Sabbath People
From its inception, the Seventh-day Adventist church has been clinging to the seventh-day Sabbath as one of its pillars and defining doctrines. This has been done so much to the point where many see it as the distinction between those who will be saved in the parousia of Jesus, and those who will not. For lack of a better metaphor, Adventists have often identified themselves with the sheep that Jesus mentions in Matt. 25 and those who do not keep the Sabbath have been identified with the goats. [1]
It is my opinion that this is both a poor interpretation of scripture and a terrible misuse of the purposes of the Sabbath throughout the Bible. The Sabbath has become a weekly requirement rather than the lifestyle that Biblical theology portrays it to be.
It is unfortunate that most Seventh-day Adventist conversation concerning the Sabbath in the Torah is limited to Ex. 20:8-11 and Deut. 5:12-15. The book of Leviticus contains some of the most prominent commands concerning the Sabbath, which can be found in chapter 25. Though there are many environmental ethical issues to be found within the Sabbatical year mentioned in vss. 1-7, I would like to focus specifically on the following passage concerning the year of jubilee.
As described, the year of jubilee is to occur every 50 years. Stating it in another way it was to be celebrated every “seven weeks of seven years,” or as the Hebrew literally states “seven Sabbaths of seven years.” Thus, the jubilee is to be a great Sabbath, more significant than the rest. As described throughout the passage, it is the year when property is returned to its original owner, the land is allowed a Sabbath to rest, and liberty is to be proclaimed to the inhabitants of the land. The Israelites are then commanded that within this year of jubilee, they are to care for the poor within their land. This is central for the topic at hand.
This great Sabbath of Sabbaths demanded Israel to live within the realm of self-sacrifice and social justice. It was a great call to portray the true nature of their election and indeed the true nature of the Sabbath: to bless the nations. But as can be seen throughout the story of Israel, they fell short of this goal. This is evident in Isaiah’s condemnation of the Sabbath because Israel has refused to “seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, (and) plead the widows cause.” [2] Israel did not live up to the calling that the true nature of the Sabbath placed upon them. Indeed, these failures cause many of the prophets to condemn Jerusalem herself. Isaiah describes the “faithful city” as a “whore” [3] while Ezekiel compares it to Sodom, which was destroyed because “she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” [4]
Though earlier condemning the Sabbath, Isaiah lays out the framework for how the Sabbath is truly to be lived in chapter 58. The chapter begins with the people complaining that God has not acknowledged their fasting. God then answers by telling them the true nature of their fasting. “Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicket fist.” [5] God then tells them that the fasting that he chooses is “to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.” [6] The chapter then ends with a call to keep the Sabbath as it was truly meant to be kept.
“If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or taking idly; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” [7]
This verse has been used several times by Adventists to force certain Sabbatarian views on the church. Specifically, “not doing your own pleasure” has been interpreted by many to mean that it is not acceptable to do things like watch secular TV shows or movies, or listen to secular music on the Sabbath. But given the context of chapter 58, refraining from personal pleasure seems to mean refraining from oppression.
In chapter 61, Isaiah continues his theme of justice for the oppressed by culminating the discussion with the year of jubilee previously described in Lev. 25. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” [8] Thus, the Sabbath and the year of jubilee and caring for the poor and the oppressed are themes that are inevitably connected.
Jesus uses the imagery of the year of jubilee in his discourse with the Jews in his hometown of Nazareth in Luke 4. Quoting from the Isaiah 61 text previously mentioned, he tells those attending the synagogue that the words of the prophet had been fulfilled that day in front of them. [9]
The brilliant New Testament scholar N.T. Wright comments that this could have been due to a problem of debt in ancient Israel. [10] He also notes that it is unlikely that Jesus was aiming to have the whole nation of Israel celebrate the year of jubilee because there is no evidence that Israel ever celebrated the year of jubilee. [11] Rather, he was calling his followers to live their lives as though the jubilee were “being enacted.” [12] Thus this great Sabbath of Sabbaths is a mandate from Jesus for his followers to constantly embody the themes of the year of jubilee. Richard Hays writes, “Luke…proclaims God’s liberating power on behalf of the poor and hungry (Luke 1:52-53, 4:18-19) and highlights the vision for a new community of believers who share all possessions in common so that there are no poor among them.” [13] They were to care for the poor, needy and oppressed around them. It is evident that the early church embodied this theme in Acts 4:32-37. They cared for the poor. None of them were needy, because they all gave to support each other. They were more than willing to give of all of their material possessions to answer the call that Jesus had placed on them.
Conclusion
The Sabbath has been a great blessing to many Seventh-day Adventists throughout the years. For many, it has been a stronghold of communion with God: a time to rest from the weary work of life and enjoy the blessings of God. But what I would like to suggest is that we have not followed the theology of the Sabbath far enough. Perhaps it is out of fear. Perhaps there are some that know when this theology of the Sabbath is followed through to its end, it will demand a great deal from us that a western-capitalist culture tells us is ours alone, and that we have a right to what we have and have a right to decide what to do with it. But the call of the gospel and the call of the Sabbath are stronger than these claims.
Perhaps we have been given possessions and money so that we can share them. Perhaps we have been giving blessings so that we in turn can bless others. Perhaps God has given the Sabbath as a true sign of his love. Not only a restful and placid love, but an active love that is constantly giving to those in need, being a voice for the voiceless, and fighting oppression. The Sabbath embodies all of these themes. As Sabbath people, it is time for the Seventh-day Adventist church to stand up and stop using the Sabbath as the sign of the end and to start using it as a sign of the beginnings of the Kingdom of God.
[1] Matt. 25:33-34.
[2] Isaiah 1:13, 17.
[3] Isaiah 1:21.
[4] Ez. 16:49.
[5] Isaiah 58:3-4.
[6] Isaiah 58:6.
[7] Isaiah 58:13-14
[8] Isaiah 61:1-2.
[9] Luke 4:18-21.
[10] N.T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God Volume 2: Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996) p. 294. He also notes that this theme can be seen within some of Jesus’ own parables cf. Luke 7:41-42, Matt. 18:23-35.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996) p. 464.
Perichoresis and Parousia
During this season of Advent my thoughts are directed to the hope of the final appearance of Jesus. This is not easy for me, I admit. If I had to name the one thing that pushes me from faith to the edge of doubt (and sometimes beyond that edge), it is the delay of the parousia.
As a Seventh-day Adventist, there are two aspects of my faith heritage that accentuate this delay: the fact that Adventism was born out of the foolish act of setting a date for the coming of Jesus; second, having reinterpreted the biblical passages that led to the Great Disappointment, the church now teaches that Jesus moved into a new compartment in heaven so that he can judge the world, which means that he should be here any minute now. So we sound the alarm that Jesus is coming back soon (what ‘soon’ actually means, not what the New Testament writers meant when they said ‘soon’), but we’ve been doing so for a while. And so, having grown up in a church that has been “crying wolf” for the last century and a half… well, you get the idea.
So, where is Jesus?
The answers to this question seems obvious: heaven, the right hand of the Father, the Most Holy Place in the heavenly Sanctuary. And these are, according to Scripture, the right answers. But might they mean something different than what we typically think? I think so, and you can tell me if I’m wrong. I’m not convinced that the ascent of Jesus to the Father means the absence of Jesus. That is to say, while I affirm that Jesus is in all of the places listed above, I nevertheless still affirm Jesus’ actual presence among us here and now—and not just through the agency of the Spirit.
Some months ago I translated Colossians, and while I was smoothing out my translation I noticed something very strange: Paul (or whoever the author is) does not speak about the Spirit anywhere in the letter. Instead, the presence of God according to Colossians is the presence of Christ: “To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (1:27 NRSV).
Needing to investigate this more, I went through the rest of Paul’s letters, and then examined texts in the rest of the New Testament dealing with the resurrection, ascension and coming of Jesus. What I found was the Trinity.
Throughout most of Paul’s writing, the Spirit plays a significant role. For Paul, we dwell in the Spirit and the Spirit dwells in us. And yet it is not just the Spirit. In Ephesians, the first two chapters describe the church as being “in Christ,” having been raised up with him into the “heavenlies,” and yet also being marked by the presence of the Spirit. In chapter four, the author writes this: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (4:3 NRSV) In this Trinitarian formulation, it is the Father whose presence we experience. In Acts, Paul is recorded as having said that in God “we live and move and have our being” (17:28 NRSV).
This trend is consistent with other New Testament material, like John’s Gospel, in which Jesus says in prayer that he is among the church and the Father is in him. Similarly, in Matthew 28, Jesus promises to be with his disciples “to the end of the age.”
What does this mean?
As I understand it, I believe that the New Testament picture of the seeming absence of Jesus is that his absence is actually a state of being unrevealed. Thus, the parousia is not so much a coming (in the sense of traveling from point A to point B) as it is, quite literally, an appearing—a revelation. In this I agree with Moltmann, who has written that the resurrection appearances of Jesus are a “pre-reflection” of his coming glory in all the world—what the disciples experienced will one day be the universal experience of all creation in greater glory.[1]
If, following the Trinitarian hints in the New Testament, we can affirm that we experience the presence of all three persons of the Trinity (not just the Spirit), and we dwell in the Trinity and the Trinity dwells in and among us, then we can say that what we wait for is not the coming of Jesus, but the full revelation of the glory of his resurrection that will transform all creation.
This shift in thinking moves us away from the kind of eschatology that looks only to an in-breaking of God to fix everything; it does not allow us to sit back and wait for the fulfillment of prophecy. Rather, the presence of the risen Jesus among us is what makes us the church, and what demands that we participate in God’s mission to transform our world. The presence of God among us calls us to a collaborative eschatology in which our talk about the future does not consist of “psychological terrorism,”[2] but rather motivating, transformative hope. Because God dwells in us, and we in God, or hope is for Jesus to be revealed. And we already catch glimpses of this now.
[1] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 83-85.
[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. xi.
Jared Wright on Progressive Adventism
I asked my friend Jared Wright, a Master of Divinity student at La Sierra University, to come over and share with us some of his thoughts on progressive Adventism and theology. Jared is a blogger for Spectrum.
Otherness and Ecumenical Unity: Moving Beyond Homogeneity and Heterogeneity to Solidarity
One of the stated goals of these ongoing conversations is to promote ecumenical unity—denominationally and inter-denominationally. I believe that the gospel mandates, and scripture testifies to this fact, that Christians work towards unity with one another.
This is a delicate topic among Adventists, who have historically been suspicious of anything ecumenical. My understanding of this suspicion is that it comes two places: (1) Adventist eschatology has placed the Adventist community in a central role in the cosmic battle between good and evil, and has singled this community out as the faithful remnant among the so-called Christians who are actually apostate, and (2) ecumenism carries with it the risk of a loss of identity in the homogeneous mass of those that are ‘just Christian’ churches. At the present I will not address the first, theological concern.
In the West, the Protestant Christian church has become increasingly post-denominational. That is, most Christians seem to identify more strongly with their local congregation than they do with a specific denomination, and denominations themselves are becoming difficult to distinguish from one another; they are typically some conglomerate version of evangelical (whatever that is evolving into) or mainline Protestant. This is neither praise nor criticism, but simply the way things appear to me.
Adventism is an exception to this rule for a variety of reasons, some of which are more significant than others. In the context of post-denominationalism, does Adventism, which is deeply invested in preserving its unique identity and mission, have good reason to be apprehensive about ecumenical endeavors? If I am going to answer honestly, then I have to say that, yes, apprehension is the correct response. It is naïve to believe that one’s identity, self-understanding and theological self-expression will be unchanged by vulnerable interaction with ‘the other’. I believe that this is self-evident simply because of the post-denominational climate in Protestant Christianity.
The challenge that faces Adventism, then, is the Christian responsibility to actively seek out unity with all Christians, and to do so without completely losing its identity and relevance in the homogeneous mass of those who are ‘just Christians’. However, those who are familiar with Adventism should already see the irony in this last statement: Adventism, now 165 years removed from the Great Disappointment, is largely uncertain of its identity, and in its identity crisis has steadily been losing its relevance.
It would seem, then, that in this moment of crisis in Adventism, it would be foolish to put ourselves in a position to truly lose our identity and relevance in the homogeneity of evangelicalism or mainline Protestantism. I have heard many an Adventist lament the fact that their church is already losing its distinctiveness. But I believe that the very reason why Adventism is experiencing an identity crisis and loss of relevance, as well as any quality that would distinguish it as something with a valid reason to exist, is none other than the fact that Adventism has closed itself off from ecumenical discussion.
In a theological culture of deconstruction, unity has become the façade under which homogeneity hides, and in this rising tide of homogeneity Christians have retreated from theological questions and have found a strange safety in the supposedly more important discussions on ethics and pragmatic questions. However, Adventism, broken and confused as it is, has not yet been absorbed into the mass.
What I believe Adventism needs to piece together its own identity and to redefine its own relevance (while serving the rest of the Christian church) is to be intentional about its involvement with other traditions of Christianity. Adventism has the opportunity at this time in its history to move forward in promoting Christian unity that does not demand homogeneity, and is not conquered by the reality of heterogeneity. Indeed, the very idea of unity assumes difference. Christian unity, I believe, can never allow homogeneity, and learns to see beyond heterogeneity. What unity calls for is solidarity with ‘the other’.
The principle of unity that looks beyond mere tolerance of difference to solidarity in the midst of otherness must begin within each community. Adventism must get beyond the wars about who gets to define what it means to be an Adventist Christian, and learn to define its community with its broad spectrum of ideologies in mind; our unity, identity, and relevance must be grounded in our diversity and our solidarity with all Christians.
Sabbath Prayer
God, we rejoice that today no burden of work will be upon us and that our body and soul are free to rest. We thank thee that of old this day was hallowed by thee for all who toil, and that from generation to generation the weary sons of men have found it a shelter and a breathing space. We pray for thy peace on all our brothers and sisters who are glad to cease from labor and to enjoy the comfort of their home and the companionship of those whom they love. Forbid that the pressure of covetousness and thoughtless love of pleasure rob any who are worn of their divine right of rest. Grant us wisdom and self-control that our pleasures may not be follies, lest our leisure drain us more than our work. Teach us that in the mystic unity of our nature our body cannot rest until our soul has repose, that so we may walk this day in thy presence in tranquility of spirit, taking each joy as thy gift, and on the morrow return to our labor refreshed and content.[1]
[1] Walter Rauschenbusch, Prayers for the Social Awakening (London: The Phillips Publishing Company, 1910), p. 37.
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