The following is an extended excerpt describing (in a cursory manner) the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses from Protestantism- Faith that Made the Modern World by Alec Ryrie (Penguin Random House LLC, 2017)

A reviewer named Dimtry on the website goodreads.com has this to say about Alec Ryrie- “An incredibly well-researched and thoughtful overview of the historical interaction of the Protestant Christianity with the surrounding society on many levels – politics, other religions, ethical dilemmas, poverty, slavery, Nazism and Communism, etc. Special chapters are dedicated to Protestant Christianity in South Africa, Korea, and China, which have a fascinating and controversial history. Reading the book helps one think deeper about the importance of various doctrines in the life of the church and in the life of a person. It is not a quick read – almost 500 pages of dense text, but the time that it takes to go through a work of this size is conducive for additional contemplation and analysis. I highly recommend this work to any serious thinker.”

“Well-researched” is not an accurate description for this book. The information contained in Alec Ryrie’s book concerning the Seventh-day Adventist Church is not comprehensive. Neither is it entirely accurate, as the author appears to principally focused on maximizing the sales of his book. It is therefore sensationalist in nature, but nevertheless presents Adventism in a relatively favorable light to a readership that remains largely ignorant of the forces that shaped the distinctive doctrines and traditions of this rigorous denomination. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, as described by the author, come across as being less admirable than do the Adventists, yet this is certainly not due to a lack of zealousness on their part. Both organizations believe that their adherents should lead lives that are spiritually removed from the secular world, but the Witnesses have historically carried this separation to extremes. Historians of Christianity note that the early church thrived despite intermittent persecution by the Roman Empire. Shared persecution builds group cohesion, so the Witnesses, as noted by Mr. Ryrie, reinforce the unity of their insular faith by proactively courting the animosity of outsiders. Adventist, in contrast, seek to win converts in a less confrontational manner. The Witnesses are an extremely closed and insular sub-culture, but the Adventists keep a set of open books. Witnesses exert themselves to retain members, but the Adventists do not hold any member hostage. Both groups are growing at present, but have followed divergent paths subsequent to their common origin in a 19th century movement known as Millerism.

The introductory blurb located below was not written by the author of Protestantism- Faith that Made the Modern World, but represents a summary of the material in Mr. Ryrie’s book that immediately precedes an extended excerpt from this highly readable, yet regrettably cursory and superficial work.

Two robust (yet for very different reasons) religious organizations were formed in the aftermath of the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844, a date that Baptist preacher William Miller had convinced thousands of hopeful believers would mark the return of Jesus Christ. Christ failed to appear as expected, even though this date was clearly the terminus of Daniel’s 2.300-day prophecy (each prophetic day equaling one calendar year) that is noted in Daniel 8:14- “…Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” This period is believed to have commenced with a decree of Artaxerxes which authorized the restoration of derelict Jerusalem, depopulated due to the temporary exile of most of its inhabitants during the Babylonian captivity.

EXTRACTS FROM THE CHAPTER “PROTESTANTISM’S WILD WEST”

One former Millerite, told by a Shaker that Adventists ought to press on in their spiritual journey, felt at last that he had met “a person that speaks as though he comprehends our whereabouts, and understands our path ahead.” He and a decent trickle of Millerite survivors joined, and found peace in, these communities [Shaker enclaves wherein celibacy was practiced, as advocated by founder Anna Lee, a Quaker] were working for Christ’s second appearance, and the settled holiness of their lives was a standing rebuke to the fretted consciences of disappointed believers.

Only a handful of the tens of thousands of Millerite took this route, however. Those who did often found, eventually, that they were not pure enough for this austere heaven. Lifelong celibacy might have had an appeal in the urgent rush of a religious crises, but as the sun’s ascent remained imperceptibly slow, the cost rose. Enoch Jacobs himself [a man who had hoped to find a place where “…Advent work takes the place of Advent talk] eventually left, reportedly saying that he would “rather go to hell with Electra his wife than live among the Shakers without her.” The Shakers slowly withered: tolerated, even admired, but doomed by their own principles to a slow extermination.

“THE NARROW WAY”

Two groups emerged from Millerism that managed to resolve this conundrum, finding ways to be rule-bound communities of believers dedicated to the arduous work of holiness, while also engaged with the wider world and capable of winning converts.

The first was grounded on one believer’s insight on the bleak morning of October 23, 1844. Hiram Edson and his friends had kept watch all night, and he now stared into the abyss:

I mused in my own heart, saying, My advent experience had been the richest and brightest of all my christian experience. If this had proved a failure, what was the rest of my christian experience worth? Has the Bible proved a failure? Is there no God- no heaven- no golden home city- no paradise. Is all this but a cunningly devised fable?

As he prayed with renewed urgency, he was given an explanation. Miller’s calculation had foretold when the sanctuary would be cleansed. Edson now realized that that did not actually refer to Christ’s return to earth in glory. The date had been right after all! Christ had now entered the heavenly sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, in final preparation for the Last Judgment. The world might look the same, but while the Millerite had wept and prayed the night before, it had moved a decisive step closer to its end.

It was a very satisfying solution, allowing Adventist to affirm the message they had first believed while explaining its apparent failure, and Edson rushed it into print. It was taken up by a seventeen-year-old Millerite from Portland, Maine named Ellen Harmon. In December 1844, she had a vision in which Adventists were walking on a narrow way toward the new Jerusalem, their eyes fixed on Christ. But some now “rashly denied the light behind them, and said that it was not God that had led them out so far.” Those poor fools stumbled and fell oFf the path into darkness. Only those who embraced Edson’s sanctuary doctrine remained on the straight and narrow.

Harmon then added two further doctrines. One was the “shut door”: an argument made by several Millerites that during this, presumably brief, interlude between Christ’s entry into the sanctuary and his final return, the door was shut on fresh conversions. The world had had its chance before October 22. This meant that Harmon’s efforts were focused exclusively on the scattered Adventist community. The other addition came in a vision in which Jesus showed her the original tablets of the Ten Commandments. One commandment was circled by a halo: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

Since the sixteenth century, Catholics had taunted Protestants by asking why, if they rejected all authority aside from the Bible, they still worshipped on a Sunday. Worship on Sunday, the first day of the week, is a very ancient Christian practice, but the only Sabbath the Bible explicitly teaches is the Jewish one, on Saturday, the seventh day. Very few Protestants had ever shifted their Sabbath, however, whether because of the radical rejection of tradition it implied, because of its unwelcome tang of Judaism, or simply because of its disruptive challenge to social norms. Ellen Harmon’s little band now did so, distinguishing themselves sharply from a sinful world. Perhaps this was the last step in their purification before the sanctuary was cleansed. The Joshua Himes [a Boston pastor who assisted William Miller with his evangelical endeavor] to Ellen Harmon’s Miller was a young preacher named James White, her chaperone, publisher, and then husband. They were a formidable team, not least in turning a movement with a very short-term outlook into one capable of functioning indefinitely. By 1851, the “shut-door” was becoming a problem: new converts were being won, and others were being born. A rigidly consistent movement might have withered, but the Whites recognized the new situation and quietly dropped the shut-door doctrine. They also disowned any further date-setting. The reason Christ had entered the sanctuary in 1844, Ellen was told in a vision, was to conduct his “investigative judgment”: working steadily through the record of humanity’s sins in advance of the end. By its nature, this might take a while. Rather than playing guessing games with the calendar, they should use this providential delay to make themselves a truly Holy people.

In 1860, this community reluctantly organized itself as a church. The name they chose- the Seventh-day Adventists- encapsulated their distinctive double focus. Their eyes remained fixed on Christ’s imminent return, but in the meantime they urgently pursued personal and corporate holiness, of which the Saturday Sabbath was only the most prominent symbol. In the 1860s, that quest for holiness took a new direction. Ellen White had long suffered from poor health, and like many other American Protestants she distrusted the learned priests of medicine as well as those of theology. Many Adventists expected miracles of healing in these later days, and some toyed with rejecting human medicine altogether, but White was too levelheaded for that. She accepted that God worked through human medicine. She did not, however, mean the medicine practiced by learned and expensive MDs. It was not merely socially exclusive and cruelly ineffective; it also offended her notions of purity, simplicity, and natural perfection.

These notions were hardly original. Sylvester Graham, still famous for his trademark crackers, had become a celebrity on the back of an eccentric vision of dietary purity during the 1830s. Graham was a Presbyterian pastor, and his quest for health was a spiritual one. A Grahamite society in Boston, founded in 1837 to make “worthy disciples of the Great Reformer of men, and the Redeemer of their bodies and spirits,” made an explicit link between Miller’s prophecies and their own quests:

The millennium, the near approach of which is by so many confidently preached, can never reasonably be expected to arrive until those laws which God has implanted in the physical nature of man are, equally with his moral laws, universally known and obeyed.

Ellen White picked up the theme following a vision in 1863. As well as denouncing alcohol, she urged Seventh-day Adventists to abstain from the “filthy weed” of tobacco, and disapproved of tea and coffee, dangerous stimulants that fostered gossip. Pork was forbidden, in line with Old Testament prohibitions. White in fact abandoned all meat, fish, eggs, cheese, and cream for a time, although unlike some of her disciples she continued to permit milk, sugar, and salt. The spread of vegetarianism in Adventism was slow and uneven. White’s own final conversion to absolute vegetarianism came late in life, in 1894, after an Australian Catholic woman reproached her with “the selfishness of taking the lives of animals to gratify a perverted taste.” It was a novel way of thinking about the subject. Vegetarianism has periodically surfaced in Protestantism, but it has usually focused on the heath and purity of the believers’ bodies, and not the ethics of butchering fellow creatures.

Diet was only the beginning. White was also a convert to hydrotherapy, a technique that consisted chiefly of wrapping yourself in soaking bandages and drinking copious quantities of pure water. She credited this harmless technique with saving two of her sons from a dangerous illness in 1863, and a vision led her to declare the merits of “God’s great medicine, water, pure soft water, for diseases, for health, for cleanliness, and for luxury.” She also had firm views on sexual health and on the dangers of excessively frequent sex. When her sons were teenagers, she wrote vehemently against masturbation, which she blamed for “imbecility, dwarfed forms, crippled limbs, misshapen heads, and deformity of every description.” That streak of Victorian prudery meant that she would never advocate nudism, as some Christian perfectionists had done in previous centuries. She did, however, have stern views on dress, and her recommendation of a “short” (calf-length) skirt for women, with loose-fitting trousers, was almost more scandalous in her age than public nudity would be in ours. A vision in 1875 finally gave her permission to abandon that particular lost cause.

Nurturing good health became central to Seventh-day Adventism’s identity: a means not only of purifying believers but of winning converts. The church began to publish journals such as Health Reformer aimed at a general reader, and to establish sanitoriums [sic] and spas where patients of any religion might “become acquainted with the character and ways of our people, see a beauty in the religion of the Bible, and be led into the Lord’s service.” One result of this was the long and fruitful, though eventually unhappy, partnership between White and John Harvey Kellogg, nutritionist, health reformer, and the inventor of cornflakes. White, who did not particularly like cornflakes, turned down the opportunity for the church to own the Kellogg’s brand. It was an expensive decision, but it might have saved the church’s identity from being swallowed up in a commercial empire. After she had kept her church’s soul pure throughout her long life- she finally died in 1915- it would have been a shame to have sold it for breakfast cereal.

Thanks not least to White’s own legacy of levelheaded pragmatism, Seventh-day Adventism has repeatedly escaped vanishing into extremism while keeping its distinctiveness. It moved from its early view that the United States was one of the anti-Christian beasts described in the book of Revelation to a more constructive pragmatic apoliticism. It never allowed its apocalypticism to tip it into madness, although some pf its splinter groups- most notoriously, the Branch Davidians who were immolated in Texas in 1993- show how easily that could have happened. Nor did Adventist health reform take the blind alley represented by White’s near-contemporary Mary Baker Eddy, whose superficially similar Christian Science movement became trapped in a ghetto by her occultish preoccupations and her blunt rejection of medicine. The Adventists, by contrast, were able quietly to abandon quackery and fully embrace mainstream medicine in the twentieth century.

Cautious, pragmatic, untroubled by scandal or open fanaticism, focused both on this world and the next- no wonder their numbers have grown so steadily. Seventh-day Adventism has grown from some two hundred members in 1850, to 3,500 in 1860, to 75,000 worldwide by 1900, to some eighteen million at the time of this writing. It has quietly mushroomed into one of the world’s major Protestant denominations.

Is it a Protestant denomination, however, or a heretical sect? It has in some ways come closer to the Protestant mainstream. Whereas many early Seventh-day Adventists openly questioned the doctrine of the Trinity, White herself was studiously cautious on the subject. Her eventual split with Kellogg was caused by his radical pantheistic speculations. Some Adventists remain anti-Trinitarian, but the church formally affirmed the Trinity in 1931 as part of its alliance with the burgeoning Fundamentalist movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, Adventists began to engage with other evangelical organizations and with the World Council of Churches. But if a time will ever come when the Seventh-day Adventists are simply conservative Protestants who worship on a Saturday, it is not yet here. Although Ellen White’s visions have never been elevated to the status of scripture, accepting them as genuine is a decisive test of fellowship. For all of the embrace of modern science and scholarship in Adventist universities, historical study of White herself remains painfully sensitive. To question her status is to question Hiram Edson’s sanctuary doctrine, the foundational significance of 1844, and the entire culture of what Seventh-day Adventism has become. Other Protestants are sometimes impatient for Adventists to decisively choose between retreating to sectarian irrelevance or joining mainstream orthodoxy. So far, however, Adventism’s knack for adapting to the world while retaining a firm grip on its own soul has not done it any harm.

“WITNESSING FOR JEHOVAH”

Millerism’s last, untimely apostle was Charles Taze Russell, born in 1852 and converted as a teenager by a preacher from the mainstream, post 1844 Adventist tradition. Like Miller, he turned to self-taught study of Bible chronology. Unlike the Seventh-day Adventists, he assumed that Miller’s calculations had been wrong and set himself to find the mistake. By 1876, he had an ingenious solution. One of Miller’s arguments for his date of 1843 had been a tenuous calculation that there would be an interval of 2,520 years during which Israel’s enemies ruled over it. Miller counted this as beginning in 677 B.C., when the first exiles were deported from Jerusalem, which took him to1843 A.D. Russell argued that a much more natural start date would be the actual fall of Jerusalem in 606 B.C. That pointed to the crux year as being 1914 A.D.: helpfully, still in the future.

Russell was hardly the first to come up with a new date. What set him apart was a separate set of calculations, based on the ancient Jewish years of jubilee. This led him to believe that the millennium, Christ’s rule on earth, would begin not in 1914, but forty years earlier, in 1874. That year had recently passed without obvious cosmic incident, but far from torpedoing Russell’s theory, that fact became central to it. He preached not Christ’s second coming, but his second presence on earth, a slow process that had already begun. During the years leading up to 1914, Christ would slowly harvest the souls of his faithful, eventually reaching 144,000, the number foretold in Revelation.

Russell was no keener than any other prophet to found a new church or sect. Like the century’s earlier “Christians,” his disciples were known with studied humility only as “Bible students.” They would keep that anonymous title until they adopted the modern term “Jehovah’s witnesses” in 1931, and that, too, was meant to be a plain description: people who bore witness to the God whose name is Jehovah. Outsiders’ habit (which I will follow) of calling them “the Jehovah’s witnesses” or “the Witnesses” thrusts onto them a denominational identity that they reject. What Russell founded was not a church but, like every other nineteenth-century American religious movement, a publishing enterprise. He began with a self-published book in 1877, and in 1844 established the Zion’s Watch Tower and Tract Society as a legal corporation.

It was a very American way to form a sect. As a corporation, the Society, renamed the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in 1896, has unchallenged legal rights over its publications and a simple, autocratic style of internal governance. As a result, under Russell and his successors as president, the Witnesses have become Protestantism’s most rigidly controlled large-scale movement. They have also become by far the most persecuted Christian movement in modern times.

Russell’s understanding of the window of opportunity before 1914 gave his Bible students their ethos. He adopted a variant of the shut-door doctrine: this was a time not for winning fresh converts to Christianity but for calling nominal Christians out of their false churches while there was still time. Distinguishing his movement from false churches became, and remains, a central concern. So, like other anti-sectarians before him, he rejected the Trinity, “the unreasonable theory that Jehovah is his own Son and our Lord Jesus is his own Father,” thus giving his own movement and the mainstream churches an enduring pretext for reviling each other. Hence, too, his self-conscious use of the word “Jehovah,” the traditional Latin form of the Hebrew name of God. That not only set his movement apart; it also became a way to assert that Jesus, who has a different name, is not God, merely a “god.”

The need to fill up the numbers of faithful gave Russell’s Bible students their only priority. It is hardly novel for Christians to decide that saving souls is more important than anything else. Russell’s achievement, however, was not only to create the most determinedly conversionist movement in Christianity’s history. His Bible students lived to bear witness to the truth, regardless of whether they were believed. If there will be only 144,000 chosen, that means that most of humanity will spurn the message. The legion of Witness “publishers” who work door-to-door and in public places across the world do so in deadly earnest, after careful training in managing difficult encounters and turning conversations so as to have a chance to save another soul. But they neither expect a high rate of success nor regard rejection as a failure, and they find camaraderie in shared tales of doorstep rebuffs. Their responsibility is to bear witness faithfully, whether or not that witness is heard. Later Witnesses told of how Russell himself, as a young man, “would go out at night to chalk up Bible texts in conspicuous places so that workingmen, passing by, might be warned and saved from the torments of hell. In the 1920s, American Witnesses sometimes descended on quiet neighborhoods with loudspeakers so that locked doors would be no barrier to the Word. This is proclamation whose primary purpose is proclamation itself.

That was the Witnesses’ answer to Millerism’s unresolved question: how should you live in the shadow of Armageddon? Only snatching souls from the fire mattered. The whole world, all it’s governments and nations and churches and families, was shortly to be judged and destroyed. True students of the Bible should, therefore, renounce all worldly ties. Nations mean nothing:; Russell’s movement could only been born in America, but while he would not defy the American state, neither would he actively support it through such means as voting or military service. His disciples were pacifist until it came time to fight for God in the Battle of Armageddon. In the meantime, they would bear witness by rigidly refusing to conform to this world’s norms.

The movement’s most obvious problem was its preprinted expiry date of 1914. As the year grew closer, Russell began to backpedal, but his earlier predictions had been very specific. He now began to embrace more eccentric theories, such as that the date of Armageddon could be deduced from the dimensions of the pyramids of Giza. The movement ought to have disintegrated. Instead, two new developments saved it.

First, although the world did not actually end in 1914, the year did indeed bring a global catastrophe of biblical proportions in which the world’s corrupt nations set about each other’s destruction. It was possible, although a little awkward, to argue that this was what Russell had been predicting all along. In which case, prophecy was vindicated and the end was near. Second, when Russell himself died in 1916, the Society’s presidency was seized in a boardroom coup by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the movement’s second founder and the creator of the modern Witnesses. Rutherford forcefully made the best of the new circumstances. On the authority of a newly published volume of what he claimed were Russell’s writings, he argued that 1914, like 1874 before it, was the beginning of a process. In early 1918, Rutherford delivered a speech, later a tract, titled “The World Has Ended- Millions Now Living Will Never Die!” Time was short, and Jehovah’s witnesses had to separate themselves from the world’s dearth throes. As the United States entered a short-term, intense war fever in 1917, Rutherford vehemently denounced both the war and its cheerleaders, the clergy of the mainstream churches.

He and seven of the Society’s other directors were arrested, found guilty of sedition, and given lengthy prison sentences. They were released in 1919, as war fever abated and the courts became wearier of locking up Americans purely for their political opinions, but the damage was done. By the war’s end, the Society’s main periodical, the Watch Tower, which had boasted forty-five subscribers in 1914, had only three thousand left. Rutherford led a short-lived recovery based on a further, confident prediction that the end would finally come in 1925. When that prophecy also failed, this time without a world war as consolation, the movement reached its lowest ebb.

So Rutherford reinvented it. Along with the new name, in 1931, went central control of the appointment of elders in local congregations. Teaching offered in those congregations, whose buildings were renamed Kingdom Halls, would now be uniform across the globe. Russell’s original works, many of them now embarrassingly obsolete, were allowed to go out of print for good. Publications now began to appear anonymously, as the collective, unchallengeable wisdom of the Society, which in 1927 declared itself to be God’s “faithful and discreet slave,” with authority to determine matters of faith. Its new books typically had sweeping one-word titles such as Life, Riches, or Vindication.

The Witnesses apocalypticism is undimmed, as any glance at their publications will show, but since 1925 there has been no further authoritative date setting. There have been excitements around other dates, in particular 1975, which some of the Society’s directors apparently endorsed. Yet in 1976, the Society’s vice president could confidently reproach an assembly of Canadian Witnesses: “Do you know why nothing happened in 1975? It was because you expected something to happen.” For most of the twentieth century, the Society simply held tight to 1914, declaring week by week in its main magazine that the new world would dawn “before the generation that saw the events of 1914 passes away.” In 1885, this increasingly implausible claim, too, was redefined, explaining that “generation” was a spiritual rather than a literal term.

The Witnesses’ global growth is built not on their apocalyptic hope but on the abrupt, disconcerting separatism of their lives in the present. Rutherford continued Russell’s pattern of distancing the Witnesses symbolically from Christian norms, for example by insisting that Christ was impaled rather than dying on something so popish as a cross. For this, other Christians have duly reviled them, but the real hatred has come from governments. The most extreme example, their fate in Nazi Germany, we will return to. Nowhere else have they faced actual extermination, but during World War II they were subject to state bans in much of the British Empire and were more likely to be imprisoned than any other religious conscientious objectors in the United States. The Witnesses’ refusal to salute flags or stand for national anthems led to their children’s being expelled from some American schools. In all of these countries, with grom irony, the Witnesses were accused of Nazi sympathies. Since 1945, their sharpest trials have been in one-party states. Malawi banned the Society in 1967 after Witnesses refused to join the ruling party, and over twenty thousand were expelled to brutal camp conditions in Zambia in 1972. Some eventually ended up in Mozambique, where after 1975 some seven thousand Witnesses were interned in Communist reeducation camps.

The Witnesses’ best know ethical stance, the rejection of blood transfusions, is characteristic. Russell, citing Acts 15:20, argued that it was wrong to eat meat in which blood remained. In 1945, Rutherford ruled that this ban extended to blood transfusions. No other religious group of any kind has found his argument persuasive, and it is an odd fit in an organization that has no general aversion to modernity or to science. Its, value, apparently, lies in compelling Witnesses to assert a highly visible difference that challenges social notions of religious tolerance.

It is not easy for outsiders to love the Witnesses. They have endured appalling persecution with astonishing stoicism, but facing and even courting persecution are part of their identity. Their steady growth- they currently number some eight million active members worldwide- can easily be ascribed to their missionary barrage and to their formidable system of control rather than to any real attraction offered by their faith. There is a large constituency of ex-Witnesses with little good to say about the Society. The Society has no culture of intellectual openness or of scholarship and does not reply to critics.

Yet there is more to the witnesses than hostile caricature admits. Their determined internationalism and disregard for racial differences has made them- along with the Seventh-day Adventists- among America’s most racially integrated religious groups. They are capable of winning real respect from their neighbors, especially in tough social environments. When other churches have a reputation for clericalism, hypocrisy, or financial corruption, the Witnesses can justly boast that they have no paid ministers, take no collections, and maintain strict moral discipline. The rigorous training that all Witnesses undertake, from carefully directed study of texts to sharing in leadership, can be as rewarding as it is demanding. Outsiders need not admire the Society, but they should try not to hate it, not least because hatred is one of the fuels on which it thrives. Neither Witnesses nor mainstream Protestants like to admit it, but they belong to the same extended family.