The imminent Second Coming of Christ

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.

The nearness of the end shapes the whole outlook of these traditions: their urgency in preaching, their strong prophetic interest, and their sense of being a people prepared for Christ's appearing. The emphasis distinguishes them from churches that affirm the second coming in the creed but do not treat its nearness as a defining and organising conviction. The two movements differ significantly in their detailed eschatology, but they share the expectation that the present order is soon to give way to God's kingdom, and this hope colours their identity and mission.

The two traditions responded very differently to the experience of failed expectation: Seventh-day Adventism, chastened by the 1844 disappointment, moved away from further public date-setting, reinterpreting the original calculation as marking a heavenly rather than earthly event. Jehovah's Witnesses, by contrast, have publicly revised their expected timeline more than once across the twentieth century, including expectations associated with 1914, 1925, and 1975, each revision followed by renewed theological explanation for the community; historians and sociologists of religion studying both movements have used them as prominent case studies in how millenarian groups sustain belief and membership despite repeated disconfirmation of specific predicted dates.