You pray to people on earth. In fact I bet you prayed to someone not to long ago because you needed prayer for something. Pray means to ask so let's stop playing games which you SDA love to do. You don't even know me so don't pretend to and don't think you know how I pray. Your answer tells me everything, you can't defend your position that you all believe Christ being a created being
The SDA believe in Soul Sleep, and on that basis I think they have more valid reasons for not asking the intercessions of the saints than most Protestants. So on this point alone, I respect their doctrine as internally consistent, because they believe, correct me if I am wrong, that all the righteous are asleep amd awaiting the resurrection. This view is actually more accurate than the neo-Gnostic error believed in by many evangelicals, that when we die, our souls instantly and permanently go to Heaven or Hell and remain there without a Last Judgement, a General Resurrection, and the Parousia establishing a new Heavens and a new Earth, the error that the whole point of Christianity is to just save your soul amd get it to Heaven, as opposed to reposing in Heaven being resurrected into glory, judged by our Lord as deserving eternal life, being ascertained as part of the wheat and not the chaff.
The error is that the SDAs believe that we are unconscious until that resurrection, when the Bible suggests that the soul after death, before the Parousia, is conscious and exists in spiritual form.
However, on the basis of their theology, praying to the departed saints would make no sense because owing to soul sleep, they could not answer.
On the other hand, I do not understand the logic behind the magisterial Protestant rejection of the intercession of the saints; if these people are in Heaven, and there is in each case strong evidence that they are, why not ask them to pray for us? The Virgin Mary certainly is.
By the way, while according to traditional theology as historically always understood by the ancient Christian church, Judaism and most other related religions such as Zoroastrianism, Yarsanism, Yazidism, Gnosticism, Islam, et cetera, angels are created beings or emanations of God, so according to the shared traditional theology of the ancient Christians, the denominations that still adhere to that theology, and the surviving religions that believe in it (most Gnostics and West Semitic Paganism, which also jad angels, being extinct), if our Lord was an archangel, He was a creature or a non-eternal emanation of God, in fact, the Gnostics explicitly believed our Lord was an emanation.
However, I accept as sincere Adventist claims that they believe Jesus Christ to be an Archangel and at the same time the eternal uncreated Son of God, because Ellen G. White, while clearly having some knowledge of ecclesiastical history (I believe she probably read Gibbon, or another account of the history of the Roman Empire, and Calvin's Institutes, in addition to certain other polemical works, predominantly I suspect by non-conforming English theologians of some learning and knowledge, like John Nelson Darby), she clearly did not study in any detail the history of religion; I think her knowledge of Paganism for example was probably limited to a comprehensive catalog of all the Pagan practices certain non-conforming, belligerent, radically anti-Catholic Protestant theologians from Great Britain, who actually had studied classical Paganism in Greek and Latin at Oxford or Cambridge in many if not most cases, ascribed to the Roman Catholic Church. But even if I am wrong and she herself conducted direct research into the theological concept of the angel as it appears in West Asian religions beginning, as far as we can tell, with Zoroastrianism, and which the Christians from the start accepted, I believe she would have rejected it as a pagan superstition and advanced her own idea of Jesus Christ as an uncreated God, angel and man, on the basis of her general spirit of defiance.
Most Adventists then follow this doctrine, and from that basis, they can sincerely worship Jesus Christ as both God and an angel, without realizing how these concepts are actually mutually exclusive; in some religions like Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Yarsanism or Yazidism, an angel is an emanation or reflection of God who might appropriately be given full divine honors and regarded as God, but is not the original God; there is always a sequence of events or a progression of reflections and emanations, or in Judeo-Christian angelology, the creation of angels and then their fall, a view later copied by Islam.
So I believe we should not accuse all Adventists of believing something many of them deny. Several of them however do actually reject the Trinity and the full eternal deity of our Lord, which was the historic, pre-Ellen White doctrine and which I believe is a logical implication of Adventism if evaluated through the lens of the ancient Church, but most of them either have not thought about it, or if they have, they have formed a sincere belief in the Trinity in which Jesus is also St. Michael amomg other things.
Now, here is where the real problem comes into play: even Adventists I think would agree that most angels are not human, and they are not God; they lack the divine nature and they also lack the human nature. It is also widely believed that they lack free will beyond the ability to have decided whether to rebel with Satan or remain with God.
The ecumemical councils of the ancient Church through careful study established definitively, supported by a balanced and consistent exegesis of the entire Bible, that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully Man. Adventism seems to propose that he is also fully an Angel.
But the nature of an Angel is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of man?
Also, there is another problem: why would Jesus need to be St. Michael? Why would Jesus Christ our Lord God Emanu-El (meaning God-With Us), being God incarnate, perfectly God and perfectly man, having risen from the dead into an incorruptible and perfected body of the new creation, which is still material, but which posesses attributes otherwise reserved for the angels, such as the ability to pass through closed doors, to appear suddenly, to levitate amd ascend into the clouds, et cetera, need to also have the attributes of an archangel like St. Gabriel?
For the purposes of physically fighting demons, if our Lord were to condescend to do it (and the harrowing of Hell doctrine suggests that he may have done so; recall the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom "Hell is despoiled!"), Jesus Christ could do so either as a risen man, or as God, relying on His divine omnipotence. But in the New Testament, even before His resurrection, when he was united with us in our fallen and unglorified human nature, having put on corruptibility and mortality so as to trample down death by death, he easily prevailed over all demons, even against the direct temptations of Satan himself.
So, being God, I just don't see a reason why Jesus Christ would need to be St. Michael. The angels loyal to him did not fall and do not need saving; the demons fell in such a way that they are probably unsalvagable, and having become pure evil, God could not save them by becoming consubstantial with the good angels, since the demons had lost that nature, and God would not on the basis of His statements that light and darkness can have no fellowship become incarnate as a devil in order to save the other devils as He did the human race, and furthermore, unlike Origen or St. Gregory of Nyassa, who propose that God might save the devil and the demons by restoring all things using His omnipotence (apokatastasis), or Universalists, who believe that God will do these things inevitably, Adventists believe that the devils along with all of the unsaved sinners (including us, I think, for not observing the Sabbath) will be annhilated.
Anglicans have a model I like of basing doctrine on Scripture, Tradition and Reason. The proof-texts Adventists cite to support this view are eisegetical proof-texting, contradicted by the Bible when read as a whole, the doctrine does not accord with the traditional understanding of angelology as believed in by the ancient Church and all mainstream traditional churches today, and the doctrine is also Unreasonable because there is no need in the economy of salvation, no logical purpose for our Lord to be an angel, and the angelic nature, created, subordinate, lacking free will and not neccessarily created in the image of God (or bearing the image in a purely spiritual way), seems to be incompatible with both the divine and human natures of our Lord which were proven by the theologians of the early church and proclaimed by the great Ecumenical Councils which most Christians deliberately or consequentially follow.
