Sunday worship

I've discussed this before:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/01/presbyterian-papists.html

but I'll make some additional observations:

i) I don't have a problem with Sunday worship, so long as we recognize Sunday worship as a custom rather than a divine mandate. By the same token, I have no intrinsic problem with messianic Jews making Saturday their Sabbath, although I might disagree with their rationale if they make Saturday their Sabbath for the same reason they continue to practice circumcision and kosher diet.

ii) Over and above what I've already written, there are two additional obstacles insisting that Sunday is the divinely-mandated day of worship. To begin with, there's the question of how we demarcate a day. When does one day end and the next day begin? You can define a day as the interval between sunrise and sunrise or sunset and sunset. That's a matter of convention. One definition isn't right while the other is wrong. But depending on which system you use, depending on when a day begins and ends, a day under one system won't coincide with a day under the other system.

iii) Another complication is time zones. Even if we agree on what demarcates a day, sunup and sundown don't occur at the same time all around the globe. Because the earth is a large globe spinning on its axis, my today may be your tomorrow, so it isn't physically possible for all Christians to worship on the same day, since the day is constantly shifting. That wasn't an issue for ancient Jews clustered in Eretz Israel, but for a global faith it makes a difference.  

iv) Not only is there a longitudinal distinction, but a latitudinal distinction, regarding solar days and solar nights. So there is no fixed reference point. It's a fairly (but not entirely) arbitrary calendrical convention. It has some basis in nature, but even from a natural standpoint there are different natural choices regarding the starting-point and end-point. 

v) Since the Mosaic law code contains both moral laws and ceremonial laws, there's no presumption that every command in the Decalogue must be a moral law. That might be the case, but it's not a given.

vi) There's no evidence that the Jewish Sabbath was originally a day of worship. Rather, it was originally a day of rest from labor. The association of the Sabbath with worship probably arose with the synagogue system, to service Diaspora Jews.

vii) Apostles worshiping on Sunday doesn't entail Sunday replacing Saturday as the day of worship. For one thing, that assumes the Sabbath was a day of worship. If, however, that's not the case [see (vi)], then at most, Sunday worship creates an additional day of obligation: Saturday Sabbath and Sunday worship. Two separate days of obligation. 

viii) Likewise, apostles worshiping on Sunday doesn't entail Sunday replacing Saturday as the Sabbath and/or day of worship inasmuch as apostles continued to frequent the Temple services as well as Saturday Sabbath/worship services in the synagogue. So both systems were in play.

ix) If you imagine that the Gregorian calendar coincides with the Jewish Sabbath, you're not tracking the argument. It's just the opposite. If the Gregorian calendar dropped 10 days from the Julian calendar, then Sunday doesn't fall on the same day on both calendars. What makes Sunday fall on the same day? If Sunday is seven days apart from the last Sunday and the next Sunday. If, however, the Gregorian calendar dropped 10 days from the Julian calendar, then that breaks the cycle. It renumbers the days and resets the cycle at a new starting-point. The first Sunday on the new calendar doesn't fall on the same day as the last Sunday on the old calendar because it's not seven days apart. If you can't count back by 7-day intervals from our Sunday to the apostolic era, then our Sunday doesn't match their Sunday. It's a different day on their calendar. We simply relabeled the days.

x) It's vacuous to say there's one right day of worship when you can't specify the conditions which single out a particular day, to the exclusion of other candidates:

Polar days and polar nights. What counts as Sunday in that setting? It's purely calendrical with nothing in nature to back it up. 

What makes a day a day? What demarcates one day from the next? When a day begins and ends. A day which is reckoned from sundown to sundown won't coincidence with a day that's reckoned from sunup to sunup. If the apostles used a dusk-to-dusk calendar while we use a dawn-to-dawn calendar, or midnight-to-midnight calendar, then those are different days since a day is defined by when it begins and ends. the issue of time-zones. Sunday isn't simultaneous across the globe. Sunday in one time zone doesn't fall on the same day as Sunday on a time-zone 12-14 hours apart;  So the identification is equivocal. 


BTW, if we had a space colony on Mars, what day would the Sabbath fall on? What's the frame of reference? A terrestrial diurnal cycle or Martian diurnal cycle? If the future, this may be more than hypothetical.

I find it amusing that some Protestants who swear by sola scriptura can't bring themselves to see or admit that this is an ecclesiastical tradition rather than a divine mandate. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that so long as you don't confuse the two and assign divine obligation to a human custom.