Froom, Amillennialism, and Date Setting

Dan Starcevich

I was wondering if someone could help me out. I recently saw a presentation where it was said that Froom attributed most date-setting regarding the return of Jesus to amillenialism. I have been searching through on-line resources such as "The Prophetic Faith of the Fathers" but have not been able to find this. 

Is there anyone familiar with the various works of Froom who can help me out?

TIA,

Dan

MJ. Smith

Weekly bump of threads without a response in hopes of getting them answered.

Lynden O. Williams

Dan Starcevich said:

I was wondering if someone could help me out. I recently saw a presentation where it was said that Froom attributed most date-setting regarding the return of Jesus to amillenialism. I have been searching through on-line resources such as "The Prophetic Faith of the Fathers" but have not been able to find this. 

Is there anyone familiar with the various works of Froom who can help me out?

TIA,

Dan

Not familiar with Froom's works. Ask the presenter for his/her source.

Justin Gatlin

I am not an Adventist, so it is out of my scope, but a search in my library for "Froom AND date" 

[quote]

These positions are familiar and require no further exposition. The early church fathers were largely premillennial in their eschatology,10 but a shift to amillennialism had set in by the time of Augustine. Although there were dissenting voices in the medieval church advocating a form of popular millennialism, such as Joachim of Fiore, the Spiritual Franciscans, and the Taborite faction of the Hussites, Augustinian amillennialism held sway in both Catholic and Protestant circles until the seventeenth century. Then a revival of premillennialism in the Protestant world occurred and along with it the appearance of postmillennialism, especially in works of Jonathan Edwards. Before long, some of these writers began to fall prey to the temptation to identify the Antichrist and set a date for the coming of Christ and the end of the world.
L. R. Froom, in his massive compilation The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, identifies a wide variety of seventeenth and eighteenth century date-setters. According to which particular author one read, the end of the 1,260 day tribulation period and the return of Christ would be 1694 (Johann Heinrich Alsted), 1697 (Thomas Beverly), 1714 (Pierre Jurieu), 1762, (Richard Clarke), 1798 (Edward King and Richard Valpy), 1830 (J. A. Bengel), 1847 (J. P. Petri), or 1866 (Joseph Lathrop, John Gill, and Samuel Hopkins). And these are only selected examples; Froom cites numerous others.11 Moreover, like their predecessors in the preceding two centuries, preachers in nineteenth-century America often made rash statements about the imminent return of Christ. For example, the renowned evangelist Charles Finney told a gathering in New York City in March 1835 that if the church would do all her duty, the millennium might come in the United States in three years.12 But the most noteworthy of all the date-setters were the Adventists.13

Evangelical Review of Theology 23 (1999).

Footnote 11 is 

11. LeRoy Edwin Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1948), charts on II, pp. 786–87; III, pp. 252–53.

Unfortunately, the Internet Archive has Volumes I and IV, but not II or III! And EGWwritings.org does not seem to have page numbers. But by process of elimination, I think that this is the right passage in volume II. But if so, it seems that your presenter misunderstood. Froom clearly links date-setting with Pre-Millenialism: 

[quote]

To this survey should be added the American evidence, appearing in Volume III, pages 252, 253. Then the entire expositional picture for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Old World and New, will be before us. The comparisons and contrasts are interesting. But the fundamental emphasis is identical—the historical sequence of empire, the Antichrist Little Horn, and the year-day nature of all time periods. The same progressive unfolding and the same correction of minor inaccuracies obtain—the same earnest effort to place the 1260-, 1290-, 1335-, and 2300-year periods for Daniel, and the attempt to find the relationship between the 70 weeks and the 2300 years, and between the 1335 and the 2300. The correspondence over the trumpets is impressive in the Revelation, with Pre-Millennialism—and all that it implies and involves—as another common denominator

I think the discussion in volume III starts here, but cannot tell exactly what the reference is to. Again, it does not seem like there is anything to support the idea that amillenialism leads to most date setting.