7. Keeping the Sabbath

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
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1. I've already shared a bit about my family's theology of the Sabbath growing up. First, we understood Sunday to be the Sabbath. We certainly went to Sunday School, morning and evening services on Sunday. We did not believe you should have a job on Sunday, and we did not buy or sell on Sunday to cause others to have to work. We didn't have a problem with cooking on Sunday.

In our family, we did not watch TV on Sunday, although exceptions could be made. We didn't generally throw a baseball or do sports on Sunday. It was to be set aside as a fairly serious day. We often took a nap on Sundays, which we called the "Wesleyan hour" after a long-running Wesleyan radio program on Sunday afternoons.

Occasionally, we would travel on Sundays, although this was unusual. We could eat out on such trips because "the ox was in the ditch" (Luke 14:5). After I was married, my dad knew that we did not have any convictions against eating out on Sunday. A couple times when Angie prepared a meal for us all on Sunday we kind of felt like my Dad was disappointed that we weren't planning to eat out. After all, why miss an allowed exemption to eat out on Sunday when you can? We chuckled about that. It's like some family members who didn't believe in having a TV but sure seemed to enjoy watching our TV when they came over.

2. I didn't really struggle too much with this set of rules. I did feel bad to miss the television premiere of Star Wars and Star Trek and other movies when they premiered on TV. You see, we weren't allowed to go to movies, so to this day I haven't seen E.T. or other famous movies of my childhood. In my last year of college, it became possible to rent movies and watch them on VHS. I'm still not sure I've seen the first Star Wars all the way through -- or the first Star Trek. An older lady at church loved Star Trek and somehow got a cassette tape of the first movie from the cinema. I listened to that thing a number of times.

Apart from a class trip to see animated Cinderella in the fifth grade (my mother went with me as a chaperone), the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was The Dream Team in 1989. I felt a little uneasy going to the movies then. I think it had been moved to the Special Directions of the Wesleyan Church by then and had become a suggestion not to go rather than a membership requirement. That was a clever political move the denomination made in those days. Rather than get into a direct fight with ultraconservatives over an old tradition, they just put it in the Special Directions section. That way it still felt like it was a requirement without it really being a requirement.

There obviously isn't a verse in the Bible about not going to movies. It was one of our "traditions of the elders" (cf. Mark 7:3). If many conservatives in my background didn't think you should own a TV, they certainly didn't think you should go to movies. I'm sure it was felt that movies depicted lifestyles that were inappropriate. 

Entertainment itself probably smelled of sin to some. After all, it was pleasurable in a self-oriented way. It could involve comedy, and sometimes I fear it was hard for some to distinguish between seriousness and holiness. Some probably thought it a waste of time when you could be doing something helpful or worthwhile. 

I imagine there were even some who weren't sure whether fiction was appropriate for a Christian. Is fiction lying? After all, it is a story that didn't actually happen. Don't tell Jesus that with his parables. A parable is a short fictional story, after all. Upon posing this fact, I've had some people respond, "How do we know the parables weren't real stories?" 

How do we get off into such craziness? Just because a story did not happen in history doesn't mean it's lying or even that it's not true. Good grief. Everyone knows it isn't something that happened in history. No one is deceived! Fictional stories teach us all kinds of truths. The story Nathan the prophet told David wasn't a story that actually happened, but it told a truth so powerfully that David repented. 

4. It's worth remembering that all these debates were our version of the Jewish traditions of the elders. Like good rabbis, holiness folk debated what made you unclean and what didn't. When VCRs came out, I heard that holiness folk debated whether you could have a TV if you didn't watch anything but good videos using a VCR. For example, if you only used the TV to watch Gaither videos, was it ok to have the equipment then? Was the machine intrinsically unclean or did the things you watch on it make it unclean? Sounds a lot like Romans 14.

Sunday meals at camp meetings were a wonderful example of holiness "Mishnah" (the name for the collection of Jewish oral traditions on keeping the Law first written down about AD200). On the one hand, you weren't supposed to buy or sell on Sundays. But you wanted people to drive in from all over to come to Sunday worship. How would they eat if they didn't know anyone with a cabin there?

The solution was a "free will offering." You were allowed to give on Sunday -- it wasn't actually buying a meal or selling one. So a man would sit there and take "donations" (with a suggested amount). Wesleyan guilt did the rest. People gave a donation for their meals that, coincidentally, was what they would otherwise have been charged.

Another important concept I already mentioned was to "abstain from all appearance of evil." This idea came from the King James of 1 Thessalonians 5:22. The verse was taken to mean that you should not do anything that even could be interpreted as doing the wrong thing. For example, if someone sees you go into the cinema, you might be going to see Cinderella, but someone might think you're going in to see something seedy or violent. 

"Abstaining from the appearance of evil" meant not going at all so no one would even think you were going to the movies to watch something bad. The same with owning a TV. You didn't want to tempt yourself to watch something bad, and the very association of the TV with bad things meant you shouldn't have one.

Or if you go into a restaurant that has a bar (like Applebees), someone might think that you are going in to drink even if you aren't (see also 1 Cor. 8:10). Bowling alleys were frowned on because people smoked a lot in there, and they didn't seem like the right kind of people. People might think you were smoking or drinking, so don't go so they don't see an "appearance" of you doing evil. In more recent times, many bowling alleys have become less smokey, and it was interesting to think of my dad going bowling with other people from his church in Lakeland in retirement.

Of course, 1 Thessalonians 5:22 didn't actually mean anything like this. A better translation would be "Stay away from every form of evil." The idea is to abstain from every kind of evil not anything that even looks like it might be evil.

5. In contrast to all the "traditions of the elders" that were part of my holiness background, there actually is a good deal of biblical teaching on the Sabbath. Exodus 20:8-11 told the Israelites to set the Sabbath day apart as holy. What did that mean? It meant not to work on the Sabbath (20:9). No one in your household was supposed to work either (20:10).

Not working on the Sabbath was a big deal in much of the Old Testament. A man gets stoned to death in Numbers 15 for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Nehemiah 10 and 13 give stern commands to Israel not to buy or sell on the Sabbath.

It is fascinating to me that, today, everyone in my Wesleyan circles believes that observing a Sabbath is important but 1) it doesn't necessarily matter which day it is, 2) it is often associated with setting aside a day of worship more than a day of rest (although there has been a "rest" movement in recent decades), and 3) it doesn't usually involve any prohibition on buying or selling. Given how many rules I grew up with around the Sabbath -- and my own struggle through them -- I find these contemporary practices hermeneutically sloppy.

6. First, Sunday is never equated with the Sabbath in Scripture. That is to say, Christians are not keeping the Old Testament Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath, when we worship or set aside Sunday. The Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists are half right. I have always said that the Seventh Day Adventists are often right about something they observe in the biblical text. They're just wrong in the application. They find minority texts and then go with them instead of the ones the majority of Christians have focused on for two thousand years.

Sunday is the Lord's Day. It is the day that Christians gather together to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. Every Sunday is a little Easter. John of Patmos had his vision on the Lord's Day (Rev. 1:10). As far as I can tell, it was a work day in the New Testament. I picture some early Christians meeting at dawn on the Lord's Day, and I picture local assemblies meeting in the evening for a meal together (the Lord's supper, cf. 1 Cor. 11:17-34).

Since the Bible itself never transfers or equates Sunday to the Sabbath, this is an "outside the Bible" interpretation. It is a Puritan development in recent centuries. It is a piece of modern Mishnah, a modern tradition of the elders. The early church fathers did not consider the Jewish Sabbath obligatory (Didache, Justin Martyr) or even rejected it (e.g., Epistle of Barnabas). As we will see, the New Testament did not consider it obligatory either, especially for Gentile believers.

Equating the two reflects a common pattern among Christians where we ascribe something we practice to Scripture when it isn't actually stated in Scripture. It reflects an unreflective of reading of the Bible where we insert our assumptions into the text when the text doesn't state them. We "glue" pieces of the Bible together and say they're the Bible when in fact we are providing the glue from outside the Bible, from our traditions or our minds.

7. So should we follow the Seventh Day Adventists and start meeting on Saturdays, the seventh day of the week? ...