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From Millerism to Seventh-day Adventism: “Boundlessness to Consolidation”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Jonathan Butler
Jonathan Butler
Affiliation:
Mr. Butler is visiting scholar in the history department, University of California, Riverside, California.
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Extract

In his comparative analysis of various millennial movements, anthropologist Kenelm Burridge constructs a formula for cultural change, which he defines as “old rules” to “no rules” to “new rules.” The first phase of these movements invariably involves a period of social unrest. Society deviates from the old rules as old formulas fail and institutions malfunction. People flout the political, religious, and social establishments with seemingly unpatriotic, blasphemous, and antisocial acts. In the next phase, society hangs between the old order and the new in an interim period in which neither the old standards nor the new hold sway. At that point, millennial movements often materialize in search of a new society. Burridge defines them as new cultures or social orders coming into being. Rather than “oddities” or “diseases in the body social,” they involve “the adoption of new assumptions, a new redemptive process, a new political-economic framework, a new mode of measuring the man, a new integrity, a new community: in short, a new man.” In the third and final phase, the new rules solidify as the new culture takes shape, which in time may represent the old rules and old order for a future prophetic movement. Millenarians cannot last as millenanans. They endure only as they scuttle or transform their millenarian outlook.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 50 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1986

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References

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5. Cited in Froom, LeRoy Edwin, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1961), 4:463.Google Scholar

6. Where “Adventist” is capitalized, I refer to the spin-off of Millerism which in 1860 adopted the name “Seventh-day Adventist,” while “adventism” in lower case refers to millenarians in general.

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