This page is a collection of notes and links concerning the issue of whether Christians should observe Saturday or Sunday.
At issue is Ten Commandments, more particularly the fourth one (the fourth one, that is, according to the Protestant reckoning - the third according to that of Augustine and the Catholic Church). According to the SDA Church, the sabbath, the day of worship and rest, is Saturday -- always has been and always will be. God never changed it. It is right there in black and white in the Bible.
Well, I see that I must research the whole issue.
Some preliminary notes and observations:
I must confess that I do not know the real reason the Church changed the day from Saturday to Sunday. I assume it is because that is the day that Jesus rose from the dead. What I do know is that the switch happened at a very early date -- by the year 100 at the latest if not right from the start (going by such references as there are in the New Testament, worship services always seem to happen on Sunday. But such evidence is not conclusive).
On the other hand, I find it extremely implausible that 99% of Christians can be so wrong for so long. If I had to stake my immortal soul on what Augustine says versus what Ellen G White (the profetess of Adventism) says, I would bet on Augustine. And in a sense I am, though in practice the choice is hardly so bald. Jesus died for our sins and could see the future and presumably knew he was not dying in vain. So either it is not an important point or he made sure that Christianity as a whole got it right. So in either case Sunday is the safe course of action.
Several years ago I read Calvin's Institutes. Like Ptolemy's Almagest, a very beautiful and wonderful and yet deeply flawed piece of work. Granted his presuppositions (all of which I do not buy), there are two points in particular where he goes off the track:
First, after taking the Bible so literally for so many hundreds of pages, he suddenly does an about turn when it comes to the Eucharist and Jesus's words "This is my body". Even though centuries of Christians had no problem in taking this literally, Calvin for some reason cannot swallow it. The only way I can make sense of this anomaly is to say that more than Calvin loved the literal truth of the Bible he hated or could not abide the Catholic priesthood (which then was in a very sad state).
The second point where he goes off the track is on the Commandment against idolatry and the making of graven images. He savages the Catholic (and Orthodox) understanding of this commandment. He shows how flagrantly they contradict this commandment in their visual arts and practice of worship. All wonderful, thrilling stuff. Except for one small thing: if you really buy into Calvin's interpretation of the commandment, then you cannot buy into the Incarnation, of God made man in the form of Jesus Christ. And from that alone I knew that his interpretation was fundamentally wrong.
You go into some Protestant churches and there is not even a cross, much less a crucifix. There is something wrong in that. The thing that dominates the room is not a huge crucifix, as in most Catholic churches, but a man in a business suit talking. I find that disturbing.
I have read about many heresies and there are a few things they usually have in common. One is the inability to swallow the idea that the divine and the material intermix -- as it did, according to the Catholic Church, in Christ and in the sacraments. Another is the great itch to simplify the truth, to have all the answers, even if that means driving a bulldozer through the Christian tradition and indeed the Bible itself. This is what I think Adventism is doing.
One of the things that most impressed me about Catholicism originally was its comfort with the idea of mystery, of the idea that some truths are beyond man's understanding and that we are lucky to understand only a piece of it. Modern science, in mature hands, is the same. Catholicism has a lot of awkward doctrines -- such as the Trinity and lifelong monogamy -- but rather than chuck them to to make the faith more marketable, it stubbornly held on to them and grappled with them, despite the enormous upheaval and loss of believership it caused. Its teachings on divorce and contraception are modern examples. That is why when people say that Catholicism is just warmed-over paganism, I do not believe it.
Resources in regard to the issue of Sunday worship being wrong (I have yet to go through all of these):