In 1991, the California Institute of Technology celebrated its centennial. In November of that year, Stephen Hawking went to the Pasadena campus to lecture with the aid of his computer and a speech synthesizer. I was fortunate to have a seat in the third row of the balcony.

Hawking’s lecture was "the future of the universe, or rather, what scientists think the future will be. Of course, predicting the future is very difficult," he noted. After commenting on a couple ancient oracles, he shifted to "recent prophets of doom" who were willing to stick their necks out by setting definite dates for the end of the world. Dryly, he announced, "So far, all of the dates for the end of the world have passed without incident."

But then he said that prophets often "had an explanation for their apparent failures." I was startled by what followed. "For example," he said,

William Miller, the founder of the Seventh-day Adventists, predicted that the Second Coming would occur between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When nothing happened, the date was revised to October 22, 1844. When that passed without incident, a new interpretation was put forward. According to this, 1844 was the start of the Second Coming—but first, the names in the Book of Life had to be counted. Only then would the Day of Judgment come for those not in the Book.

Hawking concluded that brief part of the lecture with, "Fortunately, the counting seems to be taking a long time."1 There was much appreciative laughter among the scientists and laypeople in the crowd.

In the Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought: Ideas That Shaped Our World, I found this entry for the word eschatology:

The doctrine of eschatology, "last things" (Gk–eschaton, "the end") in Christianity is now recognized as being central to the teachings of Jesus, and the message of the New Testament. The fact that the word itself was not invented until 1844 indicates that its significance had long been ignored or discounted.2

The day-year principle in prophetic interpretation means that each prophetic day stands for a year. The day-year principle is supported by the historicist interpretation of Scripture. It was the way Jews such as Daniel understood time prophecies and the way the majority of Christians did until the Counter Reformation, during which the Roman Catholic Church postulated the preterist and futurist methods of interpreting the prophecies. The first would have concluded before the papacy was formed and the latter has not happened yet. Therefore, neither could support accusations by Luther and other reformers that the pope was the Antichrist.

John Nelson Darby, and more recently Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, follow a dispensational form of the futurist method of interpreting prophecies, which pulls the plug on the time clock after Jesus’ ascension. Then, after the rapture of the righteous, they start the clock again for a seven-year Tribulation, during which the Jews will be converted.

Of importance to our topic this week are the facts that the 2,300-day prophecy of Daniel 8 is the last prophecy of time in the Bible and that it carries through to 1844, which indicates the beginning of the end times in which we live today. But it gives less of a hint than Al Gore’s movie as to how much longer this world will last. One of Stephen Hawking’s predecessors, Sir Isaac Newton, concluded that the world would end before 2060, but I digress.3

In 1844, the roots of what would become the belief system of millions of members scattered currently in more than two hundred countries and territories of the world developed from a relatively small remnant of people from the many who had been stirred to millennial fever. They are currently active in education, publishing, and charity work. They recently built an impressive new world headquarters.

Of course, I’m referring to the Bahai Faith.

Like Adventism, the Bahai Faith is truly a global religion, but its roots are in nineteenth-century Persia (now Iran). The forerunners of Bahai were from a sect of the Shiite branch of Islam, which teaches that there were twelve imans (direct descendants of Muhammad), the twelfth of whom, The ’Bab,’ (the Gate), disappeared in the ninth century. Ever since, Shiites around the world have looked for him to return as the triumphant messiah.

The Bahai Faith has its world headquarters in Hafia, Israel, on the slopes of Mount Carmel. Its adherents predict that there will be a great crisis, sometimes identified as a thermonuclear war, after which the world will unite in one government, one religion, and one currency, and peace will reign worldwide.4

Although I have many disagreements with Bahai beliefs, I did not mention Bahai for that reason. I was sure that when you read the paragraph about the small remnant in 1844 that has done so well, you would think I was talking about us—the Seventh-day Adventists. It’s easy to read ourselves into the good stuff.

The Jewish religious leaders who should have been looking for the first advent of Christ, mistakenly applied prophecies of the Second Coming with disastrous results to their sure defeat of the Romans. In the 1840s, because of an influx of Catholics from Ireland, anti-Catholicism was becoming rampant. Adventists have been keeping an eye on the pope ever since. As long as the pope is behaving himself we think the end is not yet and we can keep on building our Mcmansions and living like everybody else.

We have twenty-eight fundamental doctrines. Number 24—the heavenly sanctuary and investigative judgment coupled with the significance of 1844—is really the only original one we have, and therefore the most controversial. You either love it or leave it.

No one among the earthly participants of the Great Disappointment in 1844 is alive today. The latter generations of Adventists seem to be embarrassed by the importance we put on 1844. Several times in recent weeks, I have heard or read refutations of the explanation our church gives for what happened in 1844. Some have claimed nothing happened.

By contrast, the author of this quarter’s Bible Study Guide, Clifford Goldstein, says in his book 1844, Made Simple:

My understanding of 1844 gave me a new experience with Jesus, with Adventism, and with the spirit of prophecy. Once I saw how biblical 1844 was, I knew that this church was everything it claimed to be.…[T]he 1844 teaching proves beyond question that the Seventh-day Adventist Church is the remnant church of Bible prophecy and our message is present truth.5

The sanctuary doctrine need not divide us. It’s OK to say "I don’t know." A reporter asked Einstein’s wife if she understood his theory of relativity. She answered, "No, but I know he can be trusted." I don’t know exactly what God has been doing in heaven since 1844. I know that he’s not been poring over books counting names all this time. (I got 2,730,000 hits on Google for Bahai in less than a second.) Maybe he’s giving us time to get to know and trust him better.

Notes and References

1. Stephen Hawking’s lecture was first delivered as the Darwin Lecture at the University of Cambridge in January 1991. It is reproduced in the book Black Holes and Baby Universes and other Essays ( New York: Bantam, 1993), 141–55.
2. Kenneth McLeish, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought: Ideas That Shaped Our World (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 245. 3. See the NOVA video, Newton’s Dark Secrets (2005), and its related Web site.
4. The official presence of the Bahai Faith on the Web, and related sites.
5. Clifford Goldstein, 1844 Made Simple (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press, 1988), 10.

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