Before You Begin

The Betrothal

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

1 Thessalonians 5:21

Joining a church is not subscribing to a service. It is a betrothal. Scripture chooses that very word: “I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:2), and it calls the bond of Christ and His people a marriage (Ephesians 5:25–32). No one should enter a marriage with questions festering behind the vow, because whatever is buried at the betrothal grows in the house.

So ask everything now, while asking is still free. About the day. About authority. About what was changed, and by whom. The Lord Himself said to count the cost before building (Luke 14:28), and He praised the Bereans, who “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). To answer a matter before hearing it, Scripture says, is folly and shame (Proverbs 18:13).

This book is premarital counseling for your soul’s union with a church. It puts every hard question on the table before the vow, the questions a suitor would rather you asked after the wedding. If the church you are considering can answer them, marry her with joy. If she cannot, you deserved to know before the ring. Either way you enter whole, hiding nothing, with nothing left to surface in year ten. The same standard binds the author, who kept a trial Sabbath, sat through the liturgies, and brought his hardest questions to the priests before he made any vow of his own.

The Keel

The Church is a ship. This is not a borrowed picture; it is Orthodoxy’s own. The ancient church order directs that the building “be long… and so it will be like a ship,” with the bishop governing “as the commander of a great ship” and the deacons working “as mariners.”1 Constitutions of the Holy Apostles II.57, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7. The central hall of every Orthodox temple is still called the nave, from the Latin navis, “ship.” Within that ship, Scripture is the keel: the one member laid first, to which every plank, rib, and mast is fastened. A ship is one thing, keel and hull together, Scripture and Tradition together, exactly as Orthodoxy insists. But a crew that saws at its own keel does not end up with a richer ship. It ends up with a sinking one.

Hear the elders describe the keel in their own words. Kallistos Ware, whose introduction to Orthodoxy is the most widely read in English, places the Bible, the Creed, and the councils in the one tier the Church holds “as something absolute and unchanging, something which cannot be cancelled or revised,” and adds that “not everything received from the past is of equal value, nor is everything received from the past necessarily true.”2 Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed. (London: Penguin, 1993), in the chapter on Holy Tradition. Ware tiers Tradition and places Scripture, the Creed, and the conciliar definitions in the uncancellable rank. Georges Florovsky, one of the century’s great Orthodox theologians, insisted that Tradition is not a second source standing beside Scripture, “not because tradition could add anything to what has been manifested in the Scripture,” but because it gives the living context in which Scripture is rightly read.3 Georges Florovsky, “Scripture and Tradition: An Orthodox Point of View,” Dialog 2, no. 4 (1963): 288–293. Florovsky holds that “tradition does not and cannot add anything to Scripture, but only elicits what is contained in Holy Writ.” If Tradition cannot add to Scripture, it surely cannot subtract a commandment from it.

The elders gave us the saw-detector too. St. Cyprian: “custom without truth is the antiquity of error.”4 Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle to Pompey (Ep. 73 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Ep. 74 in the Oxford numbering), ยง9. Cyprian wrote in a dispute he did not finally win on its own subject, the rebaptism of heretics, but the principle he stated has stood on its own ever since. St. John of Damascus: “We do not change the everlasting boundaries which our fathers have set, but we keep the Tradition, just as we received it.”5 St. John of Damascus, On Holy Images, First Apology, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas Baker, 1898). The standard the fathers set for themselves is the one this book asks the Church to apply: keep what was received, add nothing against it, take nothing away.

Now the question writes itself. When a council pronounces anathema on the rest that the fourth commandment requires, as the Council of Laodicea did, that canon is not the ship’s tradition. It is a saw at the ship’s keel, and the elders’ own principles, not this author’s, are what condemn it. The question this book puts to Orthodoxy is not the Protestant one, “Scripture or Tradition?” The elders rightly reject that choice. The question is whether the ship will stay fastened to its keel.

Two honesties keep this fair. Ware also writes that “it is from the Church that the Bible ultimately derives its authority, for it was the Church which originally decided which books form a part of Holy Scripture.” That is true, and it is answered, not dodged: recognizing which books were already inspired is an act of discernment, not creation, and the appendix on objections treats it in full. And the keel argument lands on one plank, Laodicea’s anathema, not on Orthodoxy as a whole. The same tradition also produced the canons that defend Saturday’s honor (Apostolic Canon 66; the Quinisext Council, Canon 55; Laodicea’s own Canon 16 mandating the Gospels be read on the Sabbath). The tradition is divided against itself at exactly one point, and the keel decides which half of it is the true ship.

What This Book Does Not Claim

Before the argument begins, here is what it will not say, so that no reader has to brace against a blow that is not coming.

It does not claim that sincere Sunday-keepers are condemned. God does not hold people accountable for light they have not received (Acts 17:30). It does not claim that keeping the Sabbath saves anyone; salvation is the finished work of Christ, and the Sabbath is the sign of resting in it, not a wage that earns it. It is not an attack on Catholic people. The critique falls on an institution’s direction across the centuries, never on the devotion of the faithful within it, and the book names actual Catholic saints with respect. It is not anti-Orthodox; the author is himself becoming Orthodox, and it was Orthodoxy that preserved the thread this book follows.

It does not claim that Sunday itself is the mark of the beast. The early church kept both days, and honoring the resurrection is no sin. What Scripture warns against is the enforced substitution of a human authority’s day for God’s, backed by the power to forbid buying and selling; the mark is that submission, not the square on a calendar. And it does not claim that any one denomination is the sole remnant. The thread is older than every institution, and it runs through more doors than one.

The Case in Ten Sentences

If you read nothing else, read this.

  1. God blessed and sanctified the seventh day at creation, before there was a Jew, a temple, or a law (Genesis 2:3).
  2. He wrote its command in stone with His own finger and placed it inside the ark, among the moral law, not beside it among the temporary ordinances (Exodus 31:18).
  3. Jesus kept the seventh day as His custom (Luke 4:16), and the women who followed Him rested on it after the cross, “according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56).
  4. No verse in all of Scripture transfers the holiness of the seventh day to the first.
  5. The Roman Catholic Church admits, in its own published words, that it changed the day by the Church’s authority and not by any command of Scripture.
  6. Daniel foretold a power that would “think to change times and laws” (Daniel 7:25), and the only commandment that touches time is the fourth.
  7. The thread of those who kept the seventh day never broke, from the apostles through the synagogues of the diaspora to the Ethiopian highlands and the scattered faithful of every century.
  8. How they kept it, sunset to sunset, as a delight, with mercy, defined by Scripture rather than by a later power, was itself their confession of whose day it is.
  9. The mark of the beast is not Sunday; it is the enforced substitution of human authority for God’s in the matter of worship.
  10. You are now woven into that thread, and what you do with this knowledge is between you and the Father.

This book draws its witnesses from every tradition that kept the day, and it tries to tell each tradition the truth about itself, including the author’s own. That is the spirit in which it is offered, and the spirit in which it asks to be read.