Why Do Christians Worship On Sunday?

Joe looks at the position of Sabbitarians, and their claim that Emperor Constantine instituted worship on Sundays.

Transcript:

JOE:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And why do Christians worship on Sunday? Is it because of something that Jesus did or because of something that Constantine did? In other words, was Sunday chosen because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ or was it chosen as a way of compromising with Roman pagans in the fourth century? You might be convinced you already know the answer to this question, but I hope you’ll give me the opportunity to share some historical evidence that you might not already know. After all, the stakes are high.

CLIP:

The Bible is very clear. We are to worship God on his Sabbath, which is the seventh day of the week. So if you’re worshiping on Sunday, the first day of the week, you’re worshiping on the wrong day.

JOE:

None of us should want to worship God on the wrong day or in the wrong way. We should strive to worship him both when and how he calls us to worship him. And according to Sabbatarians, like the men you just heard, we are meant to worship him on the Sabbath day, Saturday. So how, according to this view, did we end up worshiping him on the wrong day?

CLIP:

How did Christianity go from keeping the Sabbath to observing Sunday? After the death of the apostles, the church maintained much of the same religious practices, including the observance of the seventh day Sabbath. However, by the 300s, things changed dramatically for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Enter Emperor Constantine.

JOE:

We’ll take a closer look at this in a moment, but just for now, recognize the story is this. Allegedly, the early Christians were Sabbatarians. They worshiped on Saturday until 3:21 when Constantine, who’s the villain of the story, changed the day of rest and eventually the day of worship to Sunday.

CLIP:

Every story needs a good old-fashioned villain, and Constantine is ours. Constantine was the Roman emperor from 306 to 337 AD. Constantine ended Christian persecution with the edict of Milan in 31380. But on March 7th, 3:21, Constantine decreed Sunday to be the Roman day of rest, saying on the venerable day of the sun, let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest and let all workshops be closed.

JOE:

Now, that’s partly true, by the way. Constantine did create Sunday as a weekly day of rest in Rome for the very first time. But according to the story, he did this because this was already the day the Romans were used to worshiping the sun.

CLIP:

Now, this law initially wasn’t aimed at replacing the Sabbath with Sunday, but it did establish a day of rest on the day of the sun or Sunday. And sun worshipers, like he had been, now had a day of rest. But what that did do was pave the way for pagans who were converting to Christianity to keep their old day of worship in honor of their new Christian God.

JOE:

So that’s the basics we’re in a nutshell. I’m going to try to distill it to three claims that I want us to investigate. Number one, the earliest Christians worshiped on Saturday, not Sunday. Number two, the switch from Saturday to Sunday worship happened because of the influence of the Emperor Constantine in 321. And number three, this switch was a compromise with paganism so that the Roman pagans could keep their old day of worship. But are any of these three claims true? I want to look at them one by one, but in reverse order. So starting with Constantine and slowly working our way back to Jesus. And if you find that helpful, if this is something that you would like to support more of, I’d encourage you to join my Patreon over at shamelessjo.com. So with that, very briefly out of the way, let’s look at that third claim that this switch to Sunday is the day of rest, this happens in 321 and it happens in order for Roman pagans to keep their old day of worship.

As I said, is a small kernel of truth in the story. Constantine really does establish Sundays a day of rest in the Roman Empire in 3:21, but here’s where that story immediately starts to fall apart. Now remember, the claim is that allegedly this was done in order to-

CLIP:

Pave the way for pagans who were converting to Christianity to keep their old day of worship. Wait a minute.

JOE:

If this was already the well-established, the old day of worship for Roman pagans, why is Constantine the first to give them the day off on Sunday? So in order to believe this story, we’re actually meant to believe several things that are not just not founded in the historical record, but are obviously false. First, the center of Roman worship, it wasn’t the Son. It wasn’t the Son God’s soul. Pretty famously, there’s a pantheon of Roman gods and the head God is Jupiter, not soul. Second, regardless of which God you worshiped, this idea of a weekly day of worship, that’s a Jewish and a Christian idea, not a pagan one. In fact, the first century Saturist juvenile mocks the Jews for giving up every seventh day to idleness, keeping it apart from all the concerns of life. His point has nothing to do with Saturday verse Sunday.

His point is that from a Roman pagan perspective, it’s bizarre to take a religious holiday every single week. Now, of course, there were plenty of pagan holidays dedicated to the various gods, including the God’s soul, but they weren’t set for one day a week. They were scattered throughout the calendar. So for instance, the special festivities in honor of soul, the Son God, were on August 8th, August 9th, August 28th, December 11th, and then later, October 9th, October 22nd. And then in 354 after the rise of Christianity, we find December 25th added to the calendar as well. This tone marked as the nativity of the unconquerable soul. My point is that Sunday wasn’t the old day of worship for Roman pagans, both because their religious lives weren’t centered around soul, but also because they weren’t centered around a weekly day of worship at all. Even the seven-day week itself was pretty new to the Romans.

It arrived in Italy at about the same time that Jesus was being born in Bethlehem, and it was used principally for astronomy. It wasn’t the standard calendar Romans used for their regular life. The fact that it’s used for astronomy is reflected in the fact that the various days of the week were named after the sun, Sunday, the moon, Monday, and then the other days are named after various planets. Outside of astronomy, the calendar you would ordinarily use wasn’t one that was built around a seven-day week. Rather, the month was divided up into Cowans, nuns and eyes, hence famous line. Well, the eyes of much. Now that’s a little detail in the story. I think it’s easy for us to miss as Christians. We’re used to the idea of a weekly day of rest, but Constantine, he’s not just introducing the Romans to the idea of a weekly day of rest.

He’s actually helping to standardize and popularize seven-day week calendars in the first place. So hopefully it’s clear that that part of the story, this idea that Sunday is chosen because the day on which the Romans were out there worshiping their God every week, it’s demonstrably false in several different ways. But okay. If Sunday wasn’t chosen by Constantine to appease the pagans, why does he establish Sunday as the day of rest? Well, because it was already the Lord’s day for Christians. So here, we need to take a closer look at the second of the Sabbatarian claims, this idea that Sunday worship starts with Constantine. A lot rides on this claim. For instance, the largest group of Sabbatarians are the Seventh-day Adventists. There’s about 23 million members, and they teach that their co-founder, LNG White, was a prophet, and she claimed that in the first centuries, the true Sabbath had been kept by all Christians.

But the problem is their prophet has no idea what she’s talking about. This is very obviously untrue. So let’s take just a few of the earliest Christian writings we have outside of the Bible. I’m going to start around the year 200 and then we’re going to keep moving backwards to the time of Christ. At the close of the second century, Turtulian distinguishes the Sabbath from the day of the Lord’s resurrection, and he talks about how on the Lord’s Day, Christians should be in the habit of deferring even our businesses lest we give any place to the devil. So it’s clearly this idea that as a day distinct from the Sabbath, there’s also this day of the Lord’s resurrection, Sunday, and that it’s some kind of day of rest. Let’s move earlier than that to the middle of the 100s. Here we find St. Justin Martyr explaining that Sunday is the day in which we all hold our common assembly, and that this is in honor of the Father creating the world on the first day of the week, and because of Jesus rising from the dead on the first day of the week.

Even before that, in a dialogue with the Jewish trifo, Justin tells him that he needs to get baptized in order to be circumcised with the true circumcision. And then he adds that we too would observe the fleshly circumcision and the Sabbath and in short, all the feasts if we did not know for what reason they were enjoined, namely on account of your transgressions and the hardness of your hearts. So here he’s explaining not just why Christians worship on Sunday. He’s explicitly saying as well why we don’t treat the Sabbath as the heart of our worship anymore because we understand what the Sabbath was for. Now, that point bears some explaining. After all, Sabbatarians might argue Christians should still observe the Sabbath because after all, scripture describes it as an everlasting sign.

CLIP:

The third fact I ascertained in my study is that the Sabbath is an everlasting sign between God and his people.

JOE:

The problem with this argument is that the exact same language is used to describe circumcision. God introduces it by referring to it as an everlasting covenant, and yet the church was perfectly clear in Acts chapter 15 that circumcision was no longer required. Why? Because the old covenant sign of circumcision was pointing to something higher in the new covenant, baptism. Now, early Christians recognize the same thing about the Sabbath as well. Yes. The Old Testament does talk about it as if it’s an everlasting sign, but the New Testament treats it as no longer binding. Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and St. Paul says, “Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.” Festivals were the annual Jewish feasts, New Moon were the monthly Jewish feasts, and the Sabbath was the weekly Jewish day of rest.

So how do we make sense of this? How can it be, on the one hand, this everlasting sign, and on the other hand, no longer something that is part of our daily or weekly life? Well, by recognizing that like circumcision, the Sabbath is everlasting because it points beyond itself to something deeper. Here, it’s worth looking how the New Testament treats this idea of the Sabbath. Hebrews chapter four, quote Psalm 95, in which God says that the disobedient Israelites that they shall never enter into his rest. Now that’s clearly a reference to eternity and Hebrews is quite clear this is a kind of rest we can enter only by faith. We who have believed enter that rest. And so there remains the Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever enters God’s rest also ceases from his labors as God did from his. Now, Hebrew’s treatment of the Sabbath is pretty similar to the way that the so- called Epistle of Barnabas, which dates to about the year 135, talks about the Sabbath as well.

It describes the old Saturday Sabbath is no longer acceptable to God and says that the true Sabbath will be when God giving rest to all things shall make a beginning of the eighth day that is a beginning of another world. And the author of the Epistle of Barnabas says that it’s in anticipation of this true Sabbath that we keep the eighth day with joyfulness, as well as the fact that it is the day that Jesus rose from the dead. Now, all of this is also in keeping with what we find even earlier than Turtulian, even earlier than Justin Martyr, even earlier than the Epistle of Barnabas. In about the year 107, St. Ignatius of Antioch describes faithful Jewish converts to Christianity as those who were brought up in the ancient order of things who have come to the possession of a new hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord’s Day, on which also our life has sprung up again by him.

Ignatius is talking in this context about not returning to the observance of the Mosaic law, what was called Judaizing. And one of the hallmarks is that these Christians are no longer observing the Sabbath, that they now instead observe the Lord’s Day on Sunday, the day Jesus froze from the dead. Now, I know many Sabbatarians will protest the Sabbath was meant for Gentiles as well as for Jews, but the important thing here isn’t whether you think Justin or Ignatius or the Epistle of Barnabas are right. The important thing here is just to recognize that this was an ancient Christian practice hundreds of years before Constantine. Whether you agree with the early Christians or not, they clearly demonstrate Sunday worship isn’t originating with Constantine or paganism or anything of the sort. It goes back hundreds of years earlier and it’s done explicitly in honor of the resurrection.

So it’s simply indefensible for Sabbatarians to continue to say the kind of obviously false claims that people like Walter Veath may care.

CLIP:

When Constantine, the emperor introduced Sunday as the day of the Lord, when they mingled, this was in the fourth century when he mingled the pagan Sunday with Christianity.

JOE:

But Constantine simply couldn’t have introduced the church to the idea of Sunday as the day of the Lord, because we find references to Sunday as the day of the Lord 200 years earlier back in the year 107. And amazingly, we can seemingly go back even earlier. Within the Bible itself, St. John says in Revelation one that he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. Now, I know some Sabbatarians will claim that John really meant Saturday. He meant the Sabbath by that. The problem is that goes against the way the expression the Lord’s Day is used in all the other ancient Christian writings. Quite clearly, the Lord’s Day or the day of the Lord reversed to Sunday. Now, similarly, in the dedicate, which might actually be older in the book of Revelation, seems to have been written during the lifetime of the apostles. It distinguishes things like the Jewish practice of which days they keep fast and the Christian practice of which days to keep fasts.

And it also says that for Christians, the sacrifice of the Eucharist is offered every Lord’s day. The Greek there literally says the Lord’s day of the Lord. In short, as scholars have pointed out, Christians began to hold periodical gatherings not later than the middle of the first century, 20 years after Jesus’s death. And insofar as the sources allow any inference, the periodical gatherings of Christians took place on Sundays. In other words, we can trace weekly worship back to the life of the apostles themselves, and this weekly worship seems to have been, by all the evidence, Sunday worship. So I think we need to regard the Sabbatarian case as largely fictional. It’s based upon obvious falsehoods about Roman paganism, about the Roman calendar, about Constantine, about early Christianity, and about the way the New Testament speaks about the Sabbath and about the Lord’s day. Our worship on Sunday has literally nothing to do with Constantine.

It has everything to do with Jesus Christ. Now, if you happen to be a seventh day Adventist, or perhaps you want to know how to answer some other aspects of Adventist’s theology, I hope you’ll take a look at this debate that I did with an Adventist gentleman on whether the Bible teaches the idea of soul sleep. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.