Tuesday, July 13, 2010

From a Christianity Today Review of "The Sabbath World," Insight into once Unlikely Supporters of Sunday Blue Laws

How Shall We Then Rest?
Sabbath-keeping reconsidered.
Karl E. Johnson | posted 6/28/2010
(Excerpt) - "...she also sees that, when it comes to the ever-encroaching world of work, resistance is greatly aided by legal proscription. She thus favors European-style vacations (longer) and work-weeks (shorter), suggests we incentivize the coordination of social time by taxing off-hours labor, and—get this—she calls blue laws "underrated." Indeed the irony is that those most sympathetic to blue laws today include secular and religious Jews, neo-Marxists, and even atheists such as Sam Harris. Although such legal advocacy would have been familiar to Christian Sabbatarians from William Bradford in the 1620s to William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s, Christians today speak of Sabbath-keeping in terms that are essentially experiential and therapeutic. As Shulevitz trenchantly puts it, Christians are no longer Sabbatarians in part because they are so busy on Sunday, rushing from their megachurch's ATM machine to the mall.  If she is right about the church's captivity to consumerism, then perhaps the Sabbath is a feast that will be preserved not primarily by those who have been invited, but by those who are hungriest for a different order of time." Source
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That prophesied time indeed has come when the churches and the world are united in corrupt harmony:   "The so-called Christian world is to be the theater of great and decisive actions. Men in authority will enact laws controlling the conscience, after the example of the papacy. Babylon will make all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication. Every nation will be involved....'These have one mind.' There will be a universal bond of union, one great harmony, a confederacy of Satan's forces." 3SM 392 (1891).  "The professed Protestant world will form a confederacy with the man of sin, and the church and the world will be in corrupt harmony."  7BC 975. (1891).

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