The final countdown will begin in March of 2012. Around that time a huge comet will strike the earth, causing an explosion that will in turn trigger a variety of horrific plagues, bringing severe physical suffering, many deaths, and widespread anarchy. An account of the exact nature of these coming events is hidden in the Scriptures, and the mysteries contained therein can only be discerned by a prophet who is known to his followers as the Chosen Vessel. Those who accept his teachings will be saved. All others will perish in the terrible days that will soon arrive.

This is the scenario sketched out in great detail in a recently produced book-length manuscript, "March 2012 A.D.: It All Begins As Foretold," that can be read at www.sevenseals.com, the website of the Branch Davidians. Yes, this group is still around, composed of folks who were not present when their Waco compound was destroyed by fire, along with a handul of the nine survivors of that conflagration.

Even though David Koresh and 79 of his followers died in the destruction that occurred in April 1993, the continuing Branch Davidians do not see that as a defeat. Like the death of Samson, Koresh's demise was for them an important victory, an essential part of the divine plan. To be sure, the victory did not conform exactly to Koresh's own predictions, but this too makes perfect sense, as the Branch Davidians now explain it on their website: just as Samson had to become "literally blind" in order to destroy the temple of the Philistines, so too it was necessary for David Koresh to be made "spiritually blind to the part he fulfilled" in the unfolding events of the end-time.

What all of this shows is that the Branch Davidians are engaged in an ongoing theological project. And to recognize that is important for understanding the character of the movement, and especially for correcting some common misperceptions of what they were about prior to the events of 1993. In the popular imagination, for example, the Branch Davidians are regularly lumped together with Jonestown and Heaven's Gate, two other collective tragedies in which cultic groups followed charismatic leaders to the bitter end. But these other groups have no continuing legacy. No one has taken up the cause of keeping their teachings alive. In contrast, the Branch Davidians are not only an enduring presence, they are hard at work with their theological project—including a detailed theological explanation of what happened in Waco in 1993.

Kenneth Newport's The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect is a lengthy apologia for the Branch Davidians as possessing a highly nuanced and coherent theological system. Not that Newport, who holds ordination in the Church of England, means to defend the Davidians' perspective. But he does treat the movement's theology with great care—even with a kind of loving respect. David Koresh, he insists, cannot be dismissed merely as "a sex-crazed maniac who duped his followers into accepting his twisted views on life, death, and the world that is to come." For one thing, Koresh's followers were too smart for that kind of blind following: one of them was a graduate of Harvard Law School, another a wealthy businessman, yet another a former pastor with a graduate degree in theology. There is every indication, Newport argues, that most of his followers were convinced by Koresh's theology, and were willing to stick by their convictions no matter what.

To be sure, Newport is not the first scholar to insist that we must take the theological views of David Koresh and his followers with utmost seriousness if we are to understand what happened during those fateful days that led to the great fire of April 19, 1993. James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher, whose book on Waco I reviewed in the very first issue of Books & Culture,1 argued at length that the Waco tragedy was largely the fault of federal agents who systematically misunderstood Koresh's beliefs, and therefore his intentions, in the lengthy negotiations that led to their decision to raid the compound. But Newport is not willing to lay the blame squarely on the government negotiators. This interpretation too, he is convinced, is based on a failure to grasp the full significance of the theological system that was—and is—at work among the Branch Davidians.

It is hard to imagine a more thorough exposition of Koresh's teachings than what Newport provides. Indeed, he offers 170-plus pages of theological background before getting around to the specifics of Koresh's thought. Newport manages to provide a fairly clear structure to a theological story that includes many esoteric interpretations of myriad passages in the biblical books of Daniel, Isaiah, Zechariah, Revelation and the like—esoteric, I might add, even for those of us who were once schooled in the detailed notes of the Scofield Bible! And woven into this complex theological narrative are many plots and subplots about power struggles among various leaders.

But the overall pattern of doctrinal development is made clear. For Newport's purposes, the basic story begins with early Seventh-day Adventist teachings, particularly Ellen White's scheme for interpreting Bible prophecy. Victor Houteff, who saw himself as refining White's interpretations, established a splinter group in the 1920s that originally called themselves the "Shepherd's Rod" movement, but eventually adopted the label "Davidian," to signal the central importance in their thinking of the biblical motif of the Kingdom of David. When Houteff died, his wife, Florence, took over the leadership, but her authority suffered a fatal blow when she predicted that major end-time events would occur "on or about" April 22, 1959. Clearly disillusioned when her prophecy failed, she and her leadership team not only acknowledged that they had been wrong on the specifics but went much further: they had come to see that there were serious flaws both in their own movement's approach to biblical interpretation and in the larger Adventist system from which they had derived their basics. In March 1962, Florence Houteff and her trustees simply disbanded the community headquartered in the Texas compound that was later to become the home of the Koresh movement.

There was a group, however, who remained loyal to Victor Houteff's pre-Florence teachings. They set up shop in Riverside, California, and their movement still operates, maintaining, for example, a web archive of Houteff's writings.2 Much more significant for Newport's story, however, is the group headed by Ben Roden, who soon laid claim to the Mt. Carmel property near Waco, Texas. Roden adopted the name "Branch Davidian" for his offshoot, a reference to the prophecy in Zechariah 6:12 (KJV): "Behold the man whose name is THE BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD."

The Davidian movement's use of biblical references of this sort has to be understood in the context of general theology of types and antitypes in the Scriptures. The ancient Kingdom of David, for example, was a temporal-physical phenomenon that pointed beyond itself to a future end-time Kingdom of Christ, the Son of David. But in the last days God would raise up an antitype of the ancient David, who would assume a kingly role: Victor Houteff claimed this role for himself, as did David Koresh. Both also saw themselves as present-day antitypes of the likes of Elijah and John the Baptist—and of "THE BRANCH" of Zechariah's prophecy.

Newport's detailed exposition of these matters—much too detailed to spell out here—is itself worth the reading of his book for anyone who cares about the varieties of Bible prophecy schools of thought, as well as about apocalyptic religious movements in general. But his analysis takes on added significance for a very down-to-earth hypothesis that he sets forth regarding the setting of the Waco fire that destroyed the Davidians' Mt. Carmel compound.

Unlike Tabor and Gallagher, who argued in their book that the destruction might have been avoided if the federal negotiators were more conversant with Branch Davidian theology, Newport suggests that the fire was in fact unavoidable—because Koresh and his followers actually wanted it. Their expectation of a conflagration, he theorizes, "was very much part of the overall eschatological scheme that the Branch Davidians believed themselves to be acting out during these last days," a scheme that had long focused on texts such as Isaiah 66:15-16: "For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh: and the slain of the Lord shall be many."

Newport spells out the significance of the biblical "fire" texts at great length, providing a context that makes his concrete hypothesis less shocking—and far more persuasive—than it would be without such patient exposition: Koresh and his followers actually started the fire themselves, he proposes; and they did it because they saw the fire as a necessary cleansing force for preparing their community for entrance into the coming Kingdom.

Newport knows that this hypothesis is underdetermined by the available evidence, but he rightly makes much of the fact that the present-day Branch Davidians themselves see the Waco fire as constituting a victory of sorts. Nor is this a case of a significant "when-prophecy-fails" adjustment in their prophetic scheme. Newport demonstrates that the movement had long taught that a smaller-scale cleansing fire (some leaders connected it to the "baptism by fire" motif) would take place as a necessary prelude to a more universal fire of judgment that God would visit upon the unbelieving majority of the human race. Thus the Waco fire serves today as a firm basis for the eschatological expectations of the continuing Branch Davidian movement.

In his concluding observations, Newport acknowledges that many readers will think that he has gone into far too much detail in telling the story that led up to the tragedy at Waco. I am not one of those readers. The matters that he chronicles in this important book are well worth the effort required to understand them. The Waco tragedy is a case study of a group of people who took the details of "Bible prophecy" with utmost seriousness—to the point of being willing to die for their interpretations. Even if Newport is wrong in his concrete hypothesis regarding the self-immolation of the folks who died in the Mt. Carmel compound (although I don't think he is wrong), he demonstrates convincingly that this was a community of intelligent people for whom theological ideas were a matter of life and death—no small finding in an intellectual climate where religion is often dismissed as a disguised version of something else.

One matter that impressed me particularly as an evangelical reading Newport is his insistence that the tragic errors in David Koresh's understanding of the Bible do in fact have a history, a history that can in turn be traced to a perspective that was birthed by Ellen White, whose denomination has by now rightly earned considerable respect in evangelical circles and beyond. When the Waco tragedy was unfolding, the Seventh-day Adventist community engaged in a major public relations campaign to distance themselves from the Branch Davidians. I find no fault in that effort—having done my own share of public denying that this or that person who once studied at the seminary that I lead does in fact represent our theological position! The distancing was especially important in the Waco case, since that situation was a highly visible example of theology gone awry, and it was necessary for the general public to be advised that the Branch Davidians had long departed from the mainstream of Adventist thought.

But the flames at Waco no longer burn, and the smoke has cleared. Now is a good time for Adventist theologians to acknowledge at least some responsibility on the part of their tradition for the developments chronicled by Newport, since those developments do in fact draw on important elements in early Adventism. Many of us in the Dutch Reformed communities expended considerable energy insisting during apartheid days that South African racism was not a necessary consequence of our theological convictions. But some of us also did a good deal of soul-searching during that time, checking out the ways in which those racist themes did make connections—legitimately or illegitimately—to motifs that are indigenous to Reformed theology. That theological self-examination was a healthy exercise, and I recommend a similar project to my Adventist friends.

It is a fact, for example, as Newport points out, that the Davidians share with the early Adventists an expectation that some sort of violent cleansing in the end-time is a necessary preface to the coming Kingdom. And this scenario was often connected, in early Adventism, to the notion that in the last days America would function as the second beast of Revelation 13, a deceptively "lamb-like" collective entity that would foster false worship and persecute the faithful remnant of Sabbath-keepers.

This prophecy-based anti-Americanism looms large in Davidian thought, but it does not seem to be a prominent emphasis these days among the Seventh-day Adventists. While we can be grateful for that de-emphasis on purely theological grounds, the question of the theological status of the American nation in God's plan for the world is no minor theme in certain parts of the Christian world today. It is not uncommon to hear contemporary theological voices—including not a few evangelical ones—describing the United States in the present world as a beastly "imperial" force that has aligned itself with much that is destructive on the global scene. Since these thoughts often lack the serious attention to biblical specifics that the Davidians, in all of their confusions, have exhibited, this might be a good time for Adventist thinkers to lead the way in helping all of us get clearer about how we can think sensible—and appropriately biblically informed—thoughts about such important matters.

Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author most recently of Praying at Burger King, coming soon from Eerdmans.

1. James D. Taylor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Univ. of California Press, 1995); my review appeared in the September/October 1995 issue.

2. www.shepherds-rod-message.org/answerers

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