disappointment while still a
teenager. Like White, he lacked formal education beyond a few years of
elementary school, but he was a gifted autodidact who learned seven languages and has been described as the foremost Adventist intellectual of the
19th century and the architect of Adventist doctrines.31 Andrews was also
the Adventist churchs first overseas missionary, starting a publishing house
in Switzerland where he died in 1883. The denominations flagship institution of higher learning, Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, is
named in his honor. Like virtually all of the Adventist pioneersincluding
James White, Uriah Smith, J. N. Loughborough, R. F. Cottrell, and Joseph
BatesAndrews was a fervent anti-Trinitarian who denied the full divinity
of Christ, in part on the grounds that the Council of Nicaea was an illegitimate
imposition of papal authority.32 Adventism was born according to what other
Christians would classify as an Arian heresy and many if not most of its
early founders went to their graves without a classically orthodox understanding of the nature of Christ.
Following widely accepted hermeneutical methods and long-standing
Protestant tradition, as well as the teachings of William Miller, Andrews
identified Roman Catholicism with Babylon, the anti-Christ, and the
beast symbolized in Revelation 13:18 due to the Catholic Churchs historical
suppression of liberty of conscience and persecution of those who defied
Romes authority.33 There was nothing particularly original or (in the context
of their day) controversial in these Adventist beliefs, which had a long history
tracing back to medieval Europe and which became the dominant view in
post-Reformation England and Puritan America. What set Andrews interpretation of Revelation 13 apart from others was his innovative linking (building on an article by his fellow Adventist, the abolitionist ship captain and
revivalist minister Joseph Bates) of the Catholic Church in dark alliance with
30
Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic, p. 24.

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 corrupt
religious 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.
31

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 come
down from heaven and controlled the ability of people to buy and sell. It
forced people to worship the image of the [first] beast and ordered that
whoever refused to worship the first beasts image should be killed
(Revelation 13:1117). Other interpreters of the period argued that this creature symbolized (variously) the Byzantine Empire, Napoleonic France, or
monarchical England. But in Andrews startling and deeply subversive
reading, the second beast of Revelation 13, with its morally ambiguous qualities of both lamb and dragon, was one thing alone. It was none other than the
United States of America.
The Republic had originated in principles of religious liberty and political
equality, symbolized by the two lamb-like horns, Andrews declared, but it
was steadily betraying these principles as was most glaringly evident in the
moral abomination of slavery:
If all men are born free and equal, how do we then hold three millions
of slaves in bondage? Why is it that the Negro race are reduced to the
rank of chattels personal, and bought and sold like brute beasts? If the
right of private judgment be allowed, why then are men expelled from
these 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 accordance with their creed?34
The intolerance that had led the Protestant establishment to persecute the
Quakers, to expel the Millerites from their congregations, to support the
Fugitive Slave Law, to expend millions of dollars constructing beautiful
churches in the manner of impressive European cathedrals while neglecting
matters of social justice (monuments of popish pride that virtually
exclude the poor, Andrews charged35), and to reject the truth of the biblical
Sabbath would soon lead it to unite with the Catholic Church to trample
freedom of conscience and persecute the Adventists as Gods true church for
their principled refusal to worship on Sunday. The climax of this persecution,
Andrews concluded, would be the passing of a death edict by the United
States government upon all Sabbath-keepers. At this harrowing moment,
Christ would at last return to save and vindicate the Adventists and destroy
those who followed after the beast of Rome with its profane Sunday
worshipthe image formed by the Anti-Christ (Satan acting through
the institution of the papacy) in blasphemous parody of Gods divine com34
John Andrews, Thoughts on Revelation XIII and XIV, in Review and Herald, May 19, 1851,
pp. 816.
35
As cited in Bruinsma, Seventh-day Adventist Attitudes Toward Roman Catholicism, p. 98.
235
mandments in the Decalogue of Hebrew Scripture. Peace and safety is the

delusive dream in which men indulge whilst the wrath of God hangs over
them, Andrews thundered.36
IV. The Plausibility and Potency of the Early Adventist Prophetic Imagination
Early Adventist Sabbatarianism was therefore at its heart a radical theopolitical critique of both secular political as well as traditional religious
authorities. The early Adventist apocalyptic and prophetic imagination is best
seen as a principled rebellion against Americas civil religion with its claims
to be progressively ushering in the millennium.37 Andrews inverted the story
of the nations founding as a shining City on a Hill so that it now read as a tale
of Babylon rising. The descendants of the persecuted pilgrims would become
the persecutors. Americas precious civil liberties would not expand but
steadily contract as the country descended ever deeper into intolerance and
injustice, climaxing in a collapsing of the vital wall of separation of church
and state in a revived and oppressive Christendom project that would recall
the darkest days of the Catholic Inquisition. The early Adventistswho by
1863 numbered no more than 3,500 members38were convinced that all of
these 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 with
Americas Protestant establishment and the civil authorities in an atmosphere
of growing conflict between North and South led to a heightened sense of
foreboding and fear of persecution among Adventistsand to a penetrating
consciousness of real intolerance in Americas social order. The historicist
hermeneutical methods that Andrews used to interpret biblical apocalyptic
literature were widely accepted at the time, giving his readings additional
plausibility. Devout evangelical William Lloyd Garrison was using similar
apocalyptic and prophetic language to condemn the United States government on the slavery issue in the face of angry lynch mobs as far north as
Boston. And nativist anti-Catholic conspiracy theoriesfuelled by ethnic
xenophobia and social resentment at the willingness of poor Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy to work for very low wageswere a
widespread phenomenon in America throughout the century. In his classic
1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
quotes from an 1855 Texas newspaper article that illustrates the social context
for early Adventist attitudes toward the Catholic Church. It is a notorious
fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very
36
Andrews, Thoughts on Revelation XIII and XIV, pp. 816.

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.
37

moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions, the article declared:
We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way
into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with
the infectious venom of Catholicism . . . The Pope has recently sent his
ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of
which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic Church throughout
the United States . . . These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our
Senators; reprimanding our statesmen; propagating the adulterous union
of Church and state . . .39
Such paranoia was unfortunately not eased by the words and actions of the
Catholic Church itself, which, although weakened by the French revolution,
behaved throughout the century in highly disturbing if not beastly ways in
perfect keeping with the Adventist eschatological script. In his 1831 encyclical, 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 erroneous
proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained
for everyone, as well as to the never sufficiently denounced freedom to
publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people.41 The
Catholic Church, the letter continued, has always taken action to destroy the
plague of bad books. The Waldensians and other such sons of Belial, who
were the sores and disgrace of the human race, Gregory inveighed, had
received a richly deserved anathema from the Holy See.
In fact, the Waldensians had not simply been anathematized but had been
persecuted with genocidal ferocity by the Catholic Church to the verge of
extinction, and these stories of the Waldensians and other Protestant martyrs
were vividly retold by the Adventists as a reminder of what the Catholic
Church might do again if given the kinds of secular political powers it once
held 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: We
predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those
who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break
the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood.
The charge laid by Andrews, White, and others that the Catholic Church
idolatrously 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
237
by unfolding historical events. In 1854, in the Papal Bull Ineffabilius Deus,

Pope Pius IX proclaimed as dogma the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin
Marya shocking affront, in the eyes of Protestants, to the teachings of the
New Testament about the uniquely sinless nature of Christ. It was the first
time that a Pope had asserted a dogma ex cathedra in history. In 1870, during
Vatican I, the teaching of Papal infallibility was formally defined and
defended for the first time.
Strident words from Rome were accompanied by oppressive actions in
clear violation of basic principles of freedom of conscience, human rights,
and religious liberty. In 1858, an international controversy erupted when
papal 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 a
Christian family servant and turned him into a ward of the Vatican to be
raised a Sunday-worshiping Catholic. Edgardo Mortaras parents were told
they could only have their son back if they converted to Roman Catholicism.
They refused and the boy eventually became an Augustinian priest charged
with the task of helping to convert the Jews. In 1859, the Review and Herald
published an article concerning the Mortara Case. The spirit of the Inquisition yet lives, it warned. The Papacy is a fearful tyranny over every mans
household, the article continued, ready to trample at any moment upon the
dearest rights of nature, the fondest pledges of affection.42 The article was
not written by Adventists, however, but was republished by them from an
article that first appeared in the abolitionist press. Its conclusion was that
what had happened to Mortara was in fact already happening daily in the
United States, with the children of slaves being violently separated from their
parents at their masters whims.
The article, having been circulated but not written by Adventists, illustrates
the non-uniqueness of Adventist views of the Catholic Church for the
periodalthough in one sense, as Reinder Bruinsma documents, Adventist
anti-Catholicism was unique: Adventist writers were, if anything, considerably more restrained than other Protestants in their theological polemics
against Catholics since their most immediate fear was not the Catholic
Church as such but rather the apostate Protestant establishment with its
persecuting 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 their
fields on Sunday were arrested and thrown into jails in Southern states such
as Tennessee, Georgia, and Arkansas under so-called Sunday Blue laws
written to enforce legislatively the values of a Christian nation. These
Adventist dissenters for religious liberty and freedom of conscience were
levied 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.

pressed into chain gangs for their refusal to adhere to dominant Protestant
religious understandings. All of these factsas well as Ellen Whites visions
confirming and elaborating Andrews apocalyptic predictionsgo far to
explain why the early Adventists, as Yankee dissenters and champions of
political and religious liberty, so resolutely opposed not only the Catholic
Church but even more significantly mainstream Protestant America and the
United States government, which they now cast in the language of the beastly
symbolism of the book of Revelation. Nineteenth-century social and political
realitiesnot detached biblical exegesisexplain why Adventist eschatology took the peculiar shape it did.
Far more difficult to understand is the fact that official Adventist eschatology has undergone literally no modifications in its broad outline since the
early 1850s.
V. Adventist Apocalypticism as Progressive Research Program
For a time, one might argue in Lakatosian perspective, Adventist apocalypticism constituted a surprisingly progressive theological research
program. (Research paradigms, we should recall, have an evolving character
over time; they may be progressive at one stage only to become, at a later
phase, degenerating, or vice versa.) Whatever their shortcomings, the Adventist pioneers were animated by commendable moral concerns for social
justice. Many if not most early Adventists were pacifists in the Radical Reformation and Garrisonian abolitionist traditions and thus staunchly opposed
to violence and political tyranny of any kind. During the Spanish-American
War, they emergedin sharp opposition to many mainline Christians, who
embraced the conflict as a civilizing crusadeas outspoken and prophetic
critics of American imperialism.43 Their reading of Revelation also attuned
them in vital ways to both theological and historical realities that many other
Protestants had not yet grasped.
Politically, this translated into vigorous activism in the courts in defense of
the 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 manifestations of anti-Catholicism on the grounds that bigoted discrimination
toward Catholic believers was itself paying homage to the European Catholic principle. As the dean of American religious studies Martin E. Marty
writes, Adventists made major contributions to the American legal tradition
by helping expand the liberties of all Americans, illustrating the creative
role of marginal and outsider groups.44 Adventists have remained (with
43
See Douglas Morgan, Apocalyptic Anti-Imperialists, Spectrum Magazine, Vol. 22 ( January
1993).
44
Martin E. Marty, Forward, to Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic, p. xii.
239
some problematic exceptions) dedicated civil libertarians up to the present,

opposed to any union of church and state and far more likely to side
with the ACLU than conservative evangelicals on matters such as prayer in
public schools.
Sociologically, Adventist rejection of the American civil religion led the
denomination to imitate many of Americas social functions by developing
an impressive parallel network of institutions including schools, hospitals,
and publishing houses aimed at allowing Adventists to live as a faithful
remnant inside the belly of the beast without being completely absorbed
by it. For being an apocalyptic movement anticipating the soon-coming end
of the world, Adventists have in fact shown a remarkable zeal and talent
for long-term institution building. In consequence, it is possible for a
twentieth-century Adventist to spend his entire life within the Adventist
subculture, Bull writes. He or she can be educated from nursery to
graduate school entirely by Adventist teachers, receive medical attention
only from Adventist doctors, work only for denominational institutions or
businesses, travel all over the world as a guest of Adventist missions, retire
to one of the churchs rest homes, and expect to die in the Adventist hospital in which he or she was born.45 Many Adventist church leaders, it can
safely be said, do not have a single close friend who is not a fellow Adventist. Yet the very institutionalism that allows for members to spend their
entire lives secure within the Adventist subculture has also continually
renewed that culture. Highly educated Adventist scholars and medical professionalswho typically earn their degrees from Americas and Europes
major research universitieshave helped to translate the outside world
for those inside the community while also presenting a non-sectarian side
of Adventism to non-members.46 While highly sectarian in some regards,
Adventism thus does not have the kind of insularity of Amish or ultraorthodox Jewish communities. It is a deviant subculture that remains critically engaged with its surrounding culture. It is also largely invisible to
most non-members since Adventists have typically avoided entering into
social 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 for
public office47).
45
Bull, The Seventh-day Adventists, pp. 18485.

For example, a 2010 documentary about Adventists entitled The Adventists directed by
award-winning non-Adventist filmmaker Martin Doblmeier was aired nationally on PBS stations. The film offered a highly positive picture of Adventists focused on the churchs commitment to providing excellent medical care to non-members. Many if not most of the Adventists
featured in the film by Doblmeier to explain the church to outsiders were individuals who
represent the most progressive or liberal wings of Adventist thought.
47
The most prominent recent Adventists in American political office have included: Congressional 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
46

Doctrinally, Adventist concern for recovering the lost meaning of the
Sabbath led them to cultivate a rich theology and practice of Sabbath-keeping
that theologians of other traditions are only now beginning to discover.
Although many of the churchs pioneers were Arians or semi-Ariansa fact
that continues to be evident in many aspects of Adventist church life, including the intense preoccupation among many of its members with achieving
doctrinal as well as moral perfectionas a result of Whites prophetic intervention, Adventists unambiguously embraced the doctrine of the Trinity in
the 1890s and so today stand within the fold of classically orthodox Nicene
Christianity.48 Their intense study of Scripture with a view toward cosmic
conflict 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 sophisticated hermeneutical defense of the seemingly more compassionate doctrine
of annihilationism (the idea increasingly embraced by progressive and
even some conservative evangelicals that God will finally destroy the unrepentant wicked so that they simply cease to exist). It also led them to a
rejection of dualistic anthropologies in favor of a metaphysical holism that fits
well with Nancey Murphys own research program of developing a theological anthropology of non-reductive physicalism.
This understanding of the relationship between mind, body, and spirit
fueled Adventist concern for health reform and medical care, so that the
denomination is today perhaps best known to the general public for its
healthy lifestyle practices (Adventists do not drink or smoke and have among
the highest life expectancies in the world) and for its many state-of-the-art
hospitals and clinics around the globe dedicated to alleviating physical
suffering. Some of these hospitals have conducted cutting edge scientific
research, perhaps the most famous example being the controversial 1984
transplant operation at Loma Linda Hospital in California conducted by
Adventist surgeons in which a baby received a baboon heart. Finally, one
cannot help but add, every time someone pours a bowl of Kellogg cereal they
are enjoying an Adventist invention originally created by health reformer
John Harvey Kellogg to promote vegetarianismanother distinctive Adventist concern ahead of its time.
VI. Adventist Apocalypticism as Degenerating Research Program
Yet in the past 160 years official Adventist eschatology has undergone no
significant 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 a
Democrat to Congress, representing Californias 36th congressional district.
48
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.
241
taken on an increasingly surreal and ad hoc quality in much Adventist

theological discourse. What has changed in Adventism since the middle of
the nineteenth century is not the grand narrative of immanent catastrophe
and persecution of Sabbath-keepers leading to Christs return but rather the
relative prominence now given to the different dramatis personae in the script.
Adventists in the United States today collectively exhibit little passion for
prophetic modes of critique of the violence or structural injustices of the
American empire. They no longer boldly name the second beast of Revelation in the present tense as they once did in response to the evils of slavery
and U.S. imperialism in the Spanish-American War. Instead, they have by
and large come to accept the conservative evangelical myth of America as an
essentially benign and God-led nation whose military serves as the guarantor
of world peace and even of Adventist religious liberty. America will become
the persecuting beast of Revelation, to be surebut only in the future under
diabolical 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 Catholic
Church, by contrast, remains the unquestionable temporal manifestation of
the anti-Christ with no possibility of change in Adventist eschatology. Like
the prophet Jonah, it seems that Adventists will be bitterly disappointed if
God 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 authentically prophetic in tone as it was at the denominations founding so much as
it is invidiously conspiratorial. A prominent Adventist evangelist holds a
series of meetings in Rome based upon Millerite timelines and nineteenthcentury anti-Catholicism and returns to the United States suffering from a
nagging fatigue. Whispers begin to circulate among highly educated and
otherwise rational church officials: Maybe he was poisoned by the Jesuits.
An Adventist theologian invites two Catholic scholars to deliver a guest
lecture 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 America
Division to distribute among the thousands of Adventists currently serving in the U.S. military
as full combatants. It features articles of spiritual and psychological uplift while studiously
avoiding any mention of the churchs pacifist or apocalyptic heritage. Visually, however, the
publication is often an unabashed celebration of nationalistic symbolism and martial values that
would have been unfathomable to the Adventist pioneers (including, for example, photographs
of soldiers in heroic poses, armed with assault rifles as they stand before the American flag). See
For 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 its
publications. In the 1850s, the American beast was shown in Adventist artwork as a truly
terrifying and ferocious monster. By the 1950s, America was often visually depicted as either a
relatively unthreatening lamb (albeit with a disturbing glint in its eyes) or a buffalo exhaling
some slightly angry puffs of steam from its nostrils (symbolizing latent violent potential). See
Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic, pp. 758.

campaign denouncing the professor with reference to anti-Catholic statements made by Ellen White. Soon the Adventist scholars mailbox is filled
with scores of angry letters, many of which, he reports, are simply hate mail,
filled with animosity toward Catholics and me for inviting two Catholic
priests to feed the wine of Babylon to our students.51 There have been some
rigorous and sophisticated Adventist attempts to mine the churchs apocalyptic heritage for new moral and theological insights. At the level of marginal or folk Adventism and various para-church ministries, though, claims
of Catholic infiltrators in Adventist colleges and universities, and even in the
halls of the General Conference, abound. Officials at the General Conference
as well as conservative theologians for their part warn members to be vigilant
against Catholic thought infiltrating Adventist classrooms and churches, especially cloaked in the garb of evangelical theology.52 Mainstream (though by no
means monolithic) Adventist beliefs today include the view, taught as part of
the officially approved curriculum in all Adventist high schools, that any day
now the Catholic Church will join forces with Protestant evangelicals to enact
a mandatory Sunday worship law, leading to a death sentence upon Seventhday Adventists, who alone among Americans will continue steadfastly to
worship on Saturday in obedience to Gods commands.
Adventism thus often presents itself to the world (or arrives in the worlds
mailboxes, as the case may be) in the form of tracts featuring lurid imagery
of the beasts of Revelation along with sensational promises of initiation into
the Bibles hidden amazing facts or secret codes, the knowledge of which
will enable an elect few to escape a doomed planet. Every latest news headlinefrom 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, to
tsunamis in Southeast Asiaprovides ample fodder for Adventist evangelists skilled at continually reworking the familiar (and for many Adventists
comforting) tale of impending global calamity and nefarious Catholic designs
to force every knee to bow to the Roman Pontiff. It takes no prophet to see
that the planet very well might be doomed or to point out that through much
of its history the Catholic Church did indeed inflict great violence on religious dissenters. Nor is it difficult to convince many Americans or others
around the world that the U.S. government is on the verge of exerting
tyrannical control over their lives. For some struggling to make sense of
global instability and political, social, and ecological crises, this literature
therefore has its appeal. And the Adventist apocalyptic scenariowhich
warns 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? And
Why Should We Care?, Adventist Review, June 10, 2010, on the web at: http://www
.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3383
243
lead it to abandon its democratic virtues and impose an oppressive theocratic

statemay not be so farfetched even in non-Adventist perspective. In the
event of massive and repeated terrorist strikes or an environmental catastrophe, journalist Chris Hedges warns in words that read like an excerpt from
an Adventist evangelistic tract, an authoritarian state church could rise
ascendant within American democracy.53
Meanwhile, however, anomalous data that severely challenges the
hard core of the Adventist apocalyptic narrative and remnant selfunderstanding is quietly but resolutely pushed aside by the guardians of the
faith. Adventists have yet to wrestle seriously with the theological implications of very significant changes not only within Americas social order since
the Civil War, but also within Catholicism in the past five decades, including
its official embrace of religious liberty and freedom of conscience and its
repudiation of the death penalty in the name of a consistent ethic of protecting human life (at a time when many conservative Adventists support the
death penalty).54 For most Adventists, Vatican II may as well have never
occurred. There is little awareness among rank and file Adventists of Catholicisms significant contributions to religious liberty, social justice, and human
rights in the twentieth century. There is no sober reckoning by most Adventists with the fact that the Catholic Church is today severely weakened in
much of the world, its ranks ravaged by scandals and the inroads of secularism in the West and Pentecostalism in the developing South. There is little if
any acknowledgement of the fact that countries with majority Catholic populations are today among the most religiously tolerant in the world, many
having even fewer governmental restrictions on religious expression than the
United States (according to recent studies by the Pew Forum).55 Today the
most restrictive regimes in the world when it comes to matters of religious
liberty are overwhelmingly Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, or secular authoritarian states such as China and Vietnam. But these parts of the world were not
included in Ellen Whites apocalyptic visions or in J. N. Andrews Eurocentric
exposition of the book of Revelation, and so they barely figure in contemporary Adventist apocalypticism either.56
53
Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), p. 148.
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 and
unnecessary. See Cardinal Renato R. Martino, Death Penalty is Cruel and Unnecessary, on the
web 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 Public
Life, December 2009, on the web at: http://pewforum.org/Government/Global-Restrictionson-Religion.aspx
56
Andrews mentions Islam in his 1851 reading of Revelation in a single sentence: Mohammedanism is introduced in this prophecy under the symbol of locusts, but its power departed
with the second woe. I have found a single reference to Islam in the corpus of Ellen Whites
writings (which are contained in a searchable online database by the Ellen G. White Estate). In
1892, she wrote, Mohammedanism has its converts in many lands, and its advocates deny the
divinity of Christ. Shall this faith be propagated, and the advocates of truth fail to manifest
54

All such facts, which fly in the face of the millenarian predictions of the
pioneers, are understood by most Adventist members simply as the lull
before the storm of Catholicisms final assault, with the connivance of the
American government and apostate Protestants, upon religious liberty and
Gods true Sabbath day. The beast may be silent but it is not sleeping and no
new evidence can falsify the Adventist apocalyptic script. For Adventists
(insofar as one may generalize about what is in fact a diverse and increasingly
pluralistic social movement that includes a small but significant liberal or
progressive wing), the Inquisition is perennially on the verge of being
rekindled, with Adventists cast for all time in the role of last heroes of
Salvation History and final scapegoats of the anti-Christs efforts to crush the
Protestant principles of sola scriptura and sola fides. The signs of the times,
Adventists insist, are just as clear today as they were when Edgardo Mortara
was seized by papal police in 1858, or in 1863 when the U.S. Constitution still
enshrined the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of human beings on
American soil, or in the 1870s when Adventist farmers were being seized and
pressed into chain gangs by civil authorities for plowing their fields on
Sunday. Adventists continue to see themselves as being triumphantly vindicated at the end of time through the fact that they alone among Christians will
courageously stand for obedience to Gods commandments and freedom of
conscience 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 has
repeatedly proven indistinguishable from its surrounding cultures (the witnesses of some remarkably courageous individual Adventists notwithstanding).57 This also poses a severe challenge to the hard core of traditional
Adventist eschatology. There has been a steady increase of potentially falsifying anomalous data not only outside of the church but inside of it as well.
During World War II, many German Adventists supported the Nazi party the
same as other Christians and prior to the outbreak of the war Adventists even
in the United States praised Hitler as a vegetarian concerned with matters of
bodily hygiene.58 Despite its early abolitionist connections, during the Civil
Rights era many Adventist churches in the South actively discriminated
against Blacks while church officials discouraged political activism for racial
justice 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 the
world? 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 as
heathens 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 of
the Third Reich, Church History, Vol. 65, no. 3 (September 1996), pp. 42540.
245
Gospel now being understood as a purely spiritual matter having

nothing to do with concern for social justice).59 The cafeteria of the churchs
General Conference building in Takoma Park, Maryland, was racially segregated until almost 1960, while the churchs handbook to ministers advised
against interracial marriage until, incredibly, 1992, possibly based upon statements against interracial marriage made by Ellen White.60 The Adventist
church was deeply complicit in apartheid in South Africa. In Rwanda in 1994,
significant numbers of Hutu Adventists actively participated in the genocide
of their countrymen. According to a high ranking Rwandese church official
and survivor with whom I spoke in Kigali in 2010, some of these Adventist
genocidaires are known to have abstained from killing on Sabbaths, such was
the depth of their Adventist commitment. A conservatively estimated 10,000
Tutsi Adventists were killed in Rwanda, which at the time had one of the
highest concentrations of Adventists relative to population size of any
country in the world.61 But one would be hard pressed to find sustained
theological reflection on any of these facts in any official church publication
or from any Adventist church pulpit. There is no post-Holocaust or postRwanda Adventist eschatologyonly ad hoc auxiliary theorizing and fervent
evangelism to sustain the hard core of the Adventist millenarianism first
advanced by J. N. Andrews a decade prior to the American Civil War to give
meaning to the Sabbatarian Adventist experience of the Great Disappointment in the shadow of the American empire.
Those scholars who do openly question the Sanctuary Doctrine of 1844, the
churchs remnant self-understanding, or the apocalyptic predictions of the
pioneers concerning the United States government and the Catholic Church,
can expect to be excoriated in official church publications based upon the
failsafe principle that those who doubt the received narrative, by the very
fact of their doubting, ironically confirm it. Angel Manuel Rodrguez of
the churchs Biblical Research Institute, for example, warns against the
temptation 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 and Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary, p. 442 n87.
61
One of the worst massacres of the entire genocide in fact took place on a Seventh-day
Adventist hospital and mission compound on a Sabbath morning. On April 15, 1994, approximately 3,000 people were slain inside the Mugonero Adventist church and its surrounding
grounds. The killers were led to the compound by Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Hutu and
at the time president of the Seventh-day Adventist church in the Kibuye region. Ntakirutimana
was later found guilty of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda. If Adventists were killed in the genocide at the same rates as their neighbors, Alita Byrd
notes, the actual number of Adventist deaths could be as high as 40,000. See Byrd, Sabbath
Slaughter: Adventists and Rwanda, Spectrum Magazine, Vol. 25, no. 4 (June 1996), p. 4; and Philip
Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from
Rwanda (New York: Macmillan, 1999).
62
Angel Manuel Rodrguez, The Remnant and the Adventist Church, October 2002, on the
web at: http://www.adventistbiblicalresearch.org/documents/remnantSDAchurch.htm

E. G. White inform us that our church will have to go through an eschatological shaking in order for God to purify it? Adventists from the start
have predicted a period of apostasy, unbelief, backsliding, and betrayal (as
in the days of Noah) in the final days of human history (which they refer
to as the shaking). The Adventist apocalyptic script therefore contains a
powerful mechanism for dealing with those who call attention to potentially falsifying new information, whether from history, science, or biblical
studies. The mechanism is to write those who challenge the script into the
script itself.
The effectiveness of this defensive strategy is perhaps most clearly illustrated by Adventisms Galileo moment: the Ford crisis of the early 1980s. In
1979, New Testament scholar Desmond Ford (at the time a professor at Pacific
Union College and in many ways a highly conservative Adventist thinker)
publicly announced that he no longer accepted the theological soundness of
William Millers approach to reading biblical prophecy and so could not
believe in the eschatological significance of the year 1844. A landmark conference was held by the church in 1980 to decide how to respond to Fords
challenge. Although over a quarter of the administrators, pastors, and theologians present at the closed-door meetings reportedly shared Fords views,
the church stripped him of his ministerial credentials and he was forced out
of church employment. In the aftermath of the Ford crisis, more than one
hundred ministers and teachers, mostly in the United States and in Fords
native Australia, resigned or were fired. While the crisis pointed to significant
levels of unofficial dissent and growing tensions within the church over the
meaning of its apocalyptic heritage, the effect of the purge was to suppress
open challenges to traditional Adventist beliefs for decades to come. Fords
apostasy was itself widely regarded by Adventists throughout the 1980s and
1990s as a sign of the nearness of Christs return and as confirmation of Ellen
Whites visions.63 Today, many Adventist scholars interpret the book of
Revelation using literary and historical approaches that would be widely
accepted by other Christians. Unlike Ford, they have remained circumspect
or silent about the most troubling aspects of the churchs official eschatology
to avoid inflaming great controversy. There is therefore a tremendous disconnect between the beliefs of a significant number of Adventist educators and
theologians on the one hand and church administrators and lay members on
the other. On the whole, however, Adventists remain deeply committed to
the churchs most traditional apocalyptic formulations, including William
Millers timelines. Any pastor or scholar who openly denies the historicist
methods and key predictions of the pioneers does so at their professional and
even personal peril.
63
Bull and Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary, pp. 889, 94; and Morgan, Adventism and the
American Republic, p. 180.
247
VII. Conclusion: How Adventists Might Become a Prophetic Movement Again

Applying categories drawn from Imre Lakatoss philosophy of science, I
have argued that Adventist apocalypticism has included both progressive
and degenerating theopolitical phases. While use of these terms in the
sphere of religion and theology is fraught with difficulties, we can see how
early Adventist beliefs helped them to make plausible sense of social and
political realities in their day and also how these beliefs inspired Adventists
to prophetic forms of activism and dissent. Yet instead of making greater and
greater sense of observable social and historical realities, Adventist eschatology has over time come to explain less and less of the world. It has encountered increasing cases of what Lakatos referred to as anomalous data, that
is, facts that glaringly conflict with the predictions and expectations of the
pioneers and so can only be incorporated into the Adventist apocalyptic
narrative through unconvincing forms of ad hoc or conspiracy theorizing
and special pleading. The peculiar experience of the pioneers helps to
explain why Adventist apocalypticism has undergone no significant modifications in more than 150 years. Adventists can be described as the people
who experienced the trauma of the Great Disappointment and are determined not to be disappointed a second time. The pain of falsified apocalyptic
predictionsthe trauma and paradigm shift that marked the end of the
Millerite movement but the beginning of Adventismhas fostered a culture
profoundly fearful of any theological moves that might lead to a second
radical paradigm shift in apocalyptic expectations. Practically any changes at
all, Adventists believe, could only lead to the collapse of the Adventist
movement altogether.64
Yet the vitality of early Adventism was born precisely in the creativity
and ferment that followed the 1844 disappointment and the determination
of some Millerites to press forward in reworking familiar texts to speak a
new prophetic word to the principalities and powers in their time and
place. Great disappointments can lead to great awakenings and the recovery of vital insights. Such was the experience of the Adventist pioneers and
it might be the experience of Adventists again. Adventist apocalypticism
has become a degenerating theological research program, I would suggest,
because in their efforts to preserve unmodified what theological talents
they received from the pioneers, contemporary Adventists have actually
lost sight of their own traditions deeper spirit and, at its best, its theopolitical relevance and critical urgency. The churchs permanent freezing of
its nineteenth-century millenarian heritage and historicist methods has left
it unable to confront distressing aspects of its own history or to be a truly
prophetic voice in the face of unfamiliar political, religious, and economic
64
Thus, for example, warns Adventist historian George Knight in his book The Apocalyptic
Vision and the Neutering of Adventism (Hagerstown: Review and Herald, 2008).

beasts in the present. Contemporary Adventists have by and large failed
to translate their concerns for freedom of conscience or for the importance
of Sabbath-keeping into a compelling alternative social ethic or radical
social witness in an age of ecological devastation, corporate crime, economic inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, militarism, and war.
There is perhaps no clearer recent illustration of this factof this failure
of prophetic imaginationthan an ambitious evangelism effort launched by
church officials in 2011 entitled the Great Controversy Project (rebranded
the Great Hope Project in some parts of the world). In a 1905 letter, Ellen
White wrote of her most apocalyptic text: I am more anxious to see a wide
circulation for this book than for any others I have written; for in The Great
Controversy, the last message of warning to the world is given more distinctly than in any of my other books.65 Taking Whites statement as their
guide to what must be done to help usher in the end of the human history
at the start of the twenty-first century, Adventist leaders announced in a
dedication ceremony in the churchs world headquarters building in Silver
Spring, Maryland, on October 10, 2011, that between 2012 and 2014 they
will mass distribute more than 160 million copies of The Great Controversy
in multiple languages and editions all around the globe.66 It was a powerful
statement of the churchs current priorities and moral vision. In comparative perspective, if the average cost of printing, promoting, and distributing
each book is only 50 cents (the actual cost has not been publicized), this
single initiative will cost Adventists nearly 10 million dollars more than the
total annual operating costs of its charitable, non-proselytizing humanitarian organization, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International (which operates in more than 120 countries and in 2010 reported
programming, administrative, and fundraising expenses of approximately
$69 million67).
On July 23, 2011, Maung Maung Htay, the publishing director for the
Myanmar Union Mission, delivered a sermon to Adventists living in what
remains (despite the 2010 release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest) one
of the worlds most repressive and impoverished nations. I preached about
the Great Controversy Project, he reported, and how our General Conference leaders are planning to distribute this book all over the world. After
making a strong appeal to his congregation, he continued, the Kanbe
members promised to donate 500 copies now, and promised to give more
later:
65
A Statement Regarding the Great Controversy, the Ellen White Estate, 2002, on the web
at: http://www.whiteestate.org/vault/GCStatement.html
66
A video of the event may be watched on the web at: https://vimeo.com/30490770
67
For more information on ADRA Internationals budget, financial performance, and overall
accountability and transparency scores, see Charity Navigator.org on the web at: http://
www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=8078
249
In our country, if each member donates only 10 copies, it will mean

280,000 copies delivered. We are moving toward this project. Every
member is telling others about this project. We have started printing.
Some members have already asked me whether the printing is finished,
and I have to tell them it is not ready yet. We plan to dedicate Burmese,
Chin and Karen versions of The Great Controversy on October 8, when the
Southern Asia-Pacific Division (SSD) Publishing Ministries director
comes for our advisory. I hope this project has success in our country too.
God will do great miracles for us.
The undoubted sincerity and depth of religious commitment of Maung
Maung Htay and countless other Adventist believers around the world who
look to church officials in the United States for guidance should in no way be
criticized or lightly dismissed. But what should we think of those Western
Christians whose vision of prophetic witness for a country such as Burma/
Myanmar is to mass distribute a Victorian-era text centered upon the corruptions of American democracy and the sins of the medieval Catholic Church?
There is little reason to fear that the military junta in Burma will strongly
object to Burmese Adventists spending their time and money reading, translating, or distributing a book (or watered-down excerpts from the same) that
describes the American government and a major Western religion as a conspiracy of oppressive beasts. At the conclusion of the Great Controversy
Project in Burma, Adventists will no doubt be able to express their gratitude
to the military regime for honoring their religious liberty. Meanwhile,
untold numbers of political prisoners and human rights activists remain
languishing in Burmese jails.
Adventists searching for models of what the prophetic witness of the
pioneers would sound like today in a country such as Burma might begin by
listening to the courageous voices of other Christians in the face of unmistakable beastlike powers. In December, 2011, Archbishop of Yangon, Charles
Maung Bo, spoke of his most pressing concerns and priorities for the country.
I will end this article by simply quoting from his eloquent call for Christian
peacemaking and work for social justice. Things are already taking place
and there are greater possibilities for us in the field of education and health
programs in the country, he said:
The Catholic Church is doing her best in all of her sixteen dioceses . . . It
reaches out to all the corners of the country, and helps people without
any form of discrimination . . . There is a very great, urgent need for
development and education, and for that we also need peace and reconciliation. In spite of some of the positive signs . . . the army is still waging
war with . . . the Kachin ethnic group. So there are very many internally
displaced people in the country, some say tens of thousands. This armed
conflict must be solved by negotiations. Some days ago, both sides met in

Shwe Li, on the China border area of the Northern Shan State. However,
they could not come to any agreement, and so the fighting continues.
[Aung San] Suu Kyi is trying her best to mediate too. But the fact of the
matter is the KIO does not trust the government . . . I hope for a New
Jerusalem, obtained by dialogue, forgiveness and reconciliation, and
then through peace and development. We have great and urgent need
of all this.68
68
Dialogue, Reconciliation, Peace, and Development in Myanmar, an interview with
Charles Maung Bo by Gerard OConnell, Vatican Insider, December 8, 2011, on the web at:
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/inquiries-and-interviews/detail/articolo/
myanmar-vescovo-obispo-bishop-10630/
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Modern Theology 30:2 April 2014

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

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

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fledgling movement from outside the normal channels of interpretation,

Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic, p. 24.

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

Andrews, Thoughts on Revelation XIII and XIV, pp. 816.

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

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

Bull, The Seventh-day Adventists, pp. 18485.

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

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

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Gospel now being understood as a purely spiritual matter having