Transforming Modern Temporality with Prophetic Time: The Temporal Creations, Millennialist Visions, and Prophetic Voices of William Miller, John Humphrey Noyes, Joseph Smith, and David Walke

This dissertation, which recognizes time to be an integral component for understanding the nature of religion, asks how four of the most influential prophets of Second Great Awakening America created time. To create time means to identify the right moment for change to take place. Prophetic time is created when a prophet marks off a moment as the proper season for God and humans to act for either the salvation or liberation of the latter. The prophets under examination are William Miller, John Humphrey Noyes, Joseph Smith, and David Walker who lived during one of the most temporally charged eras of American religious history. The years of the Second Great Awakening were a period of beginnings (the United States was in its infancy) and endings (many Protestants expected the world to end soon). More importantly, this was an era when modern conceptions of temporality were beginning to have a profound effect on those living in the new nation.;Modern temporality is broadly characterized by its emphasis on speed, optimism in human ability to alter history, and a worldview that frames the relationship of the past, present, and future as teleological. These three temporal aspects contributed to the tension and anxiety of this era as well as empowered humans to take charge of their individual and collective futures. These temporal forces also had a profound effect on the development of the American prophetic voice as they fostered these prophets' belief that they were living in a special time of human history when God and humans were to work together.;This study chiefly argues that these prophets created prophetic time by either adopting or reworking aspects of modern temporality to establish a prophetic worldview that could accommodate both divine and human action. Just as a spider constructs its web from different strands, these prophets created their prophetic temporalities from different components. The strands of their temporal webs include their respective conceptions of the millennium, hermeneutics, and engagements with prophetic failure. This study is historical and employs a comparative methodology to better understand the nature of the prophetic voice in the early decades of the United States.;This dissertation's main contribution to the scholarship of American religious history is its novel solution to a problem that has vexed scholars of American religious history for decades; namely, a way to account for the variety of millennialist beliefs of this era without resorting to the inaccurate terms pre- and postmillennialism. This study also shows that as important as millennialism was for these prophets, their millennial views were simply one part of their broader temporal creations.;Prophetic time, however, creates a paradox, for if God is all powerful, why does he need human assistance? And if humans, who are weak and fallible, fail to act, does this mean that the unalterable will of God can be thwarted? While these prophets never resolved this paradox, they used it to establish confidence that God would act, which confidence would then persuade their followers to take action to help fulfill end-times events. Since these actions could take place in the past, present, or future, deciding when divine and human actions would occur is a temporal issue. The main source for indicating what God and humans respectively needed to accomplish and when these actions were to take place was the Bible. The second contribution of this study, then, is its new interpretation of their hermeneutical strategies, since their interpretations of scripture at times reordered the modern relationship of the past, present, and future.;Recognizing how prophetic time was created also reveals how these prophets empowered themselves, for they used their temporal creations to anchor their realities amidst the increasing turmoil and anxiety of the age. This dissertation's third contribution is to show how prophetic time provided these prophets with a sense of control against the threats of powerlessness and hopelessness of the modern era. It was the right time for God and humans to act, primarily, because they needed to stabilize themselves in the midst of an onslaught of monumental and rapid change. This study's final contribution is the realization that the true mettle of one's prophetic voice is manifested not solely in the act of prophesying but rather most fully appears as a prophet confronts either their prophetic failures or the potential for their prophecies to fail.