Paint-by-numbers piety

 NICK SAID:

What's amusing about this line of logic is that it can be used against Sunday worship as well, making it something entirely optional. The result is a Christendom without any unified worship, and clear proof that Sola Scriptura doesn't work in practice.

Here's a textbook case of how a papist approaches religious issues:

i) Nick doesn’t begin with the word of God. Rather, he begins with his prejudicial notion of how things ought to be. If the word of God doesn’t conform to his antecedent bias, he then judges the word of God to be defective, and turns to the ecclesiastical divination to supplement the alleged deficiencies in the word of God.

ii) Suppose that Scripture doesn’t specify a day of worship. How does that consequence prove the insufficiency of Scripture? Notice that Nick isn’t taking his cue from what God says.

Assuming that this follows from sola Scriptura, it would be more logical, as well as more pious, to conclude from this consequence that a fixed day of worship is unimportant to God. For if that was important to God, then God would specify a fixed day of worship. But Nick doesn’t begin with God’s priorities. Nick begins with his preconception of how things ought to be. Then he goes in search of whatever gods ratify his preconception.

iii) In fact, given Paul’s remarks in Rom 14:5 and Col 2:16, the issue of Sunday worship is, indeed, an open question in theology. This is subject to legitimate debate. It’s not something that can be prematurely and arbitrarily settled by self-appointed church authorities like the pope. The pope is not entitled to prejudge what the apostle Paul (to take one example) is allowed to teach us on the subject.

iv) The question is also ambiguous. For we’re really dealing with at least two distinct issues:

a) Is weekly worship a Christian duty?

b) Is Sunday worship a Christian duty?

In principle, you could answer (a) in the affirmative, but (b) in the negative.

v) Even if (arguendo), Scripture doesn’t give us specific direction on when to worship, Scripture could still give us some general guidelines–leaving us free, within the range of those guidelines, to select one option or another.

For instance, we could infer something like weekly worship from NT ecclesiology. By definition, the church is a corporate entity. It has a communal life. But to be a “fellowship,” Christians must congregate from time to time. Therefore, Christians would need to worship together to have fellowship. To be a fellowship. And that, in turn, requires them to be at the same place at the same time.

v) This doesn’t give you a scientific formula, but what’s wrong with leaving the details a bit flexible? For instance, we live in the age of cars and clocks.

But in early times, some churches were built near tidal rivers. Churchgoers would commute by river. The service schedule was pegged to the tide cycle. For the tide determined the direction of the current. A floodtide generated an upstream current while an ebb tide reverted to a downstream current. If you lived upriver, and your church was downriver, you’d come to church on ebb tide, and leave on floodtide.

vi) To take a different example, for a time I used to attend a Messianic congregation. They worshipped on Saturday rather than Sunday. Does Nick think that’s inherently wrong?

vii) Or take the house-churches in 1C Rome. These were truly “community” churches. You attended whichever church lay within walking distance of your home. There’s no reason to think Roman house-churches synchronized their worship. Indeed, it wouldn’t even be feasible at that time and place to have synchronized worship services. They were widely separated in the already sprawling city of Rome. And it’s not as if our ancient churchgoers had a Timex or Rolex–or even church bells–to go by.

So I imagine that subsets of Roman Christians met whenever it was most convenient for all parties concerned. Each neighborhood church had its own rhythms.

Did they all meet on Sunday? Who’s to say? Some of these house-churches were of Jewish origin, so they may well have favored the Jewish Sabbath as their day of worship.

Contrary to Newman’s famous slogan, Roman Catholics are far from being “deep in history.” Rather, they have their preconceived idea of how things ought to be, and they impose that preconception regardless of history’s varied particularities.