Proto-Protestantism: Playing Chick-fil-a with the Sabbath

13 March 2024

Playing Chick-fil-a with the Sabbath

https://wng.org/opinions/playing-chicken-with-the-lords-day-1707873572

I read this article in frustration and then laughed when I reached the bottom and realized it was written by Timon Cline, another name that keeps popping up in connection with The American Reformer. This website which has not (to my knowledge) produced anything sound or of lasting value has (it would seem) taken the Dominionist world by storm - just today I listened to a rather disappointing interview with his compatriot Aaron Renn. This article on Chick-fil-a (in keeping with everything else I've read from this lot) completely misses the point and obfuscates the issues at hand.

The Sabbath issue is effectively moot. Apart from being unbiblical in the New Testament context, society has fundamentally changed in the wake of industrial revolution. Sabbath cannot function in an industrial society, a point many still have not reckoned with. If these folks want the Westminster Sabbath then they're going to have to bring down industrial society - which would not reform America but destroy it. I don't believe that's what these Dominionists want.

Assuming for argument's sake the false notion of a Christian let alone Sabbatarian industrial society, factories, power stations, and sewage plants cannot be shut off on Saturday night. The realm of 'necessity' (if it is necessity) has permeated society to the extent that the line itself is blurred to the point of meaningless. The Sabbatarian doctrine states that only acts of necessity and mercy are permitted on Sunday (the so-called Christian Sabbath). Generally it's understood that hospital workers, firemen, and the like will have to work and it's legitimate for them to do so and thus miss church services.

Sabbatarians usually argue that since the Sabbath (as they see it) is part of a universal moral law (as opposed to Covenant Law or more specifically Old Covenant Law, which is subject to categories of type and fulfillment) it is therefore binding on all. Everyone who is not keeping Sabbath is sinning. Indeed everyone who is an unbeliever is indeed sinning, and all the time in all that they do - not so much because they're failing to keep Sabbath but because they are rejecting Christ. The Old Covenant prophets frequently denounced the evil of the nations but never are they castigated for failing to keep Sabbath. Why? Because as people outside the covenant it didn't belong to them and it would have been an abomination or at the very least sacrilege for them to attempt to keep the holy day.

Christian Sabbatarians who believe (contrary to all evidence) that the shifted day (Seventh Day to First Day, which indicates the so-called moral law is not immutable) is binding on all, will argue that Christians should not do anything that compels others to work on that day - fostering their sin as it were. Therefore one should not shop, eat out, and so forth.

This leads to a lot of ethical games involving casuistry, some of which I have shared over the years. Many years ago I knew one OP elder who used to give me a ride to church. He would stop along the way and buy his Sunday paper from a machine but then promise not to read it until Monday. It never occurred to him that someone had to work to fill the machine on Sunday morning.

My roommate at the time (whose father was a PCA elder) would tape Sunday television shows on the VCR by means of timer, and then watch them on Monday. It would be wrong to watch them on Sunday but okay the following day. Did no one have to work on Sunday to make the shows appear on television?

For that matter is there no ethical issue in supporting a newspaper company or television station which operate (in defiance of God) on the Sabbath? Should we give them business any day of the week? How far do you take this? Christians boycott other companies because of sinful conduct. If the breaking of Sabbath is (as part of the Decalogue) equivalent to theft, murder, and blasphemy - shouldn't all Sabbath breaking companies and institutions be rejected?

Some years later, I would occasionally eat lunch at an OP elder's house after church. He worked at a rather prominent Christian college and I was surprised to observe him turn on the radio one Sunday afternoon which played classical music. It was the college's radio station. He proudly informed me that through his efforts no one was there on Sunday morning - a way to keep the station on air without violating the Sabbath. He didn't seem to understand that listening to the music was already a violation of the Westminster Sabbath.

Leaving that question aside, it was an automated system that piped out the music - no DJ required. After further inquiry he revealed that it wasn't automated per se but rather it flipped over to a Chicago station on Sunday morning - where a DJ ran the music. When I pointed out that the DJ in Chicago was working - implying that the set-up wasn't nearly so clean and doctrinally tight as he thought, he grew silent. I honestly don't think he had ever worked that out.

Does Cline turn on his lights on Sunday morning? Someone is working so that he can do that. Is it 'necessary'? I think it's hard to argue for that. Convenient to be sure, it's certainly not necessary.

Does he expect the roads to be plowed on a snowy day? The list goes on and on and it's not just in this realm that the sacralist Church has failed to reckon with social ethics - much more could be said about the fundamental shifts in social dynamics, family, and economics. The Church is way behind on these issues and has fallen into patterns of syncretism that permeate most spheres of Christian thought.

Back in my early Reformed days I was a strict Westminster Sabbatarian. I took the Isaiah 58 imperative seriously. It meant that it was hard to even be around most Christians on Sunday. Discussions about the weather, work, and all other categories of the mundane were forbidden and to be rebuked.

With a couple of like-minded friends, Sundays were usually spent in near isolation, either quietly in a home or in the summer we would take a brief drive out to some quiet country spot and spend the afternoon sitting under a tree or walking while we discussed Scripture and only Kingdom-related issues. Since I enjoy these things it was hardly a burden. Afterward we would go to an evening service. Over time we adopted an evening-to-evening model which meant no Saturday night out having dinner, but Sunday night was permissible.

The problem was (I eventually realized) that the Sabbath principle (in terms of keeping a 24-hour day) was unsound in the New Covenant context and built on numerous false assumptions regarding everything from the nature of the law, to the relationship between Old and New Covenants, questions of typology and fulfillment, and the weakest aspect of the argument - the shift from Saturday to Sunday, which undermined the doctrinal reasons given for a Sabbath to begin with. Sunday could be the Lord's Day - but that could not be the Sabbath. The theology was flawed on several points, and the Early Church testimony did not corroborate with the system either. And when pressed, I found very few Reformed leaders who could give a satisfactory answer. One prominent man connected to the Banner of Truth (when questioned by one of the aforementioned close friends) simply fell back on a social argument about societal flourishing and godliness associated with (what amounted to) Victorian Sabbath keeping. It was not an argument, and one easily picked apart.

At one point in time during mid-1990's I was ready to face serious punishment over the issue - a work-related dispute that could have resulted in my being incarcerated. I stood my ground (in zealous but sincere ignorance) and God delivered me. And yet, it did force the issue, and forced me to really examine it. I stood my ground then, but by the late 1990's I had abandoned the position and as one still in Reformed circles I was able to appeal to Calvin. Years later, little of this mattered and now the New Testament is sufficient for me to stand my ground.

The World Magazine/Cline article is deeply flawed but more critically it completely misses the point when it comes to Chick-fil-a and this dispute with the New York Thruway.

This isn't about the sabbath or even some kind of social campaign against Chick-fil-a. As I have already argued elsewhere this is about greed and privilege on the part of Chick-fil-a and a lack of due diligence on the part of New York authorities. The Christian Right keeps trying to make hay out of this issue. If Cline wants to invoke the question of Sabbath, then what he really needs to be talking about is shutting down interstate travel on Sundays. I don't think he's going to find too many people to support that. Is he willing to shut down The American Reformer on Sundays? Somewhere someone has to work to make reading its website possible. Servers must run and the buildings that host them require monitoring. They are complicated facilities with advanced cooling systems. Does someone really 'need' to read his article on Sunday?

I find it ironic that even the Banner of Truth used to shut down its website on Sundays - a practice given up a number of years ago. Should Sunday just be limited to Edinburgh time where the store is located? I don't mean to obfuscate the Sabbath issue by losing it in the maze of modern techno-industrial life and global communication. There are ways around this but it requires a great price to be paid and it will mean Christians are out of the loop, outside the circles of power and influence. I'm fine with that - even if the likes of Cline and Renn are not. But the larger and more critical issue is doctrinal - is the Sabbath for today? The answer is 'no'.

Cline for his part is trying to take what is essentially a question of rather dubious business strategy and regulation and attempting to lose it in a kind of Sabbath labyrinth. It's not helpful. I hope people will understand that.