In Defense of the Faith

Led By Rome, The Church Makes Laws Favoring Sunday

It was not long after Constantine’s civil law for Sunday observance was promulgated until the church, through its councils, bishops, and popes, began to make religious laws in favor of Sunday. The church was by now in an almost complete state of apostasy. The rites and ceremonies of the pagan religions had almost wholly taken the place of the commands of God and the ordinances of the New Testament. The doctrine of the conscious state of the dead, witchcraft, spiritism, sprinkling for baptism, infant baptism, etc., were being embraced. Soon the mass was substituted for the Lord’s supper. Mary for Jesus, as mediator between God and man; human priests usurped the position of Christ as our High Priest; the confessional was established; and the Papacy was well under way, though it had not yet reached the zenith of its power. The crowning act in all this apostasy was the changing of the Sabbath, substituting by church authority the pagan festival of Sunday for the Christian Sabbath, Saturday. This the church began to enforce by edict. DOF 180.1

The first ecclesiastical law for Sunday observance recorded in history is that of the Council of Laodicea, held about the year 364. The pronouncement of the council was: DOF 180.2

“Christians shall not Judaize and be idle on Saturday [Sabbath, original], but shall work on that day; but the Lord’s day they shall especially honor, and, as being Christians, shall, if possible, do no work on that day. If, however, they are found Judaizing, they shall be shut out from Christ.”—RT. Rev. Charles Joseph Hefele, D.D., A History of the Church Councils, book 6, sec. 93, canon 29 (vol. 2, p. ‘316). DOF 180.3

The canons of this council were adopted by the churches, and have always been accepted as Catholic. This was a church council, an ecclesiastical congress. What it did was representative of the Catholic Church. Did it do anything toward changing the Sabbath? It did. It required Christians to rest on the Lord’s day, meaning Sunday, and prohibited them from resting on the Bible Sabbath (Saturday), under penalty of being accursed of Christ. Than this the church could pronounce no severer penalty. The command of the council was absolute. People were peremptorily ordered to rest on Sunday and to work on Saturday. The very fact that the order was given proves beyond all possible doubt that at least a large section of the Christian church still kept the Bible Sabbath, Saturday, and this canon (29) of Laodicea was given in an effort to change this practice, or in other words, to change the Sabbath. DOF 181.1

Mr. Canright the Baptist says: DOF 181.2

“We have given plenty of proof that Sunday was observed by all Christians as early at least as 140 A. D., or nearly two ‘hundred years before even the foundation of the Papacy was laid.’”—The Lord’s Day, p. 221. DOF 181.3

Does it not, then, strike the reader as passing strange that a church council held in AD. 364 should be making,laws to enforce upon its members a custom which had been universally observed by them for over two hundred years? Why should the Council of Laodicea have wasted time legislating about people’s keeping the Sabbath when no one had kept it Since AD. 140? DOF 181.4

In order to get over this point, Mr. Canright is forced to admit that there were those who were still keeping the Sabbath, but he brands them as heretics, and tries to make it appear that they were a small minority. (See The Lord’s Day, p. 217.) DOF 182.1

But we have only the statement of Mr. Canright himself that the Sabbath observers were the real heretics and were in the minority. We have already furnished abundant proof that the Sabbath was still observed very largely by the church, but that through the influence of thousands of converts from paganism, its sanctity was now diminishing and the day of the sun was rapidly supplanting it. The fact, however, which even Mr. Canright must admit, that there were Christians even in the fourth century who still persisted in the observance of the Sabbath and who had to be suppressed in this matter by an action of a church council, entirely disproves his statement that Sunday was observed by all Christians as early at AD. 140. It also further proves that the then Christian world had no clear knowledge of any change having been made in the Sabbath by divine command. Nor does the Laodicean Council invoke a command of Christ or the apostles when it thus takes its first action favoring Sunday observance, but it issues the command purely on its own authority. DOF 182.2

It was therefore the voice of a church in apostasy, influenced by the multitudes who had newly come to her from the heathen world and whose sympathies were still largely with the tenets of their former religion, who thus promulgated the first ecclesiastical law for Sunday keeping. DOF 182.3

They made no claim whatsoever that their enforcement of Sunday was in any way based on Scriptural authority. Whether it was or was not in harmony with Biblical testimony seems not to have concerned them in the least. They had set out to reform the Christian religion, and the former heathen festival of Sunday was to become the new Sabbath rest. That was all. DOF 182.4

Now this one action of one Catholic council would not have been sufficient completely to reverse the practices of the entire church in all parts of the world where the Sabbath was still kept, but it did constitute the first official utterance by the church in that direction, and instead of repudiating what was done at Laodicea, later councils have invariably upheld it. The sixty four articles adopted by that council are today practically a part of the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church. DOF 183.1

It was the churches in the West-Rome, Alexandria, etc. that took the lead in swinging entirely over from Sabbath to Sunday observance, and as Rome rose in power and prestige among the churches, she began a relentless effort to enforce this new doctrine in all the churches. On this point we have the testimony of Sozomen and Socrates. Sozomen says: DOF 183.2

“The people of Constantinople, and of several other cities, assemble together on the Sabbath, as well as on the next day; which custom is never observed at Rome, or at Alexandria.” —Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, from A. D., 324-440, book 7, chap. 19, p. 355. DOF 183.3

Socrates was born about AD. 380, and lived during the time when the first attempts were made by the Bishop of Rome to suppress the Sabbath. He had traveled over a considerable part of Christendom, and spoke of the church in general from personal knowledge. He said: DOF 183.4

“Almost all churches throughout the world celebrate the sacred mysteries on the Sabbath of every week, yet the Christians of Alexandria and at Rome, on account of some ancient traditions, refuse to do this.”—Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, book 5, chap. 22, p. 404. DOF 183.5

It was the church at Rome, therefore, that took the lead in authoritatively substituting the papal Sunday for the Christian Sabbath. Many of the churches in the East, however, soon followed its example. At the Laodicean Council began the long struggle to enforce its observance upon all. Thereafter everything was done that “Christian” emperors, kings, popes, councils, and synods could do to swing all the churches, both east and west, into line, to uphold the canon of Laodicea, and to add to the sanctity of the day of the sun. Charlemagne did more, perhaps, than any other emperor to make this part of the faith of the church effective, and in his first decree he referred directly to this canon of the Council of Laodicea. But it required repeated councils, actions, bulls, and encyclicals of the bishops and popes finally to establish the change. Yes, more still, it required bitter persecution, and a large number of those who refused to surrender their observance of the true Sabbath upon the mere authority of the church, had the privilege of sealing their faith with the blood of martyrdom. DOF 184.1

In the time of Constantine, Bishop Sylvester ordained that Sunday should be called the Lord’s day. DOF 184.2

Pope Leo I, of the fifth century, in his letter No. 19, written to the bishop of Alexandria, commanded that even the consecration of priests should be performed on Sunday instead of the Sabbath, setting forth reasons why Sunday was the more fitting day for this sacred work. We quote the following passage from this letter, which has become famous in religious literature: DOF 184.3

“For this reason you will observe the apostolic institutions in a devout and commendable way, when you observe this rule in the ordination of priests, in the churches over which the Lord has made you overseer. Namely, that the one to be ordained receives the consecration solely and only on the day of the resurrection of the Lord, which, as you know, begins from the evening of the Sabbath, and is made sacred by so many divine mysteries, that whatever of greater prominence was commanded by the Lord, took place on this exalted day. On this day the world had its beginning; on it, through the resurrection of Christ, death found its end and life its beginning [9 Decret. cf. D. LXXV. c. 5]; on it the apostles received their commission from the Lord to proclaim the gospel to all nations, and to dispense to the entire world the sacrament of the regeneration. On it, as the holy evangelist John testifies, the Lord, after He had joined the assembled disciples by closed doors, breathed upon them and said: ‘Receive you the Holy Ghost. Who so ever sins you remit, they are remitted unto them,; and who so ever sins you retain, they are retained.’ On this day, finally, came the Holy Spirit, which the Lord had promised to the apostles in order that we might recognize, as it were, inculcated and taught by a divine [heavenly] rule, that we are ‘to undertake on that day the mysteries of the priestly consecration, on which all gifts and graces were imparted.”—Leo’s Letters, from Letters of the Popes, No. 9 (German edition). DOF 185.1

The first religious council to urge refraining from labor in the rural districts in the Western Empire was that of Orleans, AD. 538, and the reason given for this was that it might be possible for the people to attend the services of the church on that day. There was no such specific law covering this point in the Eastern Empire until the decree of Emperor Leo VI, called the philosopher, near the close of the ninth century. From this decree we quote the following passage: DOF 185.2

“We ordain, according to the true meaning of the Holy Ghost, and of the apostles thereby directed, that on the sacred day [meaning Sunday] wherein our own integrity was restored, all do rest and surcease labor; that neither husbandmen nor other on that day put their hands to forbidden works.”—Quoted in The Literature of the Sabbath Question, by Robert Cox COX, Vol. 1, p. 422. DOF 186.1

Bishop Skat Rordam, of Denmark, clearly states that the change was made by the church under the Roman pope, its head. Note the following from his pen: DOF 186.2

“As to when and how it became customary to keep the first day of the week the New Testament gives us no information.... DOF 186.3

“The first law about it was given by Constantine the Great, who in the year 321 ordained that all civil and shop work should cease in the cities, but agricultural labor in the country was allowed.... But no one thought of basing this command to rest from labor on the third [fourth] commandment before the latter half of the sixth century. From that time on, little by little, it became the established doctrine of the church which was in force all through the Middle Ages during the ‘Dark Ages of the Church,’ that ‘the holy church and its teachers,’ or the bishops with the Roman pope at their head, as the vicar of Christ and His apostles on earth, had transferred the Old Testament Sabbath with its glory and sanctity over to the first day of the week.”—P. Taaning, Report of the Second Ecclesiastical Meeting in Kopenhagen, Sept. 13-15, 1887 (Kopenhagen, 1887), pp. 40, 41. DOF 186.4