Are Seventh-Day Adventists Right about Sunday Worship?

You’re listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Today I want to dip a toe into exploring the theology of a group called Seventh-day Adventists or Seventh-day Adventism. And saying what are some of the distinctive things that they believe and are those things true? What can we say about them as non Adventists particularly and if you’re an Adventist watching this, bravo, congratulations. I appreciate you being here. I hope I do a good job of fairly presenting your views. I look forward to hearing your responses, thoughts in the comments below. So to start off with, what is it that Seventh-day Adventists believe? And it’s right there in the name, although you might hear that name and say, “I don’t know what any of those words mean together.” Advent is that season before Christmas and what does that have to do with the seventh day and the seventh day of what?

Well, let me explain. This is really two different theological systems fused together. And what I mean by that is this, and take it as a Venn diagram because you can believe in the Advent, the imminent return of Christ, or you could believe in the seventh day being the day Christians ought to worship, meaning that we should worship on Saturday and not Sunday and not have the other belief. But Seventh-day Adventists are people who believe in both things. They believe number one, Christ is going to come back very soon. That’s the Advent. So just as the season of Advent to prepare for Christmas is all about getting ready for Christs first coming, Adventism is the theological system which is all about preparing for Christ’s second coming, but with the emphasis on it being really soon. Seventh-day Adventism is distinct in that it’s a form of Adventism that says, and one of the important things to do right now, is to have worship and rest be on Saturday and not Sunday.

So this is going to be, as you might imagine, a very simplified summary. There’s a lot of other really interesting controversial doctrines that Seventh-day Adventists believe in. I’m not going to touch on 99% of them. I’m going to look at just the hallmark issues here. And in particular, I want to look at the role of Ellen G. White, Ellen Gould White, who plays a really important role in the history of Adventism in today because she’s regarded as something of a modern prophet, although she preferred the term messenger, that she was the messenger of the Lord and her writings are considered by many Adventists to be inspired or fallible. There’s some question about the status that they have, but either way, she is officially recognized by her church as being someone who wrote under divine authority in some sense. What that looked like, we don’t need to get into the weeds on all of that, but that when you’re reading her writings, a devout Adventist would say, “You’re not just reading the musings of a 19th century woman.”

“You’re reading theological musings prompted by the Lord and that she’s actually a visionary.” There’s a lot going on there. We’ll get into all of that, but I want to go kind of in order. What is Adventism? What is the importance of Saturday? And then what do we make of Ellen Gould White? And in particular, what do we make about Ellen Gould White talking about the alleged history of Saturday and Sunday worship and the role of the Emperor Constantine. So hopefully it won’t be too much, but this is just going to be kind of a primer. So first, what is Adventism? As I’ve already said, it’s the preparation for the imminent second coming of Christ. Now imminent is really important. And the Bible verse I think any Adventist could point you to is Revelation 22 verse seven, when Jesus says, “Behold I’m coming soon.” Now that soon was 2000 years ago.

And so the question we should be asking is, “Okay, but how soon?” And St. Peter gives us an answer. That it’s going to be soon by our Lord’s reckoning and not by ours. And so he says, “Don’t ignore this fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as 1,000 years and 1,000 years as one day.” So think about it that way, that what to the Lord is just a few days, is no time at all in the cosmic scheme of things, is numerous generations, countless generations, millennia by our time. And so this is something to always remember that yes, we should absolutely be prepared for Christs coming and return, but also we should be aware that the vast majority of us who thought we were in the very last days and that Christ was going to come in our lifetime, we’ve all been wrong and that includes Ellen White as we’re going to see.

And so Jesus warns us, “Watch therefore for you know neither the day nor the hour.” That’s Matthew 25:13. And the problem is as we’ve kind of geared up to say, “Okay. We are ready to meet Jesus,” people can’t help but kind of guess about the day and the hour. And so the most famous of these in this context was a man by the name of William Miller in the 19th century. He is a fascinating figure and in many ways actually a pretty sympathetic figure. Daniel Walker Howe, who’s a secular historian, has a good description of this in his book, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815 to 1848. As you can imagine from the title, it’s a book about much more than that, but there’s a section in there about Miller and how Miller had been a captain in the war of 1812. He comes home, he helps run away slaves escape to Canada, he studies the Bible every chance he gets.

He seems to be a guy who’s trying to do right by God and neighbor. And he is not someone who is trained in theology, biblical studies. He is not somebody who understands Hebrew or Greek, but as Walker Howe notes, “He applied a mixture of ingenuity and common sense to the task. Dignified in Protestant tradition of individual interpretation of scripture.” And so he finds this verse to be the key to his whole eschatology, which is the belief in the end time. So in Daniel eight, verse 14, it says, “Unto 2,300 days, then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” And you’ll find variations of that translation, something like that, that after 2,300 days, the Lord is going to purify or cleanse, restore, his sanctuary. And so Miller says, “Okay. Well days must mean years here. There’s other times like in Daniel itself where that seems to be the case.”

“The cleansing of the sanctuary must mean the second coming of Christ.” Now those are both big logical leaps. And then he just does the math based on when he sees all this stuff happening and just says, “Okay. Well 2,300 years later, that’s going to be somewhere between March of 1843 and April of 1844.” Now this, if memory serves, is in 1831 that he’s coming up with these calculations. So he suddenly realizes that the world only has 12 years left before the coming of Christ. And as you can imagine, this makes something of a splash, even though he’s, again, he’s a shy guy, he’s not particularly charismatic. You can see even from his portrait, he doesn’t seem like a guy who’s a natural just like charismatic all-star.

He believed God was calling to share this message that the world is going to end in 13 years. And so he, as Howe describes, the pudgy farmer is almost 50 years old now in 1831 and then he goes and he preaches this. And he continues to do this until he’s in his 60s and he meets some pretty influential people along the way. Joshua Himes, who’s a minister and a social reformer, he’s convinced of this and he helps him spread this in massive ways. So they distribute millions of pages of tracks. They have this enormous portable tent that they bring and bring half a million people in the three summers of 1842 to 1844 to these basically tent revivals to get people ready for the fact that Christ is coming any day now. Now by 1843 there were about 25,000 to 50,000 Americans, mostly in New England, upstate New York.

This is what sometimes called the burned over district ’cause this is where a lot of 19th century religious movements start. There’s a bunch of revivals, a bunch of strange new theological systems that take off there or having started elsewhere get popular there. The Shakers are there. If you look at the history of Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s to right here. Mormonism right here. This period and this time has a bunch of people in what’s then kind of the back woods who are devout, but aren’t particularly educated and are looking for something and then people keep coming in one after another preaching some new system and lots of American religions are born right here. And the Millerites are no different. And so Miller gets 25 to 50,000 really committed people and way more than that who are, “Okay. I’m not sure you’re right, but I don’t want to be the guy who’s saying, “I’m going to stay inside when Jesus gets here.”

So a lot of people are just saying, “Well, okay. You might have something here.” And then the day comes and the day goes and Miller realizes that the year that he prophesied Jesus would return in, Jesus didn’t come. And so then some of his followers kind of take up the banner and say, “No, no, no, no. You weren’t totally wrong. You got to fix the numbers a little bit.” And so they adjust it for October 22nd, 1844 using the Karaite Jewish calendar. Samuel Snow is the one who does the recalculation there. Now if you’re familiar in modern times with a group called Family Radio, Herbert Camping I believe is his, Harold Camping, excuse me, is his name. They had a very similar thing about 10 years ago where they claim the end of the world and then when that day came and went, they adjusted it for six months down the road and then that day came and went and they realized they were just totally wrong.

Well that’s what happens here. They have this year window, it comes and goes. Then they have a new date, the Day of Atonement, October 22nd, 1844 and spoiler alert, it does not happen. And it’s really important because you’ve got these tens of thousands of people at least who are giving up everything. They’re paying off their debts, they’re quitting their jobs, they’re closing their businesses, they’re leaving their crops unharvested in the fields in the fall because they don’t think there’s going to be a winter and they don’t think there’s going to be a next year. They are giving money to the government over past frauds and cheats that they may have performed, they’re giving their money away because they have no reason to keep it, and they’re rushing to get baptized. A lot of these are actually really good things obviously, but you can imagine that they are living as if this is their last day on Earth and then they go outside to watch for Jesus’s return and they stay up all night and he doesn’t show up.

And this is known as The Great Disappointment or The Great Disappointment of 1844 and I don’t want to make light of it. It’s true. They should not have been trying to guess the day and the hour and they got what they deserved in one sense, but it is still tragic to see. William Miller, who by the way, seems like a good man as I said, he did not form a denomination because he didn’t think there was a need to form a denomination. He was just about to go return to be with Jesus. But after The Great disappointment, a lot of his followers, these Millerites who’ve been sort of thrown for a loop and have to figure out, “Well what do we do next?” They form into various groups and various denominations and a lot of them start gravitating towards some new idea. And amongst them, there is this teenage girl who starts claiming to be a visionary, claiming to be able to receive the words of Jesus.

And as you might guess, this is Ellen Gould White and that’s going to help transform now discredited Milleritism into Seventh-day Adventism. Now she’s only the co-founder. There’s more to that story, but this is an important kind of role. And so as Howe notes, “The largest group organized as a Seventh-day Adventist.” So the largest group of ex-Millerites. Now a lot of people just went back to mainstream Christianity, they went back to being Baptists, or they went back to being Shakers in a lot of cases. Baptist and Shakers were particularly prone to falling into this. Or they just lost faith in God altogether because he hadn’t shown up when they believed the Bible said he would. But of those who thought Miller was still onto something, the biggest kind of remnant group is the Seventh-day Adventist. So Joseph Bates is the main founder in Ellen Harmon White, or Ellen Gould White as she’s also known, is the co-founder.

And Bates, his big thing is that we should observe Sunday, excuse me, we should observe the Jewish Sabbath instead of Sunday. And White’s big thing is that we should stay away from things like tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and meat. And so these are all kind of central ideas. I’m going to actually not touch on the dietary stuff at all. As you can imagine, it’s important. As you can imagine, it’s related to the kind of Judaizing element within Seventh-day Adventism of trying to keep a lot of these Jewish elements, but I’m going to just alight it for now. I might cover it in a topic down the road. But here’s how Ellen Gould White describes the Millerite kind of experience, again as someone who lived through it. She writes, “Hiram Edson, one of this group, lived in central New York state at Port Gibson. He was the leader of the Adventist in that area.”

“The believers met in his home on October 22nd, 1844 to await the coming of the Lord. Calmly and patiently they awaited the great event. But as the hour of midnight came and they realized the day of expectation had passed, it became clear that Jesus would not come as soon as they had thought. It was a time of bitter disappointment.” Then she says, “The early morning hours, the next day, Hiram Edson, a few others, went out to his barn to pray,” and she says, “As they prayed, he felt assured that light would come. A little later, he and a friend are crossing a cornfield to visit some fellow Adventists. He looks up to see as if a hand touched his shoulder.” And she says, “He looked up to see. As if in a vision, the heavens opened in Christ in the heavenly sanctuary entering into the most holy place, there to begin a work of ministry on behalf of his people.”

Instead of coming forth from the most holy place to cleanse the world with fire as it talked, in other words, she’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, no, the October 22nd date was actually right, but it just wasn’t that Jesus was going to come back to earth then. Rather he invisibly enters into his sanctuary to cleanse his heavenly sanctuary.” And this is what she’s going to stick to later on, but these are her early writings. And so she points out that Hiram Edson, we already heard from, and then two other guys, one of them a physician, another a school teacher, and they sit down and they start reading the Bible and they become convinced that the sanctuary to be cleansed at the end of the 2,300 years isn’t the earthly, but the tabernacle in heaven, with Christ’s ministry on our behalf in the most holy place. And so they’ve just reinterpreted what the 2,300 year prophecy is all about and much later in a work called The Great Controversy, she says the same thing.

She quotes Daniel seven about the son of man receiving glory and she says, “The coming of Christ here described is not his second coming to the earth. He comes to the ancient of days in heaven to receive dominion and glory in a kingdom which will be given him at the close of his work and is a mediator. It is this coming and not his second coming to the earth that was foretold in prophecy to take place at the termination of the 2,300 days in 1844.” Now in terms of Daniel seven about Christ receiving glory from the ancient of days, seeing that as a heavenly event makes complete sense. It’s stranger though I think to see Daniel eight, which is what the 2,300-year prophecy is about in that light because if you read Daniel eight verses 13 to 14, you’ll see that the line is, “For how long is a vision concerning the continual burnt offering the transgression that makes desolate in the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled underfoot?”

And he said to him, “For 2,300 evenings and mornings, then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state.” So to apply this to heaven, you have to say that the abomination of desolation described in Daniel eight is occurring in heaven, this trampling of the Holy Ones underfoot, this kind of diabolical corruption is happening in heaven. So it’s a very strange kind of reinterpretation, but it means that she doesn’t have to say they were wrong. Just that they had the right date, just the wrong event. And so she says, “Attended by Heavenly Angels, our great high priest enters the Holy of Holies and their appears in the presence of God to engage in the last acts of his ministration on behalf of man to perform the work of investigative judgment and to make an atonement for all who are shown to be entitled to its benefits.”

Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff going on there. The rule of the investigative judgment in 1844 is just this non-falsifiable sort of claim. Yeah. You’d have to assume heaven’s timeline works the way it works on earth. That it’s 1844 in heaven at the same time it is on earth. We’ve covered that two weeks ago, whether that’s a plausible kind of reading of time in Heaven. Remember a day is like 1,000 years to the Lord. We’ve got pretty good biblical evidence that’s not the case. But then also, the idea that Christ isn’t making his atonement until 1844 and what’s significant about 1844? Why this particular date in heaven? None of that I think is particularly convincingly explained, but nevertheless, that’s where she ends up.

That’s the Seventh-day Adventist view of the Advent. So Christ is still coming and he’s still coming soon, but modern day Adventists, following White, are very careful not to claim a particular date and this is a really important thing. Now I will say, if you’re familiar with the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses, there’s a lot of similarities here. They have an early 20th century date. I want to say 1914, might be 1917. I don’t know. I’ll have to go back and look, but an early 20th century date where they thought there was going to be a major end of the world event. It came and went and they said, “Well it just ended spiritually.” So they do a similar thing where, “Yeah, sure, there was no visible evidence. We got our date right, but we’re just going to reinterpret that to mean it was a spiritual event none of us could see.”

And at that point, it’s a good question to ask. What could possibly debunk your prophetic claims then? But that’s just the first. The other half, remember, they’re not just Adventists ’cause there are non-Seventh-day Adventists. There’re first day Adventists who believe you should worship on Sunday, but they’re much smaller and basically die out. But Seventh-day Adventists are those who believe that we should be worshiping on Saturday and it makes complete sense that they would hold this because the 10 Commandments say, “Remember this Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do your work. The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” And notice, it doesn’t just say, “Because of your sin.” It says, “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in it, and rested the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hollowed it.”

And so that’s actually a pretty reasonable argument that, hey look, in the order of creation, Sabbath rest is built in, particularly if you’re someone who believes that the six days of creation are literal days and this is the basis of course for the seven-day week. So in Washington, New Hampshire a group of Adventists, they’re not even actually Adventists at this point, they’re just Protestants in an independent Christian Church, in 1843 they come and hear someone preaching the Advent message. So now they become Adventists and they buy into that. And then another woman comes in, a woman by the name of Rachel Oakes. So remember, the first group that comes in is Adventist, but not Seventh dayers. Rachel Oakes isn’t an Adventist. She’s a Seventh-day Baptist. And she comes and starts handing out tracks saying that the Sabbath is still binding on Christians. And so in 1844, they take on this toe.

So when I say they’re open to just whoever is coming through the door, this is what I’m talking about is that there’s these incredible religious shifts that you see going on all over during this period. And if you remember the series that I did on Mormonism, you’ll see some of that stuff and I didn’t even get into kind of all of the religious movements that were going on during that time. Sometimes you’ll trace the biography of one of the major figures in this and you’ll realize they were in five different kind of radical Protestant fringe groups. That’s not particularly unusual for the mid 19th century in New York. Okay. So then one of the now Seventh-day Adventists gets up on a Sunday morning and declares that he intends to start keeping the Sabbath again. And a dozen or others follow him and that’s the beginning, she says, of Seventh-day Adventists.

So there it is. That’s kind of the history of the movement. Now she will later claim a sort of, or this is still early writings, she’ll later claim a sort of religious vision to explain the whole thing in which the faithful are taken up and Jesus opens the door of the Holy of Holies and they see the light of the Sabbath. People of God were tested as the children of Israel were tested anciently to see if they would keep God’s law. So there’s three angels. I’m skipping two of the angels. These are the three angels depicted in Revelation according to Adventism and these are really important, the notion of the three angels’ messages. And so the third angel is pointing upward, showing the disappointed ones the way to the holiest of the heavenly sanctuary, and they by faith enter the most holy, they find Jesus, and they start to feel hope and joy.

And she says, “I saw them looking back, reviewing the past from the proclamation of the second Advent of Jesus down through their experience to the passing of the time in 1844. They see their disappointment explained, in joy and certainty again animate them. So these are the disappointed faithful. These are the Millerites. And they’re being comforted and consoled, but also the third angel is revealing the past, present, and future to them. And it’s there that they follow Jesus in, into the Holy of Holies and in the most holy place, they behold the ark, the mercy seat, and then Jesus lifts the cover of the Ark and inside are the 10 Commandments and he opens up the 10 Commandments and they’re all there, but one of the commandments has a halo around it because it’s the holiest of the 10 Commandments and that’s the fourth commandment. It’s not the first one about loving God and honoring no one besides God.

It’s not about God being the one you should worship. No. It’s honoring the Sabbath. That is, according to Ellen White, holier. It’s the one out of the 10. Now you would think if that was the case, it would be the first one. That that would be the first commandment, but it’s not. It’s the fourth commandment, according to her numbering. And so in the fourth commandment, it’s shining and the people there, these Millerites who are being consoled, see that there’s nothing in there about the Sabbath being abolished or changed to Sunday. And so they start to mourn because she says, “They saw they’d been trampling upon the fourth commandment of the decalogue,” that’s the 10 Commandments, “And have observed the day handed down by the heathen in papist,” that’s a shorted word for Catholics, “Instead of the day sanctified by Jehovah.” So then they humble themselves before God and mourn over their past transgressions.

So that’s the seventh day part that not only are the 10 commandments still binding in this way, that you must literally keep Saturday, but this is in fact the holiest part of the 10 Commandments. Okay. So I’ve mentioned her a lot. So who is she? Who is Ellen White for Seventh-day Adventists? And so if you’re watching the video version, she is the one woman in this picture. She’s there depicted with her husband who was also an ex-Millerite and their children. And according to the Seventh-day Adventist church’s website in the article Who was Ellen G. White, they pointed out she was only 17 at the time of The Great Disappointment, but she became inspired by a message from God just a couple months after The Great Disappointment. She was encouraged that what they’d learned about Jesus’s literal return was indeed correct, but setting a date for it was an error.

Now in 2015, the general conference session of the Seventh-day Adventist met in San Antonio and they thanked God for his continuing presence and very spiritual gifts among his people, particularly for the prophetic guidance we’ve received through the life and ministry of Ellen G. White. And then they reaffirm their conviction that her writings are divinely inspired. Now they want to be clear that they don’t replace the Bible. They uplift, they say, the normative character of scripture and correct inaccurate interpretations of it derived from tradition, human reason, personal experience in modern culture. But notice, this is important ’cause there can be things that are not in the Bible at all that Seventh-day Adventists will believe have been divinely revealed to Ellen Gould White. And that makes it a lot harder as a non Adventist to debate these things because they’re appealing to a kind of vague spiritual authority because they don’t just say, “This is another testament of Jesus Christ,” the way Mormons do.

It’s a little more ambiguous what her standing is. So with that, I want to turn to the second half of what I’m doing in this video, which is what does Ellen White claim about Sunday worship? Remember, this is a woman who’s allegedly the messenger of God. She’s allegedly prophetic. Her writings are allegedly divinely inspired. What does she have to say about where Sunday worship comes from? Well she claims, “It’s the production of an apostate Christendom. Sunday is a child of the papacy exalted by the Christian world above the sacred day of God’s rest. In no case are God’s people to pay it homage.” Pretty strong words, but notice the historical claim there, that the papacy is where we get Sunday worship. Now that’s going to be important because on the Adventist website now they claim that papacy doesn’t exist until the sixth century and admit that they see Sunday worship in the mid 100s.

Now we’re going to see that Sunday worship is actually even older than that, but that is an important difference that Adventists today present a historical claim that is simply incompatible with the idea that Sunday is a child of the papacy. But this is something that Ellen White absolutely believed and reiterated throughout her life. In another work entitled Darkness Before Dawn, she quotes Revelation 13:8 about worshiping the beast and says that in both the old and the new world, “The papacy will receive homage and the owner paid to the Sunday institution, that rests solely upon the authority of the Roman Church.” In other words, if you’re a Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, whoever you are, when you go to mass or when you go to Temple or when you go to whatever, your local church on a Sunday, you, according to White, are actually worshiping the beast because it’s by the Pope’s authority that the 10 Commandments have been nullified and Saturday was replaced by Sunday.

And so even if you thought you were worshiping God, you were actually worshiping the Pope. Again, a big claim. In The Great Controversy, maybe the most famous of her books, probably the most important, she claims that Satan, working through unconsecrated leaders of the church, tampered with the fourth commandment and that he tried to set aside the ancient Sabbath, the day which God had blessed and sanctified and in its stead, to exalt the festival observed by the heathen as a venerable day of the sun. I want to pause on this because this is another important part of Ellen Gould White’s claims, which is that the move from Saturday to Sunday worship happens number one because of the Pope, but number two, as an accommodation to paganism because this is the day sun worship happened and that was a very popular, very widespread theory for a long time.

And not many scholars today that I know of still hold that theory because we actually have the writings of old pagans and we realized they didn’t have weekly Sunday worship of the sun. That just wasn’t what it was. We actually know which days on the calendar were set aside for the worship of the son on the Roman calendar. Well first of all, they weren’t weekly. There were various days throughout the year, but secondly, they weren’t tied to Sunday. So it’s true, the day Sunday was named after the sun, not the son God, but just named after the sun. Just as Saturday is named after Saturn who was a God. So you can do that game with any day of the week because the days of the week in English are coming from an old Roman calendar that was dedicated to different gods.

Sunday is actually the one that you can argue maybe isn’t dedicated to a God. Saturday certainly is because we know Saturn was worshiped, but the sun had this more ambiguous role. Now I actually did an episode on that back at Christmastime looking at whether Christmas was of Pagan origin because those same arguments you hear trotted out then. So I’m not going to rehash all of that right now, but just realize that Ellen Gould White’s assuming that this move from Saturday to Sunday worship is to accommodate paganism, which presupposes pagans were doing Sunday worship, which they did not appear to be. Now there might be some conflicting evidence. I’d be happy to get into that kind of discussion. I’m sure there were times when worship happened on Sunday. There’s a lot of different pagan groups doing a lot of different things and a lot of them have different calendars.

But nevertheless. Okay. So then she says, and this is important, “This change from Saturday to Sunday was not at first attempted openly. In the first centuries, the true Sabbath had been kept by all Christians.” Now that is the most important claim and that’s what I want to really investigate. She says, “They were jealous for the honor of God. Believing that his law is immutable, they zealously guarded the sacredness of its precepts, but with great subtlety, Satan works through his agents to bring about his object. So is it true that for the first century’s plural, we find the true Sabbath being kept by all Christians,” which for her means Saturday, and the answer is going to be no. We’ll get into all the evidence for that. And then she says, that, “The attention of the people might be called to the Sunday. It was made a festival in honor of the resurrection of Christ.”

“Religious services were held upon it. It was regarded as the day of recreation, the Sabbath being still sacredly observed.” So she’s going to say, “Yeah, yeah, sure. You do find Christians worshiping Christ on Sunday,” but she says, “They’re still keeping the Sabbath.” So these are the key claims. Number one, Sunday worship is evil apostate and a compromise with paganism. Number two, it was instituted in the fourth century by Constantine and the Pope. She doesn’t actually say what century, but she does point to Constantine as being kind of an influential figure. And when she has the language about the venerable day of the sun, that is from Constantine, when he has religious proclamation basically giving a day off on Sunday.

And then remember, they reclaimed that in the first centuries Christian worship is on Saturday, not Sunday, or at least that Christians are observing the Sabbath. And so while, as I mentioned, the Adventist church itself seems to distance itself from these historic claims, you will still find plenty of people who appear to be Adventists who claim this stuff and still say, “Oh yeah. This is Constantine. This is the later papacy,” all this to explain where Sunday worship comes from. For instance …

Did you know that you can search your Bible from Genesis to Revelation and you won’t find one scripture in the entire Bible where God both blesses and sanctifies the first day of the week, which we know as Sunday, to be set aside as some special day for holy observance. So why is it that the majority of the Christian world religiously observe Sunday, the first day of the week, as some type of holy day? Well it’s because in the year 321 AD Constantine the Great, the Emperor of the Roman Empire and a Roman Catholic convert seeking to heal the division within his empire between paganism and Christianity, he made it a decree that all the inhabitants of Rome were to rest on the venerable day of the sun, which is the first day of the week, Sunday. And this is the origin of the human authority behind the institution of Sunday as a holy day as opposed to God’s true Bible Sabbath day, which is the seventh day, which we know as Saturday. And whether you like it or not, the truth is the truth.

So yeah. Again, that’s the claim in a nutshell and you can see it’s even more specific there. It doesn’t just say fourth century 321. We have these very specific claims about when Sunday worship was instituted. And now the question is, well is any of that really true? What did Christians before Constantine do in the way of worship? Did they treat Sunday as their holy day or did they treat Saturday? And fortunately, there are a lot of really good books on this from reputable scholars. So for instance, Dr. Valerie Aleecan, I’m going professor too, the earliest history of the Christian gathering, origin, development, and content of the Christian gathering in the first to third centuries. He’s looking at just that. What did Christian worship look like in the first, second, and third century? That’s up to 299. So all of this is happening before Constantine. What was Christian worship like and what does he say?

Well he says, “Christians began to hold periodical gatherings not later than the middle of the first century,” so not later than 20 years after the death of Jesus. “Insofar as the sources allow any inference, the periodical gatherings of Christians took place on Sundays. They could be held at various locations, although most took place in private houses.” Now he’s a scholar and he qualifies his work appropriately. There are times where they don’t tell us what day they get together. So for instance, in the work of Pliny, when he’s investigating the Christians, he mentions they get together weekly. He doesn’t tell us what day of the week they get together. But when we have evidence, that evidence always points in the same direction, that the Christians get together on Sunday. Now I don’t expect you to just take my word for it. Just like I hope you’re not just taking the Adventist word for it blindly.

Instead, I’m going to show you the early Christians in their own words. And what I’m going to do is start around the year 200 and work my way back to the time of the Bible. So I’ll go kind of quickly during the early ones because you may not care. St. Clement of Alexandria, in a work called The Stromata, claims that Plato was speaking prophetically about the Lord’s Day when he referred to the eighth day in the Republic. Now I think that this illusion is a stretch that Clement is making, but the important thing to note there is that there’s something called the Lord’s Day and that it’s the eighth day. The eighth day of the week meaning you’ve got seven days of creation, then you have the eighth day. So day one of creation, creation of the world, Sunday, and then you have the sixth days of creation through Friday.

The seventh day is the original Sabbath and then you have the eighth day, Resurrection Day, Resurrection Sunday, Easter Sunday. This notion of the eighth day being the new day of Christian worship, that they’re not just going back to the first day to the order of creation. They’re doing that, but they’re also going to the eighth day, meaning Resurrection Day. Later writers will actually develop this even more in saying there’s a Trinitarian theology to this. That Christians worship on Sunday for three reasons. Number one, because God the Father created the world on Sunday, number two, because God the son is resurrected on Sunday, and number three, because God the Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost on Sunday. But Clement is just referring to the Lord’s Day and making clear that it’s the eighth day. So that’s all we need to show there that clearly there’s something called the Lord’s Day and it is on Sunday.

Justin Martyr is much clearer 20 years earlier in the first apology. He’s writing this against the pagans and he’s explaining to the Roman Emperor that on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together in one place. And then he explains kind of what Christian worship looks like, that the biblical readings are read, that there’s preaching, that there’s gathering for the Eucharist, that there’s prayers in Thanksgiving. People say amen. There’s eucharistic distribution. There’s a gathering for those who are absent and bringing communion to the sick. There’s the gathering of the collection. And so you see very clearly, he’s describing the early Christian liturgy. In fact, he spent several chapters doing this. I’m giving kind of the truncated version, but he’s explicit that it’s on the day called Sunday. And then he says it again. He says, “Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly because it is the 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 there it is. He doesn’t talk about Pentecost, he doesn’t talk about the Holy Spirit, but he talks about the other two-thirds of that explanation. That’s in 160. Way before Ellen White claimed Christians were worshiping on Sunday. And then he also says, “For he was crucified on the day before that of Saturn,” Saturday. You’ll notice, like Justin realizes Saturday has a pagan name. “And on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to his apostles and disciples, he taught them these things which we have submitted to you also for your consideration.” So the idea that this is a compromise with paganism is just clearly not true. The reason they’re worshiping on Sunday is the reasons that he gave. This is when God created the world and this is when Christ rose from the dead. 10 years before that in dialogue with Trypho, so remember, in first apology he threatened to a pagan audience, dialogue with Trypho threatened to a Jewish audience because Trypho is Jewish.

And he asks him, “Well is there anything that we’re accused of other than this, that we live not after the law and are not circumcised in the flesh as your forefathers were and do not observe the Sabbath as you do.” He says, “Aren’t our lives and customs also slandered among you?” Like in other words, those three things we’ll cop to. Yeah, sure. We don’t keep the mosaic law, we don’t require circumcision, and we don’t keep the Jewish Sabbath. That’s really important because someone defending the Adventist view might say, “Well, sure. They might’ve had the Christian Day of worship, but they also kept the Sabbath.” And Justin’s like, “No we don’t. We don’t do that anymore.” And in fact, he goes on to distinguish those from the false accusations like that Christians are cannibals, that they engage in promiscuity.

And he explains that just as there was no need of circumcision before Abraham or the observance of Sabbath feasts and sacrifices before Moses, no more is there need of them now according to the will of God. That according to the will of God, Jesus Christ the son of God has been born without sin of a virgin sprung from the stock of Abraham. That is, think about Paul’s argument in Romans. That if Abraham could be saved by faith without the Mosaic law, then clearly the Mosaic law wasn’t inherently necessary for salvation. And therefore also a gentile could be saved. That’s what Paul’s saying in Romans. And this is the same argument Justin Martyr’s making. That, yeah. That’s true about the Mosaic law and likewise about things like the Sabbaths.

So then in the Didache, now that I think is fairly clear evidence. In the Didache, this is variously dated to sometime in the first century, maybe during the lifetime of the apostles. Some of the dates were under the earliest second century. So there’s controversy there. It would be great if it was super abundantly obvious that yes, this was while the apostles were living. But while I think that to be the case, I don’t want to push the evidence further than it goes. In the Didache says, “Every Lord’s Day, gather yourselves together, break bread, and give Thanksgiving after having confessed your transgressions that your sacrifice may be pure.” Okay? Again, very clear evidence. Maybe the clearest evidence is even earlier than the Justin certainly. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, the first bishop of Antioch, he was a disciple of the Apostle John, writes to the Magnesians, the Christians, not the element.

And he says this, look, this is a lengthy Paul line kind of sentence. Everything you see on the screen there is one long sentence, but I’ll zoom in on part of it. He’s referring to those who were brought up in the ancient order of things. He means here Jewish Christians, “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 and by his death.” So that’s making it very clear. It’s no longer Saturday Sabbath worship. It’s now Sunday Christian worship. And that brings us to the biblical evidence. In Revelation chapter one, St. John writes about how he was in the spirit on the Lord’s Day. Now, Adventists who don’t critically examine this kind of historical evidence will claim, “Oh. The Lord’s Day here must be Saturday because in Isaiah, God refers to the Sabbath as his holy day.”

But the phrase the Lord’s Day only ever refers to Sunday when you see it used by Christian writers. And there’s a bunch of references as we just saw. This is just some of them. There are even references from crazy heretical groups like the Gnostics. And even they understand that the Lord’s Day refers to Sunday. They may not agree with the physical resurrection, but even they get that the Lord’s Day is Sunday. So for Adventist today to come along and say, “Oh, no, no, no. The Lord’s Day in Revelation one means Saturday,” you would have to imagine that John writing maybe 15, 17 years before Ignatius doesn’t know what the Lord’s Day is going to mean and uses a phrase that will be completely misunderstood for 1,800 years because this is one of the clearest passages is it shows that, yeah, there is such a thing as the Lord’s Day during the life from the apostles acknowledged by the apostle.

That’s evidence this isn’t some post apostolic invention. That the Lord’s day is not we abandon the teaching of the apostles and started our own thing. No. Because up to this point, you could listen to all those guys and say, “Okay, sure. Ellen Gould White doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe she’s a false prophet, but how do we know that Christian worship should be on Sunday instead of Saturday?” And it’s like, “Well because this idea of the Lord’s Day being the center of worship.” That Lord’s Day thing isn’t something they’re making up after the apostles. The Apostle John refers to the Lord’s Day. He treats it as a given in Revelation chapter one. And we also have these other references that don’t use the phrase Lord’s Day, but refer to Christian gatherings on the first day of the week. That is Sunday.

So for instance, in one Corinthians 16, St. Paul calls for a gathering, a collection. He says, “On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up as you may prosper so that contributions need not be made when I come.” So the collection for the poor happens on the first day of the week. Now we know from Justin Martyr that these collections happened during the Christian worship, that it happened during the liturgy in the same way that you pass around the tithe collection today. Now I’ve seen Adventist try to explain this away and say, “All this proves is that the collection happened on Sunday. It doesn’t prove the worship happened on Sunday.” That’s technically true, but it’s a weak argument to imagine that Paul knew they were getting together on Saturday already, didn’t have the collection gathered then, and instead insisted for some reason the collection happen every Sunday.

That doesn’t make sense. That’s fundraising 101. You don’t hold your fundraiser on a day people aren’t going to be at church. You don’t pass the tithe basket around every Monday for instance. Why? Because you’re not going to get very much money. You pass it around when everybody’s together when the congregation is gathered. So it’s true that is indirect evidence, but I think it’s pretty clear indirect evidence. A little clearer that Christian worship is happening is in Acts 20 verse seven, which says, “On the first day of the week when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them intending to depart on the morrow and he prolonged his speech until midnight.” Now that’s important because we know from Acts, for instance Acts 2:42, that the breaking of the bread is how St. Luke speaks of the Christian liturgy. And remember also the Didache. When it’s talking about coming together, says, “Every Lord’s Day gather yourselves together and break bread.”

So all of that seems to point to a pretty coherent, cohesive set of evidence that all points in the same direction. That the early Christians did not view themselves bound to keep the Sabbath on Saturday and instead viewed themselves as bound of observing the Lord’s Day that Christ was the fulfillment of all of these things. And in fact, Justin Martyr says, actually I don’t have it right in front of me, but he says, “If we didn’t understand why Christ came, we would keep the Sabbath as well.” And it’s a pretty punchy kind of line because he’s saying Jesus is the fulfillment of all of these things. And it’s something to bear in mind because the risk here is that we fall into a kind of legalism, of thinking we’re still bound by the Mosaic law. And I understand because in the 10 Commandments, people expect we have to keep this literally. That’s a misreading of the 10 Commandments and we know that in part because of the practice of the apostles and the early Christians.

But the last point here is, even if you disagree with everything I’ve just said, even if you think all of the early Christians were wrong, that John either wasn’t or shouldn’t have been worshiping on the Lord’s Day, that all of that stuff happening on the first day in Acts, it looks like worship isn’t really, that the collection on the first day of the week is just not related to worship. Fine. You can take all of that stuff, but you would still have to acknowledge that when Ellen Gould White claims that for centuries, all the Christians were keeping the Sabbath and not doing Sunday worship, she is completely wrong. And I think that’s enough to prove that she’s a false prophetess. And if you are an Adventist who thinks that’s not the case, I would love to hear what your reasoning is.

But besides the question of whether you think we should prepare for the imminent return for Christ, besides the question of whether you think we should worship on Saturday, why should any of us trust Ellen White when she makes numerous historical claims like this one that have been repeatedly shown to be demonstrably false? For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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