The New Sabbatarians

Published on by D. G. Hart

(From NTJ, April 1998)

How do you tell a true old lifer from a pretender? We used to think that a fairly reliable indicator was to raise the question of the Sabbath. Ask how should a believer sanctify the Lord’s Day (and be sure to raise the thorny language of recreation from the Westminster Standards). If one responds by clearing the throat and changing the subject, you knew you were looking at a counterfeit. But a curious trend seems underway. More and more Christians are claiming the Sabbath. There has been a recent flurry of publishing on the subject in several Christian magazines. In all of these articles there is the recognition that the Sabbath is essential to the Christian life, and that Christians ignore this discipline to their great disadvantage. But don’t worry, readers, because as it turns out, the Sabbath is really not that hard to observe after all.

Presbyterian Minister Eugene Peterson of Regent College takes care to distance himself from anything that smacks of Puritan repressiveness (but he waxes redundant). Although he recognizes the Sabbath as a command and not a suggestion, he discourages pastors from imposing a “common observance” in congregations, lest it communicate “guilt-trap legalism.” Moreover, the Puritans only got it half right: the Sabbath is a day to pray and to play. When he and his wife retire to Vancouver’s beautiful beaches on Sunday afternoons after church, he likes what he sees as he joins the beachcombers and kite fliers: “The outdoor playfulness always strikes a chord of harmonious response in our hearts that have so recently tuned to prayerfulness in the sanctuary.” This too, is not enough, he acknowledges. “In America we have conspicuous examples of widespread observance of half-Sabbaths, prayerful Sabbaths without any play, and playful Sabbaths without any prayer. Our Puritan ancestors practiced the first; our pagan contemporaries practice the second.”

But Sabbath-keepers just wanna have fuh-un, and at least Vancouver knows how to play, so Peterson applauds. It’s important that the watching world sees that you’re enjoying yourself. Sorry, but Peterson’s Sabbath chic smacks too much of Young Life spirituality.

A better case comes from Lutheran Dorothy Bass, in “Keeping Sabbath: Reviving a Christian Practice,” (Christian Century, Jan 1-8, 1997). Unlike Peterson, Bass at least reckons that outsiders will inevitably look at Sabbath-keeping as a “dreary set of restrictions,” because the joy of the Sabbath is inaccessible to those outside the community of faith. Still, she urges de-Puritanizing the Sabbath, removing kill-joy notions of rules, restrictions, and obligations. She also laments that Protestants have tended to require too many hours of worship every Sunday. We’d love to know what Protestants she has in mind.

Twenty-first century Christians, Bass continues, must “respect diversity.” Peterson agrees, so neither want to prescribe Sunday as the Christian Sabbath. The result is designer sabbatarianism, where Christians discover their own Sabbath time and Sabbath-keeping practices.

Designer sabbatarianism is the subject of Les Parrott’s “Stress and the Sabbath” (Moody Monthly, Sept. 1994). What do working moms and Vietnam veterans have in common? Too much stress in their lives. Stress provokes chemical imbalances within us and disorders in our families and work relationships. The author profiles several people who have found stress-busters in jogging, gardening, aerobics, and juggling (no, that was not John Frame). Some even discovered the ultimate in stress-management, Sabbath-observance. Such relaxation performs wonders for the workaholic. Parrott finds confirmation in the Scriptures: Pharaoh and Herod’s hostility put Moses and Jesus both under a lot of stress, which they relieved through careful delegation and time management.

Most Christians are still willing to acknowledge that other disciplines in the life are meant to be hard — that’s why, after all, they are called disciplines. The benefits of diligence in maintaining teen-age chastity or raising children or writing a dissertation emerge only after the practitioner has faithfully persevered, generally through painful denial of self-gratification.

Not so the Sabbath. It has gone from discipline to therapy in the user-friendly formulas of the new Sabbatarians. Rather than a holy day of rest from everyday cares of life, the Sabbath is the private lifestyle enclave of individuals nursing their wounds from the brutalities of the public work place. The language of worship has been joined and at times even eclipsed by the language of leisure.

And by choosing one’s time and means of Sabbath observance, the new Sabbatarians convert it into a vehicle not for identification in a community set apart from the world but for individual self-expression. Far from a “pocket of resistance” (Peterson’s term) to the idols of our age, they offer a heightened enslavement to the chief idol, the demands of the self. In a word, the new Sabbatarians are the same old consumers, exchanging the foretaste of eschatological rest into the worldly tastes of self-gratification.

16 thoughts on “The New Sabbatarians”

  1. The discovery of the Sabbath has been a massive blessing to me and my family.

    Traditionally, I took Doug Moo’s neo-Lutheran approach to the law and binned the threefold distinction and therefore the idea of a Sabbath altogether. It was only after my discovery of confessional Reformed theology (is there any other type of Reformed?!) and my realising that the threefold distinction is unavoidable that I started to seriously consider rethinking my practise of the Lord’s Day.

    Sunday is now my favourite day of the week. I’ve chucked all church activities that don’t serve word/sacrament feeding. Stopping work to let God work through preaching/sacraments (and turning off the TV) has blessed me beyond words. I’m finally realising that man wasn’t made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man.

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  4. PS What I was trying to say was by discovering the Sabbath discipline, I’ve experienced blessing indirectly, i.e. by disciplining the Sabbath and not turning it into a spiritual therapy.

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  5. Nick, I was agreeing, but trying to be funny about it, by noting your lack of humor. Sorry, I don’t do emoticons. I wholeheartedly agree with you about the sabbath.

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  7. Dr. Hart,

    Good stuff. My wife and I have been in a stage of transition on the Sabbath for a while. We’re members of a thoroughly non-Sabbatarian Presbyterian congregation, have both been raised in families where Sunday meant shopping, eating out, entertainment, and football. Our family and friends now look at us in odd ways when we kindly decline their invitations to a Lord’s day afternoon lunch and movie gathering. I’m not yet convinced that *all* leisure activity is impermissible, but reading your thoughts is helpful.

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  8. Nick, the NTJ is all about thick smart-mouths. How else do you chew tobacco? (Actually, Muether and I never chew. We only inhale.)

    Jonathan, I think an important point to keep in mind about leisure on the Sabbath is to make them different from week-day leisure. The question is how to make a nap holy rest. But I do try to smoke a better grade (holy?) of cigar on the Lord’s day. (BTW, don’t assume that I was the author of the piece in question. I was simply dipping into an old issue of the NTJ.)

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  9. That the Sabbath is a creational ordinance makes it hard to convey the difference between Sabbath-as-recharge and Sabbath-as-discipline. But it’s especially hard when spiritual discipline is presumed to have its accent fall on inward experience instead of outward observance., affect over against response.

    Jonathon: Speaking of wives, if trying to figure out how to make Sabbath leisure different from six-day leisure seems perplexing, try, after having taken the girl out of new Sabbatarianism (sorta easy), taking the new Sabbatarianism out of the girl. For any thick smart-mouths out there, no, lording it over her doesn’t work. It seems patience is indeed a virtue.

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  10. My evangelical wife has been drinking in the good confessional Reformed wine. She much prefers the taste to the evangelical dish water we’ve been quaffing over the years.

    Every time I talk to her about some different and evangelically challenging aspect (eg infant baptism) of confessionalism, she adopts it as if I were OB1-Kenobi performing a Jedi mind trick.

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  11. I’d love some recommended reading on this matter. I am (currently) unpersuaded on the matter of “Christian Sabbath.” How do we respond to those like T. David Gordon who suggest that the Ten Commandments were given only to those who God brought of of the land of Egypt, not to the modern Christian. How do we respond to Carson’s “From Sabbath to Lord’s Day” which argues that the NT writers didn’t believe the Lord’s Day to be a Sabbath Day.
    I’d like to be persuaded from Scripture that the confession is correct, but I am not.

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  12. Tim,

    A good place to start is Richard Gaffin’s article, “A Sabbath Rest Still Awaits the People of God,” in Pressing toward the Mark, ed. by Charles Dennison (OPC, 1986), TDG is right to argue that the form in which the sabbath commandment is given in Exod 20 is peculiar to the Israelite theocracy, which is only to observe that the covenant of grace is administered differently in the Old Covenant. (And this is true of the entire decalogue — consider the promise in the 5th commandment.) The Sabbath remains a creation ordinance, and Gaffin comments that it is observed in our day in the already/not yet structure that describes new covenant realities. The day is changed to the first day (already) and it is still observed (not yet) because we are still a pilgrim people on the way to Zion.

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  13. Thanks Dr. Muether. Are there any good Reformed review of “From Sabbath to Lord’s Day”? Carson, et al. make a strong case.

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  15. Tim,

    I meant to note that the aforementioned article by Gaffin is actually a response to Andrew Lincoln’s article in the book, “From Sabbath to Lord’s Day.”

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