On a dark winter’s night in Lincolnshire, England, a group of cloaked men gathered by the banks of the River Don. As the hour neared midnight, two of their number broke away from the group and made their way into the river. As it turned out, they were none other than the local vicar and one of his parish elders. As they entered the Don, a shiver ran through them both. Then, they did something that had not been done in England for more than a thousand years: the elder held out his arms, embraced the vicar, and lowered him into the dark water.
Ask any moderate Seventh-day Adventist to explain the theory of the Big Bang, and you’ll likely be met by confusion. Imagining cosmic origins through God’s Word is much more comforting—and understandable. To use physics pioneer Georges Lemaître’s terminology, how can an entire universe emerge from one “primeval atom”?
And yet, many Adventists are oddly comfortable with another Big Bang theory—the theory of how we as a movement came to be. The story of the early Adventists—starting with William Miller—studying the Bible and in doing so, coming to the truths we know and love today is one often thought of as that “primeval atom”. Miller, later describing his method, said, “I determined to lay aside all my prepossessions, to thoroughly compare Scripture with Scripture, and to pursue its study in a regular and methodical manner.” There is a real appeal to this and, indeed, a promise—that anyone who puts aside their own assumptions and studies Scripture with an open mind can and will discover “The Truth” for themselves. As Miller himself said, “I was thus satisfied that the Bible is a system of revealed truths, so clearly and simply given, that the ‘wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein’.” There’s hope even for me.
This instinct is not unique to Adventists; indeed, the wider Protestant project has made the same claim ever since Martin Luther, who famously once wrote, “If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.”1 It could be argued that Luther himself set the template for theological discovery and that for Protestants (bolstered by the Enlightenment), this has now become the default. Of course, the trouble with the notion that through a sincere study of the Bible, anyone would naturally arrive at “The Truth” is not only anecdotally untrue—it has been proven false by history. There have been thousands of Protestant groups, offshoots and denominations since 1517, each with their own interpretation of the Bible, each as convinced as the others that they alone were right. As convenient as it would be to claim that we originated from the “primeval atom” of early Adventists’ sincere study of Scripture, when you examine the history of our movement, you’ll discover the reasons we believe what we believe are far more complicated.
The message and method
Alexander Campbell was the son and successor of Presbyterian minister Thomas Campbell who started the Restorationist movement, the Disciples of Christ. He believed that if Christians focused only on the “facts of the Bible”, they would eventually all come to agreement.2 Like William Miller, Campbell was an adherent of the Scottish School of Common Sense, separated from his parent denomination, embraced Baconian methodology and sought kinship with other Christians through agreed-upon facts rather than tradition and creeds. In 1832, Campbell merged his movement with that of Barton Stone’s (A Kentucky Presbyterian who had started a similar movement). A splinter group who chose not to merge with Campbell and Stone would adopt a name recognisable to those familiar with Adventist history: the Christian Connection (CC).
Though parted from Campbell and Stone, the CC nevertheless clung to many of their teachings. Joshua Himes, formerly a CC minister, said, “Their leading purposes [were] to assert, for individuals and churches, more liberty and independence in relation to matters of faith and practice, to shake off the authority of human creeds . . . [and] to make the Bible their only guide.3 Early Adventists adopted wholesale the CC’s package of anti-creedalism, Arminian free will theology and sola scriptura—as well as print culture and openness to women participating in ministry. Undoubtedly, early Adventists also adopted their methodology from the CC, who in turn got theirs from Methodist revivalism—in whose water all non-denominational Christians in this era were swimming. Personal experience of salvation, practical sanctification, theological reform, mistrust of institutions and the promotion of discourse and debate in the search for truth all were inherited from the CC.
The state of the dead
As some historians4 have noted, the CC laid the groundwork for what we think of today as the doctrine of “the State of the Dead” but in truth, most Restorationists, and Millerites, accepted the view of the immortal soul. It wasn’t until George Storrs, an abolitionist and former Methodist minister, became convinced that immortality was a gift given by Jesus in the resurrection, that the idea began to put down roots among Millerites. He came by this idea by chance in 1837 when he found a pamphlet by Henry Grew, in which the latter laid out his beliefs on conditional immortality. Grew emigrated from England when he was 13 and had been a Baptist minister, though he was later fired after adopting “sentiments and usages different from those of the church”.5 It is unclear what these “sentiments” were. Whatever the case, George Storrs, having chanced upon his pamphlet, couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something to Grew’s views.
In 1841, after years of study, Storrs wrote Three Letters and then the following year, Six Sermons, where he laid out his convictions. It appears that the Millerites mostly ignored Storrs but after the Great Disappointment, they eventually embraced conditionalism with JN Andrews, James White and Uriah Smith noting Storrs as instrumental in introducing the idea that would eventually become a fundamental Adventist conviction.
The Sabbath
Returning to the midnight baptism we opened with, the name of the vicar who was lowered under the frigid waters of the river Don was John Smyth, a former Anglican minister who was exiled for his conviction that infant baptism was wrong, and that full immersion baptism by a consenting adult was required for salvation. Though the story of the midnight baptism is probably apocryphal, we do know that Smyth baptised himself, then his followers, in 1609, eventually leading to the first London Baptist congregation in 1612. In 1617, a tailor named Hamlet Jackson convinced a pastoral couple named John and Dorothy Traske of the truth of the seventh day Sabbath, eventually leading to the first Seventh Day Baptist congregation. In 1664, the Mumford family emigrated to North America, becoming the first Seventh Day Baptists in the New World.
Fast-forward to 1844 when Rachel Oaks, a Seventh Day Baptist, shared the Sabbath with Millerite pastor Frederick Wheeler. He then introduced the Sabbath to fellow minister TM Preble, then later to Joseph Bates. In 1845, some Millerites adopted it and soon a dozen people in the Washington church were keeping the Sabbath—and the rest is history.
The path of providence
Seventh-day Adventists are similar to other Christian movements on the one hand, and unique on the other. On the one hand, Adventism did not emerge via one “primeval atom”—rather, through hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of inputs all building on one another to create both the conditions and the context for the emergence of the church we know today.
On the other hand, it is remarkable that the combination of these inputs—the fervour of Alexander Campbell, the convictions of Henry Grew and the “punctiliousness” of Hamlet Jackson—came together how and when they did. Like the Creation story, the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (both its prehistory and actual history) does not illustrate a set of jumbled components that just so happened to combine to create something, rather than nothing. Rather, our history illustrates the hand of God moving over the chaos, bringing not only order, but a movement which, imperfect as it is, has developed to express, more beautifully than any other in history, the character of God and His incredible plan for humanity.
Jesse Herford is the associate editor of Signs of the Times.
- Martin Luther, Theodore G Tappert, Luther’s Works, Volume 54: Table Talk. Fortress Press, 1967. ↩︎
- Leonard Allen, Richard Hughes, Discovering Our Roots: The Ancestry of Churches of Christ. ACU Press, 1988. ↩︎
- Joshua V. Himes, “Christian Connexion,” in The Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, ed. J. Newton Brown (Battelboro, VT: Battleboro Typographic Company, 1838), 362-364. Accessed from <webfiles.acu.edu/departments/Library/HR/restmov_nov11/www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/texts/jvhimes/CC-ERK.HTM [8/13/23]>. ↩︎
- Donny Chrissutianto, “The State of the Dead and Its Relationship to the Sanctuary Doctrine in Seventh-day Adventist Theology (1844-1874): A Historical and Theological Study,” (PhD diss, Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies, 2018). ↩︎
- Centennial Memorial of the First Baptist Church of Hartford. Press of Christian secretary, 1890. ↩︎
