William Miller

All My Sons is a powerful play that holds up to scrutiny an American story of success at a high cost and the devastation that malignant success brings to so many others. With this play Miller established himself as a major talent and voice of conscience. It is a study of the results of failure in family and social responsibility and is remarkable for its tightness of structure and its honest facing of the problem of how a man should act in the complicated modern world. It has been described as an Ibsenite play and certainly if we restrict Ibsen to the kind of play he wrote between The league of Youth (1869) and Rosmersholm (1886). According to Raymond Williams, " The similarities are indeed so striking that we could call All My Sons pastiche if the force of its conception were not so evident. It is perhaps that much rare case, of a writer who temporarily discovers in an existing form an exact way of realizing his own experience. At the centre of the play is the kind of situation which was Ibsen's development of the device of the fatal secret. From Henrik Ibsen's play The Wild Duck Arthur Miller took the idea of two partners in a business where one is forced to take moral and legal responsibility for the other. He also borrows the idea of a character's idealism being the source of a problem. All My Sons is a story about joe Keller. He is a good husband, a good father but not a good citizen that his son, Chris demands. He is an apparently successful businessman who committed a social crime for which he has escaped responsibility. He acquiesced in the sending of defective parts to the American Air Force in wartime and yet allowed another man to take the consequences and imprisonment. The action begins after the war and is basically on the lines of what has been called Ibsen's retrospective method. The ibsen method of showing first an ordinary domestic scene, into which, by gradual infiltration, the crime and guilt enter and build up to the critical eruption, is exactly followed. The process of this destructive infiltration is carefully worked out in terms of the needs of the other characters-Keller's wife and surviving son, the girl whom the son is to marry, the neighbors, the son of the convict-so that the demonstration of social consequences and therefore of Keller's guilt, is not of any abstract principle, but of personal needs and relationships, which compose a reality that directly enforces the truth. Miller's realistic drama All My Sons involves his basic concept of moral responsibility in the family, linking it to the inner struggle of men in authority during the war. Taking the hypothetical case of an executive who allowed defective airplane parts to be shipped to the army rather than ruin his company's business and losing contract, the playwright sought to show the consequences of the man's dereliction.

During the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the Second Advent movement was a potent religious force in both Europe and North America. Its adherents focused on a specific date for the literal fulfilment of Christ’s Second Advent—his return to earth to establish his kingdom. In America, the rising prosperity and growth of social democracy of the Jacksonian era evoked a fervid optimism that for many focussed on utopian visions of America’s millennial glory. Such an environment proved fertile ground for the theories of William Miller, and his followers, the Millerites, who became the largest and most influential early nineteenth-century American premillennial group.
William Miller (1782-1849) was a primarily self-educated farmer living in upstate New York who, while raised a Baptist, became a Deist as a young man. Following his participation in the War of 1812, he first questioned and then rejected his Deist beliefs, undergoing a dramatic conversion experience and rejoining the Baptist Church. In order to respond to the questions of his Deist friends regarding the Bible’s reliability and their accusations that the Bible contradicted itself, Miller began a systematic reading of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
While reading, Miller became convinced that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to the earth would take place, “about the year 1843”. He began to publicly proclaim this Second Advent message in 1831, and soon gathered a large number of followers who accepted his message. Miller came to his conclusions because of the particular way in which he approached Scripture—seeing the Bible as a “feast of reason”—and by using a very systematic approach influenced by Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and based on Historicist principles. Miller approached the Bible “rationally” and a belief in the Bible’s perspicuity, literality, and truthfulness, was at the core of his hermeneutical approach. While he himself refrained from setting an exact date, he eventually accepted the October 22, 1844 date predicted by Samuel S. Snow. When this date passed without Christ’s return, the majority of Millerites gave up their beliefs.
A minority of Millerites maintained their beliefs in the soon return of Jesus Christ and/or the significance of October 22, 1844. These groups developed a variety of explanations for Jesus’ non-appearance on that date and either reinterpreted the event linked to October 22, 1844 or set other dates for Christ’s return. The Seventh-day Adventist denomination that formally formed in 1860 out of these Millerite believers was one such group who developed an alternative scenario allowing them to maintain their belief in the significance of the October 22, 1844 date. The Seventh-day Adventist Church is now a 17 million strong denomination with a worldwide presence that reads and interprets the Bible using an approach that owes a great deal to Miller’s hermeneutic.

During the Sylvan Lake, Alberta campmeeting in 2013, Jeff Pippenger  proposed a question, ‘On what date was the midnight cry given at the Exeter campmeeting in 1844?’ That is, was it the first day of the fifth month on the Jewish calendar in 1844?  Could we connect Ezra’s arrival to Jerusalem on the first day of the fifth month in 457 BC to the empowerment of the Seventh-month Movement in Millerite history?  To answer this question, it required a deeper look in the calendar used by the Millerites to arrive at the date October 22 for the end of the 2300 days of Daniel 8:14. By the summer of 2014, it was generally settled that Snow arrived at Exeter by horse on the 14th of August and, after his sister Mrs. Couch interrupted Joseph Bates mid-sermon, he did a short presentation, which was followed the next day with a series of three presentations. It is these presentations which were the midnight cry, the empowerment of the second angel’s message. Thus, we could place the midnight cry on August 15, 1844, which was the Jewish first day of the fifth month, tying this to Ezra’s arrival to Jerusalem 2300 years prior.

Still, there were questions that remained. While we had two eyewitness accounts, that of James White and Joseph Bates, our understanding leaned heavily on the accounts complied years later by Loughborough, Spalding, and Froom (those who were not eyewitnesses, with accounts decades removed from the actual events). As well, these accounts differed in several important details. Did Snow present on the third day of the meeting (Spalding), Sunday forenoon (Loughborough), or some other day. Was there a question-and-answer session at Exeter, or was this at Boston a month earlier? Was the midnight cry given at Boston or Exeter - July or August? What does Sister White have to say on the matter?

The answer to these questions unfolded over the next few years. We came to recognise that July 21, 1844 marked the arrival of midnight, being the exact midway point between the first disappointment and the end of the prophetic periods. This date is marked by the question-and-answer session Snow gave at the Boston Tabernacle, but which Loughborough mistakenly placed at Exeter. By 2016, we were able to present all of these waymarks on a line, connecting the dates on the biblical calendar with those on our calendar. Most of the uncertainty centred around the timing of the empowerment of the message. If Snow presented on the 14th, would that not have been the midnight cry? Why would we then mark the 15th? We could not readily prove the series of events, since accounts differed significantly.

Recently, an examination of these sources has revealed further details that had previously gone unnoticed. These details give new insight into the timing and significance of the messages both then and now.

This research document provides ample and true biblical and historical evidence that the SDA historicism has failed in its attempt to establish itself as a valid and reliable interpretation school for the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation. The issues that have confronted and still confront the SDA historicism are as follows:

Definition and Application Issues

Factual evidence indicates that the SDA definition for historicism is fragmented into various and uneven formulations that as a whole present an inconsistent hermeneutical perspective. This fragmentation has produced uneven prophetic interpretations and incorrect exegetical applications to Daniel and Revelation due the intentional or non-intentional confusion between human historical events and assumed fictional or non-terrestrial events. Some claimed and assumed “events” also appear to have been concocted and reshaped from real event distortion and misinterpretation.

No Divine Origin for Historicism

The SDA theologians have claimed that God himself has originated the historicist hermeneutics and that the Bible has been written from a historicist perspective. Another assumed but undocumented SDA claim is that Daniel, John, Jesus, Paul, and other Bible writers have written their books as historicists. All these claims are assumptions derived from an excessive theological focus on historicism as a method and the attempt to obtain a pre-established deductive conclusion that cannot be substantiated with biblical and historical evidence and fails to demonstrate authentic and reliable “fulfillments” for the SDA assumptive and erroneous time and event predictions.

Selective Historical Attestation

The SDA historicist theologians have used selective, tendentious, and therefore biased historical data to establish false claims for “prophetic fulfillments,” a fallacious and non-scientific approach to data authentication. Based on these deceptive “proofs” the SDA theologians have argued for untenable and irresponsible prophetic interpretation positions on Daniel and Revelation. Such excesses have weakened and discredited the SDA historicism in the Christian World and have made the historicist hermeneutics impossible to consider and accept.

Repeated SDA Prediction Failures

The fact that William Miller, the amateur historicist and preacher has committed multiple interpretation and logical errors while he computed the prophetic time for the assumed Second Coming in 1844 is well known. What is less known and ignored is the fact that the SDA pioneers and also the present SDA theologians and scholars are still dependent on Miller’s hermeneutics and worldview in their Daniel and Revelation interpretations. There were multiple attempts for time setting during the Millerite effervescent period and also multiple “prophetic fulfillment” errors, and these errors have been adopted in the SDA theological circles as true and self-evident “prophetic fulfillments.” This research document has provided the most relevant examples that demonstrate the repeated Adventist failures to provide verification for the speculative hermeneutical approach through solid historical evidence that would indicate indisputable prediction fulfillment and validate the spurious SDA historicist claims.

Historicist Mania and the Gospel

The SDA fixation or rather obsession with the eschatological prophecies in Daniel and Revelation has caused a backlash effect and collateral damage in the Adventist circles. The true fact is that almost all Adventist church members have noticed that most “Net Seminars” or local Evangelistic Meetings appear to have a singular focus, and that is not the Gospel but the strange beasts in Daniel and Revelation. One other item that is promoted and circulated in an excessive manner and on a regular basis in the SDA evangelistic meetings is the one related to the presumed time “landmarks” or the word’s end countdown. The obsessive denominational focus on Daniel and Revelation associated with the excessive preaching from the two prophetic books together with the bombastic and triumphalist emphasis on the “final events” and the “imminent” Second Coming which is considered the “remnant message” or the “present truth” has replaced the Christian Gospel with fantastic and implausible tall tales and has caused almost the complete and inexcusable failure to preach the genuine Gospel, the Bible’s Good News, of salvation, to the truth-starved world.

Resumo: O cenário teológico do protestantismo no século XXI apresenta uma fragmentação de pensamento, tendência que começa a ser observável no adventismo. Haja visto que o princípio protestante sola Scriptura projetou e proporcionou o desenvolvimento da identidade adventista, sua importância é vital para preservar o adventismo de uma eventual fragmentação. O presente artigo traça preliminarmente a rota desde a hermenêutica protestante do século XVI até a fomentação da identidade adventista no século XIX, surgido após o desapontamento vivenciado pelos participantes do movimento mierita, que anunciava o retorno de Jesus à Terra como cumprimento das profecias. Na sequência, se aborda o modelo canônico de sola Scritura, ferramenta vital para uma abordagem canônica das Escrituras. Essa proposta se apresenta no contexto contemporâneo como uma forma de extrair do cânon bíblico as pressuposições necessárias para interpretar a própria Bíblia, alinhando-se com a tradição que se iniciou no século XVI e que deu origem ao movimento adventista. Ao fim, se reflete sobre a importância de vincular o movimento adventista ao sola Scriptura com o propósito de manter sua identidade.

William Miller cleaned up his life and began preaching the soon-return of Jesus Christ to Earth in 1833. 1 in Tishri, 2022 to 1 in Tishri, 2023 allows 190 years between preaching and fulfillment. The basis, erroneously so, of his understanding in chronological terms was the 2,300 day-years of Daniel 8. Here we correct this minor chronological error.

Il gruppo di venticinque monotipi  di Antonio Mancini (Roma 1853 – 1930), pressoché inediti nell’opera dell’artista noto come pittore , scaturisce da uno scenario alquanto singolare: la ripresa del monotipo in Italia nell’ultimo quarto dell’Ottocento, Essa muove da un complesso intreccio di scambi e relazioni internazionali ancora poco indagati, che potrebbero dare nuova luce al ruolo non secondario degli artisti italiani svolto per lo sviluppo di questa forma espressiva.
Gli indizi fino ad ora raccolti ci mostrano un movimento di scambi a doppio senso tra l’Italia con gli Stati Uniti da una parte e l’Italia con la Francia dall’altra.

Contents

1. Emblematic Debate: Librarianship's Meaning in a Digital Age

2. Professions and their Context

3. Applying Ockham's Razor

4. Building on our Past

5. U.S. Librarianship and the Library Profession's Body of Work

6. Is a New Profession Emerging?