Restorationist
Jehovah's Witnesses
The far end of the 'close' axis from Rome: no rite, no office, no confrontation, and a demonology derived from Genesis 6 rather than from any grimoire.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
Russell's volumes identify the demons with the angels of Genesis 6 who left their own habitation, and hold them to be the power operating behind spiritism — which is a genealogy this corpus can check, since the Watchers material of 1 Enoch is already seeded and the same reading of the sons of God runs through it.
What follows in practice is avoidance rather than engagement. There is no rite, no ordained exorcist and no session; the counsel is to have nothing to do with spiritistic practice, to be rid of objects associated with it, and to call on the divine name. Recorded here because it fills the end of two axes that were otherwise occupied only by Rome's opposite: a body that takes demons entirely seriously and has built nothing whatever for confronting them.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
Seventh-day Adventist · 1881Russell'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?
Described from a text the corpus holdsCeased with the apostles, and their absence is part of the argument against other churches.
The gifts are read as belonging to the apostolic period; the claim to exercise them now is treated as a mark against the body making it.
Studies in the Scriptures (Millennial Dawn) · 1886–1904
Who may act?
Described from a text the corpus holdsThe individual, by avoidance rather than by confrontation.
There is no office and no rite. What the literature prescribes is separation from spiritistic practice and from objects associated with it, which is not an act performed on anyone.
Studies in the Scriptures (Millennial Dawn) · 1886–1904
What counts as evidence?
Not established here. Where a tradition decides it is dealing with a spirit rather than an illness, a grief, or nothing at all.
Where is the spirit?
Not established here. All four inherit gospel scenes in which spirits are in people. What each adds beyond that is the largest difference between them.
Whom do the words address?
Described from a text the corpus holdsGod, by the divine name. Not the spirit.
The counsel is to call on the name rather than to speak to what is troubling the person, which puts this body at the opposite end of the address axis from the deliverance literature.
Studies in the Scriptures (Millennial Dawn) · 1886–1904
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.