SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM

SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM . The origins of Seventh-day Adventism run back to the interdenominational Millerite movement in the United States in the early 1840s, when William Miller, a Baptist lay minister and farmer, sought to rekindle a "second awakening" by predicting that Christ would soon return to earth. On the basis of Daniel 8:14 ("Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed"), he calculated that the end would come "about the year 1843"—2,300 years after Artaxerxes of Persia issued a decree to rebuild Jerusalem. Following a series of failed time-settings, Millerites fixed their hopes for the second advent of Christ on October 22, 1844, the Day of Atonement, which, according to the Jewish calendar, fell on the tenth day of the seventh month. The "great disappointment" that resulted from this miscalculation splintered the movement into several factions. The majority, including Miller, admitted their exegetical error but continued to expect Christ's imminent return; eventually they coalesced into the Evangelical Adventist and Advent Christian churches. A much smaller number embraced the suggestion of Hiram Edson, an upstate New York farmer, that only the event, not the date, had been wrong: "that instead of our High Priest coming out of the Most Holy of the heavenly sanctuary to come to this earth on the tenth day of the seventh month, at the end of the 2,300 days, he for the first time entered on that day the second apartment of that sanctuary and that he had a work to perform in the Most Holy before coming to this earth." Millerites of this persuasion formed the nucleus of what, in the early 1860s, evolved into the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The Formative Years: 1844–1863

Edson's sanctuary doctrine, which held that Christ in 1844 inaugurated a new era in the history of salvation, became one of the most distinctive and central tenets of Adventist theology. However, other beliefs—for example, belief in the "shut door," the seventh-day Sabbath, and the gift of prophecy—brought them their greatest notoriety and earned them the name "sabbatarian and shut-door" Adventists.

Early beliefs that October 22 marked the date when God shut the "door of mercy" on all who had rejected the Millerite message gradually gave rise to an open-door theology and to evangelization. The observance of Saturday as the Sabbath, as required by the Ten Commandments and practiced by the Seventh Day Baptists, became the most obvious symbol of Seventh-day Adventist distinctiveness and served as a means by which legalistic members sought to attain the higher morality expected of God's people at the close of history.

Shortly after the "great disappointment," Ellen Gould Harmon, a sickly, introverted adolescent ecstatic from Portland, Maine, began having visionary experiences that validated the sanctuary, shut-door, and Sabbath doctrines. The Millerite movement produced numerous mystics and trance mediums, and the believers in Portland were especially infamous for what Millerite publicist Joshua V. Himes called their "continual introduction of visionary nonsense." Thus, Ellen Harmon would probably have been lost in the crowd of enthusiasts had she not been discovered by James White, a young Adventist preacher and teacher, who became her protector, her promoter, and, in 1846, her husband. Together, James and Ellen White built the Seventh-day Adventist church, James serving as organizer and entrepreneur, Ellen as exhorter and visionary. The Adventist brethren, under James's leadership, functioned as the sect's theologians and biblical exegetes, frequently relying on Ellen's "gift of prophecy" to support their doctrinal positions. Committed to sola scriptura biblicism, Adventists regarded Ellen White's charismatic role as confirmatory rather than initiatory; her testimonies related to the Bible as a "lesser light to the greater light." Despite sporadic questioning of her authority, even by her husband, her visions helped to identify Adventists as God's end-time people and thus assured her of a singularly precious place in Adventist history.

In many respects, Seventh-day Adventism developed as a typical nineteenth-century American sect, characterized by millenarianism, biblicism, restorationism, and legalism. Its Old Testament orientation, its self-image as the chosen people, its sabbatarianism, and its sense of cosmic destiny all betrayed the influence of eighteenth-century American Puritanism, while its Arminianism (which rejected Calvinist predestinarianism in favor of free choice of salvation), its doctrine of soul-sleep (asserting that human beings have no separate "spirit" and therefore the dead have no consciousness until the resurrection), its concern for religious liberty, and its adoption of medical and educational reforms also revealed it to be a product of antebellum evangelicalism. Adventists, however, especially during their early years, stressed their distinctiveness and separateness rather than their many points of similarity with the religious landscape of nineteenth-century America.

By 1850, sabbatarian Adventists, still looking for the imminent appearance of Christ, composed a "scattered flock" of about two hundred loosely structured sectarians who sought to restore such primitive Christian practices as foot-washing, greeting with the "holy kiss," and calling each other "brother" and "sister." As time passed uneventfully, their radical millenarianism, which had led some to predict the end in 1845, 1847, and 1851, gave way to a more realistic attitude. As early as 1848 Ellen White had had a vision in which she saw Adventism spreading "like streams of light…clear round the world," a scene that implied long-range involvement in earthly affairs. In 1850 her husband began editing The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, which became the official Adventist organ. In 1855 the Whites moved on to the fresher evangelistic pastures of southern Michigan, where the church eventually enjoyed enough material prosperity to elicit, in 1857, a notable jeremiad from the prophetess on its "Laodicean condition," a phrase referring to the "lukewarm" church described in Revelation 3:14–18.

By the late 1850s the institutionalization of Seventh-day Adventism was well under way. In 1859 the Adventists adopted a plan of "systematic benevolence" to support a clergy; the next year they selected the name Seventh-day Adventist; by 1863 there were 125 churches with about 3,500 members. That year they organized a General Conference and invited James White to serve as their first president, an honor he temporarily declined. In 1866, in the wake of an epidemic of sickness among church leaders and Ellen White's discovery of the virtues of the "water cure" and vegetarianism, the Adventists established a sanatorium at Battle Creek, Michigan—the Western Health Reform Institute—and began publishing the Health Reformer, a monthly magazine. John Harvey Kellogg, who became the leading force in Adventist health reform, developed several new food products, among them ready-to-eat dry cereals. His brother, Will Kellogg, established the company that created a mass market for this new way of eating breakfast.

Years of Transition: 1863–1915

The years following the formal organization of the Adventist Church and its emergence as an established sect saw American Protestantism split into modernist and fundamentalist parties, divided by such issues as evolution and higher criticism. Not surprisingly, Adventists in this period generally, but idiosyncratically, followed the fundamentalists. Because the Adventists observed the seventh-day Sabbath as a memorial of creation, and because Ellen White insisted on a recent six-day creation, they rejected all compromises with evolutionary biology and geology. They also rejected higher criticism in favor of biblical inerrancy, but they displayed less concern about the integrity of the scriptures than about the writings of Ellen White, whose apotheosis occurred during this period. For years Ellen White had lived in the shadow of her husband, providing visionary endorsement for the opinions of the founding fathers of Adventism. But after James's death in 1881 she assumed a more assertive role, directing the activities of a younger generation of male leaders, who quickly learned to clear matters of doctrine, development, and policy with the prophetess. By the time of her death in 1915 she had, despite disclaimers to the contrary, become the real authority for Adventists in matters of behavior as well as belief.

Acceptance of Ellen White's prophetic role set Adventists apart from other fundamentalists, as did their peculiar doctrines regarding the sanctuary and the Sabbath. In fact, nothing distinguished Adventists as a separate religious community as much as their Sabbath-keeping, which led them to distrust not only evolutionists (who undermined belief in a literal Sabbath) but Catholics (whom they blamed for changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday), labor unionists (who, they feared, would force them to work on Saturday), and blue-law-minded evangelical Christians (who, the prophetess said, would pass a national law requiring Sunday observance). Efforts to enact such legislation in the 1880s, coinciding as they did with hard-labor sentences for up to fifty church members who violated blue laws in the South, proved to the Adventists that they were indeed living in the "last days."

Adventist theology shifted in the 1880s, when two West Coast editors, Ellet J. Waggoner and Alonzo T. Jones, both still in their thirties, challenged the legalistic emphasis that had come to characterize the sect. In opposition to General Conference leaders, who maintained that salvation depended upon observing the Ten Commandments (especially the fourth), Waggoner and Jones followed evangelical Christians in arguing that righteousness came by accepting Christ, not by keeping the law. At a pivotal general conference in 1888, Ellen White broke with the Battle Creek administrators—and the view of her late husband—to endorse this controversial "new light," a move that symbolized her "coming out" as the Adventists' matriarch. But despite her pronouncements in favor of "righteousness by faith," the issue of grace versus law remained a sensitive one within Adventism.

For decades Adventists confined their evangelistic efforts almost exclusively to North America. In the early 1870s, however, church leaders became convinced that they had an obligation to carry their message "into all the world" (Mk. 16:15), and in 1874 they sent J. N. Andrews, a former General Conference president, to Switzerland as the first Adventist missionary. Other appointments followed in quick succession, first to the large white, Christian populations of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and, later, to the nonwhite peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By 1900 the Adventists were supporting nearly five hundred foreign missionaries, and over 15 percent of the more than seventy-five thousand Adventists lived outside North America. In part to provide for the growing needs of its foreign missions, as well as to shield its youth from worldly influences, the church developed an extensive educational system. By the second half of the twentieth century, Adventists were operating one of the largest Protestant school systems in the world.

In 1895, in order to train medical personnel for service at home and abroad, Adventists opened the American Medical Missionary College, with campuses in Battle Creek and Chicago. The school's dominant force was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a former protégé of the Whites. In his mid-twenties Kellogg became superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute (later the Battle Creek Sanitarium) and after 1893 headed the Medical Missionary and Benevolent Association, the Adventist body responsible for operating medical institutions around the world. By the early twentieth century the association's two thousand workers considerably outnumbered General Conference employees, an imbalance that aggravated the friction between the imperious and imperialistic Dr. Kellogg and the equally ambitious ministers who ran the General Conference. In 1906 the latter arranged for the doctor and his cohorts to be disfellowshipped for questioning the authority of Ellen White; thus, for the first time, making the acceptance of her testimonies a "test of fellowship." When Kellogg, the most prominent Adventist in the world, left the church, he took the medical college and Battle Creek Sanitarium with him, forcing loyalists in 1909 to open an orthodox medical school, the College of Medical Evangelists (which developed into Loma Linda University), in southern California.

In the years since the Whites moved their fledgling church to Michigan, Battle Creek had grown into the administrative, publishing, medical, and educational center of Adventism. Such centralization and concentration of power concerned Ellen White, who recommended dismantling the Battle Creek colony. As a result, Battle Creek College (now Andrews University) was moved in 1902 to rural southwestern Michigan, and administrative and publishing activities were moved to the outskirts of Washington, D.C., which became the international headquarters.

Contemporary Adventism

Ellen White died in 1915, leaving a church of more than 136,000 members. By 2001 membership had swelled to over twelve million, roughly 92 percent of whom lived outside of North America. Despite the preponderance of third-world believers, and the fact that recent growth in North America had come to a great extent from Hispanics and blacks, the administrative and economic power of the church remained largely in the hands of white, male leaders. In the mid-1940s the General Conference created segregated black conferences in North America, but it later rejected demands for separate unions that accompanied the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Similarly, as the feminist movement gathered momentum in the 1970s, Adventist women, long relied upon for cheap labor, began demanding equal pay for equal work—but they won their case only after resorting to the courts.

As their church grew and prospered, Adventists felt increasingly uncomfortable with their sectarian identity. Thus, they were greatly cheered in the 1950s when such prominent evangelicals as Donald G. Barnhouse and Walter R. Martin, after studying Adventist beliefs, certified them to be Christians rather than cultists. Many Adventists, nevertheless, continued to live in tension with the church's teachings on the sanctuary and the authority of Ellen White. Dissident voices became increasingly audible in the 1960s, especially after a group of Adventist academics and professionals created the independent Association of Adventist Forums (AAF) in 1967 and began publishing a lively journal, Spectrum. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Adventism was torn by claims of Adventist scholars that they had uncovered evidence that the writings of the prophetess not only contained historical and scientific errors but, in many instances, paralleled the prose of other authors—discoveries that forced a rethinking of White's role in the community. During the same period an Australian biblical scholar, Desmond Ford, announced to an AAF group that the church's distinctive view of the sanctuary derived more from White than from the Bible and that it infected Adventism with an unhealthful and unbiblical legalism. Although Ford and a number of his ministerial colleagues were promptly defrocked for their heresy, they still effected a subtle recasting of the sanctuary doctrine, orienting it more toward the atonement than toward last-day events and bringing it more into conformity with evangelical Protestantism. Some sectors of the church, often called "historic Adventists," opposed these developments, but Seventh-day Adventism generally continued to move haltingly along the path from radical millenarian sect to conventional denomination as it entered the twenty-first century.

See Also

White, Ellen Gould.

Bibliography

There is no standard history of Seventh-day Adventism. Until recently, non-Adventist scholars had tended to ignore Adventists, and Adventist historians have been reticent to examine their heritage critically. Among the several comprehensive histories, the best of the old is M. Ellsworth Olsen's History of the Origin and Progress of Seventh-day Adventists (Washington, D.C., 1925), and the best of the new is Richard W. Schwarz and Floyd Greenleaf's Light Bearers, rev. ed. (Nampa, Id., 2000), a well-documented survey designed to serve as a college text. Adventism in America: A History, edited by Gary Land, rev. ed. (Berrien Springs, Mich., 1998), offers a readable chronological overview written by six Adventist historians. A valuable reference work, filled with historical data, is the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, 2 vols., 2d rev. ed. (Hagerstown, Md., 1996).

The Rise of Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Edwin S. Gaustad (New York, 1974), though misleadingly titled (most of the essays say nothing about Adventism), does contain a marvelous 111-page bibliography of Millerite and early Adventist publications and an important interpretive essay, "Adventism and the American Experience," by Jonathan M. Butler. The Millerite movement has become the subject of a considerable body of scholarly literature, which Gary Land analyzes in his historiographical introduction to Everett N. Dick's, William Miller and the Advent Crisis, 1831–1844 (Berrien Springs, Mich., 1994). The best survey of the movement is George R. Knight's popularly written Millennial Fever and the End of the World (Boise, Id., 1993). P. Gerard Damsteegt's Foundations of the Seventh-day Adventist Message and Mission (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1977) uncritically but microscopically traces the development of Adventist theology to 1874. Ingemar Linden's iconoclastic and unpolished The Last Trump: An Historico-Genetical Study of Some Important Chapters in the Making and Development of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1978) covers roughly the same period in a different style. Douglas Morgan's Adventism and the American Republic: The Public Involvement of a Major Apocalyptic Movement (Knoxville, Tenn., 2001) examines the interplay of the denomination's theology with society.

Despite an abundance of inspirational biographies of Adventist leaders, few scholarly studies of individual Adventists have appeared. Notable exceptions include Richard W. Schwarz's John Harvey Kellogg, M. D. (Nashville, Tenn., 1970), which unfortunately lacks the documentation found in the doctoral dissertation upon which it is based; Ronald L. Numbers's Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White and the Origins of Seventh-day Adventist Health Reform, rev. ed. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1992), a critical analysis of White's health-related activities; Gilbert M. Valentine's The Shaping of Adventism: The Case of W. W. Prescott (Berrien Springs, Mich., 1992), a study of a frequently controversial editor and educator; and Calvin W. Edwards and Gary Land, Seeker After Light: A. F. Ballenger, Adventism, and American Christianity (Berrien Springs, Mich., 2000), an examination of a minister who was dismissed from the denomination because of his criticisms of the sanctuary doctrine.

Jonathan M. Butler (1987)

Ronald L. Numbers (1987)

Gary G. Land (2005)