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”.