The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

For Chapter One:
APPENDIX
ADDITIONAL NOTES ON THE SECOND ADVENT MOVEMENT
As noted on page 43, along with intense interest in time
prophecies, the Second Advent movement was also characterized
by a number of other distinctive factors.
Many of the Second Adventist splinter groups that branched off
from the original Millerites rejected the immortal soul and hell
doctrines (and even the trinity doctrine). This was due largely to the
articles and tracts published in the 1820’s, 1830’s, and 1840’s by a
former Baptist pastor, Henry Grew of Hartford, Connecticut and
later of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1
The doctrine of “conditional immortality” was first introduced
among the Millerites by George Storrs. It was the reading of one of
Grew’s tracts in 1837 that turned Storrs against the immortal soul
and hell doctrines, and he was later to become the leading
champion in the United States of conditionalism.
Typical of many Second Adventist periodicals, the World’s Crisis
advocated conditionalism, the doctrine of the conditional―not
inherent—immortality of the human soul, with its corollary tenet
that the ultimate destiny of those who are rejected by God is
destruction or annihilation, not conscious torment. The World’s
Crisis had advocated the date of 1854 for Christ’s second coming
and when, like all the preceding dates, this date failed, the
“immortality question” came strongly to the fore and caused a
second major division within the original movement.
1 LeRoy Edwin Froom, The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, Washington D.C.:
Review and Herald, 1965, pp. 300–315. Grew’s anti-trinitarian position, too, was
adopted by a majority of the Second Adventists, including the three major
Adventist groups that branched off from the “original” Adventists: 1) the Seventh-
Day Adventists, 2) the Advent Christians, and 3) the “age to come” Adventists. In
1898 the SDA Church, on the authority of Ellen G. White, the “prophetess” of this
movement, changed its position on the question. (Erwin Roy Gane, The Arian or
Anti-Trinitarian Views Presented in Seventh-Day Adventist Literature and the Ellen
G. White Answer, unpublished M.A. thesis, Andrews University, June 1963, pp. 1–
110) Some decades later, the Advent Christian Church, too, began to reconsider its
anti-trinitarian position.—See David Arnold Dean, Echoes of the Midnight Cry: The
Millerite Heritage in the Apologetics of the Advent Christian Denomination, 1860–
1960 (unpublished Th.D. dissertation, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1976)
pp. 406–416.
312