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Seventh Day Adventists claim that the Sabbath was changed from Saturday to Sunday centuries after the life of Jesus. Joe Heschmeyer, author of The Early Church was the Catholic Church, joins us to debunk this claim.
Cy Kellett:
Apologist, Joe Heschmeyer, thank you for being here with us on Catholic Answers Focus.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The pleasure is mine.
Cy Kellett:
You want to talk about the Sabbath?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, lets.
Cy Kellett:
It seems very straightforward, and yet it’s a matter of some great controversy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s even a denominational splitting issue.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. We’re split off. So maybe we should start with the Seventh-day Adventists, who are most famously differ from us, I guess I should say it that way, most famously differ from us on this.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So the name highlights two beliefs that they have, “Advent,” means coming, it does not mean they celebrate a seven-day season of Advent, these are two separate beliefs they have, they’re Adventists, meaning they believe that Christ is about to come back. First, they thought it was going to be in 1844, and then they moved the dates around a little bit, they keep making predictions that keep being wrong. But they also believe in a seventh-day Sabbath, that Christians need to rest on Saturday and that needs to be the day of rest and of worship, rather than Sunday, that’s the seventh-day part of Seventh-day Adventism.
Cy Kellett:
So I have to say, this seems like sort of a marginal issue, from a Catholic perspective, it’s like if you’re going to break off from mainstream Christianity, there’s so many other things. How do we end up focused on this particular thing? The day of the celebration of the Sabbath?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think in a couple of ways. Number one, it shows the methodology, it’s sola scriptura, so when I’m reading the Bible, I come to passages like the 10 Commandments, which talk about keeping the Sabbath holy, God creates the world in six days, and on the seventh day he rests so therefore, they would say, “Well, you don’t just dispense with the whole, ‘Don’t murder,’ so why are you dispensing with the Saturday Sabbath?” And so, on face, using the kind of tools that Protestantism has, it makes sense-
Cy Kellett:
You could apply the tools and come to this conclusion.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. Now, it seems to me like you could also do the same thing for the Judias, which are one of the first heresies that we find in the Bible. They’re saying you have to keep the Mosaic Law, you have to be circumcised, and they’re making these arguments from scripture, “Well, it talks about this being an everlasting covenant, this is the sign of it, how are we going to say it doesn’t apply a [inaudible 00:02:14] convent?” So you can see how left to scripture alone without some kind of interpretive guide, this is kind of where you end up. This period, Seventh-day Adventism comes out of this 19th Century American religious revival that gives us other things like Mormonism, it gives us Jehovah’s Witnesses, it gives us all these kind of fringe groups that are just trying to make sense of things, while basically being on the frontiers of society.
Cy Kellett:
Do Quakers and Shakers come out of the same period?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, so those are a little earlier, but they get much bigger.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And yeah, the Shakers are really fascinating.
Cy Kellett:
So there’s a lot of radical, religious stuff going on in America at this period?
Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s a part of New York called, “The Burned-over district,” because it’s had so many revivals, it’s just constantly people are catching fire, and going in one way, and then they’re catching fire, and going in a different way, and There’s a lot of really interesting stuff kind of going on, but the results are really a cacophony of different religions. And that’s actually, if you know anything about the biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, that’s one of the things as a teenager, he’s really troubled by, “How could all these contrary denominations teaching radically different things, how do I know which one’s true?” According to him, God appears to him and says, “There’s no true church on Earth, I got to give you a new one.”
Cy Kellett:
Wow. Yeah. Swipe the slate clean.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly.
Cy Kellett:
But you can see it all comes from the same kind of fervor, it’s just a more radical-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. There’s a real enthusiasm… Because if you were to say like, “Here’s 50 really convinced Christians, I’m going to hand them a Bible and see what conclusions they come to,” You’re going to get 50 different conclusions.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Would it be fair to call some of this entrepreneurial? That there’s an entrepreneurial spirit to it?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think there certainly is that. I think there’s also a lot of investment in some of these ideas. So for instance, both Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses descend from what was called, “The Millerite movement,” and I alluded to this already, but the Millerites had what was called, “The Great Disappointment of 1844,” they predicted the end of the world, they alienated themselves from their families with these kind of radical beliefs, they sold everything to prepare for the end of the world, and then 1844 comes and goes, and spoiler alert, the world is still here.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And-
Cy Kellett:
“What a disappointment, the world is still here.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
It was a great disappointment.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so then I say, “What do you do with it?” And maybe a third of the people kind of go back to mainstream Christianity, and then a lot of the other people just glam onto some other, “No, no. It’s about to happen, it just hasn’t happened yet,” kind of movement, and they’ll tinker with the dates, they’ll adjust things, or they’ll find someone else who will kind of scratch that itch. And Ellen Gould White kind of falls pretty neatly into this period where she’s able to pick up a lot of disaffected Millerites and point them in a different, but similar direction.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. These… It’s maybe an under reported aspect of some Christian splinter groups is this tendency, or this predicting the end of the world, and really people getting badly hurt. I mean, it happened probably a decade ago with-
Joe Heschmeyer:
With the Harold Camping-
Cy Kellett:
Harold-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Family radio. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. Who was kind of a mesmerizing voice on the radio, but-
Joe Heschmeyer:
I loved listening to Harold Camping-
Cy Kellett:
And he was really hard to stop listening, you turn him on, and he was just so, I don’t know, there was something about him that was mesmerizing, but people got really badly hurt by him.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
And by his claims.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And it’s sad in a way, because it points to a certain spiritual sickness, you had people who were selling their life savings, and going on around the world trips because they thought the world was ending. And it’s like, “Guys, if you were right about the world ending, I don’t think that’s how you would want to approach your maker of like, ‘I got really selfish at the end, and really took a lot of time for myself rather than giving up everything to spread the gospel.'”
Cy Kellett:
I purchased the drink package on the Disney cruise.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
That is not the way to go out.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No, it’s not. And so in that sense, it praised God in a way, but at the same time, in the span of time he was making these false predictions because he had a whole series of them, a good portion of his followers died of natural causes while thinking they were preparing for something a little further in the future, they actually were not getting ready that day to meet their maker, which is what happened.
Cy Kellett:
Well, “The Lord will come again.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
“In glory to judge the living and the dead.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
I am fairly certain of that because I repeat that constantly, as a Catholic, but-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes-
Cy Kellett:
But okay, but so it is going to happen, but so you get these Millerite predictions, 1844, and we get something like we’ve seen recently with Harold Camping, right?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, Harold Camping.
Cy Kellett:
And then there’s this disappointment, really people’s lives have been ruined by this.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
So Seventh-day Adventism kind of… How does it pick up the pieces for people?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. It picks up the pieces because it has this very hopeful, “Christ is coming soon,” kind of note to it, at the same time it has this, “Look, we take the 10 Commandments very seriously,” and trying to make sense of what to do with the Old Testament. One of the earliest and recurring issues within Christianity is, what do we make of everything that came before Christ? What do we make of the Old Testament? What do we make of Judaism? What do we make of the prophets? And you find people who go off the rails in both extremes.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Like Marcion.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Like right from the beginning.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right, or more modern anti-semis where it’s like, “Okay, that’s not the right way.” But at this other extreme, you’ve got like the Judias who want us to still follow the Mosaic Laws-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, good point, yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so that’s not the right way either, so how do we make sense of this? You get the Dispensationalists who are like, “Well, God has one plan for Israel, and one plan for the church,” that’s not the right way either, so there’s a lot of ways you can screw this up. And so the Seventh-Day Adventists kind of play around with these ideas, and in a way that I think leads them into a lot of legalism in a way that I think leads them astray, but they’re asking the right question. It’s a good question they’re asking, it’s a question that is not super straightforward. A lot of Christians have hit the rocks in one direction or the other, trying to make sense of this. So I have some sympathy for that, I even have sympathy for the whole, “Well let’s worship on Saturday because the 10 Commandments sure seems to say that.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. So I guess then the content of this little conversation we’ll have, we would need you to illustrate for us why we don’t believe that as Catholics.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
If you can look at the scriptures, and come to that conclusion without being a person of ill-will, or… Then why do we not come to that conclusion?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. The short answer to that is that, in the time of the apostles, worship has moved from Saturday to Sunday in honor of the resurrection, a deeper issue is that all of the Mosaic Law falls into a few different categories, you’ve got ceremonial laws, you’ve got kind of the national laws of Israel, and then you have these things that are expressions of the eternal moral law. But the particular penalties, the particular enforcement of them, isn’t something still binding on Christians, so if God says a certain thing is sinful, it might be something like mixing cloth, you don’t put two different fabrics together.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Or, you don’t eat pork, those kind of things are ceremonial, the whole point of them was to set the Jews apart in preparation for Christ. And so Christ fulfills that in the same way that someone’s coming over, you clean the house, but that house cleaning is it needs to stop when the guest gets there, if you’re still cleaning when the guest arrives, it’s defeating the purpose of the cleaning, just like how can you fast when the bride groom is present?
Cy Kellett:
Gotcha.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That sort of idea. So major aspects of the Jewish law were set up like that, there were a sort of spiritual cleaning, and spiritual preparation for Christ, and we have little tastes of this, the season of lent for instance, and to a certain extent, even an Advent, these preparatory periods. So that’s one aspect. You also have the moral law where God just says a certain thing is wrong because it’s just wrong, it’s contrary to natural law, it’s contrary to the way we’re made. And so even then, the penalty that may have been attached on the old law isn’t still attached, but it’s still an expression of right and wrong.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So we don’t have to stone adulterers, Jesus is pretty clear about that, but adultery is wrong, and that was the point of the old law, that was what that was about, it was just show us, adultery is not where human flourishing happens. And so when we get to something like the Sabbath, the notion that we are made for both work, and for rest, and worship is true, and that is built into our nature, and that’s built into even the order of creation. That it has to be on Saturday, and not on Sunday was provisional, and that’s the part that goes away. So when we’re talking about the Sabbath day, there’s these two aspects, one part that’s preparatory, it’s a reflection of the first creation in preparation for the recreation that happens on Easter Sunday that’s… And so Christ fulfills that, and so we find very quickly what’s called the Lord’s Day, and so it’s-
Cy Kellett:
Very quickly meaning?
Joe Heschmeyer:
In the time of the apostles, how-
Cy Kellett:
“We’re celebrating the Lord’s Day,” yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly. So we find in the book of Revelation, which is probably the last written book of scripture, a reference that St. John says in Revelation 1:10, “I was in the spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, like a trumpet.” Now there is an addition of that Didache now the Didache is a not scripture, but it is probably first century, maybe early Second Century, early one hundreds, but it’s probably First century, which means it may actually be older than the book of Revelation, but it also talks about this, it says, “Every Lord’s Day, gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving, the word there’s a Eucharist, after having to confessed your transgressions that your sacrifice may be pure.” So very clearly you have Sunday worship, and it’s the sacrificial worship of the Eucharist. That is not some late medieval thing, that’s not Constantine, that’s not any… It’s right here in the first century, this is the kind of worship that Christians are practicing. And there are other sources say, Ignatius of Antioch writing to the Magnesia, and it’s a great name for a church.
Cy Kellett:
They had cows that made wonderful milk there, milk of magnesia. Oh, sorry.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I can’t believe it took me long to get that joke-
Cy Kellett:
A Joe Heschmeyer missed a dumb joke, I can’t-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh my gosh, you were milking on for all’s worth.
Cy Kellett:
Sorry.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Ignatius talks about how those who were brought up in the ancient order of things have come to the possession of a new hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord’s Day, that is just a hundred percent explicit. That what’s meant by the Lord’s Day is not the Saturday Sabbath, it’s Sunday, the Lord’s Day is Easter Sunday, it’s every Sunday of the week. And this is important because you’ll occasionally find Adventist apologists who will say, “Oh, well, when John says, ‘The Lord’s Day,’ he actually means Saturday, because that’s the day the Lord created, in the Old…” And yet no one in the early church has ever used the Lord’s Day to refer to Saturday, and we find these numerous distinctions between Saturday, and the Lord’s Day, which is Sunday.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Justin martyr talks about this, he says, “On the day called, ‘Sunday,’ all who live in cities, or in the country gather together in one place, the memoirs of the apostles or writings of the prophets are read,” and then it goes on to describe the whole order of the mass, and that’s happening on the day he calls, “Sunday.” And he goes on to say, “But Sunday is today on which we all hold our common assembly because it is a first day on which, God having brought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world, and Jesus Christ our savior on the same day, rose from the dead.” So it’s pretty explicit there too, that we’re talking about the first day of the week here, we are First-day Adventist, in that sense, we are-
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And it’s just unambiguous. Now, Justin Martyr’s 160, Ignatius is 107, the Didache’s probably even earlier than that, and that matters because Ellen Gould White, who I should stress here, is viewed as a prophet whose words are as inspired as scripture.
Cy Kellett:
I know didn’t that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So in the 1980s, the Seven-day Adventist had a general conference, they had a list of seven affirmations and seven negations, or denials, number seven of their affirmations they say, “We believe that Ellen White was inspired by the holy spirit and that her writings, the product of that inspiration are applicable, and authoritative, especially to Seventh-day Adventists. And the first denial is we do not believe that the quality or degree of inspiration, the writings of Ellen White is different from that of scripture.”
Cy Kellett:
Wow. That’s pretty clear.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. So they say her writings aren’t scripture, but they’re equal to scripture.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, my-
Joe Heschmeyer:
And yet, she says, in the great controversy, “In the first centuries, the true Sabbath had been kept by all Christians,” that’s just demonstrably false. Now we have the writings of the first Christians and she has no idea what she’s talking about, and then she claims that in the early Fourth Century, the Emperor Constantine was the one who changed it, and that’s also not true, that we find Sunday worship hundreds of years before Constantine was born.
Cy Kellett:
So essentially, you have someone… This reminds me very much of Joseph Smith in a way that you have someone using 19th Century knowledge who is dispositively disproved, within the 20th and 21st century with scholarship, I’m thinking of Joseph Smith with his translations of Egyptian hieroglyphs that were nonsense.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And he has all sorts of historical anachronisms, where he has horses in the new world when they weren’t there yet, and all sorts of these things where-
Cy Kellett:
And so-
Joe Heschmeyer:
He writes a Cowboys and Indian story about Jesus and the First Century after, and none of the stuff he gets, right, he’s like, “Iron weapons,” and all this stuff that would’ve changed the entire course of human history if it existed in Meso America at the time.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. So here we have a similar thing-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right-
Cy Kellett:
Just an assertion about a historical fact, that to the 19th century person that may have not been easy to challenge, but it’s very easily challenged to now.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. And now, even in the 19th Century, I mean, you have in the 19th Century, the production in English of Philip Chaves, who works on The Church Fathers. So you eventually will have a lot of stuff where a person who has a good library near them could look it up if they knew where to look. But even today, there are a lot of Adventists who probably don’t know where to find stuff on The Church Fathers, who have never read this stuff. There tends to be a lot of suspicion, and skepticism about Roman Catholics within Seventh-day Adventism, and a lot of weird conspiracy theories about what Catholics are going to do to all the Sabbath keepers. And it would just, I think it creates this sort of intellectual, mental, and spiritual barrier where it’s like, “Well, no, just read a book. Ellen White, who you’re saying is a prophet makes these historical claims, you can’t possibly hold these historical claims to be true because there’s all this stuff that directly contradicts it.”
Cy Kellett:
Could I ask, what do the Seventh-day Adventist make, if you know the answer to this, I don’t know about St. Paul’s as an apostle dismissing us from the observation of the Sabbath?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes. I do know about this because he directly says, “We’re not still bound by new moons Sabbath,” and he has one-
Cy Kellett:
In festivals.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In festivals, right. And so they would say, “oh, the Sabbath that’s referring there is not the weekly Sabbath, but is the special holidays on the Jewish calendar.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I see.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so it takes a really strained interpretation of it. But if you actually… St. Paul, there’s a parallelism between his reference and the New Testament, and then the Old Testament, when the law is talking about this, because you have the weekly festivals, which are the Sabbath, you have the monthly festivals, new moons, and then you have the annual festivals, which are the feasts, and so those bits of the calendar are all set aside, and Paul is explicit, “You are not bound by any of that.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And in more than that to try to impose that on your brother, Christian, is really directly the sort of thing that gets condemned because you’re putting a burden that isn’t a burden to be help, and it misunderstands the whole point of the old law, the whole point of what’s going on in the old covenant, by treating into something that’s supposed to last past Christ. And so all of that just just goes, I think, directly to the heart of what it gets wrong, but this is a common point, I didn’t even touch on this point just because it leads to this I find very unproductive debate because anyone who’s non Adventist will just look at this and say, “Well, you say this scripture says a hundred percent the opposite, the opposite.”
Cy Kellett:
The opposite. Yeah. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But Adventists are just kind of trained to reinterpret and ignore that passage.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Sure. And there are passages that you would say, as a Catholic-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. Well, no man, father sounds like, yeah-
Cy Kellett:
They do require some very fine distinctions.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right, and context and all that is important.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In this case, the context really only doubles down on what Paul’s saying.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because when you compare the New and Old Testament, but I totally agree with you, it’s not enough to say, “This thing appears to say the opposite of your theology.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because it’s possible for that to be true, “The father is greater than I-”
Cy Kellett:
I mean, Jesus seems to say, “Cut off your hand.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
But clearly we’re not supposed to go around cutting off our hands, so-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
So the scripture doesn’t interpret itself
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. Well, and I think really if you trace the history of these groups, especially if you’ll get several of them at once, the takeaway is you’ve got these people who are well intentioned, who are spiritually hungry, and want something really exciting, and interesting who have the kind of twitching ears or itching ears that St. Paul warns about, and you’ll find these teachers who will come along and tell them what they want to hear, and often brilliantly kind of unpack these hidden messages from scripture. And then you look at a few of these and you think, “Okay, this is why we need an infallible church because this is what man will do left his own devices.”
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. Certainly as a Catholic, we are repeatedly confirmed in our Catholic dependence on the church as a source of revelation, as a source of proper interpretation of revelation, when we see the really infinite number of ways, scripture can be misinterpreted.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. Absolutely. I mean, you, again, go back and even compare the reformers believe to what modern Protestants believe, and I don’t know any modern Protestants who say, “The reformers were right about everything.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And of course not, they’re not infallible.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But it points to this part that even people who within Protestantism are tremendously well respected, there’s this sense of, “But they don’t get everything right,” but that difficulty of, “Well, if the person who I look up to, the person, who’s my spiritual better, isn’t getting everything right, and maybe making some disastrous missteps.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
“What hope is there for me to be an orthodox believer? What hope is there for me to get Christianity right, if no one gets Christianity right in kind of my view of the world?” And that’s, I think the real problem, is that you end up with, Kylie [inaudible 00:20:43]’s were always talking about the endless number of Protestant denominations, and I hate we say like, “There’s 40,000,” that number’s wrong.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. That’s an unfair thing to say really.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. But what is true is that there’s an ever growing number of denominations. It is true that whatever the number is-
Cy Kellett:
There’s not a limit. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s too high, it’s not one, which is what Christ calls us to in John 17, and it’s ever growing, there’s not a movement towards unity, there’s not a movement towards everyone sharing the same understanding that we find increasing kind of fracturing, and increasing sense of Christianity sort of falling apart within Protestants.
Cy Kellett:
Interesting, one of the things that happens sometimes on a live show is that Muslims will challenge us on the Sabbath, I don’t know if it’s just a thing that they learned from the Seventh-day Adventist to challenge us on the Sabbath, but there’s certain challenges that you will hear from Muslims who will call, and that is among them, so the Catholic teaching then, is not that’s the commandment to keep holy, the Sabbath is vacated.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So how am I supposed to understand that commandment right now?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, it is fulfilled in Christ, that when we are having Sunday worship, it is the fulfillment of what the Sabbath is pointing to. Now, ultimately we are called to enter the Sabbath, rest of God, Hebrews talks about this. So we can talk about Sabbath’s past and future, and then the current kind of spot that we’re in. So looking backwards, we can talk about the rest of God and creation, that he creates, there’s this tremendous creation of all the living things.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And we don’t see that going on anymore, there’s a sense in which God enters a period of rest on the order of natural creation, whether you believe in young earth creation is a more evolution, there’s still a sense that we don’t just see new species popping up every day.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But then second, there’s of course, the Jewish Sabbath, the Mosaic Law, that which was a Saturday rest, all of that was to teach us something about the relationship of work and rest and worship, and again, to prepare us for Christ, that he fulfills that Sabbath rest on holy Saturday, that after doing the work of holy week, he then goes, and he is asleep, in death, in the tomb, on Saturday, perfectly fulfilling that, and it’s done, that’s the end of it, that it is brought to its eternal kind of completion, and consummation in Christ on holy Saturday, and something new happens the next day, Easter Sunday, just like the first day of the week in Genesis 1, you have the creation of something new Easter Sunday, first day of the week, you’ve got the creation of something new, and that’s what we’re really celebrating.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Now, we follow what’s laid out in terms of the Sabbath in a certain sense, that we refrain from menial labor, if you can avoid working, you should avoid working on Sunday, but there’s still this sense also that the purpose of the Sabbath is revealed in Christ, he says, “Man is not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath is made for man,” so imposing a legal regime in which people find it onerous, in which people find it less relaxing.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Defeats the point of the Sabbath-
Cy Kellett:
It wouldn’t [inaudible 00:23:58] like that-
Joe Heschmeyer:
So you can find in the time of Christ, all of this legalism around what you can and can’t do on Saturday, and you can find frankly, within Adventism all of this legalism of what you can and can’t do, and that totally defeats the point of the Sabbath, that’s not what it’s about, that it should be a time of relaxing, and prayer, and it’s good if you have time to spend with your family, it’s a time, it’s a human experience of leisure, that’s what we’re ordered for. And so we have that in honor of Christ’s resurrection, that human need remains, is no longer attached to Saturday, and we now celebrated on Sunday, the day of the Lord. St. John Paul II has a good document on this called Dies Domini, which just means, “Day of the Lord,” where he explores this, this idea, but again, we see it from the earliest Christians.
Joe Heschmeyer:
They didn’t view themselves as bound by the particulars of the Sabbath, they’re not still bound by Saturday, they’re not still bound by, “Don’t walk this far,” or any of these things, but the human impulse, this kind of being revealed, this need for rest and worship, and a day dedicated rest and worship, not just the kind of worship you’re hopefully doing throughout the day, that doesn’t go away, because that’s built into us, that’s fulfilled in the Lord’s Day.
Cy Kellett:
I’m very interested in this idea of Sabbath rest as fundamental to our faith because, and this theme keeps coming up I think in the calls we get on the radio show, and the people we meet when we’re out talking, the sense of restlessness, and also of exhaustion, of a kind of emotional, and spiritual exhaustion that many, many people are living in today. And not because they’re bad people, it just seems like our way of life is beating the living daylights out of people. Even the things that we call restful, like maybe turning on the television in a certain way is just a different kind of agitation.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
You know? So will you say something about that-?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I’d be happy to-
Cy Kellett:
About that whole… Because that seems to me something that Christ offers, it’s certainly foreshadowed in the insistence on the Sabbath rest among the Hebrew people, and that God gave them, but in Christ it’s brought to its fulfillment, and I do kind of feel like we’re pretty badly in need of this right now, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And so that actually is one area where hopefully there’s some common ground between Adventists and Catholics, properly understood something like rest as a period of Sabbath style rest is needed. And I like the distinction that you make, that the normal ways in which we think of ourselves as resting and relaxing are not particularly restful.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Binging on a bunch of shows, and then falling asleep with the TV on you’ve not really entered into something like leisure. So here I’m heavily indebted to Joseph Pieper work, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, and he argues that in ancient Greece, the word for work was just not leisure, that the Greek understanding was work was ordered towards leisure, that you worked to have the means to be able to have-
Cy Kellett:
Leisure-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Rest. And now we get that totally backwards where we say, “Well, you need to have occasional vacations so you can be a harder worker,” and so-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right, to make you more productive, that’s literally how we talk about people, “Well, if people don’t take those days off, they really decline in productivity.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly, so Pieper calls it another chain in the link of work, that it’s just-
Cy Kellett:
That’s that’s wonderful, wonderful insight. Yes.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is. And he’s writing this in Germany, in the 1940s, right after the follow of the Third Reich, he sees the way a culture that’s been totally dehumanized in its relationship to work and rest became something really monstrous, and very much mechanized, very much like a machine, and very inhuman in the way it operated. And I think that he tapped on something that it… When you first find out about the context, a book about leisure, sounds like almost superficial as a response to that, but it’s not because it’s all about reclaiming humanity in the face of a society that wants to strip you of your humanity. It’s all about what it is to really be human, and what it is to really be human is not just to work until you’re exhausted and then watch TV and fall asleep.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That, there’s something deeper than that, that it’s worship, that it’s culture, that it’s art, he argues, “Culture comes from cultus worship,” where we get words like, “Cult,” worship is where we get culture. If you don’t have that, if you’ve got no connection to the infinite, to that which lasts more than the ephemeral, you don’t just not have a spiritual life, you don’t have a life even to have great poetry, and great literature, and all that, you have no capacity for that because you’ve stifled it completely. But those things, there’s a reason you don’t just read Tolstoy while you’re in the middle of a work day, it’s something that takes freedom from all those distractions you can actually enter into, and experience something deeper.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so likewise with real worship, you need some freedom from those distractions, and then you enter into something deeper, like you enter into this encounter with the infinite God. And so rest is a sort of clearing out of all the noise, all of the just chaos and hassle, because if you don’t do that, if you’re constantly just running around in the rat race and the maze, you don’t make any real progress, you don’t really get anywhere, you just get older.
Cy Kellett:
Yep. Not to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, if you want to experience-
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s fair, that’s fair, Dostoevsky’s better, but I’m not even going to disagree with you on that, although I will say [inaudible 00:29:34] has a fantastic book in revealing the human person, and someone argued that Dostoevsky does a better job of writing extremes, and Tolstoy does a better job of writing ordinary characters.
Cy Kellett:
Well, that’s very interesting, that’s a very interesting take.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And I think actually-
Cy Kellett:
Maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to get through Tolstoy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s like, “I don’t relate to these-”
Cy Kellett:
“This is a lot of ordinary characters-”
Joe Heschmeyer:
“People-”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Well, thanks Joe. Thanks very much. I mean, I suppose the appeal to those who are Seventh-day Adventists listening, is that essentially-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, I could make an appeal.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, go ahead. You make the appeal. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So I’d say particularly for Seventh-day Adventists, the claims that Ellen Gould White, look up what Sunday Adventism actually teaches about her in terms of what’s affirmed and what’s denied, you can find that even on the Adventist website, you can find it on Ellen Gould White’s family foundation’s website, you can find all of these things and it’s put her at the level of a scriptural profit, and an Evangelist basically. And then look at her claims about the timeline of the Sabbath, and see if that can be harmonized with what we now know as a fact of the teaching of the Didache, about the teaching of book of Revelation, about the teaching of Justin Martyr’s first apology and Ignatius Antioch’s letter to the Magnesians. And I think what you’ll see is, history contradicts White’s predictions, so just as she makes false predictions about the future, she makes false predictions about the past, she’s a failed prophetess.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The scripture’s very clear that if you have a bunch of predictions that don’t come true, you’re not worthy of being followed, that’s the first part. Second part, in terms of, because someone could say, “Well, okay, maybe the early Christians did worship on Sunday, maybe Ellen Gould White is a false prophetess, but why do I know I should worship on Sunday instead of Saturday?” And I would say the fact that we see the Lord’s Day in the book of Revelation, that we see the Evangelist John, doing this, and the fact that his student Ignatius of Antioch is one of the clearest early sources on this, shows it’s of Apostolic origin.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We can get into the why, which we just did in this episode, but it should be sufficient to say the apostles make it clear by their practices and by their witness that this is how things are to go. St. Paul talks about collecting the collection on the first day of the week, because that’s when Christians are together, and so that idea is not some later invention, it’s not Constantine, it’s not some later Pope, it’s there at the time of the apostles. And so if that’s true, I hope that’s good enough for you, I hope it’s good enough for anyone who’s striving to follow Apostolic Christianity.
Cy Kellett:
And our appeal to everyone who’s other than Seventh-day Adventist is, follow the Lord’s command, and rest when he tells you to rest.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes, that’s everyone, whether you’re Seventh-day Adventist or not.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Rest and worship in accordance of what the Lord has for you, for your good, because you need it.
Cy Kellett:
Yep. Praise God. Thanks, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, my pleasure.