What Do Some Protestants Say?

Official documents outlining the beliefs of several Protestant denominations agree that the Bible provides no authority for Sunday observance.

Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran Church, wrote in the Augsburg Confession, Article 28, paragraph 9:

“They [the Roman Catholics] allege the Sabbath changed into Sunday, the Lord’s Day, contrary to the decalogue [the Ten Commandments], . . . neither is there any example more boasted of than the changing of the Sabbath day. Great, say they, is the power and authority of the church, since it dispensed with one of the ten commandments.”

Methodist theologians Amos Binney and Daniel Steele observed:

“It is true, there is no positive command for infant baptism . . . nor is there any for keeping holy the first day of the week.”—Theological Compend (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1902), pp. 180, 181.

Dr. N. Summerbell, historian of the Disciples of Christ or Christian Church, wrote:

“The Roman Church had totally apostatized . . . . It reversed the Fourth Commandment by doing away with the Sabbath of God’s word, and instituting Sunday as a holy day.”—A True History of the Christian and the Christian Church, pages 417, 418.

A leading Protestant church historian wrote:

“The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intentions of the apostles to establish a divine command in this respect, far from them, and from the early apostolic church, to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday. Perhaps at the end of the second century a false application of this kind had begun to take place; for men appear by that time to have considered laboring on Sunday as a sin.”— Dr. Augustus Neander, The History of the Christian Religion and Church During the Three First Centuries (Rose translation), p. 186.