The Oxford University Press Blog has an interesting post on an Apocalypse that was expected and that didn’t happened. The world was supposed to end on October 22, 1844. On that day, more than 160 years ago, many Americans waited hopelessly for the world to end and for Jesus. Sugary excerpt:
On October 22, 1844, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand people gathered in groups all over the United States to watch the sky. They stayed up until after midnight, straining to see Jesus Christ coming out of the heavens. A Vermont farmer named William Miller, undeterred by his lack of knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, had applied his naive ingenuity to biblical study. Calculations based on prophecies in the Book of Daniel had convinced him and his disciples that the long-awaited Second Coming of Christ would occur on this day.
How would people behave if they were convinced the world was coming to an end on a known day only months away? In 1844, many paid their debts, quit their jobs, closed their businesses, left their crops unharvested in the fields. Some who felt guilty about past frauds and cheats turned over money to banks or the U.S. Treasury. Others simply gave away money keeping no accounting of it. There was a rush to get baptized. On the appointed night, thousands gathered in many locations outdoors to watch the sky. But Jesus did not appear to them, and October 22d became known among Adventists as “The Great Disappointment.” The legend that Miller’s people had donned ascension robes for the occasion was one of the many humiliations heaped on the Adventists over the next year by a laughing public that had not quite dared risk scorning them until after the fact.
William Miller had never formed a denomination while expecting Christ, for there would have been no point in any long-term planning. But after the Great Disappointment his followers, many of them were expelled from their previous churches, kept their movement alive by differentiating themselves more sharply from mainline evangelicalism.
[…] Many Americans of that time and since have believed in their country’s special destiny to help prepare humanity for the Second Coming of Christ. Faith in democratic progress, in equal human rights, and even in economic and technological improvement have all been expressed in terms of paving the way for Christ’s return.
I may be too insensitive and too cynical, but I don’t know whether to laugh and to be afraid when I hear someone saying that s/he cannot wait for the end of the world. The frightening is that the belief that the world is terrible and that people should anticipate with ecstasy the end of the world is very common in America and expressed regularly without those expressing it realizing how fanatic and scary they sound. Even American politicians aren’t afraid to say that they are awaiting the return of their lord as to conform the fact that politics can never improve the lives of the citizens because only Jesus God. My question when I hear things like is what is the point of living then and actions if Apocalypse will make everything better. Why not just hasten the end of the world by encouraging wars around the world or just having a nuclear war that would annihilate this terrible world? I always wonder how people can rationally expect Jesus to make the world a paradise when he couldn’t do it the first time. How many comings does Jesus get to make things right? Doesn’t the fact that he needs more than one try shows that something is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark and that human happiness and the health of the world out of his hands?
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