A PROTESTANT CLAIM OF CHANGING GOD’S LAW
By J. P. C.
May the Church at Will Set Aside a Statute of Jehovah? — What About These Claims? In its answers to correspondents, the Living Church of January 23, 1915, has this in reply to “L. C. G.” on the Sabbath question, which now seems to interest so many people: “The Sabbath is superseded by the Christian festival of the Lord’s day, purely on the authority of the church, which from the beginning has exercised the authority of our Lord on earth in its distinct realm. Those sectarians who rigidly observe Sunday as the Sabbath (which it is not), and yet deny the authority of the church which authorized the observance of the day, are of course wholly illogical.” Those who are familiar with the statements contained in Catholic catechisms and other Catholic writings, will at once suspect that this quotation is direct from the same source. But all such will miss their conjecture. The foregoing excerpt is from an organ of the Protestant Episcopal Church, published in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But with this information, a query, and a very pertinent one, is in order. It is this: Why does that paper claim to be the exponent of “Protestant” religion? And further: What is the nature of its Protestantism? And against what does it protect? On the point contained in the extract, it certainly is in the same class with Catholic authorities. Take, for instance, this from Coppens’s “Systematic Study of the Catholic Religion,” pages 318, 319: “The first commandment of the church is: ‘To hear mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation.’” But how came Sunday to be a “holy day of obligation”? The answer is thus candidly direct in the author’s own words: “God in the old law had appointed the last day of the week, the Sabbath, to be specially consecrated to His honor. No power but God’s could have dispensed with this obligation. We do not read that Christ did so; on the contrary, we know that He observed it Himself. And yet we also know that the church abolished the obligation of keeping that day, and in its stead instituted the observance of the Lord’s day, the first day of the week. This fact by itself shows that the church from the beginning claimed the fullness of power to have been committed to her, to legislate in God’s name for the followers of Christ.” BOTH CLAIM THE SAME THING
As extravagant as is the foregoing regarding the authority of the Catholic Church, it is no more so than is the excerpt taken from the Episcopal organ. The latter claims that the church—presumedly with reference to its own organization—changed the Sabbath day, with sufficient authority to make its decrees binding upon all. It goes further to declare that strict Sunday keepers who deny the authority of the church to change the rest day from the seventh to the first, are “illogical.” Why are they to be counted so greatly in error?—Simply because, denying the authority of the church to change the day of rest, they should logically observe the seventh day, as commanded in the Bible. The Episcopal Church thus fully agrees with the Catholic organization in its advocacy of Sunday observance. In other words, it agrees that Sunday keeping has no higher authority to sustain it than a human council. On the other hand, the papacy claims, as in the foregoing quotation, that no power but God’s could make the change. Yet it boldly affirms that it did the thing itself, an act which Christ Himself did not undertake, who assumes the leadership of His people, and exhorts them to hear His voice and follow Him. PLACING THE CHURCH ABOVE GOD
This is no less, in either case, than to exalt the church above the word of God. If the church has power to release one from Sabbath obligation, so strictly and continuously enjoined by the Bible, why may it not also release from any other bond of duty which it fancies to be inconvenient, and which it may point to with lofty speech as evidence of its commission to be God’s viceroy on earth? In this perfect agreement of the Episcopal Church with the Catholic, in what does the Episcopal body’s Protestantism consist? Let those answer who can discover the difference.