Objection 66: By preaching the soon coming of Christ, Seventh-day Adventists are falsely creating hope and excitement. Misguided people through the centuries have repeatedly thought His coming was at hand. That fact is best illustrated by the excitement that spread throughout Europe in AD. 1000, when multitudes waited in fanatical fervor for Christ's coming.
There have indeed been many dates set for the Second Coming, among which the turning of the millennium was not even the most prominent. It turns out that the story that Europe witnessed wild excitement in anticipation of the Advent as the year 1,000 drew near is a baseless myth, exploded by an article by George Lincoln Burr, entitled, “The Year 1,000 and the Antecedents of the Crusades,” which appeared in the American Historical Review, April, 1901, pages 429-439. Burr observes:
“In fine, then, the sole contemporary evidence for a panic of terror at the year 1000 proved to be a statement that forty years earlier one Paris preacher named it as the date of the end of the world. A preacher whose prophecy was at once refuted, and, for ought we can learn, at once forgotten. . . . The terrors of the year 1000 are only a legend and a myth.” — p. 435.
It would be far more accurate to say that all through the centuries the vast majority of Christians have had little interest in the doctrine of the personal second coming of Christ, for two reasons. First, all through the Dark Ages and virtually up to Reformation times only the clergy and a few intellectuals had copies of the Scriptures. That was the long period of papal dominance in religious thought, when the Scriptures were kept away from the common people. Hence Christians at large could hardly become particularly concerned about the doctrine.
Second, in the eighteenth century certain Protestant leaders began to teach, and their view has been increasingly accepted, that the coming of Christ will be spiritual, invisible, the coming of the Divine Spirit into human hearts, gradually to turn all men to righteousness. Hence there would be no occasion for anyone to look forward with intense feeling to a certain moment ahead. (See Objection 61 for a discussion of the claim that Christ's coming is a spiritual one.)
It would also be equally accurate to say that the long centuries fail to support any general charge that those who have believed in the doctrine of Christ's personal appearing have deported themselves in an irrational, fanatical fashion.
While there is no evidence that believing in the doctrine of a literal, visible Second Coming of Christ to this earth leads to fanaticism, it is undeniable that setting specific dates for the Second Coming often generates false excitement, excitement that in the end does much more harm than good. But, as we discussed in answer to Objection 56, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has never set a date for the Second Coming, and the founding prophet, Ellen White, warned against date-setting in the strongest possible terms:
Many who have called themselves Adventists have been time-setters. Time after time has been set for Christ to come, but repeated failures have been the result. The definite time of our Lord's coming is declared to be beyond the ken of mortals. Even the angels, who minister unto those who shall be heirs of salvation, know not the day nor the hour. “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”—Testimonies for the Church 4:307 (1879).
“Beware of anyone who would set a time for the Lord to fulfill His word in regard to His coming, or in regard to any other promise He has made of special significance. "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power. . . . We would see the truth developing and expanding in lines of which we have little dreamed, but it will never develop in any line that will lead us to imagine that we may know the times and the seasons which the Father hath put in His own power.” --Selected Messages 1:188