Seventh-day Adventist Church - History

History

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is the largest of several Adventist groups which arose from the Millerite movement of the 1840s in upstate New York, a phase of the Second Great Awakening. William Miller predicted on the basis of Daniel 8:14–16 and the "day-year principle" that Jesus Christ would return to Earth between the Spring of 1843 and the Spring of 1844. In the summer of 1844, Millerite Adventists came to believe that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844, understood to be the Biblical Day of Atonement for that year. When this did not happen, most of his followers disbanded and returned to their original churches.

Some Millerites came to believe that Miller's calculations were correct but that his interpretation of Daniel 8:14 was flawed as he assumed it was the 'earth that was to be cleansed' or Christ would come to cleanse the world. These Adventists arrived at the conviction that Daniel 8:14 foretold Christ's entrance into the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary rather than his second coming. This new awareness of a sanctuary in heaven became an important part of their thinking. Over the next few decades this understanding developed into the doctrine of the investigative judgment: an eschatological process commencing in 1844 in which Christians will be judged to verify their eligibility for salvation and God's justice will be confirmed before the universe. This group of Adventists continued to believe that Christ's second coming would be imminent. They resisted setting further dates for the event, citing Revelation 10:6, "that there should be time no longer."