Are Seventh-day Adventists Millerites?

“Adventists are just Millerites who never got over 1844.” “They came from the same place as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” You will hear both, and both contain a grain of history wrapped in a large misunderstanding. The real story is better than the slogans — and it shows why a people who study prophecy must also be willing to be corrected by it.

What the Millerites believed

William Miller was a Baptist farmer from Low Hampton, New York, and a former skeptic. After two years of studying the prophecies of Daniel with nothing but a Bible and a concordance, he reached a conclusion he did not want to preach:

I was thus brought, in 1818, at the close of my two years study of the Scriptures, to the solemn conclusion, that in about twenty-five years from that time all the affairs of our present state would be wound up.

The heart of his message was one verse: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (Daniel 8:14). Reckoning a day for a year from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 457 B.C., he arrived at “about the year 1843.” He believed the “sanctuary” was the earth, to be cleansed by fire at Christ’s visible return. He began writing in 1832 and preaching in 1833, and the movement swept through the churches — Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, and others. By his own count, about fifty thousand believers gathered in nearly a thousand congregations, and many more heard the message.

October 22, 1844

Miller had always given a range, not a day: “about the year 1843,” later between March 1843 and March 1844. When that year passed, he wrote with remarkable honesty — months before the more famous disappointment:

I confess my error, and acknowledge my disappointment; yet I still believe that the day of the Lord is near, even at the door.

The specific date of October 22, 1844 — the tenth day of the seventh month, the Day of Atonement by the older Karaite reckoning — came from others in the summer of 1844. Miller did not originate it; he accepted it only two or three weeks before the day. When October 22 passed, believers wept until dawn. Some gave up faith entirely. Others went back to their Bibles.

Myths about the Millerites

The newspapers of the day were not kind, and some of their stories still circulate. The tales of believers in white “ascension robes” waiting on rooftops were denied at the time by those who were there:

All reports respecting the preparation of ascension robes … were demonstrated over and over again to be false and scandalous.

Nor was Ellen White a leader of the movement. She was a Methodist teenager in Portland, Maine, who heard Miller preach when she was about twelve, and was sixteen in 1844.

The roads out of 1844

After the disappointment, the believers went three different ways.

Those who held to the old platform. In April 1845 a conference at Albany, New York, with Miller as chairman, reaffirmed the visible, personal coming of Christ and rejected the new ideas some were exploring. From this wing came the Evangelical Adventists, who kept the immortal soul and later died out, and the Advent Christian Church (organized about 1860), which keeps Sunday but came to believe that the dead sleep until the resurrection.

Those who kept setting dates. Some recalculated again and again — for 1854, for 1873, for 1874. This is the road that would lead, through Nelson Barbour, to Charles Taze Russell and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Those who went back to the text. A small group asked a different question: if the time was right, was the event wrong? Studying Leviticus, Daniel, and Hebrews, they concluded that the sanctuary of Daniel 8:14 was not the earth but the heavenly sanctuary, where Christ began the closing phase of His ministry in 1844. They also found the seventh-day Sabbath. This group became the Seventh-day Adventists.

What Miller himself rejected

Here is the clearest proof that Seventh-day Adventists are not simply Millerites: Miller rejected the very things they came to believe. In 1845 he wrote:

I have no confidence in any of the new theories that have grown out of that movement, viz., that Christ then came as the Bridegroom, that the door of mercy was closed, that there is no salvation for sinners, that the seventh trumpet then sounded, or that it was a fulfilment of prophecy in any sense.

He also held to the immortality of the soul, and said the doctrine of the soul’s unconsciousness in death had “no necessary connection” with the Advent (Apology, p. 29). The Adventists who followed the Bible on the sanctuary, the Sabbath, and the state of the dead parted ways with the man whose preaching had first stirred them. Miller died in 1849, honored by them as a man raised up of God — but not followed as an authority. The authority was the Word.

What Adventists kept, corrected, and added

Honesty requires two admissions. For several years after 1844 some of the early Sabbath-keepers believed probation had closed — the “shut door” — until Scripture corrected them. And a few early voices briefly speculated about time again, which is exactly why the counsel above was written. The movement grew by being corrected, not by refusing to be. In 1860 the believers chose a name — “we call ourselves Seventh-day Adventists” — and in 1863 they organized.

Where the Jehovah’s Witnesses came from

Charles Taze Russell was born in 1852, eight years after the disappointment. He was never a Millerite. As a young man troubled by doubts, he wandered into a meeting of Second Adventists — the wing that kept Sunday and kept calculating dates — and told the story himself years later:

Seemingly by accident, one evening I dropped into a dusty, dingy hall, where I had heard religious services were held… There, for the first time, I heard something of the views of Second Adventists, the preacher being Mr. Jonas Wendell…

He gratefully credited two other Second Advent writers, George Storrs and George Stetson. Then he met Nelson H. Barbour, a former Millerite who had predicted Christ’s return for 1873 and then reasoned that Christ had come invisibly in 1874. Russell funded Barbour’s paper and co-published a book with him, until they split over the atonement in 1878–79. In July 1879 Russell launched Zion’s Watch Tower. In 1931, under his successor J. F. Rutherford, the movement took the name Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So the line runs Miller → the Second Advent date-setters → Barbour → Russell. It is a real link, but a distant one — and it runs through exactly the road Seventh-day Adventists refused to take. Russell himself wrote that he was “greatly grieved at the error of Second Adventists” who expected Christ in 1873 or 1874.

1874, 1914, 1925, 1975

The Witnesses inherited the habit of setting dates. Russell taught an invisible presence of Christ from 1874, and wrote in 1889:

…the full end of the times of the Gentiles, i.e., the full end of their lease of dominion, will be reached in A. D. 1914; and that that date will be the farthest limit of the rule of imperfect men.

Later printings quietly changed some of that book’s 1914 statements. Rutherford then announced that “we may confidently expect that 1925 will mark the return of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the faithful prophets of old” (Millions Now Living Will Never Die, 1920, p. 89). In the 1960s and 70s Witness publications pointed to 1975 as the end of six thousand years of human history, and afterward the organization admitted:

It is to be regretted that these latter statements apparently overshadowed the cautionary ones and contributed to a buildup of the expectation already initiated.

Today they teach that Christ began ruling invisibly in heaven in 1914. Seventh-day Adventists, by contrast, have set no date for Christ’s return since 1844, and believe He will come visibly — “every eye shall see him” (Revelation 1:7).

Adventists and Witnesses: the differences

Critics often lump the two together, because both groups reject the trinity, and both teach that the dead sleep and that the wicked are destroyed rather than tormented forever. On those points they agree. But on the most important question — who Jesus is — they stand far apart:

• Who Jesus is. Witnesses teach that Jesus was created — in their words, “the only one directly created by God” (What Does the Bible Really Teach?, 2005). The Adventist pioneers taught the opposite: “He is begotten, not created” (E. J. Waggoner, Christ and His Righteousness, 1890), brought forth from the Father, divine by nature, the Creator and not a creature (Colossians 1:16).
• Worshipping Jesus. Since 1954 Witness teaching has been that “Our worship is to go to Jehovah God” (The Watchtower, Jan. 1, 1954), and their Bible now has the angels “do obeisance to” the Son. Scripture says, “let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6), and heaven gives “Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power” to the Lamb as to the Father (Revelation 5:13).
• The resurrection. Witnesses teach that Jesus was raised as a spirit creature. Jesus said, “handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39).
• Setting dates. Witnesses looked to 1874, 1914, 1925, and 1975. Adventists have set none since 1844.
• The Sabbath. Witnesses teach that “Christians are not required to observe a weekly sabbath” (jw.org). Adventists keep the seventh day, as the commandment says (Exodus 20:8-11).

One honest note: the first edition of one pioneer’s book on Revelation (Uriah Smith, 1865/1867) called Christ “the first created being.” Smith dropped that language, and in his Thoughts on Daniel and the Revelation (1882, p. 430) wrote that “the Scriptures nowhere speak of Christ as a created being, but on the contrary plainly state that he was begotten of the Father.” The pioneers also warned against the opposite error: James White called “that ultra Unitarianism that makes Christ inferior to the Father” worse than the trinity itself (Review and Herald, Nov. 29, 1877). For the created-Christ arguments answered one by one, see the Answering Common Heresies Cheat Sheet.

Followers of the Word, not of a man

Revelation describes a little book that was sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly, followed by a command: “Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings” (Revelation 10:11). The disappointment was real, and so was the call that came after it. What separated the Seventh-day Adventists from the other roads out of 1844 was not loyalty to William Miller, but a willingness to let the Bible correct them — even when it meant leaving Miller behind.

To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.

Further reading