‘Is there any command in the New Testament to change the day of weekly rest from Saturday? —None.’ Episcopal Manual of Christian Doctrine.
Q9 So how was the change made from the seventh day Sabbath to Sunday?
‘The day is now changed from the seventh to the first day … but as we meet with no scriptural direction for the change, we may conclude it was done by authority of the church’. Episcopal ‘Explanation of the Catechism’.
Q10 What will happen to those things that are not established by God?
But he answered and said, Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Matthew 15:13
Q11 How has history shown the change from Saturday to Sunday?
The Christian church of itself made no formal, but a gradual almost unconscious transference of the one day to the other. F W Farrar The voice from Sinai p167 (This of itself is evidence that there was no divine command for the change of the Sabbath.)
The gradual process of the change is shown below:
The beginnings. Sunday observance began as a celebration of the resurrection on the first day of the week, but with no divine authority. It came about as a reaction to the persecution of the Jews by the Imperial Romans. Sunday celebration was observed by the new Christians in Rome to put a distance between themselves and the Jews at a time when Jews were being strongly persecuted by the Romans. They argued that if they should continue to keep Sabbath they would be considered to be Jews and so they hid behind an observance of the resurrection, which was a supplementary day and a voluntary choice, never God’s command.
The festival of Sunday, like all other church festivals (Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, infant baptism, etc) was always only a human ordinance. Only much later did it become considered a sin to work on Sunday. At the beginning of Sunday observance it was not regarded as a day of rest, making it therefore a Sabbath. Sunday was more a day of holiday which had an element of joyful worship within it. It was attractive to the pagan religions within the Roman Empire who already honoured the first day as the day of the sun.
In the first three hundred years the Bishop of Rome gradually became the most powerful of the bishops and began to exert religious authority. On occasion this authority involved Sunday activities. For instance Victor, in 196 ruled that the Passover should be observed on a Sunday. Churches outside of Rome in Asia Minor refused to comply with this mandate. The process of change was gradual, but with each generation adding factors to justify the change, thus weakening opposition to the claims of authority from Rome.
321 AD The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that the earliest recognition of Sunday as a legal day of rest is found in the constitution of Constantine in 321 AD. This was the first step towards a church which used the civil powers to uphold its ecclesiastical laws. Something that was at first voluntary, as was Sunday celebration for convenience to avoid persecution, has now become a legal statute. The next stage was the development of doctrines to uphold this new and stronger position.
270-338 AD Eusebius stated in his lifetime: All things whatsoever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord’s Day (Sunday)
364 AD The Council of Laodicea, although a small regional council, made an important further step in the change from Sabbath to Sunday. The keeping of the seventh day was now anathematised.
386 AD Business should cease on Sunday. |
