How Do Born Again Christians Keep the 4th Commandment
Jonathan Willis
(For the offset, introductory mail service in the serial, click here)
After the 2nd, it is probably the Fourth Commandment that has received the near attention by historians, because it outlines what became 1 of the central priorities of Protestant (and specifically Puritan) piety: the observation of the Sabbath.[1] The Fourth Commandment was also the longest in the Decalogue:
Remember the sabbath day, to go along it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and practise all thy piece of work: Merely the 7th day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any piece of work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy girl, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and globe, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the 7th day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath solar day, and hallowed it.
The Sabbath was a potentially controversial and complex notion for several reasons. Equally it had been instituted for the Jewish people in the One-time Attestation, the Saturday Sabbath was counted as part of the Ceremonial Police force along with other ritual aspects of Judaism, such as the dietary requirements that forbade the eating of pork and shellfish. Christian doctrine held that this Ceremonial Law had been abrogated – superseded and therefore rendered obsolete – past the coming of Christ. Many aspects of Judaism were considered to foretell of import features of Christianity, such as the welcoming of male infants into the Jewish faith and community through infant circumcision equally a foreshadowing of the spiritual induction into the Christian customs provided by the sacrament of baptism. Once Christ had come to earth and sacrificed himself, these weak glimmers of true religion were replaced by the blinding light of the gospel.
Early Christians had therefore begun to observe the Sabbath on a Sunday, as a mark of difference from Judaism, and Reformed Protestants maintained this exercise, in spite of isolated suggestions like that past John Frith in 1533 to move the Sabbath to a Tuesday, to avoid any charges of continuity with Catholic practice.[2] In the primary, Protestants squared the circumvolve by maintaining that while the external details of the Sabbath (such every bit when it was to be held) were formalism (and therefore non-binding) bug, the necessity of resting from work and worshipping God one day in Vii was a bounden imperative of God's Moral Constabulary (another term for the Ten Commandments), which remained mandatory for all Christians for all eternity.
John Dod, whose blockbuster Plaine and familiar exposition of the 10 Commandements went through twenty editions between 1603 and 1662, discussed the precept at length, i section at a fourth dimension. His summary was fairly pithy, however; this was the commandment 'to teach us, to ready apart the seventh day wholly, from all worldly affairs, to the exercises of Religion and mercy'. Dod discussed the moral, binding nature of the commandment, stating baldly that 'nosotros may hands perceive, that this Commandment is no more than ceremoniall and then all the rest'.[3] The injunction to Remember the Sabbath functioned as a special memorandum to go along the commandment in view of man'south infirmity and readiness to be drawn from God's service.
Non do whatever fashion of work was an essential ingredient of the Sabbath, and to make that point, Dod discussed extensively the example of the man described in Numbers 15 as found exterior the military camp gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. This had been such 'an ill example of libertie to others' that although 'he did the smallest worke, yet that little worke was and then great sinne, that God appoints him to be stoned to death for information technology.'
The actual works to be undertaken on the Sabbath were adequately uncontentious, although the precise formulation of dos and don'ts varied according to author: for Dod, in add-on to attending Church services, the godly ought to meditate on God'southward word and works, read the word/hear the word read, pray, sing psalms, enter godly briefing, and perform the works of mercy enjoined by the bible. The faithful had non merely to perform these works, but to delight in them, and spend the whole 24 hours of the Sabbath engaged in them, forbearing worldly business and thoughts. Some authors went much further than Dod, suggesting that the God-ward attitude of the Sabbath ought to permeate the entirety of the life of the Christian, proposing multiple or perpetual Sabbaths, or extending it to include lengthy pre-Sabbath preparations. Not only did this bring the Fourth Commandment dangerously close to the common view of the Third, but Dod had an additional alert: 'and these men that among us urge and so much, that every twenty-four hour period must be a Sabbath: marke them, whether they residue from sin an y day at all, and notice if there exist anie families, then bad as theirs'!
[1] E.One thousand. Kenneth Parker, , The English Sabbath: A study of doctrine and subject from the Reformation to the Ceremonious State of war (Cambridge: Cambridge University Printing, 1988).
[2] As recently described in Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525-1590 (Cambridge: Cup, 2014), p. i.
[3] John Dod, A plaine and familiar exposition of the Ten commandements (1604), STC2: 6968, p. 124.
Source: https://manyheadedmonster.com/2017/10/18/the-fourth-commandment-keeping-it-holy/
0 Response to "How Do Born Again Christians Keep the 4th Commandment"
Post a Comment