God's Strange Work - Review

Twenty three years after writing Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800-1850, David L. Rowe attempts to set the record straight on William Miller and his Millerite religious movement. God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World not only investigates William Miller, but also describes events during the Second Great Awakening and recounts the establishment of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Often compared with other American religious figures such as Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy, William Miller has been historically misunderstood as an early-American prophet of Christ’s second-coming. In God’s Strange Work, Rowe argues that Miller was in many ways a normal figure of both politics and religion in the early nineteenth century. 

Rowe faced an arduous task when attempting to reconstruct the true William Miller. Preceding generations have portrayed Miller as an atypical prophet who duped his followers into believing his timeline of the return of Christ. Many have depicted Miller as an egotist and unbalanced religious renegade. Rowe faces this legacy head on and for the most part, allows Miller to speak for himself, making use of Miller’s poetry, notes, lectures, sermons, and extant letters. Along with these sources, Rowe employs a variety of contemporary sources, including local newspapers and gazettes. 

Throughout his lifetime, Miller rose from the bottom up through the ranks. Earlier historians classified this aspect of Miller’s life as an attempt to gain fame. Rowe contends that Miller “was clearly ambitious, but he could not appear to be eager for acclaim. He boldly moved away from hearth and home to seek his fortune in a new town, but he reluctantly took public steps to get noticed, a trait that would become more pronounced with age” (33). Ambition does not indicate a search or desire for renown. Rowe is able to show that Miller’s attempts at being virtuous and humble in most aspects of his life argue against an effort to become famous. In fact, Rowe suggests that Miller doubted himself. “Doubt did not flow like a stream from one landmark to another but swirled like a whirlpool, catching him up and moving him as often in circles as forward” (84). 

The fact that Miller experienced a religious conversion while a soldier cannot be denied. However, that Miller’s conversion occurred simultaneously with America’s Second Great Awakening is interesting. Up to his military experience Miller was a self-proclaimed deist. In a short time span Miller lost several close relatives and friends. Rowe declares that through Miller’s grief, deism became unjustifiable - “cold, comfortless, inconvenient.” Miller wanted to believe in a life after death, and more importantly, he wanted to “cling to that hope which warrants a never-ending existence” (56). Rowe points to Baptist pastor Clark Kendrick as the commander in the attack against Miller’s deism. Kendrick worked to remind Miller that he was worthy of his parents and deserving of his children. As the Second Great Awakening dawned, and revivals swept the area, Rowe sets the scene for Miller’s conversion. 

Not only did Miller experience a religious conversion, but he continued down the religious spectrum and became a zealot of end-times prophecy. Rowe points to three influences that surrounded and heavily influenced Miller’s end-times theories. The first influence was a culture steeped in apocalyptic speculation. In conjunction with several end-of-day sermons given by visiting preachers noted by Miller in his diary, rare environmental occurrences such as the New Madrid earthquakes, and local end-of-the-world sects like the Shakers, Miller and other nineteenth century Americans were faced with a society who’s interest could be easily piqued by apocalyptic happenings. Rowe points to politics as a second powerful influence on Miller’s apocalyptic leanings. Rowe is not able to tie Miller directly to apocalyptic politics, but Miller’s former preacher Kendrick can be linked. This close association is the likely source of Miller’s conjectures on the second coming of Christ. The third influence credited with sparking Miller’s end-of-the-world speculation is history. As a young boy, Miller enjoyed reading heroic stories of the past. Rowe contends that “conversion allowed Miller to reconcile fascination with the past and disgust over its lessons” (77-81). To facilitate a religious movement that would bear his name, William Miller was in the right place at the right time. 

Rowe argues that the reason Millerism became one of the leading movements during America’s Second Great Awakening cannot solely be attributed to its namesake. Miller refused to speak publicly on his apocalyptic message for fourteen years. However, when he decided to “Go and Tell It to the World,” as the title of chapter five suggests, Rowe defends Miller by claiming that Miller had locality in mind. “Miller was preaching to his family, lecturing among fellow Baptists, seeking confirmation from his pastor”,  and not actively pushing the message beyond the Lake Champlain region (102). Rowe credits, among others, Joshua Himes for taking the Millerite message out of the local sphere to the national stage. Rowe compares Miller to Moses in his old age, allowing his Joshua to make day-to-day decisions while Miller provided guidance and wisdom that came with age and his religious experiences (172). Although the relationship would be strained at times, Miller and Himes transformed Millerism for better or worse into the movement as it is remembered today.  As Miller’s complicated life came to an end he and Himes held onto a father and son relationship. Not only did Himes provide occasional financial assistance to Miller, but Miller treated Himes “the same way he treated his own sons” (221). 

In reading God’s Strange Work, there is at least one obvious omission from both Miller and Rowe. What made Miller unquestionably famous was his exact date of the second coming of Christ. However, neither Miller nor Rowe address the inconsistencies with Miller’s predictions and Matthew 24, specifically Matthew 24:36, where Jesus proclaims “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (The Holy Bible). Miller spent and entire two-year time period combing the Bible for ‘inconsistencies.’ How did Matthew 24 not present at least a mentionable inconsistency for Miller? In his scholarship, Rowe needed to have addressed this issue in order to give readers a better understanding of Miller. This type of understanding could have helped answer the question of whether Miller was unbalanced or not. 

In meticulous detail and apocalyptic arithmetic, Rowe retraces Miller’s conversion, hermeneutics, and chronology of the Bible. Rowe leaves readers with an in-depth discovery of a truly American product, however enigmatic Miller may have been. God’s Strange Work is a must-read for anyone looking to better understand one of the most important religious time periods in American history. 

The Holy Bible, King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/108/. April 6, 2015. 

Rowe, David L. God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008.