by Gypsy Sam 13 Replies latest social current
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phillip-margulies-/endtimes-in-1844_b_4688469.html
What do you think about posting on Facebook with a comment about how interesting this is, good to be informed about questions that may come up for those that read the article...
I frequently see JW's post or like huffington post articles.
That sounds awesome! Make sure to mention all the WTBTS's dates that a householder recently asked you about in field service. Mention that we need to familiarize ourselves with these questions that honest-hearted truthseekers have.
Wish I wasn't such a chicken, I'd post this on fb with some comment about what an insightful author he is.
Posted: 01/29/2014 4:57 pm EST Updated: 01/29/2014 4:59 pm EST Print Article
The two magazines that the Jehovah's Witnesses are always bringing to my door have stirring titles: Awake! and The Watchtower. I read them with guilty, queasy pleasure. Though I do not long for the end of the world or believe in it, I've always wondered what it was like to believe that. I don't sneer at it or joke about it. I don't waste my time listing all the previous false predictions. I don't want humor or logic to block my access to the emotions. What must it be like, to walk down strange apartment corridors with the urgent mission of warning people before it is too late? To stand in subways, and at airports and supermarkets, and think that all the proud buildings, and all the shoppers with their new possessions, and their children and even their pets, are about to face a terrible judgment? It would load every minute with suspense. It would give every person and object a special dignity.
That, I believe, is the lasting attraction of the prediction of the end of the world. It's like great art. It give us new eyes. It makes us see everything differently.
I have just spent eight years writing a novel based on the life of a nineteenth century madam known to her contemporaries as Belle Cora. When I was in the early stages of my research it thrilled me to realize that my heroine would have been 16 in 1844. That meant that I would be able to write about my obsession.
According to a prediction thousands of Americans at the time believed, October 22, 1844 was the date the rapture was going to occur. Graves would spring open; the dead would rise. Farmers would be plucked out of their fields where they were plowing. Family members would be separated because the sinners would be left behind. The Earth would burn. The prediction had been made by a scholarly farmer named William Miller, based on earnest calculations from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. His followers were called "Millerites." It was the most widely-believed specific it-will-happen no-later-than-this-day prediction of the Second Coming in our history.
One reason for the success of the prophecy--until the humiliating day of its failure---was that the Millerites were well organized and media savvy. In this respect they were quite modern and very American, anticipating the mega-churches and televangelists of a later day. They wrote and distributed newspapers devoted to the prophecy. The toured the northeastern United States in a giant circus tent where great revival meetings were held and thousands were saved---saved just in the nick of time, before the burning of everything.
As the deadline approached, farmers stopped harvesting their crops, and shopkeepers threw all their stock into the streets; some people sold their houses for nominal prices or gave away all their possessions, which were only standing in the way of their salvation. Others struggled to get their work finished before the expected end. A farmer hired extra help to get his crops in before October 22. Some Harvard matrons hurried to get their canning and preserving done before the appointed hour. When asked why they were canning if they believed the world was about to end, they replied that God approved of thrifty Christians, and that to leave everything ship-shape would count in their favor.
On the day of days, crowds waited outside cemeteries expecting to see the corpses spring out of the ground; and it was later widely reported that Millerites stood on hills and rooftops in specially made white "Ascension Robes." For some reason these particular details--standing on rooftops in white robes--seemed especially absurd to the mockers, and the mention of it infuriated the believers. It was the one thing they hotly denied ever doing: They insisted that they had waited calmly in church and at home; they knew that Jesus could find them wherever they were.
After the "Great Disappointment," as the Millerites and their direct descendants, the Seventh-Day-Adventists, later called the incident, a majority of the Millerites went back to their everyday lives and their everyday religion. A few drifted into other strange beliefs. William Miller himself took to stating that he had misunderstood the nature of the prediction. October 22, 1844 wasn't supposed to be the day that Jesus would reappear and the elect be brought up to heaven. Instead, it was the last day when it was possible for people to be saved. The door to Heaven was shut for most people. No hope: A few Millerites went from church to church preaching this message, but for some reason it never got much traction.
The end of the world is a way of seeing. It enriches our sense of the reality that surrounds us. For these reasons, and because memories are short, it did not take long for America to see the return of predictions of the immediate, imminent end of the world. The Millerites are forgotten, but one fifth of us regularly state that that Jesus will return within the next several years.
The end of the world is deeply rooted in the American psyche; it is the flip side of American optimism. Ever since Ronald Reagan, with his finger on the button, comforted half the country and scared the rest of us out our socks by speculating that Armageddon just might happen during his administration, two contrasting visions of the end of the world have confronted each other. In one vision, the evangelical vision, Jesus will return very soon, and not a moment too soon, to rescue humanity from the terrible fix it has gotten itself into. In the other vision, which is not based on the book of Revelation, but is not necessarily irreligious, the world as we know it is going to end because of the terrible fix we have gotten ourselves into, and because we cannot agree to do anything about it.
Phillip Margulies is the author of the new novel Belle Cora.
Blondie rocks!
White robes on the roof tops?
Did you know that rosbes played a important role in the WTS history? Or that men were bapitzed first?
*** w96 4/1 p. 23 “Work, Not for the Food That Perishes” ***
When I was in my late teens, I made a dedication to Jehovah, and I symbolized this by water baptism in 1927. The baptism was held in Seattle in an old building that had formerly been a Baptist church. I am glad they had taken the old steeple off. We were escorted down to the pool in the basement where we were given long black robes to wear. It looked as if we were going to a funeral.
Yet
*** w95 4/1 p. 30 Questions From Readers ***
There are various ways in which each of us can reflect both the seriousness and the joy of a baptism. In some churches those getting baptized wear white robes or black ones. There is simply no Scriptural support for such a requirement.
*** w90 4/1 p. 28 ‘I Mounted Up With Wings Like Eagles’ ***
So on August 28, 1928, we were baptized.
The baptism was different from baptisms today. Behind a curtain was the baptism pool. When the curtain was opened, there was Brother Christian Jensen ready to do the immersing. He was dressed in a tailcoat, standing in the middle of the pool with the water up to his waist. We baptismal candidates were dressed in long white robes. First the men were baptized and then the women.
*** yb81 p. 213 New Zealand ***
The first convention of Jehovah’s people in New Zealand was arranged by Brother Nelson in December 1912. Around 20 persons gathered at the rear of a private home in Wellington. Of this group, eight came forward to present themselves for baptism. In those days it was a serious occasion, with the candidates dressed in long black robes.
In 1964, I was baptized into the Baptist faith at the age of 10 years & 9 months, dressed in a long white robe on a hot August morning.
In 1974, I was baptized into the JW's at the age of 20 years & 11 months, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt on a cool October morning.
Incidentally, there are reports that Charles Russell & Company dressed in white robes in 1878 and 1914, appeared on a bridge and a housetop respectively, and awaited the Rapture.
Sylvia
When 1878 arrived, failure of the expected rapture of the saints brought great disappointment for Barbour and Russell, and their associates and readers. According to one of Russell's associates, A.H. Macmillan:
While talking with Russell about the events of 1878, I told him that Pittsburgh papers had reported he was on the Sixth Street bridge dressed in a white robe on the night of the Memorial of Christ's death, expecting to be taken to heaven together with many others. I asked him, "Is that correct?" Russell laughed heartily and said: "I was in bed that night between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M. However, some of the more radical ones might have been there, but I was not. Neither did I expect to be taken to heaven at that time, for I felt there was much work to be done preaching the Kingdom message to the peoples of the earth before the church would be taken away.
—A.H. Macmillan, Faith on the March, 1957, page 27
Did he not also appear on the rooftop of Bethel in 1914, clinging to a chimney, while awaiting to be spirited heavenward?
Did I dream that?
LOL.
Sylvia
No mention of that in 1914, snowbird, but he did march into the Bethel dining hall and say:
*** jv chap. 6 p. 61 A Time of Testing (1914-1918) ***
“The Gentile Times have ended; their kings have had their day”! So exclaimed Brother Russell as he entered the dining room at the Brooklyn headquarters of the Watch Tower Society the morning of Friday, October 2, 1914.
I guess he learned from 1878.
