Of Standards and Sabbaths, or "Why the OPC doesn't like me"

"VII. As it is of the law of nature, that, in general, a due proportion of time be set apart for the worship of God; so, in his Word, by a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment, binding all men in all ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in seven for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto him: which, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, was the last day of the week; and, from the resurrection of Christ, was changed into the first day of the week, which in Scripture is called the Lord's Day, and is to be continued to the end of the world as the Christian Sabbath.
VIII. This Sabbath is to be kept holy unto the Lord when men, after a due preparing of their hearts, and ordering of their common affairs beforehand, do not only observe an holy rest all the day from their own works, words, and thoughts about their wordly employments and recreations; but also are taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of his worship, and in the duties of necessity and mercy."~ WCF XXI:7-8

 "Now it happened that He went through the grain fields on the Sabbath; and as they went His disciples began to pluck the heads of grain.  And the Pharisees said to Him, 'Look, why do they do what is not lawful on the Sabbath?' But He said to them, 'Have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry, he and those with him:  how he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the showbread, which is not lawful to eat except for the priests, and also gave some to those who were with him?^'  And He said to them, 'The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.  Therefore the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.”~Mark 2:23-28"


103.  "What does God require in the fourth commandment?"
"In the first place, God wills that the ministry of the Gospel and schools be maintained, and that I, especially on the day of rest, diligently attend church to learn the Word of God, to use the holy sacraments, to call publicly upon the Lord, and to give Christian alms. In the second place, that all the days of my life I rest from my evil works, allow the Lord to work in me by His Spirit, and thus begin in this life the everlasting Sabbath."~Heidelberg Cathechism, Lord's Day 38, question 103.

   As prior posts here should be sufficient to demonstrate, the proprietor of this blog is pro-confessional.  Specifically, yours truly holds the confessions of the reformation to be largely representative of the holistic teaching of Scripture.  Moreover, while this is decidedly a blog promoting sola scriptura, e.g., the idea that Holy Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice for the Christian believer, it is diametrically opposed to the more recent practice of "solo scriptura", otherwise known as "me and my Bible under a tree".  Radical egalitarianism, willful ignorance of history or its relevance to our day, and rejection of (fallible) church authority have been absent from the honor roll here, and will remain absent.  However, all of these are one side of a dual error.

   Phillip Schaff, in the opening of his work on the creeds of Christendom, wrote that elevation of creeds and confessions to an unhealthy or imbalanced level of exaltation was "fundamentally Romanizing...[and] a species of idolatry."  I believe creeds, confessions and doctrinal statements to be vital to the life of the local church and even the individual believer, and would adhere to the notion that they function as hermeneutical guidelines and teaching tools.  However, I do not believe in binding the consciences of men by demanding that laymen in a given local church setting should be expecting to cling in slavish obedience to a specific confession or catechism.  (The issue becomes more complex for pastors in denominations where they are expected to uphold a symbol verbatim, which is why I doubt the possibility of my becoming a minister in say, the OPC).  Still less do I feel that such laymen should be subjected to the yoke of a man, or set of men's, interpretation of that standard.  This post is to demonstrate a specific area where I feel that this unjust binding is taking place, not to besmirch the Christianity of venerable authors of confessional standards, but to demonstrate the primacy and importance of a true and vibrant doctrine of sola scriptura (with it's attendant healthy skepticism) in the everyday life of the church.

   Above I have listed three texts I want to briefly examine, all of them touching on the nature and function of the Sabbath for Christians in the covenant in Christ's blood.  This is a broad issue, and it is beyond the scope of one post to go into each of the relevant substrata addressed in the passages above.  For the purposes of this post, I will be assuming the following: A) the "traditional", which is to say Westminsterian, understanding of the threefold division of the law (which has been addressed here before, and will be again).  B) That at least some elements of the covenant administration of the Sabbath have changed, including the shift from Saturday to Sunday (this is not an Adventist-apologetics post, although there is creative space here for one in the future).  C) That the covenant in Christ's blood may alter, shift or abolish whole elements of the covenant of grace present before the earthly ministry of Christ, but that explicit Scriptural revelation is necessary to demonstrate that such has taken place.

   Beginning with WCF XXI, there is much about the paragraph to like.  I concur with the perpetuity of at least some elements of the Sabbath command, bound up as it is with the eternality and immutability of the Decalogue, which is all classic threefold division stuff.  As I said, I concur with the change of day, insofar as that goes in it's limited confessional treatment.  However, I pause to ask how many people have ever, for "a whole day", rested from their works, words and thoughts (!) about worldly employments and recreations.  It must be pointed out that such passages as Christ's healing miracles on the Sabbath are seemingly, at least in some vague way, exegetically headed off at the pass with the passage about "works of necessity and mercy".  However, there are, to me, two issues outstanding.  1) Given the seriousness of the moral law, and the historical seriousness of Sabbath-breaking in the OT (see for example Numbers 15:32-36), can we safely draw the specificity and rigor of the exact wording of the confession from Scripture?  2) Does the Bible bear out the "one-to-one equivalence" of the Christian Sabbath to that of the OT that is implied in the language of the WCF?

   The entire address of the Sabbath in the Decalogue itself comprises three primary elements: 1) the general command to remember to keep the day holy/set apart.  2)The specific command to do all labor six days and do no labor on the seventh.  3) The grounds for the command, that is that the Sabbath is patterned after God's activities in creation, and thereby tied to the creature/Creator relationship itself.  This third point is a primary basis for asserting the perpetuity of at least the essence of the Sabbath command, since the grounds for the command, like the rest of the moral law, transcends covenant administration and is linked to God's rights over creation generally (for a parallel, note the condemnation and penalogy regarding murder, and the grounds thereof, in God's pronouncing sentence over Cain).

   Note both what is present and what is absent, relative to WCF XXI.  First, working six days is issued in the imperative and without distinction from the rest of the command, yet the strictest of Presbyterian Sabbatarians have not typically said that Christians must be gainfully employed six days out of the year.  True, there is room for saying that the general purpose of the command is to affix a minimum portion of rest rather than an exact amount of work, but given that it is vital to the Westminster Sabbatarian position that the administration of the commandment change only in the day, this befits a non-WCF hermeneutic better than one in keeping with the Divines.  This will be important in our exposition of Jesus in Mark 2 in a moment.  Secondly, nothing about thoughts or words is mentioned in the commandment, nor in fact are thoughts or words mentioned in any Sabbath command in the remainder of the OT.  Third, and in a similar vein, there is no mention of "recreation", even that of the "worldly" variety in any of the Sabbath commands of either testament.  Regarding these latter two points, rigorous Sabbatarians could appeal to the internal admonishment to keep the day holy or set apart, but when considering the specificity of the claims made by the confession, a mere argument from silence will not do.  When the Decalogue does not command it, the sheer volume of expectation placed on Sabbath-keeping in the original confessional language, given the gravity of the commandment, may appear to be tying on heavy burdens in the sense of Matthew 23:4.  But to merely demonstrate the specific confessional language does not occur in the OT does not fit a sufficient burden of proof.  Especially in light of the traditional commitment of the people of God to keeping Sabbath, what we require is specific New Testament language indicating that the covenant in Christ's blood does not require abstinence from recreation, "worldly" words and works, or (in the case of some who teach on a minimal alteration of administration on this point) overmuch physical exertion.  It is that NT proof that I set forward to provide.

   From the above exchange in Mark 2 between Christ and the Pharisees, we can glean several important Truths about the Sabbath and Sabbath-keeping.  Firstly, while Christ is making one of his numerous claims to the lineage and throne of David here, he is also making application that extends beyond the isolated incident at hand and encompasses more than just heads of grain, and more people than merely himself or his apostles.  If the greatest king of Israel had committed what would have been perceived by the Pharisees as a greater Sabbath violation, in a more rigorous time of application of the commandment, we can reason from the lesser to the greater.  The Pharisees, who commanded meticulous rule-following governing every aspect of life on the Sabbath (a trend which one can witness today in rabbinic Judaism), would not have accepted the apostles actions here as being an act of necessity or mercy.  This holds true even on the level of David's requisition of the showbread or of Jesus' healing miracles (although in their blindness, they opposed all three.)  It is important to recognize in this that Jesus kept the moral law perfectly, and was not advocating dishonoring the Sabbath, but was instead showing no regard for the "rule-following" pattern advocated by the scribes and Pharisees.  Christ also circumvents the accumulated tradition surrounding the Sabbath and returns to the creature/Creator interaction nature of the commandment I previously alluded to.  If, in fact, the Sabbath is made for man and not the reverse, than Sabbath-keeping, while important to honor God's law, is not about formalism or lists of don'ts, but at least partially about rest for man, even if that doesn't always look like what is expected.  Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, as True God and True Man, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and He dictates what it will look like.  This teaching, by itself, does not demonstrate a specific doctrine of the Sabbath in the New Covenant, but it does leave the door open to a change in understanding of it, perhaps even a radical one.  Apostolic Christianity would provide additional epistolary evidence for just such a shift in understanding.

   In Colossians 2:16-17, Paul writes "So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths,  which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ."  This passage is key to the issue, for obvious reasons, and interpretations exist along a spectrum ranging from the idea that it supports the total abrogation of the Sabbath command (reflected in NCT and to a certain extent in the well-known work by DA Carson, "From Sabbath to Lord's Day") to the full Sabbatarian perspective.  Dr. Joseph Pipa, in the wonderful little book "Perspectives on the Sabbath", hypothesizes that only "ceremonial" sabbaths, or even non-christian religious festivals are in view, but this ignores the narrative flow of Colossians 2 in the overall context of Pauline theology.  Paul has just concluded admonishing the audience of his letter not to abide by dietary restrictions pressed on them by the proto-gnostics they were dealing with at Colossae, which ties into his statements regarding no longer keeping ceremonial food laws.  This comes on the heels of references to the "circumcision done without hands",(vs. 11) analogous to baptism and the new birth in regeneration, which is another reference to the ceremonial code's abrogation in Christ.  Bolting all of this together is the assertion that "the requirements which were against us" have been nailed to the cross. (vs. 14)  While there were clearly some pagan or Hellenized influences at work in the heresy at Collossae, all of these references show close ties to the kinds of language Paul used with the potential victims of the Judaizers at Galatia.  Sabbaths, festivals, food laws and other ceremonial, external religious observances have been swallowed up in the "substance, which is Christ".

   Some might point out that this lays the framework for the NCT position of the abrogation of the Sabbath, but as mentioned above, the eternality of the Decalogue and the links in both testaments between the Sabbath rest and the creative decree make this untenable.  However, an analogy can be drawn between the administration of the Sabbath being altered for Christians, in much more than in a mere change in the day of observance, and the change of administration in circumcision, which has been subsumed in the "circumcision done without hands" and its covenant sign, infant baptism.  For Pipa or other WCF Sabbatarians, denial of this analogy would undercut one of the major lynchpins of Reformed paedobaptist practice!  While Jesus never abrogates the Sabbath, or recommends its violation, in the gospels, whereas circumcision as a ceremonial practice was done away with by Paul, there is room in the passages we have explored for a "middle way", in which the essence of the Sabbath command is observed without a set list of forbidden "thoughts, words and works" as in the WCF.  (It is worth mentioning in passing that there is great disagreement within the WCF camp as to what exactly such a list would constitute.)  

   Such a "middle way" may be alluded to in Hebrews 4:1-9, in which the "rest" in which the elect enter into in passing from death into life, the "rest" which Christ enters into in ascending to the right hand of the Father, the "rest" of passing from the wilderness into Canaan, and the Sabbath rest of the Decalogue are switched between rapidly so as to be functionally equated by the author of Hebrews.  The "rest" that remains for the people of God in verse 9 is specifically said to be a "sabbatismos".  With this passage taken with the others we have discussed, I would suggest that the date of the Sabbath day of rest has in fact, changed, but in that Christ Himself is the Rest for His people, I believe that the language of the WCF regarding total abstinence from worldly affairs on a specific day of the week is as extraneous as that which Colossians 2 calls "the appearance of wisdom". 

   If the Westminster Standards fall short in having too narrow and fixed a definition of the Christian Sabbath, I feel that the 103rd question of the Heidelberg Catechism above demonstrates a more balanced view.  The answer encapsulates two key portions of Scripture's teaching.  Firstly, the maintenance of the Lord's Day as holy through the learning of the Word and the use of the sacraments, and secondly, the acknowledgment of Christ as our rest through turning from evil works and preparing for the consummation of that rest, not one day out of seven, but "all the days of our lives".  To my mind this says enough without saying too much (and perhaps rescues this blog from the reputation of "confession-bashing").  It is worth pointing out that each section of the Heidelberg is named after a "Lord's Day" of the year, and that the term "Sabbath" is predominantly applied only in Lord's Day 38, to our eternal Sabbath, which is in our union with Christ.

   Hopefully this material will be useful to people who have questions about the Sabbath in the standards, and the issue generally.  Not all answers were forthcoming here, or were intended to be.  Carson's work on the Sabbath, and the "Perspectives" book listed above, as well as Calvin or a solid exposition of the WCF, would all be good places for further reading.  As I post this, we are entering the early hours of the Lord's Day itself, and I hope that each day of your lives remains a sabbatismos for you as a child of God.

~JS