Objection 44: Although there is overwhelming evidence that the first day of the week was observed beginning with the Savior's resurrection, Adventists teach that the change from Sabbath to Sunday was instituted by Constantine in the early part of the Fourth Century (GC p. 53) while at the same time teaching that “the pope” changed the Sabbath to Sunday. (EW, p. 33)
We have already noted that no passage of Scripture can be found to support the claim that Christians ever held Sunday sacred during the early apostolic era, the time from 34 AD to 90 AD when the Scriptures were being written. There is no evidence that Sunday was venerated earlier than the Second Century, and much of that evidence can be challenged by church historians in regard to authorship, date, and exact meaning.
Moreover, what seems often to be left out of the discussion is that in the years immediately after the death of the apostles many pagan ideas and customs began to infiltrate the church. Strikingly, the apostles warned that this very thing was going to happen. Speaking to the elders of the church at Ephesus, about the year AD. 60, Paul warned:
“Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.” Acts 20:28-30.
A few years earlier he had written to the Thessalonian church of a falling away from the faith that was to come and that would result in the exaltation of the “man of sin.” This “mystery of iniquity” was already at work, he warned. (2 Thess. 2:3-7)
Most Protestant theologians through the centuries have regarded this as a prophecy of the growth of the Papacy, the great Roman Catholic power. In his general comments on this passage, Wesleyan theologian Adam Clarke, though uncertain in his own mind on various points, states:
“The general run of Protestant writers understand the whole as referring to the popes and Church of Rome, or the whole system of the papacy.”
Clarke quotes Thomas Newton (1704-1782), as saying:
“The mystery of iniquity was already working; the seeds of corruption were sown, but they were not grown up to maturity. . . . The foundations of popery were laid in the apostle's days.”
Protestant historians are generally agreed that the roots of Roman Catholicism can be found in the early Second Century, at the latest. The eminent church historian Philip Schaff, declares:
“The first example of the exercise of a sort of papal authority is found towards the close of the first century in the letter of the Roman Bishop Clement to the bereaved and distracted church of Corinth.”—History of the Christian Church (8th ed., 1903), vol. 2, p. 157.
“He [Clement] speaks in a tone of authority to a sister church of apostolic foundation, and thus reveals the easy and as yet innocent beginning of the papacy.” Ibid., p. 646.
Paul died a martyr at Rome about AD. 68. Clement, bishop of Rome, was a disciple of Paul and died circa AD. 102. Schaff describes “the interval between Clement and Paul” as a “transition from the apostolic to the apocryphal, from faith to superstition.” - Ibid.
The Sunday advocate speaks warmly of “primitive Christian authors,” who are alleged to have provided such good proof for Sunday keeping in the early church. But what is here revealed of the early beginnings of the Papacy casts a heavy shadow of suspicion over these authors.
Clement was one of the earliest “church fathers,” although he did not write on the question of Sunday. Of the so-called fathers of the church who lived in the two centuries immediately following the apostles, Schaff says:
"We seek in vain among them for the evangelical doctrines of the exclusive authority of the Scriptures, justification by faith alone, the universal priesthood of the laity. And we find instead as early as the second century a high estimate of ecclesiastical traditions, meritorious and even ‘over meritorious’ works, and strong sacerdotal, sacraments, ritualistic, and ascetic tendencies, which gradually matured in the Greek and Roman types of catholicity.” - Ibid., p. 628.
We have learned (under Objection 43) that we cannot even be sure, when we read the so-called apostolic fathers, that we are actually reading what they said rather than what some later forger introduced into their writings.
Schaff quotes a distinguished writer as declaring that when we move from the inspired writings of the New Testament to the uninspired writings of the fathers, it is “like passing, by a single step, from the verdant confines of an Eastern city in the desert out into a barren waste.” (Ibid., p. 636) And it is into this “barren waste” that the Sunday advocate leads us for proof of Sunday keeping!
Even if we could be sure of what the fathers said on the matter, what value is their testimony, given that the roots of various false teachings, even of the whole Roman Catholic system, run back to the days of those earliest fathers?
Now, because these various false teachings and practices, when crystallized by custom and the centuries, finally culminated in the Papacy, it is natural to speak of these different errors as having been brought into the church by Rome, which is equivalent to saying that they were brought in by the popes. We have found that Sunday-keeping is not Scriptural; therefore, it is one of those un-Scriptural teachings that came in later, which eventually constituted the Roman Catholic system of doctrine.
Hence Mrs. E. G. White made no historical mistake in saying that the Pope changed the day of worship. Nor is there any conflict between that statement and her other statement, that Constantine “issued a decree making Sunday a public festival throughout the Roman empire.”—The Great Controversy, p. 53. Mrs. White does not, in fact, say that the change from the Sabbath to Sunday was effected or completed by Constantine, but simply that Constantine issued a law making Sunday a holiday, which is a statement of historical fact.
It is true that the church historians we have quoted—all of them Sunday keepers—believe that Sunday had the sanction of apostolic custom, even if not of apostolic command. But the only real argument they offer, in the complete absence of Scriptural proof, is this: Surely we would not find Sunday veneration so widespread in the Second Century unless it had had apostolic sanction?
Astonishingly, they forget that they have just told us of a wave of false doctrines and practices that washed over the church in the Second Century, supported by the writings of the “fathers.” Did all these practices have apostolic sanction? They further forget that this same argument they use to prove apostolic beginnings for Sunday worship, Rome uses to prove apostolic authority for the whole panoply of her un-Biblical teachings and practices. The argument is as good in one instance as in the other—and obviously worthless in either.
No, we find no safe place to establish doctrine in the barren wastes of post-Biblical times and writers. If we would walk in the path of truth, we must keep on the highway of the Scriptures, hand in hand with our Lord and His holy apostles.
If it still seems incredible to any reader that so great an apostasy could set in within the brief compass of, say, half a century from the last part of the First Century to the early part of the Second Century, let him note a modern parallel. In the latter part of the nineteenth century most of the Christian ministry could be described as Fundamentalist (although Darwinism was catching on with some). But by the end of the first decades of the twentieth century, a revolutionary change in religious belief, known as Modernism [or liberalism], had overtaken the major branches of Christendom, including “mainline” American Protestantism. By 1920, most mainline Protestant clergy did not believe the basics of Christianity—the deity of Christ, the atonement, the virgin birth, miracles, the doctrine of creation, the inspiration of Scripture—to be literally true, as most of them had a mere three decades before. There was a sea change in religion in less than two generations (and the reaction to this is what precipitated the fundamentalist movement).
How unwarranted a future church historian would be in reasoning that because, by the 1920s, mainline Protestant leaders held Modernist beliefs, therefore those views must have been generally held in the nineteenth century!
The evidence before us regarding the first and second centuries leads us to conclude that historians are equally unwarranted in reasoning that because certain beliefs were held in the Second Century, therefore they must have been held in the first—or even promoted by the apostles. What nonsense!