As I was writing the introduction to last week’s post regarding the 1994 documentary, “The Midnight Cry!” I remembered that I had read a book by one of the three main commentators in the documentary, David L. Rowe. The book was entitled “God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World.” Since David Rowe is not an Adventist, I was not expecting the book to be pro-Adventist apologetics. But it really seemed that Rowe went out of his way to be unfair to William Miller.
Below is my 2009 review of David L. Rowe’s book, “God’s Strange Work”:
If you write about about Mozart or Elvis Presley, it is almost certain that your readers will have heard their music, and hence will know what all the fuss was about. There will be no need to explain how great the music was. In the case of the Millerite movement, by contrast, we needed more explanation of the relevant biblical prophecies. In other words, Rowe does not explain Miller's teachings well enough for the reader to understand what all the fuss was about.
By contrast, Rowe labors extensively over how Miller's youthful Arminianism evolved into Calvinism, but this is irrelevant to Miller's prophetic interpretations, particularly the 1843 teaching, and to why he became the leader of a movement.
Another problem is that Rowe seems unreasonably troubled by argumentative writing and deems Miller's writing to be evidence of character defects such as "anger" (p. 132) and "paranoia" (p. 133) when it is nothing of the sort. On page 132, he asserts that “anger was also steering Miller,” then quotes writings that struck me as indicative more of sadness than anger. They certainly did not support Rowe's conclusion that anger was “steering” Miller. Likewise, Miller's estimation of who were his most strident critics seems to me dead-on accurate, certainly not at all paranoid.
In this same passage (pp. 132 - 136) in which Rowe slips needlessly and groundlessly into defamation, Rowe asserts that Miller "crossed the border between messenger and prophet." The basis for this assertion is Miller's interpretation of the sixth trumpet of Revelation as being fulfilled by the Ottoman Empire, and the calculation that the 391 prophetic days/literal years would come to an end in 1840. This interpretation was largely the work of Josiah Litch, not Miller, but even if it had been solely Miller's, it was an interpretation of biblical prophecy, not a new prophecy rendering Miller a prophet.
Rowe also erroneously contends that the fact that the Ottoman Empire did not fall in 1840 was universally seen as a failed prophecy and an embarrassment. He calls it a “debacle.” (p. 176) In fact, although the Ottoman Empire did not fall in 1840 (it fell in 1918, at the end of WWI), four European powers dictated terms to the Sultan as to how his conflict with Egypt would be settled. The letter conveying these terms was delivered in August 1840, which is when Litch had been predicting the end of the 391 days/years.
Litch interpreted this as fulfilling the prophecy, in part because he dated the beginning of this prophetic period not from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but from 1449, when the Ottomans interceded to resolve an issue of Byzantine succession. So there was a neat parallelism in the beginning and ending of the prophetic period: demarcated not by an absolute fall, but by a weakening to the point where old enemies were dictating terms.
According to John N. Loughborough, many saw Litch's interpretation as a great success, not as a failure and an embarrassment. But Rowe mentions none of this, even to debunk it, even though he is well aware of this history. This is sloppy at best, borderline dishonest at worst.
After acknowledging that in the years leading up to 1844, Miller was maintaining an incredibly taxing regimen of traveling and lecturing, Rowe all but accuses Miller of malingering. Considering Miller's age and the difficulty of travel in those days, Miller was keeping up a killing pace. He had a painful condition called Erysipelas, which causes boils and sores on the skin. Yet Rowe writes that “a certain hypochondria was not unknown among people finding themselves thrust into public notice” and “Erysipelas is uncomfortable and sometimes painful but does not usually threaten death. Unless other undiagnosed diseases were troubling him, it is difficult to understand why it proved so debilitating.” Aside from the fact that Rowe is not qualified to engage in remote psychiatric diagnosis, that he would do so reveals a pettiness, a smallness of character, an attempt to build himself up by tearing his subject down.
I appreciate the scholarship that went into this book, but it misses the mark. The power and persuasiveness of Miller's teaching and preaching are not conveyed, and the criticisms of Miller seem contrived in an effort to achieve a tone that Rowe's academic colleagues will find acceptable.