Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
This episode starts with a discussion about the film Chariots of Fire; a fascinating film because of its largely sympathetic portrayal of a Christian man standing on a point of theological principle. Eric Liddell would not run on the Sabbath. Was he right about the Sabbath? How do Christians keep the Sabbath? The rest of the episode discusses the place of the law and the 10 Commandments in the Christian life.
You can read an article by Phillip on work and the Sabbath: Give Working Families a Rest .
The next episode is The Ten Commandments for Today. The previous episode is Wear It Purple.
PARIS OLYMPICS SCANDAL!
A sabbath-breaking controversy in 1924.
Tony Payne: I always associate the Olympics with Chariots of Fire and its music and that opening scene, where they’re running through the surf.
Phillip Jensen: It’s a brilliant scene and the music has stood the test of time.
TP: Hard to sing though. I guess I could sing the hymn that the movie starts with, “Jerusalem”, which is a very clever way to start the film.
PJ: It’s clever, but it’s funny, isn’t it? Because it’s the funeral of a Jewish man, although he came to embrace a form of Christianity by the end of his life. And it’s quite strange because the movie centres on the contrast between the two characters, the Jewish man from England, and the evangelical missionary Christian from Scotland, Eric Liddell. But the Jewish man, despite his Jewishness, was really very much an Englishman.
TP: Yes, and he sang “I am an English man” in the Gilbert and Sullivan scene. I remember watching the movie in the early 80s as a Christian, and it being one of those very few movies at that time in Western culture in which Christianity was presented in a not unsympathetic fashion, if I can put it that way—in which the Christian man in the film was, in a sense, the hero of the story.
PJ: The hero is the Christian man whose conscience won’t let him run on a Sunday. It’s about his willingness, his boldness, to follow his conscience on not being involved in the sport on Sunday, even though it was his specialized race that he was supposed to enter. And you don’t get many Christian conscience movies—you didn’t back then; I don’t think you get many today either. And it’s history–one episode of one man who did it in a most extraordinary fashion.
TP: On one level, Liddell was portrayed as a very admirable and consistent Christian man. But there was also this stream within the film, and I don’t know how accurate this is historically—as I haven’t delved into the details of it, but it certainly suited the rhetoric of the film very well—that as well as the positive portrayal of his courage and conscience, there was also an implicit critique of the legalistic, moralistic, killjoy form of Christianity that was represented in his sister Jenny. Jenny was terribly worried about him running, and doubted that something as frivolous as running was what God would have wanted him to do. Or somehow he was wasting his gifts and wasting God’s purpose in his life by doing all this running.
PJ: You can’t expect historical films to be historically accurate. It’s like asking people who tell stories to get every detail accurate. They’re bad storytellers. You mustn’t let the facts get in the way of the story! But yes, Hollywood saw that they needed to increase the drama level. And so, with her permission, I understand they made his sister Jenny as the foil, which in some ways damaged her life for the rest of her life, because it was not even vaguely true. She wasn’t even in Scotland at the time. She was in China as a child to her missionary parents. She was much younger than he was, and she didn’t have this attitude of negativity towards his sporting life in the least, but nobody would believe that in her older life. Everybody saw her in the movie as being the truth, rather than her as the person. I think that’s very sad. If the person is from a different century and they’re dead, well, they don’t have to suffer the misrepresentation. But for a person who’s still alive, a misrepresentation is very painful. So that’s a sad feature of it. I don’t know all the details, but I’ve read several articles on about her, and I feel sad for her, because she was a very lovely Christian woman, as best I can see.
TP: The conversations and the dialogue that happens—obviously they’re fictionalized and dramatizing what’s happened. The famous scene where Liddell has declared to the Olympic chiefs that he’s not going to run in the final on Sunday, and they’re desperately trying to persuade him to run, and they wheel in the Prince of Wales.
PJ: Yes, it’s just wonderful. The Prince of Wales says to Liddell, “You’ve got to put king and country first, above yourself.” And some of the people in that scene said, above God as well. But the Prince of Wales at that time is the future King Henry Edward VIII, who did not put king and country ahead of his own personal desires, not in the least! For the sake of an adulterous marriage, he renounced the crown and turned his country into chaos. And so the irony of him, of all people, trying to argue for principles, is just hilarious and sad all at the same time, isn’t it?
TP: Yes, it raises all sorts of fascinating questions about the film, and it’s a nice bounce into conversation today because it raises the question of conscience and Sabbath. That’s been an issue that Christians have disagreed about, not only among themselves, but especially with the culture at large for a long time—about the question of Sunday or of a communal day off, or of the nature of Sabbath and the Lord’s Day. And how these things should not only function within the Christian community, but also how the nation and culture as a whole should deal with the Sabbath. It interestingly raises those questions by looking back at an earlier era in which that all made quite some sense as a legitimate field of conscience, but we look back at it now, and we think it’d be very strange for somebody to refuse to play on a Sunday.
PJ: Yes, it is. The event that the movie is presenting happened. But the same man, when he was a prisoner of war of the Japanese in China, organized Sunday sport for the children in the camp. Now, I don’t think he gave up his principles in the slightest. I think that the principles of the Sabbath are just a little bit more complicated than Hollywood is going to present and how to understand what it’s about.
You see, we believe in the 10 Commandments. Tony and I have been working on a book on the 10 Commandments, which will come out next year. And we struggled with this chapter on the commandment of the Sabbath, because as Christians, we’re committed to keeping the 10 Commandments. But what does that mean about keeping the Sabbath Day? “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” How do Christians keep the Sabbath? It’s a very serious and difficult question for us.
TP: Historically, as Christians, we’ve come up with different answers to that question. Even within Protestant reformed evangelical Christianity, there are different views about the importance of the Lord’s Day—there’s a stream of more Sabbatarian thinking that thinks that Sunday as the Lord’s Day has become a kind of Christian Sabbath, a replacement of Old Testament Sabbath, and so we keep the 10 Commandments by treating Sunday somewhat as Israel was was required to treat Saturday. And at the other end of the spectrum there’s the view that says, “No, there’s no Sabbath any more. All days are alike. It doesn’t apply at all.” And everywhere in between.
PJ: Yes, and it raises the question, what is the place of the law and the 10 Commandments in the Christian life? Because a couple of things have actually diminished the 10 Commandments in our Christian community here in Sydney. One is the great emphasis on grace which we wouldn’t want to downplay in the slightest—about how we’re saved by faith in Jesus, not by works of the law. Well, then do we still have the law? Should we be obeying the law? How can we obey the law? Oftentimes we think that the 10 Commandments have been replaced with the great summary that Jesus gave of “love God, love your neighbour”. But Jesus doesn’t give that as a replacement for the 10 Commandments. He gives that as a summary of the commandments.
TP: As two foundational principles on which they all hang.
PJ: Yes, and without hearing the 10 Commandments, I think “love God and love your neighbour” can be slightly empty of content. What will it mean to love my neighbour? And so we’ve got this diminution of the 10 Commandments in the Christian life, and they’ve been replaced in the public consciousness with the Roman Catholic idea of the seven deadly sins. But the 10 Commandments in previous generations among reformed Christian Bible-believing people have been fundamental. In fact, most of our churches had the 10 Commandments written on the walls in front of us, and in the prayer book, you said the 10 Commandments every communion service in full, one by one.
TP: With a response from the congregation that goes something like “Incline our hearts to keep this law.”
PJ: Yes, and “write all thy laws in our hearts by the Holy Spirit”. So what about the Sabbath one? Some of them are straightforward: don’t commit adultery.
TP: That seems pretty applicable. I can cope with that. Do not steal.
PJ: But remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. How do I do that? We could discuss which day, but I don’t think which day is the key of the commandment. It simply says, remember the Sabbath day.
The creation is the basis for the Sabbath commandment because God created the world in six days and rested. God set up the pattern of work and rest, the differentiation between work and rest, and he sees it within the creation itself. And so for Israel, keeping the Sabbath was a covenant sign of being Yahweh’s people, because Yahweh is the creator of the universe in six days who rested. And so as Yahweh’s people, we must work and rest. But as Christians, we’re in a different kind of phase, aren’t we?
TP: Well, in one sense we aren’t different, we still live in the creation that Yahweh made.
PJ: And so we still need rest. What do they call it?
TP: The work-life balance.
PJ: Yes, the work-life balance is one of the ongoing problems of the 21st century in Western society because we’ve ignored the concept of the rest, and forgotten that you can’t actually work all the time.
TP: The 10 Commandments come in two places–Exodus and Deuteronomy. You’re obviously referring to the mention of the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20:8-11 about it being anchored in creation.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
PJ: The parallel, though, in Deuteronomy 5 is slightly different, isn’t it?
TP: It is. So the one is Exodus very much emphasizes a creational pattern that they were to reflect in their own social arrangements. And in that sense, as we look back at laws like this and see what they teach us about our lives and the world, there’s something very obvious there. We still live in creation! But the one in Deuteronomy, as you say, is a little different.
Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
PJ: The word for ‘male servant’ is the same word as the word for ‘slave’. There’s no great differentiation. But one of the things that’s striking about it is the communal nature of the rest day, and that seems to be an important part when we come to apply it across into the New Testament—that this is addressed not to every individual but to the heads of households. You are to keep it in such a way that your household can keep it, every part of your household down to the animals of your household, but certainly your slaves and your servants are to keep it. And so nowadays we assume that the commandments are addressed to the individual, but they’re actually addressed to the community–to the household community, to the household leader, that he has a responsibility to make sure that not only he remembers God and the rest day by taking a day off, but he must make sure that everybody else enjoys this benefit. And especially remembering that you were slaves. So you know what it was like when you’re in Egypt and you didn’t get a day off. You were treated harshly. You especially should remember to treat your slaves more kindly than you were treated by making sure they got their day off.
TP: So you’re saying the principle that’s at work is that there’s a creational pattern, but that Sabbath also reflects the social nature of the way we live together and work together. You don’t work on your own. You live and work and rest with everybody else in your particular social, cultural grouping. The commandments teach and emphasize those two aspects. And even though we are new covenant people who are not under the law of Israel–as Paul makes pretty plain at various points–we nevertheless learn from the commandments. They are things we should observe and understand and keep in our lives, even though we’re not Israelites living under a law code, because they teach us and instruct us about life and the world and how to live as God’s people. Would that be a fair way of putting it?
PJ: Yes, we’re certainly not under it in terms of our salvation. That’s where the grace element is completely right. And we’re not under it in terms of being a government. We’re not the nation of Israel. But yes, the law does teach us how to live, and how to live is to take a day off each week. And it teaches us how to be responsible, to make sure those who are your dependents, those who are working for you, those who are your servants—that others also share that day off. It’s a principle of justice for poor people, because it’s the poor people who suffer when they have to work in order for me to take a day off.
TP: They have to work so that I can have the enjoyment of going down to the shops and browsing and window shopping. Not that I would ever find that enjoyable, but I understand some people do. But so that I can go and have convenience and shop and do this and that on any and every day (including both days on the weekend), then people have to be behind the counters and opening the shops and on security—and they are not the bosses.
PJ: It’s never the bosses. The bosses are having a really enjoyable time going shopping or not even doing anything, playing their round of golf or some other decadent pastime. But the poor people, the only job they can get involves working on those days. And so it’s an unfair, unjust system, because work is social, communal, and rest must be social and communal as well, and the social capital–as they talk of these days–of our community is found not only in working together, but also in resting together. But if we can’t all rest together, then I’m afraid we’re undermining our society. We’re undermining the very unity of our society, because it undermines families, it undermines the neighbourhood, and it forces poor people to work unsociable hours stacking shelves at night. I always feel sad for the people who have to get ready for the Boxing Day sales by spending Christmas Day undoing all the specials and then making new specials and having the shops ready for people. A public holiday is a good thing to have for the sake of the public and especially for the sake of the poor people who are being forced to work when they don’t want it.
TP: Two things occur to me based on what you’ve just said. The first is that sense that the psalmist gives when he speaks of the wonderful, rich, good things that come out of the law. Psalm 119 has lots of this, but other Psalms as well—where the psalmist meditates on and chews over and thinks about the law, which surprises us. It’s law—how boring and restrictive is that? But he looks at the law and sees sweetness and goodness in much the kind of way you’re describing the Sabbath. Law describes something really, really good that’s worth embracing, and the more you chew over it and understand it, the more you see that it’s about the goodness and joy of rest as well as work, and about the importance of looking after everyone in your society and culture and community so that we can do that together socially. Those are really wonderful things that come out of the law. And so the law teaches us the good life, the good way to live.
And secondly, and kind of related to that, it makes me think that even though I wouldn’t regard myself as a strict Lord’s Day Sabbatarian—that is, where the Sabbath translates into Sunday and so on—all the same I think what that kind of sabbatarianism is driving at is good in its essence. We should keep a day aside as a culture, and we should rest, and we should do that together and mark a day off. And in an earlier time when we were a more Christianized society, setting aside a day like Sunday and saying, that’s going to be our day when we all just shut the shops and we have time off together as a society was a very good thing.
PJ: Yes, we don’t need seven day shopping. It’s a competitive advantage, not an absolute advantage. The amount of money the shopkeepers make will not change if you do all your shopping in six days as opposed to seven days.
TP: But as soon as somebody opens on the Sunday, then I have to open up as well. If I don’t, they get the customers.
PJ: But yet, there’s always this pressure from the greedy, from the competitors, from our desire to increase our market share and increase our economic activity, to undermine the social value of having everybody have the same day off so that I can spend time with every member or any member of my family, or any and every member of the community. See, this is not a churchman trying to protect Sunday so that church doesn’t have competition. It’s much more important than that. It’s about every community having a day off. It can be a Wednesday. It can be a Friday.
Romans 14 makes it quite clear Christians will disagree. One man counts one day more important than another. Another man counts every day alike. And when you think about the New Testament, when slaves were converted, they couldn’t keep the Sabbath Day unless their boss gave them the freedom to keep a Sabbath Day, on whichever day of the week, whether it was a Saturday or the Lord’s Day on Sunday. It’s not until the community became Christianized–or in the case of Israel, became a nation–that they could make this kind of legislation. But I’m afraid our society is run by secularists who are so keen to destroy family life and so keen to destroy religious life. And our governments are so scared of the secularists and don’t want to appear to be supporting any religion, so that they will not have Friday off because that would be supporting Muslims, or Saturday off because that would support the Jews, or Sunday off because that would support the Christians. So we won’t have any days off. We just run by the economy and destroy the social fabric and character of our life, especially for poor people. This is an appalling part of our history in Australia and Western society. It’s the capitalists who have ended up doing what the socialists and communists tried to do.
TP: That’s very true. The French Revolution tried to bring in a 10 day week, didn’t they? They said the seven day week was a church thing, we’ve got to get rid of that.
PJ: So they created a new calendar, a new series of days of the year. They tried to turn the whole world into a decimal world and so you work 10 days a week. It only lasted a few years, 15 years or so, but it was miserable the whole time. And then, of course, the Russian communists tried in 1929 to bring about the continuous week. And so everybody was given a color. And depending on your color, you had a day or two off a week on those days, but there was no weekend for the community. Everybody had different days off. This meant the machines could keep running all the time.
TP: It meant you could maximise production and efficiency.
PJ: Yes, but the communists only lasted 11 years doing this. It was so inhuman. It was so ungodly. It was intentionally aimed at undermining family life and undermining religious life. In Russia, that was explicitly part of the reason for it.
TP: The state is your father. We are your family and your religion and we must break down whatever connections you have with both, and that includes communal connections.
PJ: You and I have both worked for the University of New South Wales and recently they brought in a new timing system called trimesters, in which they got out of step with the rest of the community, and it has been an unmitigated disaster. I think it was done because it meant more government money came into that particular university.
TP: It meant they could maximize the number of students coming through. There were economic reasons and efficiency reasons why they felt it was a great idea.
PJ: But it meant the students at that university were out of step with every other student from every other university. So if there are joint university activities, like a sporting thing or camp, you couldn’t participate. There are all kinds of efficiencies but it was especially inhuman for the staff, particularly the family staff. If you had a family, your holidays didn’t coincide with school holidays, so you couldn’t go away, except at the peak time when you couldn’t afford to go away, like the Christmas holidays. They’ve now given up on it. I understand they’re trying to unravel that and go back to the same kind of term times of everybody else, but they tell us it’s going to take several years to reset the program. I can’t understand why. It didn’t seem to take several years to go wrong.
But it’s just a microcosm of what our society as a whole is doing. Out of fear of ever being seen as religious and out of commitment to economic wealth and GDP, they have undermined what is so important for our working lives—that we rest and holiday together. That is what that commandment about the Sabbath is all about. And the great example of Mr Liddell standing up for principle in his day and age when people understood it is a wonderful story to hear again and to see again.
