Millenarianism

Origins

The term millenarianism is biblical in origin, coming from the prophecy in Revelation 20, wherein an angel seized Satan “and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the abyss, and shut it, and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years should be finished….” During this thousand years, or millennium, Christ will rule directly over a new earth, “and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more….”

People unfamiliar with these passages in the Bible sometimes falsely imagine that the prophecy said Christ would return to earth after a thousand years, and the mass media sometimes claim there was an upsurge of millenarianism in Europe around the year 1000, anticipating Christ's imminent return. However, the historian Norman Cohn reports there is no record at all of millenarianism around the year 1000, and examples did not begin to appear in Europe until more than a century later. Similarly, although the mass media and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation expected an upsurge of millenarianism at the year 2000, this did not in fact happen.

Christian millenarian movements have used two different methods to predict the date of the Second Coming (the date of Christ's return). One is to pay attention to the signs of the times in current news reports, to see if world events are following the pattern that the Bible says will immediately precede Christ's return. The other method is interpreting obscure passages in the Bible to deduce the year mathematically. The most influential proponent of the latter method was William Miller (1782–1849), an American who was deeply disturbed by the horrors he witnessed in the War of 1812, and who predicted that the millennium would begin in 1843. A vast popular movement arose in the United States around Miller's prophecy, leading to “The Great Disappointment” when Christ failed to appear at the appointed time. Miller himself acknowledged his mistake, but in the following decades some of his more fervent followers created a collection of millenarian churches, known as the Adventist movement. Two major, world-spanning sects eventually emerged from the wreckage of Miller's movement, the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as numerous smaller groups and some that are indirectly connected, such as the Unification Church founded in Korea by Sun Myung Moon (b. 1920).

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