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The Seventh-day Adventist Church is an evangelical Protestant Christian denomination that grew out of the prophetic Millerite movement in the United States during the middle part of the 19th century. According to historians of the movement, this group gained its more recent name from the teaching that the expected return of Jesus Christ in 1844 had been fulfilled in a way that had not previously been understood (see also: Great Disappointment). Prophetess Ellen G. White received a vision that Jesus had entered into an "investigative judgment" of the world: a process through which there is an examination of the heavenly records to "determine who, through repentence of sin and faith in Christ, are entitled to the benefits of His atonement." (from "The Great Controversy" by Ellen G. White page 422,1911 edition) after which Jesus will return to earth. This completion of the return of Christ may occur very soon, according to the church's teaching.
In addition to orthodox Trinitarian Protestant theology, Seventh-day Adventists:
- Believe in a literal six day creation process, culminating in a seventh day sabbath of rest, which is still to be observed on Saturday, in accordance with Scripture.
- Maintain that there is no biblical mandate for the change from Saturday Sabbath to Sunday observance, which is to say that Sundaykeeping is merely a Tradition of men.
- Believe that death is a sleep during which the "dead know nothing" (Ecclesiastes 9:5), which is to say that nothing of a person survives death, that the dead simply cease to exist until they are resurrected, either at the second coming of Jesus (in the case of the righteous) or after the millennium of Rev. 20 (in the case of the wicked).
- Health message includes vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine
- Maintain the historically Protestant view of Roman Catholicism, which is that Catholicism is the apostate mother church described in Revelation 17 as a harlot. In particular it still teaches that the pope is the Antichrist, using as evidence a claim that one of the pope's titles is Vicarius Filii Dei (Vicar of the Son of God in latin), and that the phrase appeared on a Papal Tiara or a papal mitre. The Roman numeral value of the letters produce the number 666, a number featured in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 13:18) as the number of the antichrist.