The Great Disappointment: 1844 and 2011

Here I sit at my computer, the day before May 21, 2011. May 21, for most people, will just be a normal Saturday. For a number of others, not all of whom are strangers to me, there is a much greater expectation for tomorrow. As the followers of Harold Camping have boldly and publicly been communicating, they expect judgment day to come on May 21

This prediction has received much ridicule from the secular media, and received gentle (and not-so-gentle) critiques from Christian leaders – some making a joke of it, others humbly explaining that there’s no biblical reason to believe this.

But it shouldn’t really be a surprise that Camping is teaching this, or that people are staking their plans, money and faith on his teachings. It’s happened plenty of times before. The most prominent example in U.S. Christianity was William Miller, who claimed to have discovered the date of Christ’s return in the 1820’s. Miller was a self-educated farmer from New York – he had not been influenced by academia or being a prominent part of an institutional church leadership structure. He was an average American, reading the Bible for himself, and coming to a conclusion that seemed very clear to him: Christ would return in 1843. In the 1830’s, he began to share this message with others, and by the early 1840’s gained a large audience for his message throughout the U.S. Roughly a million people attended camp meetings to hear him speak, and the movement caught the attention of the nation. His book, Evidence from Scripture of the Second Coming of Christ, About the Year 1843, was published in 1836. Thousands believed his “biblical” insight that Jesus would return “sometime between March 21^st, 1843 and March 21^st ,1844,” (based on the Jewish calendar) l . They forsook their previous religious beliefs (i.e., left their churches) to follow Miller’s teachings, and the popular call that grew to “Come out of Babylon!” (Babylon, in their scheme, being the Protestant church.) Working class people eagerly anticipated the end of their struggle to earn a living. Many sold their possessions. Millerites dressed in white robes and went up on hills to await Christ’s arrival at any moment.

The spring of 1844 brought the first disappointment. The predicted time frame had passed, and the “virgins awaiting the bridegroom” were still waiting. Then the leadership of the movement focused in on an “autumnal cleansing” and fixated on the date October 22, 1844. True believers, who would be saved, were those who had left their churches and put their firm belief in this date. All others would be excluded and judged by Christ. Anyone who tempered their statement of belief with an “if” was not considered a true believer.

The results on October 22? The “spring disappointment” was followed by the “great disappointment.” The world went on, as if it were an ordinary day. In 1845, William Miller, disillusioned, left the Adventist movement that had been the vehicle for his message. He died, blind, of old age on his farm in Low Hampton, New York.

Miller was perhaps the most prominent American, but not the only church leader to make such a prediction. In the year 65, Hilary of Poiters announced the end of the world. In 1179, John of Toledo predicted 1186 as the end, based on the alignment of planets. Jehovah’s Witnesses used a mathematical calculation to predict the beginning of the war of Armageddon in 1914. When this prediction did not work out, the Watchtower society subsequently predicted 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. A fellow Christian writer, observing the Family Radio campaign, reminisced on his personal experience with the predictive pamphlet buy a NASA engineer titled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. The commonality of all these predictions? They were all wrong. EVERY time a Christian leader has set a date for the second coming of Christ, it was wrong. They have claimed biblical, prophetic and divine authority, yet the failure of their predictions has proven that they lack such authority.

But in many cases, the teachers have not recanted. They have made excuses, then regrouped and set a new date, marshaling their remaining followers, as the Millerite movement did in the spring of 1844. As for Harold Camping? He seems to know how to accomplish this. In 1994, he predicted the end of the world. It didn’t happen. Yet he still remains convinced of his own authority, unwilling to heed anyone’s interpretation of Scripture besides his.

If you are a follower of Harold Camping, believing his teaching to be biblical, please hold him accountable to his words by not following his teaching any longer when this prediction fails. The parallels with William Miller are astonishing. Many who object to Camping do not do so because they reject the authority of Scripture, as Camping claims, but because they recognize that his interpretive methods have failed over and over, and they are guided by human arrogance, not the Holy Spirit. Those of us who continue to attend Christian churches do so because we believe the biblical teaching that the church, despite it’s weaknesses and failings, is the bride of Christ, not the sin-ruled world system represented by Babylon in the apocalyptic Scriptures.

Please, please, be willing to humbly repent and seek Christ in the aftermath. Do not be deluded by Camping’s silver-tongued explanations of what happened. Hold him to his own words. And be willing to seek truth on May 22 and after. He is not the first to deceive. You are not the first to be deceived. There is freedom in repentance, but bondage in prideful determination to follow falsehood. Choose repentance from false teaching.

Be hearers of the Word, and not readers only

I sat in the shade on a campground in Northern California last summer, talking about the Christian life with a fellow counselor. He told me some of the story of his spiritual growth, describing how establishing regular Bible reading habits had greatly strengthened his spiritual life. He said that he had come the conclusion that this was essential to spiritual growth, and even though he had heard people downplay its importance and shrug it off as legalism, he didn't see "how anyone could grow spiritually without consistent, daily Bible reading." I had a brief, existential struggle before I replied. Do I point out how silly that statement seems in historical perspective, when this idea had obviously impacted this young man's life in a dramatic and heartfelt way? After my few seconds of internal angst, I think the reply I gave was something like, "You know, personal Bible reading has had a powerful effect on my spiritual growth as well; it's such an amazing privilege to have considering that through hundreds of years of church history, the majority of believers didn't have a copy of God's Word in their own language." I hoped that this communicated support for the habits that had shaped him, while at the same time gently pointing out that even illiterate people and those who have lived in times and places where it was not practically possible for them to have and read their own copy of the Bible did manage to grow spiritually somehow.

This launched me into reflection on how I think of "consuming" and interacting with the content of Scripture as an American Evangelical - and what other ways I could effectively experience the the inspired literature that reveals God's person, plan and principles.

My profs have more than once pointed out that when the letters of the New Testament were sent to their original recipients, they would have been read aloud to the church, not photocopied and passed out to everyone, or put up on a screen. (Both Xerox and Power Point would have been anachronisms at that point and for a long time afterward.) This was also how the majority of Jews would have taken in the OT writing: hearing them read aloud by a Rabbi. Owning a scroll would be way to expensive. Thus there may be some things in the way the letters were written that come across better in hearing the letter rather than looking at it on a page. I decided to explore this in a Sunday evening service at my church. So I practiced reading Ecclesiastes, then read it aloud from my trusty old NIV to the group that had gathered that night. Then I opened it up for questions and comments. It turned out to be quite an enjoyable and edifying experience. A visitor's questions led to a discussion of the gospel, and of God's love and grace, even towards those who wandered away. Not really where you plan to go when you open up to Ecclesiastes, but sometimes good conversations begin in a very roundabout way. And we read the Word in community, with the collected insights and reflections of our local church community. This seems to me a step better than consuming a book with only my personal thoughts and reactions to the content.

A couple weeks ago my pastor mentioned that he had made arrangements with a Bible media group to get audio cd's of the Bible in MP3 format, intended for people to put on their ipods or other media players. Wycliffe has been putting these files on solar-powered or hand-cranked players to take the words of Scripture to a lot of places it's never been before in our world. In our context, this group reasons that a lot of people say they don't read their Bibles because either A)They "don't have the time" or B)They don't like to read. So why not take away these excuses? Surely, you say, someone who is truly spiritually interested doesn't need things dumbed down and made more user-friendly and convenient to make them willing to take in Scripture content. But wait...what if now they're going to hear the Word, in a way a bit more akin to the original audience, rather than read it like most post-Gutenberg Christians. Okay, we miss out on the community aspect here; you can't win 'em all. But I'm excited to offer this to sixth-graders I know who are painfully slow in their reading, but show spiritual interest and just may listen.

The invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy did so much good for Christianity. When people can check the pronouncements of the church for correspondence with the teachings of Scripture, we really seem to get a lot closer to who God wants the people of God to be than when power over doctrine is solely in the hands of tradition and an educated elite. Thank God for movable type, and how it has shaped the movement of Christianity that has shaped me. And thank God for digital sound files (And even for the people who listened to the Bible on cassette tapes back in the ancient days of the '80's and '90's): may they increase our understanding and appreciation of Scripture and democratize Biblical knowledge for coming generations around the world. I'll be watching the mailbox at the church, waiting for those cd's to get here....

Did the "good old days" ever really happen?

We are people of the text. Christianity is a religion shaped by the written and preserved canon of Scripture, and belief in Scripture's authority provides parameters for orthodox belief. For evangelicalism in western culture, the democratization of Bible reading after the advent of the printing press and the growth in literacy of the masses through broader education efforts has brought us to view individual reading of Scripture as a critical practice. We hear this in the emphatic appeals from leaders and teachers to be faithful in having a personal "quiet time."
As we read, we relive the stories of the faith of past saints, and we sense the vibrant power of the messages of the prophets in the Old Testament and the letters of the apostles in the New Testament as they spoke to their faith communities. The natural and appropriate response is to want to relive these experiences, to see the powerful acts of God in our own time and experience the passionate joy of a relationship with God in our own faith communities. Those who expose themselves to the accounts of the heroes of church history will often experience the same feelings of wonder at God's past works and a desire to live out these same kinds of experiences in our own lives. May this passion burn in our hearts and spur us on to good deeds, deepened fellowship, active evangelism, and warm piety towards God!
But let us remember something. From the times of the earliest faith accounts until now, no matter how carefully and eagerly we search, we will not find a perfect age of church history. The fact is, there is no ideal age of the church. Generations of church leaders have thought and worked carefully to devise the ideal way to practice "real New Testament church life," only to have the next generation point out the faults and inadequacies in their methods and put forth new ideas on what perfect church life looks like.
Whether it be the New Testament church, the reformation, the Patristic age, or the modern age, we cannot find a time period that gives us a faultless example of Christianity. If we look throughout the world today, this search is frustrated again; persecuted churches in hostile settings can be idealized for their tenacious faith, but with more scrutiny their faults appear (sometimes in the form of serious doctrinal problems). Churches freshly emerging in new places tend to repeat mistakes from early church history in other places rather than giving a fresh, clean and pure form of Christianity, as may be imagined. In prosperous and peaceful areas of the world with the advantage of developed Biblical, historical, and theological study can use these resources to carefully define accurate doctrine only to find that the response to this highly accurate and developed teaching is apathy, as the distraction of wealth and comfort makes radical faith an entirely uninteresting concept.
In the content of the New Testament, there is sobering reality that the glowing descriptions of the early community of believers is quickly followed by descriptions of various controversies and problems, and that many of the letters were written to give correction and rebuke to erring churches with rebellious members. In the earlier fascination of protestantism to imitate the reformation ideals we do not find perfection. In the liberal attempts to make Christianity into modernism with a Jesus label pasted on top, ideal Christian practice remains far out of reach. In the recent postmodern fascination with the early church fathers and the spiritual disciplines and contemplative practices of the middle ages, there will again, despite the benefits of imitating the positive practices of these eras, be glaring faults as their weaknesses also carry over. The next generation will passionately decry these faults and seek a new example to follow.
So am I merely spouting off a pessimistic monologue to weigh you down with hopelessness? No, because in spite of these faults God's redemptive power still triumphs. I raise the issue to make an appeal that we approach Christian thought and practice with the recognition that we can't get back to the "good old days" when the church was pure and ideal, because there were no such days. Instead, let's seek to learn from the strengths of the New Testament church, and every subsequent age, as well as from each period's failures. Our standard in every age remains the principles, patterns and ethics taught by Scripture. If we seek fervently to live these out in our age, fleshing them out in continuity with the essential beliefs of all church history, but with a unique incarnation in our own context. In this way we can avoid high-minded condemnation of others who do not practice "Biblical Christianity" as we do and instead humbly allow their approaches to instruct us as we seek to do the best we can with the time we have and pray that God will redeem even our own faults and blind spots in the way only the sovereign and gracious God over the people of God in every age can. The question is not "how do we get back to how things were when the church was the way it ought to be?" but "How do we learn from what was in an effort to get closer to what ought to be?"