[Editor's Note—We are sharing with our readers some choice bits of dialectic correspondence between F. D. Nichol, associate editor of the Review, and the president of one of the prominent Fundamentalist Bible colleges, who is also writer of the Sunday School Lessons in a leading Fundamentalist periodical. This we do in the belief that this reply will prove helpful to some who may be challenged upon similar points, and faced with similar arguments. Privileged to read these and other paragraphs in letter form, we sought permission to use two sections of this line of cogent reasoning in the Ministry. The following paragraph out of the Fundamentalist's letter sets forth his position in part, and affords a setting for the reply:]
"The point about a command to keep the Sabbath being necessary for the Gentiles was in view of the fact that none of the Gentiles kept the Sabbath day, while they all recognized the other commands as obligatory. Is there any evidence that the Gentile Christians ever kept the seventh-day Sabbath? What do your scholars consider as the first movement to keep the Sabbath after the practice of keeping the first day was established in the Christian church?"
Though I have searched Fundamentalist literature diligently, I have never found any comment on our statements regarding the relation of the Sabbath to the primary tenet of Fundamentalism, the belief in the story of our world's origin as given in Genesis. All I am able to find in comment on Seventh-day Adventists is merely general denunciations of us as heretics. And all the while, of course, they bewail the increasing tide of skeptical Modernism in their own denominations, especially in their denominational colleges and seminaries. Meanwhile Seventh-day Adventists, whatever else may be their sins and shortcomings, remain free from the corrosion of Modernism, even in their colleges and seminaries. We could not become Modernists, which necessitates moving onto the platform of evolution, when every member of the church on the seventh day of every week turns aside from his ordinary labors to worship Him who in six days made heaven and earth and rested the seventh day.
I conclude from the second paragraph of your letter that you believe that the law of God is the moral standard of life for Christians. This gives us something in common. The usual method of meeting the Bible argument for the seventh-day Sabbath is by declaring that the law was done away. It is this antinomian argument that we meet most frequently. Evidently you do not believe this view, which of course, as you know and as surely anyone who claims to have any knowledge of church history ought to know, has been denounced as a heresy in Protestantism from the days of Luther onward.
You state that the fact that the ten commandments are our moral guide "does not strengthen the position of Christians who keep Saturday as the Sabbath." I conclude from this that you interpret the fourth commandment as did the drafters of the Westminster Confession, who adopted the views of one Nicholas Bownde, that "the seventh day" means simply "one day in seven." Space does not permit me to analyze what I believe are the patent fallacies and irrationalities that reside in this interpretation. Suffice it to say here that such an interpretation of the plain words of the fourth command was never thought of until 3,000 years after the proclaiming of that command on Mt. Sinai, for Nicholas Bownde lived in the sixteenth century of our Christian era.
If the touchstone of orthodoxy be in any sense the antiquity of a belief, as Fundamentalists often suggest by the very emphasis they place on the antithetical term "Modernism," then certainly Adventists are the truly orthodox ones in the matter of the Sabbath. I do not say myself that antiquity of interpretation is necessarily proof of its correctness. But when Adventists are so often charged with preaching new and strange doctrines, it is surely pertinent for me to call attention to the historical aspect of our interpretation of the Sabbath.
Later in your letter you say: "I might add in connection with your comments on the Sunday School Times lesson articles that the point about a command to keep the Sabbath being necessary for the Gentiles was in view of the fact that none of the Gentiles kept the Sabbath day, while they all recognized the other commands as obligatory. Is there any evidence that the Gentile Christians ever kept the seventh-day Sabbath?" I wonder how the proposition would sound if it were stated in this fashion: Is there any evidence that the Gentile Christians never kept the seventh-day Sabbath?
Why is it not just as proper for the question to be put in this form? Evidently your answer to the question would be "Yes," for you have just stated that "none of the Gentiles kept the Sabbath day." How do you prove this? How are you sure what they did not do? Do you prove it by what you believe to be the silence of Scripture concerning their keeping of the Sabbath? If so, I wonder if you would be willing to allow the validity of the argumentum ex silentio in some other areas of theological discussion. The whole burden of proof rests upon you in this matter. If you accept the premise that the ten commandments are the Christian's moral standard, then, unless you provide clear proof to the contrary, the conclusion logically follows that the early Christians did keep the Sabbath. Furthermore, even
if you could produce the proof, which I am confident you cannot, the only logical conclusion then would be that the Gentiles from the outset broke one of the ten commandments.
Let us pursue this matter a little further. You say that "none of the Gentiles kept the Sabbath day, while they all recognized the other commands as obligatory." This is essentially the line of reasoning of those who declare that the law was abolished at the cross, but that in some remarkable manner this law, which evidently was so faulty and unnecessary as to call for abolition, found itself nine tenths restored in the Christian dispensation. It is this process of reasoning that is employed by antinomians to escape the charge of moral anarchy which is brought against them for their doctrine that the law was done away.
Now, I do not say that you subscribe to this. I simply say that your line of reasoning in this particular connection runs parallel to theirs, and so far as I can discover is here identical with it. But this is not the teaching of the great Protestant creeds. If we are discussing the question of orthodoxy,—and "heresy" is the blanket charge against Adventists,—then any teaching that the ten-commandment law was abolished at the cross is heresy. Accordingly Gentiles, in order to square with Protestant creeds, must recognize all ten commandments "as obligatory."
I might ask further: If the Gentiles did not consider the fourth commandment as obligatory, on what, then, did they base the keeping of a weekly holy day, which you declare was Sunday? If you say they based it simply on custom and the growing practice of the church, then you admit that there is no "Thus saith the Lord" behind Sunday. If you hesitate to make this admission, and I would not blame you for so hesitating in view of the thunderings of American and English preachers through the years regarding the awful sin of Sunday desecration, then I would ask you, In what text of Holy Writ do you find a "Thus saith the Lord" for Sunday? If you can find such a text you have done better than any theologian before you. I have various theological works on my desk which admit frankly that there is no command in the Bible for Sunday keeping.
If you say, as you did in the Sunday School lessons, that in some way the spirit of the fourth command still holds for those in the Christian era, and that therefore Christians should observe Sunday, I would ask you to elucidate on this point. It is the crux of the discussion. What is there so elusive about this fourth command that we should be asked to view it only in some ghostly, transcendental form? Its language is as plain and as vigorous as that of any other precept of the ten, so plain indeed that men had no difficulty, and certainly no controversy, over the understanding of it for thousands of years. Who authorized you or any other Christian minister, I ask with all good feeling, to deprive this one precept of the ten of its body and substance?
(To be concluded next month)
