THE NEXT ADVENTISM
“That Blessed Hope” REFRESHING THE ADVENT BY LOREN SEIB OLD
William Miller was wrong about the time, but he was right about what really mattered.
A key figure in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church—though he never joined it himself—was New England farmer William Miller. One wonders how much farm work Miller actually got done,
since it appears that he spent most of his time in Bible study. His signal achievement was interpreting Daniel 8:14 to say that Jesus would return some time in the early 1840s. (With all of the attention given to Oct. 22, 1844, Adventists oſten forget that the Millerites had also set several earlier dates.) It’s easy to lampoon this, and many journalists at the time did, both before and aſter the disappointment. But one thing Miller got very right was that he anticipated the
return of Jesus as a wonderful, joyful event. He used a phrase from Titus 2:13: “Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (KJV, emphasis added). “Tat blessed hope” in Jesus’ return was deeply meaningful
among Christians in the 19th century, an age of anxiety and suffering. Life in America was hard, with many incurable diseases. It wasn’t unusual for a family to bury multiple babies, and sometimes also the mother who gave birth to them. Rural New England, which was still a frontier then, was a challenging place to live. Potential new Americans—among them Roman Catholics and Jews—were flooding the land, and then as now, some people were terrified of immigrants. Te question of slavery was heating up, threatening to rend the nation apart, and it almost did. But then, William Miller offered the answer! Jesus is returning,
and soon! In a moment—literally, in an eyeblink—we and others will be changed! Not only changed, but improved! Te virus of sin itself will be eliminated! Everything and everyone will return to the perfection of the original creation! Adventist pioneer Annie Smith expressed it in the last stanza
of a hymn we still sing: “While pilgrims here we journey on In this dark vale of sin and gloom, Trough tribulation, hate, and scorn, Or through the portals of the tomb,
Till our returning King shall come To take His exile captives home, O! what can buoy the spirits up? ‘Tis this alone—the blessed hope.”1
Legacy of Fear An Adventist Today reader sent me a note recently, confiding: “I have found it so very difficult to talk with my fellow Adventists about deep spiritual matters. At church, we talk about prophecies, hard times, and Sunday laws. We discuss papal bulls, persecution, and suffering. Tere is little about the beautiful hope of Christ’s second coming, the defeat of pain and death.” I, too, grew up with dire predictions of Jesus’ soon return.
My pastors and teachers talked about it with surprisingly little reference to the joy of the event. It might be said in passing— duing a funeral, perhaps—that we would see Grandpa again. Mostly, though, the return of Jesus was less about hope and more about Adventists as a selected, and eventually persecuted, minority. Even our families would turn against us! I also remember references to hiding in the rocks and the
mountains. For my eleventh birthday, I begged for a Pathfinder Field Guide because a section in the book taught how to live off the land, which I believed I would need to know very soon. Some of our neighbors and one of my public school teachers were Roman Catholics; I was terrified of them. I had found, on my Sabbath aſternoon walks, an uncultivated bit of prairie a mile or so from where I lived, and I remember sketching in my notebook a plan for a dugout cave, where I could shelter from those merciless people. I found no joy in thinking about Jesus’ return. To put it bluntly,
it represented sheer horror. And whenever I tell these stories, I hear from others who had the same experience. One woman wrote to me, “I haven’t been a Seventh-day Adventist for 40 years, and yet I got a knot in my stomach when I read about your childhood fears. Tese stories have affected my whole life.” Tis is the dark side of the “Adventist” part of our name. We must change that.
How Did We Get Here? A friend wrote this to me: “Tey would tell us all the horrible things that were supposed to happen to us, persecution and hiding in the mountains and even our families turning against us. We couldn’t even have any assurance of salvation! But then they’d add,
‘But you should be happy for Jesus to return! You should be looking forward to it!’ Talk about an abusive picture of God! Is it any wonder so many of us got so spiritually messed up?”
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