Should Christians Keep the Sabbath?

 

What is the Sabbath? Traditionally, it is the practice of dedicating a day of rest devoted to God on the seventh day of the week (Sabbath literally means “seventh”), as modeled in God’s work of creation and commanded under the Law of Moses (Ex. 20; Deut. 5). Throughout church history, there have been various ways how Christians have regarded the Sabbath, with most emphasizing that the legal requirements of the Law of Moses are no longer binding, but that if one so chooses, the Sabbath may be continued as an act of love and devotion rather than of legal observance.

Evidence from the Gospels: The Gospels show the Sabbath as being re-oriented in its meaning toward the person of Christ, to be fulfilled in him:

-        Jesus in the Gospels – Jesus and his disciples observe the Sabbath-laws just like any godly Jews, since the New Covenant has not yet been established by Jesus’s death. On the other hand, Jesus is regularly presented as pushing the boundaries of normal practice in his Sabbath-keeping, re-orienting its meaning around his own identity (e.g., calling himself “Lord of the Sabbath”). Jesus reinterprets Sabbath practices from an emphasis on simply keeping the Law to an emphasis on pursuing God’s created intent for humanity—“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Ultimately, Jesus’s “rest” on the seventh day of his passion-week—when he was lying in the grave—sums up the Christological significance of the Sabbath, as the event to which the Old Testament pointed.

-        Jesus’s Fulfillment of the Law – The command to observe the Sabbath is foundational to the Old Testament covenant with Israel, given to Moses in the Ten Commandments. In the Gospels, Jesus is said to fulfill the Law, not abolish it (Matt. 5:17). In practice, this means that the commands of the Law of Moses are considered binding on Christians where they reflect the character of God (since Jesus is himself the Son of God), but the practical laws intended to regulate Israelite culture are only binding insofar as they convey unchanging moral principles. For example, the laws relating to Temple sacrifices are fulfilled by Christ and are no longer binding on Christians, but they do continue to inform us about foundational moral principles regarding sin and atonement. In Christian tradition, the Sabbath is usually thought to be one of these practical laws. It tells us valuable things about who God is and who we are, but its letter-of-the-law practice is no longer binding on Christians.

o   But what about the Ten Commandments? The position outlined above surprises some people, as it appears to negate one of the Ten Commandments, but remember that the Ten Commandments were given as part of the Mosaic covenant, which we are no longer directly under. This does not mean, however, that the other rules in the Ten Commandments are somehow optional, because most of them are moral laws which reflect the character of God, and so they represent a standard of unchanging reality. Because God is still God and sin is still sin, murder and adultery and so on continue to be prohibited in Christian practice, but the Sabbath was a command specifically oriented toward the religious practices of ancient Israel, and was not required of God’s followers who were not under the Law of Moses (like all of the great men and women of faith in Genesis). In the same way that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were never asked to keep the Sabbath, neither are we who are under the New Covenant. Nevertheless, we must remember that while Christ fulfills the Law, he does not abolish it, so while we’re not obligated to a letter-of-the-law observance of the Sabbath, we should still seek out and apply the principles behind it.

Other New Testament Evidence: The New Testament shows that the idea of Sabbath now applies to the Christian’s whole life in Christ (see Heb. 4), and that Christians were not expected to keep the Sabbath laws of the Old Covenant (see Acts 15, 21; Col. 2).

-        In Acts 15:19-21, there are only three Law-oriented rules which the apostles require of Gentile converts: to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from the meat of strangled animals or blood, and from sexual immorality. These combine practical laws about food with moral laws, with the idea being that breaking these laws would make Gentile Christians offensive to the Jewish believers in whose company they now live (see v.21). Gentile Christians are not asked to keep the Sabbath; it is not one of the three requirements (see also Acts 21:25).

-        Colossians 2:16-17: “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.”

-        Hebrews 4:9-10 [using the Sabbath allegorically to speak of salvation in Christ]: “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.”

Evidence from the Early Church: It appears that early Christians considered the Sabbath to have been fulfilled in Jesus, and they no longer practiced the Sabbath laws of the Old Testament. Instead, they saw life in Christ as an obligation to a “perpetual Sabbath,” ordered around refraining from sin and resting in God’s salvific work on their behalf. They did not see this as a relaxation of the Sabbath ordinance, but, if anything, an expansion of it.

-        Ignatius of Antioch (late 1^st, early 2^nd century, a student of the apostles): “If, then, those who had lived according to ancient practices came to the newness of hope, no longer keeping the Sabbath but living in accordance with the Lord’s day, on which our life also arose […] how can we possibly [do less]?”

-        Justin Martyr (mid-2^nd century): “The new law requires you to keep a perpetual Sabbath. However, you [a Jew] are idle for one day, and suppose you are godly. […] If there is a thief among you, let him cease to be so […]. Then he has kept the true Sabbath of God.”

-        Irenaeus (mid-late 2^nd century): “The Sabbaths taught that we should continue day by day in God’s service […], abstaining from all avarice. […] However, man was not justified by these things. This fact is evident, for Abraham himself—without the observance of Sabbaths—‘believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’”

-        Tertullian (late 2^nd, early 3^rd century): “Let the one who contends that the Sabbath is still to be observed as a balm of salvation prove to us that in times past righteous men (like Enoch, Noah, or Melchizedek) kept the Sabbath and were thereby made friends of God. […] Just as the abolition of fleshly circumcision and of the old Law is demonstrated as having been consummated at its specific times, so also the observance of the Sabbath is demonstrated to have been temporary. […] We Christians understand that we still more should observe a Sabbath from all [unbefitting works]. This is not only every seventh day, but at all times.”

-        Apostolic Constitutions (3^rd century): “God had given the commandment to keep the Sabbath [to Moses], by resting on it for the sake of meditating on the laws. However, he has now commanded us to meditate on the law of creation and of providence every day. […] There is only one Sabbath to be observed by you during the whole year—that of our Lord’s burial. On that day, men should keep a fast, but not a festival.”

How Should Christians Keep the Sabbath?

1.)   First, recognize that in Christ, we have been given rest from the works of the Law, and are no longer tasked with earning our favor with God by means of following a checklist of rules. Rather, we are saved by grace, and we rest in Christ’s work on our behalf.

2.)   Second, seek to keep a “perpetual Sabbath”—leaving the works of the world behind and devoting yourself to God every day of the week.

3.)   Third, while not required of Christians, it is helpful to recognize that Sabbath was given to God’s people as a blessing, and that we can grow in a healthy and well-ordered devotional life by choosing to practice it—not because we have to, but because it is the gift of a good and loving God. As such, Christians have developed a variety of Sabbath practices, from devoting a “Sabbath hour” in each day to choosing a particular day, like Saturday or Sunday.

a.      For most, the best practice is to set aside one day per week if you are able—and preferably the seventh day—to put aside work, distractions, and other obligations, and carve out intentional time to spend in the presence of the Lord. While Christians are not required to do this, doing it on the actual Sabbath helps us order our lives according to the biblical cycles of both God’s creation and Jesus’s passion. For Christians, a continuing practice of honoring the Sabbath on the seventh day also helps prepare our hearts and minds for worship on the next day, Sunday.

b.     Just remember that if you choose to keep Sabbath this way, it is a gift of God and not a law that earns you favor or merit. There is a danger of sliding into a “works-righteousness” faith, and we need to be vigilant about that. Do not fall into the trap of judging others for not keeping the same kind of Sabbath you do, and also don’t judge yourself too harshly if your own practice of Sabbath fails to live up to your hopes and expectations for yourself.

Is the Story of the Virgin Birth a Historical Fraud?

Of all the traditional doctrines of Christianity, none elicits quite as much eye-rolling scorn from "the cultured despisers of religion" (as Schleiermacher put it) as the story of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. This is not surprising; to the crude and disenchanted minds of modern skeptics, anything that calls upon the supernatural is a target for derision--and even more so a supernatural act that turns the messiest, most carnal of human experiences (conception and birth) into something unutterably holy. A Christian can easily (and rightly) reply that with God, all things are possible. But to many doubters, the virgin birth smacks too much of the kind of religious fabulism that was common all across the ancient Mediterranean world. Why, then, should Christians believe the Gospels' story of the virgin birth? 

I recently preached on the prophecy of the virgin birth found in Isaiah 7:14. There I noted that the Hebrew word used, 'almah, was not a word that specifically meant "virgin" in the same way that our word does. Rather, it means "young woman," used of a woman of marriageable age until the birth of her first child. There is another word for an unbetrothed young woman, still in her father's care, which one might more readily go for if "virgin" is specifically what was meant. For this reason, some skeptics suggest that the Isaiah 7 passage was simply meant to refer to a contemporaneous event--the birth of a baby into either Isaiah's family or the royal household in Isaiah's time--but that it held no import for a future messianic figure. The problem with that, however, is that the text clearly implies something stunning is about to happen--indeed, something miraculous, which the birth of an ordinary baby would not fulfill. Further, the candidates often proposed (Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz? Hezekiah?) simply do not match all of the data in the text (the former does not appear to be the first child of its mother, and according to biblical chronologies, the latter would have already been born). Even more, the overriding context of the prophecy, as the prophetic hinge on which the whole section of Isaiah 7-12 turns, suggests a future Messianic connection--Isaiah 9 and 11 especially so.

So why did Isaiah use this particular Hebrew word, if a virgin birth was in view? Importantly, there is no single specific word for "virgin" in ancient Hebrew to call upon, merely the two terms applied to young women of marriageable age--and when one considers this, and Mary as a possible referent, then it immediately becomes clear that 'almah was the correct choice: Mary was betrothed and no longer under her father's care, so she could not have fallen under the semantic range of the other word; and further, in a case like hers, virginity would absolutely have been assumed. The word 'almah itself might lean ever so slightly in this direction, etymologically appearing to refer to a marriageable woman who is somehow "hidden" or "enclosed." All of this is worth knowing, but it still doesn't make for an open-and-shut case that Isaiah 7 makes reference to Jesus and Mary. The Christian argument is bolstered, however, by the fact that the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint (LXX), translates 'almah as parthenos--that is, virgin (at the very least, it leans much more heavily toward that part of the semantic range). This means that two centuries before Christ, the best Jewish textual scholars were interpreting Isaiah 7 as indicating a miraculous, virgin birth. (There's even a charming apocryphal story from later tradition--likely untrue, to be sure--which says that Simeon, of Luke 2 fame, was one of the LXX translators, who was told by an angel that he would remain alive until he saw Isaiah 7 come to pass--which would make him something like a quarter of a millennium old in the Gospel, and which gives some added poignancy, and even a little humor, to his great "Nunc Dimittis" canticle.)

Anyway, after my sermon, I encountered a question relayed from a skeptical family member of one of my parishioners. They enumerated several reasons why a skeptic might legitimately think that the virgin birth story in the Gospels was an early Christian fraud, dreamed up because the Gospel-writers thought (maybe erroneously, thanks to the LXX translation) that the Messiah had to be born of a virgin. Why doesn't Paul mention it? Why isn't it prophesied in other places in the OT? Why do only two of the four Gospels mention it? This got me thinking about the solid textual and historical reasons that Christians have for believing this wild and beautiful story, so I wrote out a few notes in response, which might prove helpful to others, too.

While in strict historical terms, one cannot definitively rule out a possible interpretation of the virgin birth tradition as being an invention of early Christians in response to a misunderstanding of Isaiah 7:14, there are several quite good reasons for thinking otherwise:

 Old Testament foreshadowings: While only explicitly prophesied in Isaiah 7, there are several other possible allusions to the virgin birth throughout the Old Testament.

-   These begin as early as Genesis 3, in the “curse” narrative, where the prophesied “seed” who will crush the serpent’s head is said to be the seed of the woman. This is extremely unusual language; in almost every parallel construction referring to biological descent, reference is made to the seed of the man, not the woman (for cultural and, frankly, biological reasons—women didn’t have “seed”). To have the Messianic figure identified as the seed of the woman implies that the identity of his mother and the nature of his birth—presumably lacking a biologically male father-figure—will be exceptional.

-   In Jer. 31:22, as part of a longer section which refers to the coming of the new covenant, there is this intriguing line: “For the Lord has created something new on earth: a woman shall encompass a man.” [This is sometimes translated differently in modern versions, because the literal meaning of the Hebrew words makes almost no sense given the surrounding context (unless, that is, it’s a reference to the virgin birth), so some versions stretch the translation to try to make it fit other themes in Jeremiah.] The word for woman here is the term for the specifically biological/gynecological aspect of female identity, while the word for man is the word for a hero, a strong one, a mighty man. This appears to indicate, then, that in bringing forth his new covenant, God will do something new, something never before seen on earth, and that the miracle will center on a woman’s physical body encompassing (as in pregnancy) a mighty hero. If the virgin birth story is not true, then this is an exceptionally weird verse that makes little sense in its broader context; but if the virgin birth story is true, then it makes perfect sense and would seem to be a reference to that very event. Since this verse’s Messianic meaning is most clearly seen in the Hebrew, not in Greek translations like the Septuagint, the earliest Christians did not seize on this as a proof-text for the virgin birth; it went pretty much unnoticed until Jerome’s time in the early fifth century. This is important, because it means that here we have a plausible prophecy of the virgin birth that cannot be accused as having been a misunderstood passage that motivated early Christians to invent a virgin birth story for Jesus; rather, it stands as an independent witness to the plausibility of the traditional reading of Isaiah 7.

-   Other possible allusions to the virgin birth also exist: for example, the fact that Jesus’s progenitor David regularly uses references to his mother’s womb in his psalmic prophecies (rather than, as would be more culturally normal, references to his father’s house); and the Messianic “Servant” character in Isaiah 49 giving emphasis to divine action in fashioning him in the womb. None of these are definitive, of course, nor as clear as Isaiah 7, but there enough hints strung out throughout the OT canon that they give some support to the plausible reading of Isaiah 7 as pointing toward the virgin birth of Christ.

 Paul: While it’s true that Paul makes no direct reference to the virgin birth, to take this as evidence against the virgin birth is an argument from silence, so not particularly strong. An argument from silence is only compelling if there is silence where one would reasonably have expected something else. In Paul’s case, this is not so—Paul’s writings are not interested in providing a narrative of Jesus’s life—where they mention it, they focus only on the Lord’s Supper, the cross, and the resurrection (Paul also mention’s Jesus’s ancestral pedigree at least once, but there his main concern is about Jesus’s connection to the Davidic line). Paul’s silence would only be instructive if it came as part of a passage in which Paul was mentioning Jesus’s birth or his early life.

-   Many scholars think that Paul does make reference to it obliquely, even if not directly. In Gal. 4:4 he writes that Jesus was “born of a woman,” which would be a strange way of putting it in that culture unless he believed there was something exceptional with regard to Jesus’s parentage and birth.

-   Acts shows that Paul is also intimately acquainted with the evangelist Luke (and in a couple places he even quotes lines that match exactly with Luke’s Gospel), so given the prominence of Mary and the virgin birth in Luke’s writings it’s hard to imagine that Paul would somehow be unaware of that tradition.

-   Furthermore, the doctrine of the virgin birth is usually tied to a high Christology—i.e., seeing Jesus as divine. Some of Paul’s letters are usually counted as the earliest NT writings we have, and yet Paul’s Christology is remarkably high, which suggests that a high Christology was part of the early Christian movement from the beginning. The argument that Paul’s failure to mention the virgin birth says anything that would cast doubt on the traditional Christian view of Jesus is therefore highly questionable.

Gospels: Some skeptics will point out that the earliest Gospel, Mark, also has no narrative about the virgin birth (nor does John, which, although probably later, is the only “independent” Gospel account in the canon, while the other three lean on each other in various ways). Nevertheless, Mark seems to assume that knowledge on the part of the audience—in Mark 6:3, Jesus is called “the son of Mary,” which is a very unusual way of speaking of someone in that culture; reference would usually be made to the father. It’s also the only reference to Mary in Mark’s Gospel, which probably means that her place was so well-known in the early Christian community that no further comment was needed. And, like Paul, Mark seems to portray a higher Christology than one would expect if Jesus’s origin was merely human. John, for its part, has a wildly high Christology, and while it doesn’t reference the virgin birth directly, some take the verbal escalation in the conversation in John 8:41 as implying that the crowds had some questions about the legitimacy of Jesus’s parentage from Joseph (as one would expect if the virgin birth story were true), to say nothing of Jesus’s repeated insistence throughout the Gospel of John that he has come down from heaven and that God alone is his Father. Matthew and Luke, of course, form the main source material for the virgin birth narrative, and it’s worth pointing out that Luke tells us that some significant research went into the Gospel, and the content of chapters 1-2 suggests that one of Luke’s sources might very well have been Mary herself. All that to say, while the Gospels may not be as early as Paul’s earliest documents, they are still the earliest narratives of Christ’s life available, and all appear to testify to a unanimous conception in early Christianity that Jesus’s birth was miraculous and that he himself was divine.

Early Christian Unanimity: The other early Christian documents also appear to be unanimous in holding to the virgin birth narrative, which is not necessarily what one would expect if it were an invented story. If it had been invented, one would expect pushback from alternative traditions in the earliest sources, such as by James or Jude, who certainly would have been in a position to speak on the matter if an erroneous version of their own family’s history was being circulated. Yet James and Jude make no attempt to rebut the virgin birth narrative, nor even to cast doubt on Jesus’s identity in any way (an argument from silence, to be sure, but one where the silence may be telling). The immediate post-NT documents attest to this unanimity and deepen it, with specific references to Mary and the virgin birth in ways that affirm and expand upon the traditions in Matthew and Luke. This can be seen in the letters of Ignatius, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Odes of Solomon, the Protoevangelium of James, and the writings of Aristides, Melito, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus (all first- or second-century sources). To my knowledge, the earliest alternative narrative does not show up until the late second century, some hundred and fifty years after Christ, when the critic Celsus brings up a rumor that Jesus was fathered by a Roman soldier, Pantera. The lateness of that alternative theory, compared to the unanimity of the earlier Christian tradition, does not give it much of an air of credence. Further, the very fact that the alternative theory was a theory of illegitimacy, suggests that even the early skeptics accepted as common knowledge that there was something unusual about Jesus’s parentage. The first appearance of the more obvious alternative theory—that Jesus could have been Joseph’s biological son—comes into view just a few years later, when Irenaeus castigates the heretical Ebionites for holding that theory. (The Ebionites were a schismatic sect that appears to have broken away from the orthodox Jewish-Christian group known as Nazarenes; for their part, the Nazarenes are believed to have descended in continuity from the original Jerusalem church, and patristic writings show that they held a high Christology, including the virgin birth). All told, then, the evidence for compelling alternative theories of Jesus’s parentage in the earliest sources is severely lacking, and the unanimity of the traditional Christian reading is significant.