Recently, I received a request from some long-time friends who are aware of my Sabbath convictions to explain my position on the matter.  For those who were unaware, I am of the opinion that the seventh day of the week is the Sabbath of the Bible and still has value for Christians today.

Goals and a Disclaimer:

Before I do so, I need to clarify my position and what I am attempting to accomplish in writing this.  I am simply trying to explain the reasons that support my convictions.  I am not attempting (at least not explicitly) to “convert” anyone my position.  I am not trying to suggest that the keeping of the seventh day Sabbath is a matter which automatically bears on someone’s salvation.  I am not suggesting that seventh day Sabbathkeepers are “real” Christians and those who observe the first day of the week are second class or worse, not saved.  The observance of Sabbath is not a legalistic conviction for me–it is not something which one MUST do to be saved.    This sort of disclaimer must be given because the most common charge raised against Sabbathkeepers is that they are legalists–requiring other people to do the trappings of the old Mosaic Law in order to be saved, or requiring people to keep some other extrabiblical set of rules to be saved.  This is likely due to the theology of “other” Sabbathkeeping denominations, whose beliefs are more well known (though significantly shorter lived, historically).  I am NOT a legalist.

I am a Baptist.  I do not believe that any denominational body has the right to prescribe extensive doctrine on individuals.  Instead, I believe that the conscience of the individual, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (which will always conform to Scripture’s testimony), is the means that God uses to guide Christians.  Accordingly, I am comfortable with the idea that not all Christians believe exactly the same on all issues.  Matters of eschatology (end times theology), prophecy, and others generate a tremendous amount of press inside the Christian church precisely because the Scriptures themselves are not abundantly transparent on these matters.  I am comfortable leaving such matters to the Holy Spirit’s direction.  Ultimately, it is individuals who must answer to God for their convictions and beliefs.  I do not believe that matters like the “divinity of Jesus Christ” or the “personhood of the Holy Spirit” are up for debate.  Orthodoxy (the long standing theological tradition of the church) has a long witness which can be found in most of the older creeds (Nicaea, Chalcedon, Westminster Confession of Faith)  and documents of the church.  The main substance of Christian doctrine has not changed for thousands of years.  I am not refuting any of the intractable truths of the faith in what I am about to say, at least not as I understand them (I would disagree with Westminster about a few small things, but not on the fundamentals of the faith.)

To sum up:  I am not trying to change your mind.  I am trying to explain a belief which I am fully convicted of by the Holy Spirit and which does not refute anything in Scripture.   Now that I’ve done my preliminaries, lets get down to business.

First Principles and Bible Interpretation:

It is my conviction that the work of interpreting the Bible (hermeneutics) is, at its most basic level, one of first principles.  Despite our best intentions, all people approach the Scriptures with their own assumptions.  I am no exception to this rule.  In the interpretation of Scripture, most conservative Christians would use some principles to guide their understanding.  First, they would understand the texts as inspired:  God participated in the creation/authorship of the texts.  I am bracketing for the moment questions about exactly how that works to make the more general statement above.   Second, they would affirm that the text is authoritative upon the matters which it teaches.  Third, they would be cautious of outside factors outside the context of the original audience (read: modern ideas and ways of thinking), which could impose incorrect meanings on the text.  Fourth, they would search the language of the text itself for clues about how it should be understood.  Fifth, they would attempt to understand the situation of the original audience as best as it can be distinguished (this is frequently tricky business).  Sixth, have done all to understand the text on its own terms, they would then take the lessons derived from the text as they would’ve been understood by the original audience and tried to bring such lessons into the present day.  The work of exegesis and hermeneutics (finding and interpreting the meaning of the text) is completed in this way.  Furthermore, certain logical principles must also apply (laws of identity, contradiction, bivalence/excluded middle, etc).

My case for the seventh day Sabbath will employ these same principles.  It is my opinion that in order to make the Bible teach that either there is no Sabbath or that the day was changed will require readers of the Scriptures to abandon one or more of these basic interpretational principles.

History

There are historical considerations which must be addressed before the Scripture texts themselves are addressed.  I debated about whether the tests of the historical context of the interpretation should come first, but given that the historical context here is the reason that the Sabbath question has been debated, it seems logical to put it first.

Christianity began as a sect of Judaism.  Jesus, obviously, was Jewish.  He was an observer of the seventh day Sabbath, as one of the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5).  In fact, to Jesus and the other Jews of that day, to use the word “sabbath” to describe a day other than the seventh day of the week (or one of the Jewish festivals), wouldn’t have made any sense:  the terms were equivalent.  After the death of Jesus, there is no biblical evidence to suggest that the disciples stopped meeting on the Sabbath for worship.  In fact, the book of Acts is clear that the disciples and other followers of Jesus were still participating in the worship at the Temple.  The Apostle Paul made it a habit to not only observe the Sabbath, but go to the synagogue on the Sabbath as well.  I don’t think anyone would dispute this who has serious considered the texts of the Gospels and Acts.  There are mentions made of meetings which took place on the first day of the week (literally, “first from the Sabbath” in the Greek New Testament), but I see no indication from these texts that this was to be considered normative.  (That point would be disputed by many first-day/Sunday observers.)

Through the early church period and up to the time of Constantine’s reign, Christianity was illegal.  Christianity had been denied the status of religio licita after Jews declared that the Christians were not of their sect and was declared illegal before the end of the first century.  Between that time (approximately 80AD and the Edict of Milan in 313AD), all Christian practices and meetings were illegal, and subject to punishment from the Roman authorities.  In the early to middle part of the second century (somewhere between 130AD and 160AD), some Christians began to distance themselves from the Sabbath and other Jewish practices because Jews were also not popular among some Roman emperors.  (As one example of this, the Emperor Nero began a process of persecuting the Jews in the early 60s AD in the series of events that led up to the Jewish revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD.)  Justin Martyr was writing in 150’s AD against the value of sabbath observance in favor of honoring the first day of the week, the day Jesus was resurrected.  By this time among Christians, the first day of the week was frequently being called “The Lord’s Day.”  There is some evidence in Palestine that Christians there kept the Sabbath into the 300’s AD, but in 321AD Constantine instructed that all people in his empire observe “the venerable day of the sun.”  This is what we now call Sunday.  Much debate in the historical literature about the Sabbath centers on whether Constantine was actually a Christian or not.  To me, the point is moot.  Even if he was a Christian, he could still be mislead.  Nevertheless, after Constantine made worshiping on Sunday compulsory, Sabbath observance wasn’t recorded much before the Reformation.

At the time of the English Reformation, the issue of Sabbath came up for the Puritans.  Reading the texts of Scripture, a Puritan named Nicolas Bownde wrote in favor of Sabbath observance in England in 1606 (He understood the Sabbath to be Sunday).  In 1618, another Englishman, John Traske, was imprisoned, along with his wife, for keeping the seventh day Sabbath. Traske later recanted his views and returned to his first-day congregation.  Theophilus Brabourne, an Anglican priest, wrote in 1628 asking the English religious establishment to consider a move to the seventh day Sabbath.  Again, with pressure, Brabourne withdrew his proposal, though he continued to write about the Sabbath in his later years.  By the 1650s, there were seventh day Sabbath keeping Baptists in London.  They were meeting together for worship by 1654 or 1655.  My current vocation is stewarding the historical archives of this group, Seventh Day Baptists.  From then to now, Seventh Day Baptists have had an amazingly constant position on the Sabbath.

Three Positions on Sabbath

With relation to the positions someone could take about the Sabbath, I think that ultimately there are three.

First, you could decide from the biblical texts that Jesus’ death on the cross rendered the entirety of the Old Testament law null.  That none of the Old Testament laws applied, including the 10 commandments.  This position would focus on the completion of the Law in Christ’s work on the cross.  Subsequently, the early church’s keeping of Sabbath would then be confusion springing from their Jewish roots.  The right understanding of the Sabbath was that it was a vestige of the Jewish law which has been entirely abolished in Christ.

The second position would be to see that the Sabbath was changed at the time of the resurrection, and that while the Jewish Sabbath was the seventh day of the week, the Christian Sabbath is the first day of the week.  God has the power to change the day, and the change was signaled by the coming of the new covenant, which rendered the Jewish law unnecessary, undone by Christ’s atoning work on the Christ.  The right understanding of the Sabbath is that it was a vestige of the Jewish law which has been repurposed and changed to Sunday to celebrate the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and as a symbol of the future rest we will all have in Christ’s kingdom.

The final position is that the day has never changed.  Because the first two positions are much more common in the Christian church, I will not spend my time explaining them.  People who are convicted of those beliefs should be able to articulate them, it seems to me.  I would be underqualified to speak meaningfully about a conviction that is not mine, and to do so charitably inside the constraints of this blog entry would be difficult.  Perhaps if the readers could find good arguments for the other positions they could post them in the comments.  Those treatments would be more likely to be fair from their own points of view.

Part 2 will focus on the Sabbath in the Old Testament, and the nature of Covenants.  [Coming Soon(ish)!]