Spirituality Column #762

June 22, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A Heartfelt Rest   

By Bob Walters

“… a world without the Sabbath is a world without soul.”

That line is from a May 8 Wall Street Journal Weekend Review essay which is the reason our past five columns here have been about the Christian Sabbath.

While I wholeheartedly agree with the line, and I learned from the piece many salient things I did not know about the Sabbath / Sunday rest in our USA, commercial, modern world, the overall arc of the essay put an exceedingly pesky burr in my saddle.

Why?  It framed the Sabbath entirely as a construct of God’s time, i.e., a day; rather than a construct of God’s heart, i.e., the glory and perfection of God’s Creation, the love of Jesus Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. 

Here was a story about Sabbath and Sunday and America with no mention of the Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus.  “Burr in my saddle” is putting it mildly.

In a prominent seventy column-inches of copy (2,000-ish words), five pieces of art (copy-desk talk for pictures, including “big art” above the fold on the lead page), a good pitch for the writer’s new book about the value of religious tradition in a chaotic society, and focused on the central topic of “Sunday” as a good idea for a society-wide, spiritually-focused day of rest especially as experienced in American culture, history, commerce, government, and tradition … never once is “Jesus” or “Christ” mentioned. 

This is a nearly perfect example of why modern journalism drives me nuts.  In a story about Sunday: no Lord’s Day, no Jesus, no Resurrection, no mention.  None.  It’s a bit of journalistic malfeasance my old mentor George would likely call a “catastrophe.”

What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Sabbath sang the (biggish) two-line, four-column, 48-point hed.  That and the jump hed (page two), The Sacred Dimension of Sabbath Time, drew me in immediately. (Link to story appears at bottom.)

Written by New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari, the essay is an excerpt from his just-published book, “The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.”   The Iranian born, American-educated attorney is a former atheist who recently became Roman Catholic and is a reliably conservative voice.  He had a notable dust-up with liberal theologian David French back in 2019 over the propriety of “Drag Queen Story Hour.”  Though a respected cultural commentator and author, Ahmari is a Christian discussing the Sabbath who doesn’t mention Christ.

Yet he writes, “… a world without the Sabbath is a world without soul.”  Indeed.

I get that the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, Islam’s Sabbath is Friday, and Christians have been “going to church” on Sunday pretty much since the Resurrection.  And in a linguistic irony, “Sabbatarian” refers to the ethic of not opening businesses on the Christian Lord’s Day Sunday.  But missing the bedrock influence of Jesus in any discussion of American Sabbath practices is to miss the heart of the story.

Ahmari’s choice of theologians to quote was 20^th-century European Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel, who became a noted American thinker and prominent 1960s peace and civil rights advocate.  A Jew, he spoke at Martin Luther King’s funeral. 

Heschel, at 16, was already a Rabbi in Poland who then studied ubiquitous Western Enlightenment philosophy at the University of Berlin in the 1930s.  He left Germany because of Hitler.  Then, as a Jewish intellectual, he was expelled from Poland in 1939.  Because of his academic and religious writings, he was invited and went to America.  He soon lost his family back in Warsaw to the Nazis and World War II.

Heschel, to his credit, rejected modernist philosophies with their human-centric focus.  He understood that only God provided the objective truth that made morality possible.  Upon his arrival at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Heschel was deemed an “old world curmudgeon” because he found American theology education – and its students – a disappointing modernist stew of lax doctrine and non-rigorous discipline.

As an aside, Nazi antagonist and German Lutheran priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hung as a traitor in Germany in 1945, thought the same thing when he studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York in the 1930s: American theology was weak. 

It takes some patience to absorb Heschel’s brilliant but incomplete view of the Sabbath as a “realm of Time” (a day, prayer) vs. a “realm of Space” (winning and prosperity in this life) that Ahmari presents.  

I say “incomplete” because his Sabbath omits the rest and peace of Jesus.

Obviously for Heschel, as with most Jewish thinkers (modern commentators Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager come to mind), the eternally living presence of the person of Christ – what I would call the far superior and heavenly realm of the Heart, the heart and love of our Lord Jesus – is ignored. 

Or is, as the headline sublimely suggests to me … rejected.

Bigger than just a “day,” Jesus is a human soul’s living, heavenly, heartfelt, and perpetual Sabbath rest and proof of God’s righteousness, goodness, love, perfection, and forgiveness, reaching eternally beyond the Law in any realm we can imagine. 

That eternal reach is what we lose when we reject the Sabbath in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was a newspaper desk editor in the 1970s and 80s, hence the dated journalist lingo. Link: What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Sabbath-WSJ