19/06/2026
On a dark winter’s night in Lincolnshire, England, a group of cloaked men gathered by the banks of the River Don. As the hour neared midnight, two of their number broke away from the group and made their way into the river. As it turned out, they were none other than the local vicar and one of his parish elders. As they entered the Don, a shiver ran through them both. Then, they did something that had not been done in England for more than a thousand years: the elder held out his arms, embraced the vicar, and lowered him into the dark water.
Ask any moderate Seventh-day Adventist to explain the theory of the Big Bang, and you’ll likely be met by confusion. Imagining cosmic origins through God’s Word is much more comforting—and understandable. To use physics pioneer Georges Lemaître’s terminology, how can an entire universe emerge from one “primeval atom”?
And yet, many Adventists are oddly comfortable with another Big Bang theory—the theory of how we as a movement came to be. The story of the early Adventists—starting with William Miller—studying the Bible and in doing so, coming to the truths we know and love today is one often thought of as that “primeval atom”. Miller, later describing his method, said, “I determined to lay aside all my prepossessions, to thoroughly compare Scripture with Scripture, and to pursue its study in a regular and methodical manner.”
There is a real appeal to this and, indeed, a promise—that anyone who puts aside their own assumptions and studies Scripture with an open mind can and will discover “The Truth” for themselves. As Miller himself said, “I was thus satisfied that the Bible is a system of revealed truths, so clearly and simply given, that the ‘wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein’.” There’s hope even for me.
This instinct is not unique to Adventists; indeed, the wider Protestant project has made the same claim ever since Martin Luther, who famously once wrote, “If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.”
It could be argued that Luther himself set the template for theological discovery and that for Protestants (bolstered by the Enlightenment), this has now become the default. Of course, the trouble with the notion that through a sincere study of the Bible, anyone would naturally arrive at “The Truth” is not only anecdotally untrue—it has been proven false by history. There have been thousands of Protestant groups, offshoots and denominations since 1517, each with their own interpretation of the Bible, each as convinced as the others that they alone were right.
As convenient as it would be to claim that we originated from the “primeval atom” of early Adventists’ sincere study of Scripture, when you examine the history of our movement, you’ll discover the reasons we believe what we believe are far more complicated.
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