- Nov 26, 2019
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Also remember the Orthodox, who number around 290,000,000 when we combine the total number of Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox (with the Eastern Orthodox being about 235 million and the second largest denomination, in between the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans, and the Lutherans are the fourth largest after the Anglicans, with around 90,000,000, and then in fifth place about 75,000,000 or so Reformed/Calvinist/Presbyterians not counting Particular/Calvinist Baptists whether SBC or some other denomination), followed by the Pentecostals and then the Oriental Orthodox if we want to break it down.
Also, the Assyrian Church of the East believes in the Dormition, despite Wikipedia having an article that claims otherwise; this is disproven however by an article on an official website of the Assyrian Church of the East and by their own liturgical calendar (August 15th is observed for commemoration of the Assumption, or Dormition, as the Assyrians and Eastern Orthodox call it).
And also the supposedly Roman Catholic author who Bob Ryan bases this article on is incorrect in claiming a lack of first century provenance for this belief. We have statements of the Apostles preserved in the Orthodox liturgy on what happened, and also we have relics of the clothing and secondary items of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but she, and our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, are the only major Christian saints of the first century where we have no bodily relics such as skeletal remains, and the reason for this is obviously because their bodies are in Heaven. There is no reason why, considering that St. Elias and St. Enoch were taken into heaven bodily, and St. Moses was assumed bodily after death, hence His presence at the Transfiguration of Christ, that our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ would leave His own mother to rot in a grave on Earth until His return, given that Christ our True God was physically closer to her than to any other human being, since she gave birth to Him, thus allowing Him to be human, and was a mother to Him; God the Logos by whom all things were made (John 1:1-3) suckled at the breast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a woman who lived a sufficiently decent life that it was deemed appropriate for God the Holy Spirit to cause her to conceive of and bear the Only Begotten Son and Word of God in her womb, and then raise him to adulthood as His human mother, tending to his needs in childhood and being present at His crucifixion and being made the adoptive mother of St. John the Beloved Disciple and Theologian, who was the youngest of the Twelve Apostles and the only one not to be martyred but who rather reposed peacefully in our Lord.
This point I think should be especially important to Adventists, given their belief in the eschatological error of soul sleep, and given that their belief in the peculiar doctrine of the Investigative Judgement makes it clear that they believe that God experiences time the same way we do (since jesus Christ is God); it makes our Lord out to be very unpleasant that given that he spared St. Elias (Elijah) and St. Enoch and Moses from the grave, and Himself, that he would leave his own mother in a state of soul sleep and endure an absence from her that, given that Adventists are young Earth creationists, represents nearly a quarter of the entire time that this planet has existed, according to their cosmology. Indeed given the priority that Adventists put on the Ten Commandments, I would argue that for them to reject the doctrine of the Assumption or Dormition, which as far as I am aware Ellen G White never commented on, would constitute them causing our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ to have violated the commandment to honor His Father AND His Mother, since He is clearly not honoring His Mother, if He allows her to simply lie in the ground for two thousand years while having taken up into heaven three prophets who, while important, are not His mother, and who therefore He is not required to honor according to the Ten Commandments which He wrote, and also are less important than the Theotokos, in that it was by Her that our Lord became Human, while Saints Enoch, Elias and Moses merely testified to his coming, along with many other prophets, and God could have called others to serve in their role, but given the unique genealogical requirements the prophecy of Christ required of His mother, that she be a direct descendant of King David, and related to St. Anna so that John the Baptist would be our Lord’s cousin, no one other than St. Mary the daughter of Joachim could have served as his mother.*
*It is ironic to consider that the Restorationists and low church Protestants who argue that anyone could have been chosen to be the Mother of Christ are completely wrong on this point, because of the specificity of the prophecies of Christ’s birth and the requirements of His relationship to the Illustrious Forerunner; really no one else had the correct genealogy, and was married to an elderly widower with the correct geneaology who was willing to remain celibate, and was sufficiently closely related to St. Jesse as an ancestor and to King David and a cousin of St. Elizabeth the mother of the forerunner for it to work. Whereas on the other hand, St. Moses and St. Elias emerged as prophets, and while their background was important, as was that of St. Enoch, it was not central to their identification, because their arrival was not itself the center of prophecies, in that they were not Messianic figures; only Christ our God was, as His name implies, a Messiah whose arrival was foretold, and who would be identified, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, by his relationship to King David, and the circumstances of his birth, and so on; the Gospel of Matthew enumerates a large number of these prophecies by showing how our Lord fulfilled them, but it does not list all of them, for indeed, as Christ demonstrated for the Apostles, immediately before being known in the Breaking of Bread (the Eucharist) and ascending to Heaven, at the conclusion of the Gospel According to Luke, that all of the Law and the Prophets testified of Him; thus an actual list of all scriptural verses that foretell the Incarnation of God in the person of Christ Jesus would be equivalent in length to the entire Old Testament.
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