No Scripture Authority for Sunday by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 9, 1914

No Scripture Authority for Sunday

By W. A. S.

THE admission that there is no Scripture authority for Sunday observance is so general, and so many testimonies have been given, that it may seem almost useless to multiply the quotations from various writers. However, here are a few that we do not remember having seen in print among us:—

Smith and Cheetham’s “Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,” issued many years ago in London, is counted one of the world’s standard works, and is the source from which statements have been taken for Bible dictionaries and other volumes. Under the word Sabbath it says:—

The notion of a formal substitution by apostolic authority of the Lord’s Day for the Jewish sabbath, and the transference to it, perhaps in a spiritualized form, of the Sabbatical obligation established by the promulgation of the fourth commandment, has no basis whatever, either in Holy Scripture or in Christian antiquity.

On the idea of the Sabbatical observance of Sunday, the Dictionary further says:—

The idea afterward embodied in the title of the “Christian sabbath,” and carried out in ordinances of Judaic rigor, was, so far as we can see, entirely unknown in the early centuries of Christianity.

The late Dr. F. W. Farrar (archdeacon of Westminster), in his work “The Voice From Sinai,” says:—

The Sabbath is Saturday, the seventh day of the week; it was to be kept holy by consecrating it to God.—Page 149.

He argues that the essence and principle of the fourth commandment applies to Sunday, and adds:—

The Christian church made no formal, but a gradual and almost unconscious transference of the one day to the other.—Page 152.

Another word as to this “unconscious” substitution comes from Wm. B. Dana, in “A Day for Rest and Worship” (Revell and Company), page 174:—

Bear in mind that the substitution [of the first for the seventh day] was not a coerced happening; it could not be a sudden, but only a very slow development, probably never anticipated, never even designed or put into shape by those chiefly interested, but creeping almost unconsciously into being.

So, like certain characters spoken of by Jude who “crept in unawares,” the Sunday institution came creeping in.

Haydn’s “Dictionary of Dates,” article “Sabbath,” says:—

The earliest law by which the observance of the first day of the week was ordained is the edict of Constantine, 321.

“Curiosities of Popular Customs,” by Wm. S. Walsh, says:—

Sunday. The first day of the week, named after the sun, and therefore an evident relic of sun worship. In French it is Dimanche, in Italian Dominica, both from Dominus, “the Lord.” Christians, with the exception of the Seventh-day Adventists, have substituted it as a day of rest and prayer in lieu of the Jewish sabbath.—Page 901.

McClintock and Strong’s “Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature,” under article on “Sabbath,” after speaking of the New Testament texts, says:—

These arguments, it is true, are not satisfactory to some, and it must be confessed that there is no law in the New

Testament concerning the first day.

Of the suggestion that Christ, as Lord of the Sabbath, had power to abolish it, the article says:—

It seems as if some cannot think of power in connection with the Sabbath unless as exercised in abrogation. If it be placed in Christ’s charge, they take it for granted that more or less extinction must be the consequence. They speak as if Christ’s scepter were an ax, and the only question were how much it would hew down and devastate. We maintain, on the contrary, that Christ would not be the Lord of the Sabbath to be its destroyer.

After all, what men say about God’s Sabbath is of no authority. When all the books have been written, and all the explanations made, the living God who made the Sabbath still says, “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.”

W. A. S.