Expecting the End: Millennialism in Social and Historical Context

Chapter Eight

131 The Davidian Seventh-day Adventists and Millennial Expectation, 1959–2004 Between February and April 1993, the Branch Davidian movement near Waco, Texas, suffered a truly catastrophic sequence of events. By their conclusion some eighty members of the movement were dead, including, of course, the leader and prophet of the community, David Koresh. While “Branch Davidianism” survives as a tradition today, and indeed there is now a new church on the Waco “Mount Carmel” site, it is hanging by a thread. Soon, one suspects, the Branch Davidians will be no more. We will have seen the end of a religion.1 The complete story of the Branch Davidians—their origins, theology, development, and fate—is a long and troubled one, and those from the scholarly community who have so far discussed it have concentrated almost exclusively upon only a small part of the bigger picture. That part is, of course, the period of the siege (February 28 to April 19, 1993) and the months in the run-up to it. Some such as Tabor and Gallagher have done more,2 but there is much in the history of this tradition that has been left unresearched, particularly with reference to the early history of the movement and to the general theology of the Seventh-day Adventist/ Davidian/Branch Davidian trajectory as a whole. Here an attempt is made Kenneth G. C. Newport Chapter Eight 132 The Davidian Seventh-day Adventists to fill one of the more glaring gaps: namely, the history and theology of the Davidian Seventh-day Adventist movement (not the “Branch” Davidian movement) from around 1959 to the present day. The Davidian Seventh-day Adventists As is well known, the Davidian movement began with the prophetic ministry of Victor T. Houteff, a Bulgarian emigrant to the United States who, in 1929, was disfellowshiped from the Seventh-day Adventist church over a dispute regarding the correct interpretation of biblical prophecy. After first gathering a group of followers in California, in 1935 Houteff moved the community to Waco, Texas. From their “Mount Carmel” headquarters they began their central task: the gathering of the 144,000 (that is, those believed by Houteff to be spoken of in Rev. 11:2; 14:1-3) who were destined to inhabit the newly restored, literal “Kingdom of David” (hence the eventual addition of the name “Davidian” to this group). This Kingdom, argued Houteff, would be based not in Waco, but in Jerusalem.3 While Houteff had been disfellowshiped from the mainstream Seventhday Adventist Church, he nevertheless took the view that it was the remnant church of God. In fact, so Houteff believed, all of the 144,000 destined to inhabit the new Davidian Kingdom were to be drawn not from the churches in general, still less the world, but from the ranks of the Seventh-day Adventists . In short, Houteff believed it to be the task of the Davidians (or the “Shepherd’s Rod Movement,” as they were then known) to call out these elect ones from a church that had now slipped into corruption. Missionary activity was hence restricted to Adventists alone. (This is a view that continued into the Branch Davidian tradition, a theological fact that explains the near-exclusive concentration by Koresh on the conversion of Seventhday Adventists.) Houteff was held in great esteem by his followers, whose numbers soon multiplied. Indeed, as is so often with these movements, it soon became the case that the proclaimer became the proclaimed, and even during his lifetime the view began to gain wide acceptance among the Davidians that Houteff was himself the antitypical King David whose destiny it was to lead the 144,000 into the new (literal) Kingdom.4 Houteff’s destiny, however, was more Mosaic than antitypical Davidic, for in 1955 he died without entering the promised land. This, of course, raised huge problems for the community he had led, and a number of different reactions emerged. One of these came to be focused upon an individual who, already by the time of Houteff’s death, had been making claims to the leadership of the movement, and had in fact already moved a small band of followers to the Holy Land to establish a small community of believers as a visible sign of what was to come—the literal Kingdom of Kenneth G. C. Newport 133 David. The name of that individual was Ben Roden, though by the end of...