Confessions #4: Paul made Sabbath-keeping optional.

Number 4 in my new series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
2. Try reading the verse before your favorite verse. 
3. Then I read the verses before the prophecies.
x. Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.
_______________________________
1. I grew up with a lot of Sabbath rules. I wasn't rebellious, although it did make Sundays pretty boring for me. We went to church at least twice. As an attention-deficit boy, that was a little torturous, if I am honest.

We didn't "buy or sell" on Sundays, which meant we didn't go out to eat or to the store. Part of why we didn't go to restaurants on Sunday is so that someone else didn't have to work. My dad occaionally got the opportunity to work overtime on weekends. He'd do the Saturdays but not the Sundays as a matter of conviction.

We didn't watch TV on Sundays. My dad felt like he would end up watching football all day if that door was open. So we set the day aside for worship. When Star Wars and E.T. premiered on TV on Sunday nights, I missed them. (I had already missed them at the movies because we didn't go to movies either.)

Sunday was serious, solemn. It was a holy day, set aside, sanctified. That means we didn't throw a football or baseball. I was kicked off a playground at a holiness camp ground once because Sunday was too serious for play.

This was all very normal for me. It was one of many practices that set my family apart from other people. We knew we were a "peculiar people," as Deuteronomy 7:6 in the King James Version says.

There's nothing wrong with any of the practices I mentioned above. As I studied the Bible more and more, though, I realized that these things were really a matter of personal conviction. A deep reading of Scripture won't see them as practices that God requires of his people.

2. Two things began to change my mind on these practices. One is an increasing ability to read the Bible in context, and the second was an openness to listen to the Bible over my tradition.

For example, the most glaring insight is that Sunday isn't the Sabbath. Saturday is and was. There's not a verse in the entire Bible that refers to Sunday as a Sabbath. [1] Sunday is the "Lord's Day," not the Sabbath. In the Bible as in Judaism still today, the Sabbath referred to the period from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday.

There are groups like Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists that have recognized this fact and they do keep Saturday as the Sabbath even today.

Of course, many Christians recognize this fact and will immediately respond, "The specific day is not what's important. What's important is that you set aside a day as your Sabbath." For example, many pastors set aside Monday or another day as their day of rest.

Many other Christians have blurred the Sabbath into a day of worship. So what becomes important is going to church to worship on Sunday. If you do that, they believe, then you have kept the Sabbath.

These are all very interesting (and practical) traditions. There's just one thing about them They're not in the Bible. They are like the traditions of the elders of the Pharisees in Mark 7:1. They are oral traditions that Christians have come up with to explain how they keep the law without exactly keeping the law.

And that's ok. It is fantastic to set aside a day of rest. It is very healthy! It is spectacular to set aside a day of worship! The Lord deserves our worship every moment of every day, and setting aside a day to gather together to worship him is VERY biblical (cf. Heb. 10:25; Rev. 1:10).

3. Here's the thing though. The farther I went into my study of the Bible, the more I let each passage say what it wanted to say. I didn't let myself continue to say, "OK, this verse sounds like it says x, but I can't let it say that because of passage y." I tried to stop "cooking the books," so to speak.

So, consider Colossians 2:16: "Do not let anyone judge you because of food or because of drink or in respect to a feast or a new moon or a Sabbath." What is this verse saying?

If I let the verse speak, it seems to say that the non-Jewish Colossians (Gentile Christians, in other words) should not feel pressure from anyone in the city to observe the Jewish food laws, festival days, or Sabbaths. That is to say, Colossians does not consider Sabbath-observance binding on Gentile believers!

If you were in doubt, let's go to Romans 14, a chapter that was very important to me on my spiritual pilgrimage. It says, "There is the one who considers one day above another and another who considers every day [the same]. Let each person be fully convinced in his or her own mind. The one who observes the day observes it for the Lord" (Rom. 14:5-6).

Verses like these are sometimes difficult for us, not because they are hard to understand, but because they wreak havoc with what we think we know. Paul here indicates that keeping the Jewish Sabbath was a matter of personal conviction, not a universal requirement. Some Christians would believe God requires it of them. Others would not.

Why is this so striking? It is striking for several reasons. For example, this is one of the Ten Commandments. "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Exod. 20:8). And Paul says you don't have to keep it. I think he especially had Gentile Christians in mind. I suspect he and other Jewish Christians continued to observe Saturday as a Sabbath.

Let that sink it. Not only does he not consider it an absolute. He does not even consider it a universal requirement. By definition, he puts it in the category of the relative, a "relativist" categorization. That's really the category in which personal convictions go. It's wrong for me, but it might not be wrong for someone else. Paul says that, on this issue, what is important is that you are fully convinced in your own mind (Rom. 14:5).

There's no way around it. That's what he says.

I was talking to a family member about this once and the response was, "But Exodus 20:11 bases the Sabbath law in creation" (cf. Gen. 2:2-3). 

"I know," I responded. "But it doesn't seem to matter to Paul."

4. Let me give it to you straight. Despite our traditions, despite what makes sense to us, despite the fact that it is one of Ten Commandments, rooted in the creation story, despite all these things... the New Testament does not consider the Sabbath to be binding on Christians.

That was a huge admission for me as a Bible know-it-all. When you listen to the biblical text, it often doesn't want to be read the way my tradition wants it to be read. Then I have to decide whether my idea of the Bible is more important to me than the real Bible itself.

[1] I did hear an ingenious argument that the Greek of verses like Matthew 28:1 changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. A wooden reading of the Greek is "Now after the sabbaths, at the dawning of the first of sabbaths." Some have argued that this verse changed the old Sabbath to Sunday as the first of the new Sabbaths. Brilliant!

But of course it is this sort of game-playing with truth that caused me to have a bit of a faith crisis. The expression "first of sabbaths" was an idiom for "first day of the week." It existed before Easter, and it existed after Easter. This interpretation is just a very sophisticated version of ripping a phrase out of its historical context. The meaning of these phrases was "Now after the Sabbath, at the dawning of the first day of the week," which is how pretty much every version translates it.

Sunday Cafeteria at Camp Meeting...

I was remembering this morning the old practice at Frankfort Camp meeting of taking a "free will offering" for meals on Sunday. Since we didn't believe in buying or selling on the Sabbath (understood to be Sunday), they didn't believe in buying or selling food on Sunday during camp meeting. On the other hand, people had to eat, didn't they?

The answer was a solution the ancient Pharisees would have been proud of (and you have to know that I don't mean that with the bias many would--the Pharisees were not the stereotypical boogie men they are often made out to be--they were just good at finding ways to do things within the rules rather than just making exceptions in certain circumstances).  The people who worked in the kitchen were volunteers, so no one was paid for working on Sunday. Meanwhile, the Sunday meal was a free will offering. The normal amount was posted, but not required.

So in theory, you could have eaten for free on Sunday. But with conscience clear, most people just paid the suggested amount.  And to be honest, they would have felt like they were stealing if they hadn't. :-)

Conflict over Values 1

I've been dripping through a chapter on the conflict Jesus got into with various leaders around him.  My last post on the subject finished a section I'm calling "Conflict over Authority."  Now I want to start a second section called "Conflict over Values."
___________
Jesus' first conflict in Mark is about whether he has the authority to forgive sins. His second conflict follows almost immediately. Some scribes and Pharisees have problems with the fact that Jesus accepts an invitation to eat with many tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:14-17).

I've already explored Jesus' interest in the lost sheep of Israel in chapter 3. In this one, I'm interested in the fact that Jesus' values got him into conflict.  One of Jesus' values was that people trump rules for their own sake. So it was more important to Jesus to reclaim the tax collectors and others of Israel who had gone astray than to worry about Levitical purity rules. The Parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates these priorities as well--saving a life trumps purity rules.

Another story in Mark 2 takes it even further. If redeeming the lost trumped the rules and saving a life trumped the rules, Jesus interaction over plucking grain showed that even basic hunger could trump the rules for him. In Mark 2:23-28, he and his disciples are passing through some grain fields on the Sabbath, on Saturday. Some Pharisees criticize this followers for violating the fourth commandment, "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping in holy" (Exod. 20:8).

What is truly interesting about Jesus' response is that he does not say what we might expect.  He does not say, "You Pharisees don't understand what this commandment is really about." What he does is tell about an incident where a high priest gave holy food to David and his men to eat, something that was only lawful for priests to eat (Mark 2:26). His point is that it was appropriate on that occasion to make an exception to the rule.

We should probably keep in mind that there is an implicit comparison here between David the king and Jesus the messiah. Jesus may not be saying that just anyone is allowed to pluck grain on the Sabbath. He may be saying that he is about to be king just as David was about to be king, and therefore it is appropriate to make an exception. Jesus is "Lord even of the Sabbath" (2:27). His authority trumps even that of  Scripture and the Ten Commandments.

But before we go any further, we should probably be a little more precise about exactly what "rules" we are talking about...

6.1 Loving God

I didn't quite finish the Jesus chapter on Jesus' followers but wanted to keep moving rather than go for days trying to get inspired to finish it. So I move on to the next chapter, on the Sermon on the Mount and some of Jesus' miscellaneous teaching.
____________
The three Synoptic Gospels all present a scene during the last week of Jesus' earthly mission when he is asked what the greatest commandment is.  His answer, while not unheard of at the time, has provided the cornerstone of Christian ethics for the last two thousand years.  "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matt 22:37-40).

It is indeed possible to see all the teaching Jesus gave while he was on earth as the working out of these principles into everyday life. These are the two great absolutes of Christian living.  For almost any other specific guideline in the Bible, we can think of an exception, a situation where a higher principle can trump another one. But these are the highest values--love God and love neighbor. They never come into conflict with each other, and there is no situation where God would want us to make an exception to the rule.

What does it mean to love God or to love your neighbor? I proposed in the previous chapter that to follow Jesus means to submit to his will over any competing authority or interest.  Loving God with all one's being means that God's will takes precedent over family or any other human authority.

But we must be careful not to trick ourselves into thinking God's will conflicts in any way with the love of our neighbor. Justice can actually be an expression of love, when we are trying to steer our children in the right direction or when we are protecting society from someone who is dangerous. In the end, most of us are not even in a position as individuals to administer justice. But we are constantly in a position to show love to others.

The danger is when we use the command to love God as an excuse not to love our neighbor. For example, some might say that loving God means to hate homosexuals and thus that in this instance the command to love God trumps the love of our "enemy." This is nothing less than a trick of the Devil, using the idea of God's will as an excuse to get out of doing God's will, which is to love even our enemy. Jesus would have none of it.

Others have a tendency to turn the love ethic into rules.  Loving God means to follow a set of dos and don'ts and to follow them without exception. But to reduce loving God to a set of rules is to go against the very example of Jesus himself.  It was not his style to treat rules as exceptionless absolutes, but to make exceptions to general rules because loving people in concrete ways was more important than always following the rules.

The best example is probably when his disciples were picking some grain on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Some Pharisees complained to Jesus that they were breaking the Ten Commandments, working on the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-24). What is interesting is that Jesus doesn't deny it.  He doesn't say, "That's not working on the Sabbath."  He doesn't say, "The Sabbath is about worship, not about working."

What he says is that there is a time to make exceptions to the rules because loving people concretely often trumps the rules, in this case the Sabbath rule. The example he gives is a time when one of the high priests gave David and his fighting men some of the sacred bread from the sanctuary, something that was completely inappropriate because it belonged only to the priests (Lev. 24:9). There is no wiggling out of this conclusion because Jesus himself said it was unlawful (Mark 2:26). Jesus' point is clear: in concrete situations, loving others will sometimes take precedence over keeping rules, even when we're talking about one of the Ten Commandments!

What does it mean to love our neighbor? ...

Ignatius, the Sabbath, and the Lord's Day

I needed to create a sample of "church historical precedents" for seminary classes.  This isn't as polished as I'd like, but time has run out...
___________
Introduction
Ignatius of Antioch was bishop of the city of Antioch mentioned in Acts 13:1. It was located in the uppermost part of Palestine in Syria, where modern day Turkey suddenly juts out to the west. Around the year AD107 (González, 41), Ignatius was tried and condemned to death by Roman authorities in Antioch. He left behind seven letters to various churches and individuals, written on the course of his journey from Antioch to Rome, where he was presumably martyred.

In his letter to the Romans, he urges the church there not to try to rescue him from death (Ign. Rom. 4.1), perhaps by bribery or some other means. There he also tells us that he is being escorted by “wild beasts” or “leopards” (5.1; cf. 1 Cor. 15:32). In transit, he also writes the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Trallia, Philadelphia, Smyrna, and to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna.

Judaizing Gentile Believers
The evidence of the New Testament is very clear that a significant number of believers in the early church insisted a male Gentile must be circumcised and convert to Judaism in order to be saved and fully become a Christ-follower (cf. Brown and Meier, 2004, p. 2-3). For example, while Paul may have considered these “Judaizing” individuals in Galatia to be “false brothers” (Gal. 2:4), they clearly did not view themselves this way (cf. Acts 15:1-5). His opponents were believers, perhaps even missionaries like him (cf. Dunn, 1993, pp. 9-11).

It would be inappropriate to think of such individuals only in terms of Jewish believers in Christ. Even Galatians never specifies whether Paul’s opponents are Jewish or Gentile, although it perhaps makes most sense to think of them as natural born Jews (cf. Gal. 6:13). The writings of Ignatius probably imply that some Gentiles advocated following the Jewish particulars of the Law even into the second century.

In Philadelphians 6.1, Ignatius says, “But if anyone interpret Judaism to you do not listen to him; for it is better to hear Christianity from the circumcised than Judaism from the uncircumcised.” On the one hand, the most natural way of taking this comment is that those who are pushing certain “Jewish” practices are uncircumcised (so also Robinson, 2009, 122). We are then left to debate exactly what it might mean to “interpret Judaism.” We can at least make an argument that Ignatius’ comments relate as much to the situation in his home city of Antioch as it does to something he might know about the city of Philadelphia.

His letter to the Magnesians has a similar comment. “Be not led astray by strange doctrines or by old fables which are profitless. For if we are living until now according to Judaism, we confess that we have not received grace” (Magn. 8.1). In Magnesians 10.3, Ignatius even goes so far as to say that “it is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism.” Clearly there must have been Christians in Ignatius’ day who strongly advocated the importance of keeping elements of Jewish practice while probably falling just short of advocating circumcision.

The Lord’s Day not the Sabbath
The most concrete reference Ignatius makes to such a Jewish practice is in Magnesians 9.1: “If then they who walked in ancient customs came to a new hope, no longer living for the Sabbath, but for the Lord’s Day, on which also our life sprang up through him and his death.” Groups like the Seventh Day Adventists who believe Christians should still observe the Sabbath on Saturday tend to reinterpret this passage (e.g., Bacciochi, 1977, p. 213-23; Thiel, 2010). For example, Bob Thiel suggests that kyriakē refers to the Lord’s “way” rather than to the Lord’s day.

Such attempts however are clearly motivated by prior theological commitments rather than from the most natural reading of the text (e.g., Schoedel, 1985, pp. 123 n.3). On the one hand, it is true that a verb sabbatizo is used rather than the noun for Sabbath (e.g., Thiel, 2010). However, the cumulative case that it refers to observance of the Jewish Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday is strong.

First, we have the background context of Philadelphians 6 and the immediate literary context of Magnesians 8 pointing us toward interpreting sabbatizo in relation to a specifically Jewish practice. Second, it is fairly clear from Revelation 1:10 that the kyriakē is a day, not a way. John of Revelation is in the Spirit on a particular day. It thus makes sense that to sabbatizo is to do something different from living according to the kyriakē, a different day. Finally, the allusion to the resurrection, “on which also our life sprang up through him and his death” (9.1), confirms a reference to Sunday, since it is clear in all the gospels that Jesus rose on the first day of the week (e.g., Matt. 28:1).

Conclusion
We conclude that tension continued to exist over whether Christians should observe the Jewish Sabbath or not into the second century AD. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, not only opposes observance of the Jewish Sabbath, but his language is very pejorative toward such individuals, who apparently were Gentile rather than Jewish believers in his context. His language treats them as marginal within the church. Further, Ignatius does not reinterpret the Sabbath as Sunday. He dispenses with it entirely as a Jewish practice. In this regard, Ignatius seems to be in strong continuity with both Romans 14:5 and Colossians 2:16.

Works Cited and Bibliography
Bacciocchi, Samuele. (1977). From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity. Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University.

Brown, Raymond and Meier, John. (2004). Antioch and Rome: Cradles of New Testament Christianity. 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist.

Carson, D. A., ed. (1982). From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical and Theological Investigation. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Dunn, James D. G. (1993). The Epistle to the Galatians. London: A & C Black.

González, Justo. (2009). The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day. Peabody: MA: Prince.

Robinson, Thomas A. (2009). Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways: Early Jewish-Christian Relations. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

Schoedel, William R. (1985). Ignatius of Antioch. Philadelphia: Fortress.

Thiel, Bob. (retrieved October 26, 2010). “The Didache, Ignatius, and the Sabbath,” http://www.cogwriter.com/ignatius.htm.