A Commandment Retained

The seventh-day Sabbath is a defining mark of Seventh-day Adventism, distinguishing it from the great majority of Christians, who worship on Sunday in commemoration of the resurrection. It returns Christian practice to the day kept in Judaism and commanded in the Decalogue, though Adventists observe it on Christian and Adventist terms. The affirmation is bound up with the movement's strong emphasis on the abiding authority of the Ten Commandments and with its distinctive reading of biblical prophecy and the end of the age.

Seventh-day observance did not originate with the Adventists: Seventh Day Baptists, tracing to English Sabbatarian congregations of the 1650s and established in America from 1671, kept the practice for over a century before Joseph Bates encountered it through them and brought it into the Adventist movement. Because it is otherwise a fully trinitarian, Sunday-surrounded Protestant body, Adventism's Sabbath keeping sometimes causes it to be confused with, or courted by, the modern Hebrew Roots and Messianic movements that urge Christians toward wider Torah observance; Adventist teaching keeps the practice narrowly to the Sabbath commandment itself and does not extend it to the dietary or ceremonial law in the way those movements do, beyond its own separate, health-based counsel against unclean meats.