Books by "Donald Edward Casebolt"
2 books found
The crisis in Adventist eschatology is due to its reliance on Millerism’s faulty methodology and falsified prophetic predictions. Ellen White taught that Father Miller’s sole authority was Scripture and a concordance; that his interpretations were literal commonsense; and most importantly, that God had originated his date-setting conclusions by repeated angelic guidance. She announced that Miller was typological of John the Baptist; that Miller was a forerunner to Christ’s Second Advent as the Baptist was to his First. This book will document that these three misconceptions are falsified by primary sources from roughly 1835 to 1851. Miller was highly dependent on disconfirmed, centuries-old, historicist speculations; his interpretations were allegorical and arbitrary not literal; his falsified proofs obviously not of angelic origin. For example, Miller initially predicted the Parousia and fall of the Ottoman Empire for 1839. White also endorsed Snow, Joseph Turner, and Crozier, whom, she said, God had given “true light.” Post-Disappointment, these men continued using Miller’s allegorical-typological-historicist methods, and Ellen Harmon “was taught” by these men. About two centuries after “The Midnight Cry” and the “end-times” signs of 1755, 1780, and 1833, the SDA church’s tenacious reliance on Millerite proofs makes its eschatology increasingly implausible.
Ellen White’s two thousand visions, revered by her twenty million disciples, were doctrinally inspired by William Miller, who fathered the largest millennial movement in US history. He and Samuel Snow, during the movement’s climax, the “Midnight Cry,” predicted Christ’s Second Coming for exactly October 22, 1844, on the basis of fifteen proof-texts. Ellen was twelve, suffering from severe brain trauma and the conviction that she was hell-bound, when Miller converted her. By sixteen she became convicted that she was having divine dreams and visions confirming Miller’s prophetic role and message. When Miller’s predictions failed and he repudiated his own predictions, Ellen announced that God had commanded her to endorse Miller’s failed “Midnight Cry” as divinely inspired, and her authority replaced Miller’s in the “shut-door” faction of ex-Millerites who evolved into the Seventh-day Adventist church. Miller claimed that his dogmas were the result of merely allowing the Bible to interpret itself and that his method was literal commonsense. White seconded this claim and said God’s angels routinely guided Miller’s interpretations. However, not only were his interpretations falsified, but examination reveals them to be farfetched allegorical treatments of parables. Nonetheless, White’s visions and SDA theology still retain many of Miller’s falsified predictions.