Restorationist
Seventh-day Adventist
The one body here whose doctrine of the dead decides its demonology. If no one is conscious after death, every apparition of the dead is something else.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
Two doctrines held together produce a position nothing else on this chart holds. The dead are unconscious until the resurrection — soul sleep, held against the whole weight of the tradition around it — and history is a contest between Christ and Satan in which deception is the adversary's characteristic method. From those two it follows necessarily that a séance is not fraud and not nothing: the apparition is a demon impersonating a person who is not there to be contacted.
That is a reading of spiritualism no other body on the chart can make, because every other body here holds the dead to be conscious somewhere and must therefore leave the question of what is manifesting genuinely open. The corpus files it under 'where' and 'evidence' because it is an answer to both: it identifies where the spirits are held to be operating and what a practitioner is held to be dealing with when they think they have reached the dead.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
Methodist · 1863What to conclude after the Millerite expectation of 1844 failed. The body that organised in 1863 kept the prophetic reading and relocated the event rather than abandoning it, and added the seventh-day sabbath and the mortality of the soul.
Bodies that separated from it
- Jehovah's Witnesses1881
Russell's Bible Student movement out of the same post-Millerite ferment, differing over the person of Christ, the Trinity, and what the 1874 and 1914 dates were held to mark.
The same questions asked of every body
What it holds
Are the gifts still given?
Not established here. Not an exorcism question, and the one that decides the rest. A body holding the gifts ceased with the apostles has no room for a deliverance ministry; a body holding they continue has no reason to license one.
Who may act?
Not established here. The first thing a rite settles, usually in its opening rubric, and the sharpest divide between an office and a gift.
What counts as evidence?
Described from a text the corpus holdsThe claim itself. Any contact purporting to come from the dead is taken as the mark.
This is a doctrinal test rather than a behavioural one, which is what makes it unlike every checklist on this branch: the diagnosis follows from what is being claimed, not from how the person presents.
The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan · 1888; revised 1911
Where is the spirit?
Described from a text the corpus holdsIn the séance, the apparition and the medium — impersonating the dead, who are not there.
The Great Controversy's chapters on spiritualism derive this directly from the mortality of the soul: with no conscious dead to contact, what answers is held to be a demon taking the shape of one.
The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan · 1888; revised 1911
Whom do the words address?
Not established here. A formal difference a reader can check by counting clauses rather than by weighing tone.
What restraint is written in?
Not established here. Every one of these traditions knows the practice can harm. What each does about that is what popular accounts leave out.
What closes the matter?
Not established here. Whether the encounter ends, and who declares it, separates a rite from an ongoing practice.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.