Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
On this point, I have to ask, for the sake of my friend
@Ain't Zwinglian who I believe is away this evening but would want to know, why the SDA does not baptize infants, since Matthew 28:29 does not differentiate based on age.
Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord
Hopefully by quoting this passage from St. James you are indicating your church anoints the sick with oil, which is a holy mystery in the Orthodox Church and one which is extremely efficacious - I myself have witnessed first hand this sacrament working in both an Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox context. Indeed the liturgy used by the Eastern churches for the consecration of the oil, and in many cases, the application of that oil to the sick, is a beautiful and extremely comforting liturgy built around five or seven sets of prayers and Scripture lessons (usually seven, except among the Syriac Orthodox), preceded in the Eastern Orthodox liturgy by a beautiful hymn called a Canon, which the entire choir will sing to pray for the recovery of one sick layman, should the need arise. We also anoint those who have been fasting with oil, as instructed by Christ our True God.
Perhaps the SDAs in Ukraine use some of that liturgy, since they did record a rather nice album of our church music.
But sadly in the West all too many churches do not even anoint the sick or the fasting with oil. Indeed there are churches where those who fast are looked on with suspicion.
But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Matthew 4:4 , as I suspect my pious Anglican friend
@Jipsah might agree , is primarily a Eucharistic verse (as is indeed the mistranslated portion of the Lord’s prayer “Give us this day our daily bread” which in the original Greek uses a word which literally means ”supersubstantial”, which is a clear Eucharistic reference. However, the King James Version’s rendering of this passage, and the Anglican translation from the BCP upon which it was based, have become so widely used that even the Orthodox use them.
However, I am not convinced that this was an intentional mistranslation, for at first the Anglicans were very high church, and there have always been some Anglican churches and Lutheran churches where the Eucharist is celebrated almost daily, like in the Roman Catholic*, Eastern Orthodox, Assyrian and most Oriental Orthodox churches, for example, many of the cathedral churches. Thus, for the English speaking Anglican and Catholic clergy who contributed to the two most influential English language Bibles of the 16th century, the Great Bible constructed from bits of Coverdale and Tyndale used in Anglican churches until replaced by the more refined Bishops’ Bible and finally the Authorized Version (KJV) intended to replace the problematic Geneva Bible and provide a unified BIble for the churches united under the reign of King James of England and Scotland, and the Douai-Rheims, which would later be refined into the Challoner Douai Rheims, which uses similar phraseology to the KJV, the phrase “Daily bread” would have not seemed out of place, since the Eucharist was celebrated daily, and was both super substantial in being in addition to the bread required to maintain life functions, and also super-substantial in the sense of having a supernatural substance, that being the Body of Christ our God, for by partaking of it together with His precious Blood, the Blood of the New Covenant**, we obtain remission of sins, ensure our continued eligibility to inherit eternal life as per John chapter 6, and become partakers of the Divine Nature.
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On that note, one thing confuses me, and that is, why do the Adventists not celebrate the Eucharist every Saturday? Is there an actual denominational prohibition against this, perhaps in some writing of Ellen G. White, or is this merely a question of local preferences?
I do find it ironic that the Roman Catholic Church, which some Adventists criticize to a degree that many of you are aware from a previous thread that I find distressing, celebrates more worship services in the form of Masses, the Divine Office and various devotional services such as the Holy Hour, Novenas, the Angelus, public Rosaries and so on, on Saturday, than the SDA church, not even counting Saturday evening services, including both vespers and Vigils in the Eastern Catholic Churches (and the Paschal Vigil Mass on the evening of Holy Saturday in the post-1955 Paschal Triduum; in the pre-1955 Roman liturgy, and in the Byzantine Rite liturgy, this service, also known as the Vesperal Divine Liturgy, is celebrated on the morning of Holy Saturday, and in my view this service, and Protestant liturgies based on it, represents the ideal way for Christians to observe the Sabbath, by commemorating God resting in the Holy Sepulcrhe after He recreated humanity in His image on the Sixth Day from the Cross, to which He was nailed at the Sixth Hour), and other Saturday evening masses now offered by most parishes, which for many decades Roman Catholic laity have been allowed to attend in lieu of attending mass on Sunday. But not only that, but the Roman Catholics ensure that Roman Catholics and certain other liturgical Christians such as members of the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East who are allowed if properly disposed to partake of the Eucharist in the Catholic Church, are generally able to partake of Holy Communion on the Seventh Day.
Thus, the widespread publication of The Great Controversy strikes me as being an environmentally dubious move to try to discredit the Roman Catholic Church and other traditional liturgical churches on the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding, which is particularly sad, because if Adventists would look to the Roman Catholic Church not with disdain but appreciation for the many good things it has done and continues to do, as the largest denomination, with the largest body of worshippers on the Seventh Day, and also the church which engages in charitable enterprises on the largest scale of any denomination, and to the fullest extent of any denomination not centered almost entirely around the provision of charitable service such as the Salvation Army, to the exclusion of other things (I love the Salvation Army, but whereas I object to the SDA practice of not baptizing infants or celebrating the Eucharist with sufficient frequency, the absence of baptism and Holy Communion from most Salvation Army parishes, I forget what they are called, due to the Quaker views of General Booth’s wife, who managed to convince him not to include these sacraments despite his prior Methodist upbringing stressing their importance, is a more severe failure, although on the other hand, to the SDA’s credit, not only do they not forbid their members from receiving these sacraments elsewhere, nor even forbid their clergy from offering them, which has led to these happily becoming a thing, a rare thing, but a thing nonetheless, but the Salvationists also do not engage in aggressive criticism of other denominations, nor distribute books which consist primarily of polemics about a particular denomination to every inhabitant of a large metro area.
*Roman Catholic members such as my dear friends
@chevyontheriver @RileyG @Michie and
@boughtwithaprice may or may not be aware that, aside from the varying practices of the Eastern Catholic Churches, among Roman Catholic Churches in the West, the Ambrosian Rite, which is celebrated by more than a million Catholics in and around the city of Milan, named for the great fourth century church father St. Ambrose of Milan, a man universally respected by Catholics, Orthodox and traditional Protestants, does not celebrate the Mass per se on most weekdays in Great Lent, reflecting the Byzantine influence we see in it and the Mozarabic Rite once equally dominant in Toledo, and the other historic Gallican liturgies. Indeed on Saturday and Sunday in Lent, when the Mass is celebrated, the Ambrosians even wear a liturgical color, Morello, closer to the hue of purple that Slavic, Romanian and many Levantine Orthodox tend to use in Lent and on feasts of the Cross, while when celebrating the Divine Office during the weekdays of Lent the Ambrosian Rite clergy use black vestments also used by the Slavs and Romanians.
** Note that this statement is by no means intended to imply that communion in one species as is the norm in the Traditional Latin Mass is inadequate; indeed the Council of Trent, in addition to abolishing the sale of indulgences and other abuses, also presented a very eloquent defense of communion in one kind, and so I regard this as a matter of what the Lutherans would call adiaphora; personally I prefer partaking of the Eucharist in the mouth via intinction either on the spoon as in the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic liturgies or with an intincted portion simply popped into the mouth by the presbyter as in the Syriac Orthodox liturgy.
