The Imminent Second Coming

Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses affirm the imminent return of Christ, that the personal, visible second coming is near and is the great hope toward which history moves. Both traditions grew from the intense nineteenth-century expectation of Christ's return: Adventism from the Millerite movement that looked for it in the 1840s, and the Witnesses from the Bible Student movement that followed. Each reads biblical prophecy as marking the present as the last days and calls believers to readiness, though they differ in how they understand the manner and sequence of the end.

The Millerite movement reached its crisis on 22 October 1844, when William Miller's calculated date for Christ's return passed without the expected event, an episode Adventist historians call the Great Disappointment; out of the movements that regrouped afterward, one strand led by Ellen G. White developed into the Seventh-day Adventist Church, formally organized in 1863. A separate nineteenth-century current, the Bible Student movement founded by Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s, developed its own distinct chronology of Christ's return, eventually reorganizing under Russell's successor Joseph Rutherford as the Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1930s, so that the two traditions, though sharing roots in the same era of intense prophetic expectation, trace to separate nineteenth-century founders and movements.