There are many contributions on the discussion of the Sabbath in this book. The biblical data is considered when looking at Jesus’ attitude towards the Sabbath in the four Gospels, Luke and Acts, the Pauline epistles and Hebrews. What we can safely say from these discussions is that there was not a transfer from the Sabbath to Sunday. As a matter of fact, there is doubt as to when Sunday as a day of worship actually began and, whenever it was, it was not a substitute for the Sabbath. Richard Bauckham walks us through the history of the Lord’s day, including the book of Revelation, from the post-apostolic period to the Reformation which comprises a big chunk of the book. A. T. Lincoln then tries to synthesize the results from the previous articles.

In a way, reading A. T. Lincoln will be enough for most people since they can always go back to the articles that interest them for further details. One thing that I noticed, especially in the more exegetical sections, is that the authors were responding to other scholars on the relationship between the Sabbath and Sunday. This made some sections a little tiresome to read although I see their necessity.

In the end, the book pretty much responds, for the most part, to the arguments and conclusions on which the writers disagree as outlined in Carson’s preface. I wrote about two chapters concerning the OT and I am in pretty much agreement with the exegesis in chapters 4 through 7. As for the history of the Lord’s day, I will take Bauckham’s word for it.

Basically what it boils down to is that Christians may certainly keep the Sabbath but they are not bound to do it. For those who insist that keeping the Sabbath is still binding, they will have to deal with the witness of the New Testament which, I think, doesn’t support it. The authors are convinced that the Sabbath is not a creation ordinance, and I agree with that but not on the basis of Dressler’s article. Part of the hermeneutical problems that the Sabbath has brought about is the interpretation of the Decalogue as being basically moral and the view of the Sabbath as a creation ordinance which is binding for all times. But if those assumptions are not correct, then there are really no exegetical grounds for keeping the Sabbath. As for Sunday, as far as we know from the history of the early church, it was not associated with the Sabbath but it was just a day of worship for Christians.

With this in mind, I still think there is something to be said about keeping the spirit of the Sabbath in the same way we celebrate special days. The Sabbath can be a memorial that, when understood properly, points to what Christ did and our final rest. There is also the fact that we need to take time off from our daily routine not only to physically rest but also to regroup and search our souls. For many, Sunday is the day when that is done.

But we need to be wise and respect people who still keep the Sabbath or Sunday (as a pseudo-Sabbath). We need to be patient and engage in fruitful conversations because keeping the Sabbath is not the real issue but how you interpret the bible. And it is here that a hermeneutics of love is utterly necessary.

Bibliography

Carson, D. A. From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical and Theological Investigation. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Pub. House, 1982.

2 Comments

• By john burnett, November 14, 2008 @ 2:05 pm

  Hi. Stumbled across your site from a recent posting of yours on the wrightsaid list. Great work!

  On this issue of the sabbath, it’s always been astonishing to me that scholars of the weight of those who contributed to Carson’s volume would be so little familiar with what scholars of liturgy have to say about the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day. Both days are, after and above all else, *liturgical* days! And to those who know even the basics of the Christian liturgical tradition, the relation of these two days is simply non-controversial: The Sabbath commemorates creation, and the Lord’s Day (which was never a “Christian Sabbath”) commemorates our redemption, or more precisely, the Resurrection. In fact in all romance languages, the word for Saturday is some form of Lat. ’sabbatum’, while the word for Sunday is some form of Lat. ‘Dominica’, from ‘Dominus’ (’Lord’). In Greek it’s the same– ‘Sabbaton’ and ‘Kyriakê’ (the latter from ‘Kyrios’). In Russian, the pattern is broken in an interesting way: there we have ‘Subota’ and ‘Voskresenie’– and the latter means ‘Resurrection’.

  In the early Church, the Sabbath continued to be observed as a day of rest, at least by Jewish Christians. For everyone, the First/Eighth Day of the week was an ordinary work day; the liturgy that celebrated it was held in the early morning so people could get to work. We can thank the emperor Constantine for giving us the “weekend”, by making both days, days of rest. The amount of rest was apparently optional, but by then, most Christians were not Jews, but Gentiles to whom Jewish law did not directly apply– there is no mention, for example, of Sabbath observance among the instructions to the Gentiles which were given by the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem in Acts. What the Apostles communicated to the new churches they founded among the nations was not Jewish Sabbath observance, but the Lord’s Day and its Eucharist. For liturgical scholars, the question is not to explain how the Lord’s Day arose, but to understand the persistence of the Sabbath in the new, Gentile context. This leads to a consideration of what is known as “the sanctification of time”, which I won’t go into here. If you’re interested, though, there’s an article on this topic by an outstanding Orthodox liturgical scholar on my own website at http://jbburnett.com/theology/theol-ltg-time.html (see the first item).

  But the point is that from its very earliest days (as we see in numerous places in the New Testament), the Church has always met on the First/Eighth Day of the week for its Eucharist, because that was the day of resurrection, the day of the Lord, the Lord’s Day. This has never been controversial, whatever arguments there may have been over other aspects of the calendar (quartodeciminianism, etc). To be a Christian is to be one who worships God-in-Christ on the day of Resurrection by hearing the words of the New Testament and by celebrating the Eucharist of the risen Messiah. The Old Testament, by the way, was read in the Synagogue on the Sabbath, and even after the split between Synagogue and Church, is still read (although, it must be admitted, rather vestigially) at Vespers on the evening of the Sabbath, in the Christian liturgical tradition.

  Those who would now have us keep the Sabbath “because Jesus was a Jew and Jews keep the Sabbath not Sunday” simply miss the point, because they are (invariably) uninformed about the nature of the practice that originated with, and was taught by the apostles. Having erroneously concluded that “Sunday” (a term not known in the Church, east or west; the proper name for this day has always been “Dominica” or some such, except in Germanic languages like our own, which were evidently not sufficiently penetrated by the Christian message)– is the “Christian Sabbath”, they want to know who had the right to “move the Sabbath”, and they want to “change it back”. And it’s easy for a liturgical scholar to agree with the first half of their objection– no one ever had the right to change the Sabbath– that’s not within the power of man! But then, neither was the Sabbath ever moved. It is, in fact, still alive and quite well in the Christian liturgical tradition– for instance, in Orthodoxy, it is never a strict fast day (except on the Great Sabbath, a.k.a. “Holy Saturday”, when Jesus rested in the tomb); and it is theologically related to the day following as Creation is related to Redemption.

  I will mention that the situation isn’t helped in places like Africa where, in all languages I’m familiar with, “Sunday” is translated as “Sabiti” and the days of the week are numbered, “First”, “Second”, “Third”, etc– starting from Monday. This is astonishingly unfortunate, because the identification of “Sunday” with “Sabbath” makes nonsense not only of the Christian liturgical tradition, but of all those passages in the New Testament itself– beginning with the resurrection accounts– which speak of the “Lord’s Day” and of the “eighth day” and of the “first day of the week”.

• By Maer, November 17, 2008 @ 4:25 pm

  John – Thank you for writing this and especially for making me aware of your site and Schmemann’s article which I will certainly read.

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