Name: The rise and fall of Adventists (1-19-22)
Uploaded: 2022-01-20T04:36:16+00:00
Duration: 12 min 3 s
Description: Bryan Ronald Wilson wrote in 1966: "The earlier adventist and millennialist movements which had arisen in expectation of a new dispensation with the returned Christ as its head were all too often move

3 years ago

Bryan Ronald Wilson wrote in 1966: "The earlier adventist and millennialist movements which had arisen in expectation of a new dispensation with the returned Christ as its head were all too often movements only in the very literal sense of the word. Their members often had little capacity for sustained Christian commitment except as impelled immediately and unreflectingly by the intense emotions awakened in a situation of social and economic deprivation. The intensity of their feeling could sustain a march but could not bring
into being a social movement which could mount a programme of sustained social action: they were incapable of compromising with the world in order to achieve their ends, which were the utter rejection of the prevailing social order.
The intensity of response of early movements reflects the deeply felt
desire to alter conditions, the urgency of hope and the demand for
solutions—a condition of emotional disturbance which can be expressed
only in religious terms. (The urgency and intensity today manifested by
Africans praying for healing for sufferers in many of the contemporary
Syncretistic sects probably characterized some of the more fanatical
adventist movements of the Middle Ages.) As increasingly people came
to learn rational techniques and procedures, so reliance shifted from
emotional attempts to control the environment, to the recognition of the
value of controlled, disciplined regulation of emotional response, and the
acquisition of ordered instrumental methods of controlling the intractable
forces of nature and society.
Thus we see the contrast. Many of the early adventist movements,
and perhaps even some which occurred up until the eighteenth
century in Western Europe, and even later in parts of the United
States and other parts of the world, were largely ecstatic emotional
outbursts reinterpreting Christianity in primitive terms and with a
literal demand for the fulfilment of biblical promises." https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141986