Restorationists and date-setters

Affiliation

Presbyterian minister; host of the Cane Ridge revival (1801); leader of the "Christian" movement that merged with the Campbells' Disciples in 1832

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Restorationists and date-setters, Revivalism and the "second blessing"

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Life

Maryland and North Carolina

Barton Warren Stone was born on 24 December 1772 near Port Tobacco, Maryland. His father died when he was a child, and the family moved to Pittsylvania County, Virginia. In 1790 he enrolled at David Caldwell's academy in Guilford, North Carolina, intending to study law. There he heard the revival preaching of James McGready and, after a long struggle over whether he was among the elect, was converted under the preaching of William Hodge, who spoke of God's love.

A Presbyterian minister

He was licensed to preach by the Orange Presbytery in 1796 and moved west to Kentucky, where in 1798 he was ordained pastor of the congregations of Cane Ridge and Concord in Bourbon County. When asked at his ordination whether he accepted the Westminster Confession, he answered, "I do, as far as I see it consistent with the word of God."

Cane Ridge

In 1801, after attending the revival at Logan County led by McGready, Stone invited neighbouring ministers to a communion season at Cane Ridge. The meeting, held from 6 to 12 August 1801, drew crowds estimated at between ten and twenty-five thousand. Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist preachers spoke from several stands at once, day and night. Many fell, some lay unconscious for hours, and others experienced "jerks", dancing, running, laughing and barking. Stone defended these "exercises" as the work of God, though he warned against excess. Cane Ridge became the most famous event of the Second Great Awakening in the West.

The Springfield Presbytery

The revival exposed tensions in Presbyterianism over predestination and the creeds. Several revival preachers, accused of Arminian teaching, withdrew from the Synod of Kentucky in 1803 with Stone and formed the independent Springfield Presbytery. On 28 June 1804 they dissolved it in The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, a satirical document in which the presbytery "willed" that it "die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large", and that the people take the Bible as their only rule. They called themselves simply "Christians".

Losses and growth

The movement suffered early defections: in 1805 two of its founders, Richard McNemar and John Dunlavy, joined the Shakers, and in 1811 two others returned to the Presbyterians. Stone continued, and the Christian churches spread through Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. He adopted believer's baptism by immersion around 1807, though he did not make it a condition of fellowship. He married Elizabeth Campbell in 1801; after her death in 1810 he married Celia Wilson Bowen. From 1826 he edited The Christian Messenger.

Union with the Campbells

In the 1820s Stone came into contact with Alexander Campbell, whose "Reformers" shared his rejection of creeds and his call for unity on the Bible alone. They disagreed on several points - Campbell emphasised reason and baptism for the remission of sins, Stone the Spirit's work and Christian unity - but on 1 January 1832, at a meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, their followers agreed to unite. Stone moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834.

Key dates

• 24 December 1772 - Born near Port Tobacco, Maryland
• 1790 - Enters David Caldwell's academy; converted
• 1796 - Licensed by the Orange Presbytery
• 1798 - Ordained at Cane Ridge, Kentucky
• 6-12 August 1801 - The Cane Ridge revival
• 1803 - Withdraws from the Synod of Kentucky
• 28 June 1804 - The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery
• 1805 - McNemar and Dunlavy join the Shakers
• 1814 - Address to the Christian Churches on the Trinity and atonement
• 1826 - Founds The Christian Messenger
• 1 January 1832 - Union with the Campbells' Reformers
• 1834 - Moves to Jacksonville, Illinois
• 9 November 1844 - Dies at Hannibal, Missouri

Teachings and claims

No creed but the Bible

Stone taught that creeds and confessions divide Christians and should not be tests of fellowship; the Bible alone is sufficient, and Christians should unite on it as simply "Christians".

Christian unity

Unity was his lifelong passion. "Let the unity of Christians be our polar star," he wrote.

The Trinity

He rejected the term "Trinity" as unscriptural and held that the Son was begotten of the Father before creation, deriving His being from Him, and was not co-eternal or co-equal in the sense of the Nicene Creed; the Holy Spirit he described as the power and energy of God rather than a distinct person.^†

The atonement

He rejected the doctrine that Christ's death satisfied divine justice or bore the penalty of sin, teaching instead that it demonstrated God's love and reconciled sinners to God by moving them to repentance.

Election and free will

He rejected Calvinist predestination and taught that God's love is offered to all, and that the sinner can respond to the gospel.

Documented controversies

The exercises

Critics, Presbyterian and otherwise, regarded the bodily exercises of Cane Ridge as fanaticism and disorder.

Doctrinal views

His views on the Trinity and the atonement were attacked by Presbyterians and later by some of Campbell's followers, who regarded them as Arian. Campbell himself avoided Trinitarian terminology but defended Christ's full deity more clearly.

The Shakers

The defection of two of his co-founders to the Shakers was used by critics as evidence of where his principles led.

Death

He died on 9 November 1844 at the home of his daughter in Hannibal, Missouri, aged 71, while returning from a preaching journey. He was later reburied at Cane Ridge.

Legacy

Stone is honoured, with Thomas and Alexander Campbell, as a founder of the Stone-Campbell or Restoration Movement, from which descend the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, and the Churches of Christ (a cappella). Cane Ridge meeting house is preserved as a shrine of the movement. His slogan of unity on the Bible alone, and his rejection of creeds, became a defining principle of large parts of American Protestantism and of the non-denominational churches that later followed.

Measured against the creeds

Stone's longing for Christian unity is the longing of the Lord's own prayer (John 17:21), and his charity towards Christians of other denominations was genuine.

But his solution - unity on the Bible without creeds - shows in his own life why the Church wrote creeds. The Nicene Creed was written precisely because Arius and his followers also claimed to take the Bible alone; the Church found that a confession of what Scripture means was necessary to preserve what it says. Stone's own teaching on the Son, which denied that He is co-eternal and "of one substance with the Father", is the very position the Council of Nicaea rejected. His teaching on the Spirit departs from the Constantinopolitan confession of "the Lord and Giver of life, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified".

His rejection of satisfaction in the atonement also departs from the teaching common to the four traditions that Christ "bore our sins in his own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24) and gave Himself as a sacrifice for sin. The movement he founded, intended to end division, itself divided several times within a century, illustrating that unity without a common confession is difficult to keep.

Major writings

• The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804, with others)
• An Address to the Christian Churches in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio (1814; rev. 1821)
• Editor, The Christian Messenger (1826-44)
• The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone, Written by Himself (1847)

Affiliation

Farmer of Low Hampton, New York; Baptist lay preacher; leader of the Millerite or Second Advent movement

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Restorationists and date-setters

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Farmer, deist, soldier

William Miller was born on 15 February 1782 at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the eldest of sixteen children, and grew up at Low Hampton in Washington County, New York, near the Vermont border. His mother was a devout Baptist. Largely self-taught, he read widely from the local library. After marrying Lucy Smith in 1803 he moved to Poultney, Vermont, where he became a deputy sheriff and justice of the peace, and, under the influence of friends there, a deist who doubted the Bible.

He served as a captain in the War of 1812 and saw action at the Battle of Plattsburgh (1814), where a much smaller American force defeated the British. The outcome struck him as providential and the deaths of comrades confronted him with mortality.

Conversion and the Bible study

Back at Low Hampton he farmed and attended the Baptist church. In 1816, reading a sermon aloud in church, he was overcome and converted. Challenged by a deist friend to prove the Bible's consistency, he set out to study it verse by verse with only a concordance, from 1816 to 1818. He became convinced that Scripture interprets itself, that prophecy is meant to be understood, and that its time periods can be calculated.

He concluded from Daniel 8:14 - "unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed" - that, taking a day for a year and starting from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 457 BC, the "cleansing of the sanctuary", which he took to mean the purification of the earth by fire at Christ's return, would happen "about the year 1843". He spent more than a decade checking his reasoning before he spoke of it publicly.

Preaching the Advent

In August 1831 he accepted an invitation to preach at Dresden, New York, and from then on preached in churches of many denominations across New York and New England. The Baptists licensed him in 1833. His lectures were published in 1836 as Evidences from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ about the Year 1843.

In 1839 he met Joshua V. Himes, a Boston minister and gifted organiser, who turned the message into a movement. Himes founded the newspaper Signs of the Times (1840) and later the Midnight Cry in New York, organised general conferences, printed millions of tracts, and in 1842 bought a great tent seating some 4,000 for camp meetings. Charles Fitch's prophetic chart (1842) was used everywhere. Estimates of Millerite believers range from 50,000 to several hundred thousand, with perhaps a million more who took an interest.

The dates

Pressed for a specific date, Miller said in 1843 that Christ would come between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844, by the Jewish calendar as he understood it. The year passed. Then in the summer of 1844 Samuel S. Snow, a Millerite preacher, argued from the Day of Atonement typology that the true date was the tenth day of the seventh month - 22 October 1844. The "seventh-month movement" spread rapidly; farmers left crops unharvested and shopkeepers closed. Miller accepted the date only in early October.

The Great Disappointment

Christ did not return on 22 October 1844. Hiram Edson, a believer in western New York, wrote: "Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before... We wept, and wept, till the day dawn." Many abandoned faith altogether; others were mocked and expelled from their churches.

Miller acknowledged his error in dates but held that the Advent was still near. At the Albany conference of April 1845 the mainstream Adventists, with his support, rejected the "shut door" theory and the new interpretations being proposed.

Key dates

• 1782 - Born at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 15 February
• 1803 - Marries Lucy Smith; moves to Poultney, Vermont
• 1814 - Battle of Plattsburgh
• 1816 - Conversion; begins two years of Bible study
• 1818 - Concludes that Christ will return about 1843
• 1831 - Begins preaching
• 1836 - Evidences from Scripture and History
• 1839 - Meets Joshua V. Himes
• March 1843-March 1844 - The "Jewish year 1843"
• 22 October 1844 - The Great Disappointment
• 1845 - Albany conference; publishes his Apology and Defence
• 20 December 1849 - Dies at Low Hampton

Teachings and claims

Prophecy can be calculated

Miller held that the prophetic time periods of Daniel and Revelation are given to be understood, using a "day for a year" principle (Numbers 14:34; Ezekiel 4:6). He found several independent periods which, he believed, converged on 1843. His fourteen "Rules of Interpretation" insisted that every word of Scripture has its place and that prophecy must be compared with history.

Premillennial Advent

Against the optimistic postmillennialism of his day, he taught that Christ would return personally and visibly before the millennium, raise the righteous dead, burn up the earth, and reign with the saints on a renewed earth. There would be no thousand years of gradual improvement before His coming.

No secret rapture

Unlike Darby's contemporaneous teaching, Miller expected a single, visible, public return of Christ, not a secret coming for the Church.

Documented controversies

• Setting a date. Miller always insisted he did not know the "day or the hour" but only the year; nonetheless he gave a range and, at the end, accepted a specific day. Critics, including most Protestant clergy, said this contradicted Matthew 24:36 and Acts 1:7.
• Excess and harm. Opponents blamed the movement for mental breakdowns, neglected farms and families, and suicide; some of these claims were exaggerated by hostile newspapers. The tale of believers waiting on hilltops in white "ascension robes" is a later legend that historians have found no good evidence for.
• Expulsions. Many Millerites were expelled from their churches in 1843-44 after the movement began to call the denominations "Babylon" (a theme pressed by Charles Fitch, against Miller's original intent).

Death

Miller's health failed after 1845; he went blind in his last years. He died at Low Hampton on 20 December 1849, aged 67, still expecting Christ's soon return. His gravestone bears the words of Daniel 12:13: "But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days."

Legacy

Out of the wreck of Millerism came several new movements. A small group around Hiram Edson, Joseph Bates, James White and Ellen G. White reinterpreted 1844 as the date when Christ entered the heavenly sanctuary to begin an "investigative judgment"; they became the Seventh-day Adventist Church (organised 1863), now with over twenty million members. The Advent Christian Church also descends from the movement. Through Adventist offshoots and the Bible Students who influenced Charles Taze Russell, the calculation of prophetic dates passed into the Jehovah's Witnesses and many later date-setters.

Miller himself was by all accounts honest, sincere and humble; he admitted his error and never profited from the movement.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead" - and say nothing of when. Christ Himself said, "of that day and hour knoweth no man" (Matthew 24:36), and "it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power" (Acts 1:7). The Church Fathers, notably St Augustine, warned against calculating the end; Augustine wrote that the Lord "puts all calculators to rest".

Miller's method - treating prophecy as a code that a private reader with a concordance can unlock - set aside the Church's reading of Scripture as a whole, in which the prophecies of Daniel are fulfilled in Christ, His Passion and the coming of His kingdom. His failure, and the many failures that followed, show the danger the Fathers foresaw.

Major writings

• Evidences from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ about the Year 1843 (1836; expanded 1842)
• "Rules of Interpretation", in Joshua V. Himes, ed., Views of the Prophecies and Prophetic Chronology (1842)
• Apology and Defence (1845)

Affiliation

Ulster-born Seceder Presbyterian; briefly a Baptist; leader of the Disciples of Christ; founder of Bethany College

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Restorationists and date-setters

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Ulster and Glasgow

Alexander Campbell was born on 12 September 1788 near Ballymena, County Antrim, in the north of Ireland, the eldest son of Thomas Campbell, a minister of the Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian Church - one of several small Scottish churches that had split from the Church of Scotland and then from one another. Thomas grieved over these divisions and tried without success to reunite the Ulster Seceders.

In 1807 Thomas emigrated to western Pennsylvania for his health. The family followed in 1808, but their ship was wrecked off Scotland, and Alexander spent a year at the University of Glasgow (1808-09). There he met followers of the Haldane brothers and of John Glas and Robert Sandeman, independents who practised weekly communion and congregational government and rejected creeds as tests of fellowship. Before leaving Scotland he quietly declined to take communion in the Seceder church.

The Declaration and Address

In America, Thomas had been censured by his presbytery for giving communion to Presbyterians of other synods. He withdrew, formed the "Christian Association of Washington" (Pennsylvania), and in 1809 wrote the Declaration and Address, which proposed that Christian unity could be restored by setting aside human creeds and returning to "a simple evangelical Christianity", with nothing required "but what is expressly taught and enjoined... in the word of God". The family motto became: "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent."

Alexander arrived in October 1809, read his father's proof sheets, and embraced the programme. The association became the Brush Run Church in 1811. When his first child was born in 1812, Alexander studied baptism, concluded that only the immersion of believers was scriptural, and was immersed with his parents on 12 June 1812 by a Baptist minister.

With the Baptists, and apart

From 1813 the Brush Run Church joined a Baptist association, and Campbell became a famous debater. He settled at Bethany in western Virginia, where he married Margaret Brown (1811; she died in 1827) and later Selina Bakewell (1828), farmed, and established a printing press. His journal The Christian Baptist (1823-30), and then the Millennial Harbinger (1830-66), attacked clergy, creeds, missionary societies and "the kingdom of the clergy". The Baptists increasingly rejected his teaching that baptism is for the remission of sins, and from 1827 to 1830 his followers - called "Reformers" or "Campbellites" - were expelled from Baptist associations.

Union with Stone's Christians

In 1832, at Lexington, Kentucky, many of Campbell's "Disciples" and the "Christians" led by Barton W. Stone agreed to unite, sealed by a handshake between Stone and "Raccoon" John Smith, who spoke for Campbell's Reformers. Campbell's own role in the union was cautious, but it created the Stone-Campbell or Restoration Movement.

Educator and debater

He founded Bethany College in 1840 and was its president until his death. He held public debates with the socialist Robert Owen (1829) on the evidences of Christianity, with the Catholic Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati (1837), and with the Presbyterian N.L. Rice (1843). He was elected to the Virginia constitutional convention of 1829-30. In 1849 he became president of the American Christian Missionary Society - a move his early writings had opposed.

Key dates

• 1788 - Born near Ballymena, County Antrim, 12 September
• 1808-09 - Studies at Glasgow; meets Haldanean and Sandemanian independents
• 1809 - Arrives in America; Thomas Campbell's Declaration and Address
• 1811 - Brush Run Church formed
• 1812 - Immersed as a believer
• 1823 - Begins The Christian Baptist
• 1827-30 - Separation from the Baptists
• 1829 - Debate with Robert Owen
• 1830 - Begins the Millennial Harbinger
• 1832 - Union with Barton Stone's Christians
• 1837 - Debate with Bishop Purcell
• 1840 - Founds Bethany College
• 1849 - President of the American Christian Missionary Society
• 4 March 1866 - Dies at Bethany

Teachings and claims

Restoring the ancient order

Campbell taught that the denominations had overlaid the New Testament with human creeds, clergy and traditions, and that unity would come by restoring "the ancient order of things" exactly as the apostles left it. Creeds were not wrong in what they said but were wrong as tests of fellowship. In practice he and his followers looked for a New Testament warrant for every element of church life.

Baptism for the remission of sins

From Acts 2:38 he taught that baptism by immersion of a penitent believer is the moment God assures forgiveness - not a work that earns it but the appointed act of obedience in which faith receives pardon. He rejected infant baptism and the Calvinist view that one must wait for an inner experience of regeneration.

Weekly communion and lay order

The Lord's Supper should be celebrated every Lord's Day, as in Acts 20:7. Each congregation should be governed by its own elders and deacons, with no distinction between clergy and laity in principle.

Reason and the Word

Influenced by John Locke and Scottish Common Sense philosophy, he held that the Spirit works through the words of Scripture rather than by direct inner impulses, and that faith is the rational acceptance of credible testimony.

Postmillennial hope

His journal's title expressed his conviction that restoring the primitive gospel would unite Christians, convert the world and usher in the millennium.

Documented controversies

• Baptismal regeneration. Baptists accused him of teaching salvation by an outward act; he denied it but held that immersion is for remission of sins. The debate split Baptist associations across Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia.
• The Lunenburg Letter (1837). Asked whether there were Christians among the unimmersed, he answered that he could not "make any one duty the standard of Christian state or character" - that there were true Christians in the denominations. Stricter followers objected.
• Missionary societies. His acceptance of the society in 1849 contradicted his own earlier arguments, and opposition to societies became one cause of later splits.
• Slavery. He opposed slavery in principle but held that the New Testament did not condemn it as sinful in itself, and opposed abolitionism, hoping to keep the movement united.

Death

Campbell's mind and health declined in his last years. He died at his home in Bethany on 4 March 1866, aged 77, and was buried in the family cemetery there.

Legacy

The movement he led divided after his death. The instrumental-music and missionary-society disputes produced the Churches of Christ (recognised separately in the 1906 census), which use no instruments; the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the more liberal body, separated from the independent Christian Churches / Churches of Christ in the twentieth century. Together they number several million in the United States and many more abroad. His slogan "no creed but Christ" became a watchword far beyond his own churches, and his weekly communion and lay eldership are still characteristic of them.

The irony that a unity movement produced several new denominations is often noted, including by its own historians.

Measured against the creeds

Campbell's desire for Christian unity, his high view of baptism and his insistence on the Lord's Supper every Sunday are closer to the ancient Church than most of the revivalism around him, and he affirmed the Trinity and the deity of Christ.

The difficulty lies in his method. The Nicene Creed was itself the Church's answer to people who claimed to teach nothing but Scripture - the Arians quoted the Bible too. Rejecting creeds as tests of fellowship removes the Church's chief means of saying what Scripture means when it is disputed. The four traditions hold that the Church received both Scripture and the rule of faith from the apostles, and that the creeds and councils express that faith rather than add to it. Campbell's restoration also passed over eighteen centuries of the Church's life, as if the Holy Spirit had not been leading it into truth (John 16:13).

His rejection of infant baptism and of an ordained ministry with apostolic succession also departs from the universal practice of the early Church.

Major writings

• Editor, The Christian Baptist (1823-30) and Millennial Harbinger (1830-66)
• The Living Oracles (1826), a revised New Testament translation
• Debate on the Evidences of Christianity with Robert Owen (1829)
• A Debate on the Roman Catholic Religion with John B. Purcell (1837)
• The Christian System (1835, revised 1839)
• Christian Baptism: With Its Antecedents and Consequents (1851)

Affiliation

Civil engineer; president of Family Radio

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Restorationists and date-setters

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Engineer and elder

Harold Egbert Camping was born on 19 July 1921 in Boulder, Colorado, into a Dutch Reformed family, and grew up in California. He graduated in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942 and built a successful construction business in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was a member and elder of the Alameda Christian Reformed Church and taught Bible classes there.

Family Radio

In 1958, with others, he bought a radio station and founded Family Radio, a non-profit Christian broadcaster. He sold his business to devote himself to it. The network grew to dozens of stations in the United States and broadcasts worldwide by shortwave and satellite, carrying hymns, Bible readings and teaching programmes. From 1961 Camping hosted Open Forum, a live call-in programme in which he answered listeners' questions about the Bible. His calm, authoritative manner won a large and loyal following.

Numbers and dates

Over the years Camping developed a system of biblical chronology and numerology, by which he believed the dates of creation (11,013 BC), the flood (4990 BC) and other events could be worked out precisely from Scripture. In his book 1994? (1992) he suggested that the end of the world would probably come in September 1994. When it did not, he said he had miscalculated.

Leaving the churches

In 1988 he left the Christian Reformed Church after disputes over his teaching. From about 2001 he taught that the "church age" had ended on 21 May 1988, that the Holy Spirit had departed from all churches, that Satan now ruled in them, and that true believers must leave their congregations and worship at home, listening to Family Radio.

2011

In the late 2000s he announced that the rapture of the elect would take place on 21 May 2011, exactly 7,000 years after the flood by his reckoning, accompanied by a worldwide earthquake, and that the world would be destroyed on 21 October 2011. Family Radio and his followers spent millions of dollars on billboards, vans and publicity across the world. Some followers quit their jobs, gave away their savings or travelled to spread the message. When 21 May passed, Camping said that a spiritual judgement had taken place invisibly and that the destruction would still come on 21 October. He suffered a stroke in June 2011. When 21 October passed, he made no further prediction.

Recantation

In March 2012 Family Radio published a letter in which Camping acknowledged that his prediction had been wrong, said that he had been rightly rebuked by critics, and wrote that attempting to know the date was sinful. He retired from broadcasting.

Key dates

• 19 July 1921 - Born in Boulder, Colorado
• 1942 - Graduates in civil engineering from Berkeley
• 1958 - Co-founds Family Radio
• 1961 - Open Forum begins
• 1988 - Leaves the Christian Reformed Church
• 1992 - 1994? predicts the end in 1994
• September 1994 - Predicted end passes
• c. 2001-02 - Teaches that the church age has ended; calls believers out of churches
• 21 May 2011 - Predicted rapture
• June 2011 - Suffers a stroke
• 21 October 2011 - Predicted end of the world
• March 2012 - Acknowledges his error
• 15 December 2013 - Dies in Alameda, California

Teachings and claims

Calendar of history

Camping taught that the Bible contains a complete and exact chronology of history from creation, and that its numbers carry hidden meanings - for example, that 5 signifies atonement, 10 completeness and 17 heaven - from which the date of the end can be calculated.

The end of the church age

He taught that the "great tribulation" of Matthew 24 began in 1988, that churches had become apostate and spiritually dead, and that the Spirit now worked only outside them. He told his listeners not to take the Lord's Supper or be baptised in any church.

Other doctrines

He taught that the dead are annihilated rather than consciously punished, and that God saves the elect without any act or decision on their part, in a hyper-Calvinist form that denied the means of grace.

Documented controversies

Failed predictions

His predictions of 1994 and 2011 both failed. The 2011 campaign was the most widely publicised date-setting in modern times and was reported around the world.

Harm to followers

Newspapers documented followers who had given up jobs, savings and family relationships to spread the 2011 message, and the distress that followed its failure.^†

Separation

His instruction to leave all churches cut many listeners off from the life of a congregation, and the Christian Reformed Church and other bodies condemned it.

Finances

Family Radio, whose assets had been reported at over $100 million, sold several of its largest stations in the years after 2011.^†

Death

He fell at his home in Alameda, California, in late November 2013 and died on 15 December 2013, aged 92.

Legacy

Family Radio continues on a smaller scale under new leadership, and no longer teaches date-setting. Camping's 2011 campaign is cited across the churches as a cautionary example of what happens when Scripture is treated as a puzzle and when a teacher has no church to answer to.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead", and the Lord Himself said that "of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven" (Matthew 24:36; Acts 1:7). Every attempt to set the date - from the Montanists to the Millerites - has failed, and Camping's own final judgement on his attempt, that it was sinful, agrees with the Church's.

His teaching that the Spirit had left the churches and that believers should forsake baptism and the Supper is a more serious error. The Lord promised to be with His Church "alway, even unto the end of the world" (Matthew 28:20), and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). The historic churches hold that Christ is present where the word is preached and the sacraments administered according to His institution, and that believers are commanded not to forsake assembling together (Hebrews 10:25).

His annihilationism also departs from the Church's teaching on the last judgement, and his hyper-Calvinism from the Reformed confessions he once professed, which teach that God uses the preaching of the word and the sacraments as means of grace.

Major writings

• Adam When? (1974)
• 1994? (1992)
• Are You Ready? (1993)
• Time Has an End (2005)
• We Are Almost There! (2008)