Religion: Seventh-Day Adventists

Professor G. G. Kretchmar of Walla Walla College (Wash.) last week at San Francisco stated the Seventh-Day Adventists’ present tenets as follows: “We accept the Bible as the revealed Word of God and believe that the Genesis record of a literal creation is an inspired record of a historical fact. We utterly repudiate the implication that man originated from any lower form of life. We look forward to the soon-coming of Christ, which will usher in the final restoration of nature to its original perfection.”

The occasion was the general conference of the Seventh-Day Adventists. They now have 299,555 members, estimate the net worth of denominational organizations and institutions at $30,967,235 and their 1929 total income from all parts of the world at $45,596,941. They elected as president the Rev. C. H. Watson of Sydney, Australia.

William Miller, Baptist licentiate, began to preach in 1831 of the Second Advent of The Christ. This was to happen between March 21. 1843, and March 21, 1844. Miscalculation of the Second Coming was the Great Disappointment of Adventists. The date was then advanced first to October 1844, then to some early but indefinite time.

Seventh-Day Adventists believe, apart from their celebration of Saturday as the Sabbath,* that “between the end of the Christian or Gospel age and the beginning of the New Earth state, there will be a thousand-year period called the millennium; that the Second Coming of Christ, the first resurrection (the resurrection of the righteous dead), the binding of Satan, and the translation of the righteous to heaven, will mark the beginning of this period; that during this time, the wicked will be dead on this earth, Satan and his angels will be confined here in solitude, and the righteous will be in heaven with Christ, sitting in confirmatory judgment on the wicked; that the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven to this earth with Christ and the righteous, the Second Resurrection (the resurrection of the wicked), the loosing of Satan, the annihilation of sin and sinners in a lake of fire, and the purification of this world by fire, will mark its close.”

*Other denominations observing the Jewish Sabbath are Seventh-Day Baptists, German Seventh-Day Baptists, and Church of God (Adventist).