I finished Fred Sanders’ How God Used R.A. Torrey, and I
will be writing my review of it tomorrow. (Moody Publishers sent me a
review copy in exchange for an honest review, just to get that out into
the open.) The book is a collection of sermons that were delivered by
R.A. Torrey (1856-1928). In this post, I would like to discuss two
topics that are in the book: the Sabbath and the Trinity. I grew up in a
denomination that observed the seventh-day Sabbath on Saturday and did
not believe in the Trinity, thinking that the Holy Spirit is an
impersonal force rather than a person. While I do not feel bound to
those beliefs, they form a background for my discussion in this post.
A. On page 59, Torrey states after quoting the Sabbath commandment:
“This is not the seventh day of the week, as some men say, daring to put
into God’s Word what He did not put in, but the seventh day is for rest
after six days of work, without specifying which day of the week it
should come. Of course it was the seventh day of the week with the Jew,
in commemoration of the old creation; but with the Christian it is the
first day of the week, in commemoration of the new creation through a
risen Lord.”
I read this sort of argument some years back on a Christian dating
site of which I was a part. Someone was arguing against seventh-day
Sabbatarianism by saying that the fourth commandment does not require
people to observe Saturday (or, more accurately, sunset Friday to sunset
Saturday) as the Sabbath; rather, it requires people to work for six
days and rest on the day after those six days. It does not specify
which days those six days are, and which days the seventh day is. The
person making this point cited Waltke-O’Connor, but (in vague
retrospect) I doubt that Waltke-O’Connor were making that point about
the Sabbath; rather, they were referring to examples in the Hebrew Bible
of a set number of days being followed by another day.
I respected the person making that point, since he brought a
knowledge of scholarship to the discussion boards. But I thought that
he was dead wrong in his interpretation of the fourth commandment. The
reason was that, in the Torah, the Sabbath seemed to me to be a specific
day of the week, not any seventh day coming after any six days. I
think of the story of the manna: manna fell for six days, but it did not
fall on the seventh day, so the Israelites had to gather twice as much
manna on the sixth day. Does that sound to you like the Israelites
could pick any seventh day as their Sabbath? No, the Sabbath was a
specific day of the week, the seventh day, and on that day manna did not
fall. Or consider the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath and got
executed. He could not say, “Today is my day of work, and it is not the
seventh day that I have chosen to rest on; my seventh day is Tuesday.”
No, the Sabbath was a specific day of the week, and all Israelites were
expected to rest on that day, under penalty of death for refusing to do
so.
My reading of Torrey indicates that he would agree with my analysis,
even though he made a similar argument to that of the person on the
Christian dating site. Torrey acknowledges that the Sabbath for Old
Testament Israel was sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. He may even
acknowledge that God in Genesis 1 rested on sunset Friday to sunset
Saturday (or at least he thinks that the Saturday sabbath commemorates
what happened in Genesis 1). But his point appears to be that
Christians, by observing Sunday as their Sabbath (not that all
Christians do, but a number of Christians in history have), are actually
obeying the fourth commandment, even if they rest on a different day
from what the ancient Israelites rested on. The reason is that the
Christians are working for six days and resting on a seventh. Their
seventh day is not the same seventh day that the Israelites rested on,
but it is still a seventh day after six days of work, and resting on it
obeys the fourth commandment, after the dawn of the new creation.
I take it that Torrey is quite specific about what in the fourth
commandment is the actual commandment. The actual commandment, for
Torrey, is to work for six days and rest on the seventh day after that.
I doubt that Torrey includes in the fourth commandment the elaboration
in Exodus 20:11 that provides the rationale for it: that God worked for
six days at creation and rested on the seventh day, and that God blessed
the Sabbath day and hallowed it. For Torrey, I infer, that is not the
commandment itself, but the elaboration of the commandment for Old
Testament Israel, as it specifies the day on which Old Testament Israel
is to rest, namely, from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. Christians
celebrate another day, Sunday, in commemoration of something else
(Christ’s resurrection and the new creation), but they are still obeying
the fourth commandment because they are working for six days and
resting on the seventh day after that.
I am not sure if I find this argument convincing, but it is interesting.
B. There is a chapter of the book in which Torrey is arguing that
the Holy Spirit is a person, not an impersonal force. (Whom exactly
Torrey was arguing against, I do not know, but he does say later in the
book that he used to read Unitarian literature, so he may be arguing
against Unitarians, people who did not believe in the Trinity.) Torrey
notes places in the New Testament in which the Holy Spirit speaks,
knows, intercedes, instructs, can be grieved, has a mind, and has a
will. According to Torrey, that applies to a person, not an impersonal
force. Torrey also refers to Nehemiah 9:20, which states that God gave
God’s Spirit to instruct Israel. Torrey believes that the doctrine of
the personality of the Holy Spirit, and even the Trinity, is present in
the Old Testament, not just the New.
I do not entirely know how Armstrongites account for such passages;
one Armstrongite I know said that such passages about the Holy Spirit
are personifications, not literal descriptions, in the same way that
wisdom is personified as someone calling out in the Book of Proverbs. I
am skeptical that such a comparison works, though. The Book of
Proverbs could be personifying wisdom as part of a poetic appeal for
people to follow wisdom and not folly; that, in my mind, is arguably
different from a New Testament narrative or statement about reality that
the Holy Spirit speaks or has personal characteristics. The two just
seem to me to be different genres.
At the same time, I am scanning a United Church of God article
that argues that the Holy Spirit is not a person, and it makes the case
that there are impersonal characteristics of the Holy Spirit in the New
Testament: the Holy Spirit is said to be poured out; it can fill
people; people can quench it. Can this be said of a person? The
article answers no.
Then I wonder: Can the Holy Spirit be the power of God rather than a
personal being, as Armstrongites argue, and still do all the stuff that
Torrey mentions? Can God instruct people through his power? Well,
where that may get tricky is that the Holy Spirit in Romans 8 intercedes
for believers. Can God use his power to intercede for believers before
God? I am not saying that is impossible, but it is hard to picture; it
is easier to picture a being interceding between us and God the
Father. Or maybe God does, through his power, support people in their
prayers. Is that a stretch, though, that departs abysmally from what
Romans 8 is saying?
Then there is the question of the Holy Spirit in the Hebrew Bible. I
am very hesitant to say that we have the Trinity in the Hebrew Bible. I
am not hesitant to question my Armstrongite heritage; my education in
the historical-critical method of studying the Bible, well, I am more
hesitant to question that! There, I am open to saying that God
according to Nehemiah 9:20 can instruct Israel through God’s power,
meaning there is only one God- person in the Old Testament, but God
still acts through God’s power; in this model, there is a personality
behind that power, namely, God, but the Holy Spirit would still be God’s
power, as opposed to being a separate person from God the Father.
I admit that I have much to learn about the Holy Spirit:
historical-critical understandings of the Holy Spirit, Jewish
understandings of the Holy Spirit, etc.