Sabbath Gospel: A New Narrative of Time, Rest, and the Work of the Church
Rest: A Theological Account
The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight
It is no secret that the western world’s relationship with time, work, and community is complicated, generally unhealthy, and does not lead to restful, delighted lives. We tend to continually desire more and perfection, and so tend not to stop, cease, rest, or enjoy community. Three recent books seek to reconstruct our theology and habits around Sabbath and rest: G. P. Wagenfuhr and Amy Erickson’s Sabbath Gospel: A New Narrative of Time, Rest, and the Work of the Church; Euntaek David Shin’s Rest: A Theological Account; and Travis West’s The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight. All three offer overarching theological ideas on rest that are intended to change our lives by orienting them toward rest, Sabbath, and joy.
Sabbath Gospel
Pastor G. P. Wagenfuhr and Professor Amy J. Erickson together write Sabbath Gospel: A New Narrative of Time, Rest, and the Work of the Church. This book puts Sabbath at the center of the gospel, reorienting the journey of the Bible and faith around Sabbath rest. Their “Sabbath Gospel” is that God is destroying human “dream home” constructions to create a community of people that respond to God’s discipline by pursuing maturity as members of the divine council in God’s household who give rest rather than take it. Primarily intended for scholars and students, Wagenfuhr and Erickson claim uniqueness in their approach, for they begin in the middle of things (Psalm 92), in the midst of our lives, starting with God relating to time and humanity, rather than at the beginning (Genesis), and with God outside time. In part one, they start from where we are—a people who center our lives on two things: first, a “dream home” of our own making that we believe will satisfy us, and second, aseity or self-sufficiency. Both are antithetical to Sabbath. They turn to Psalm 92 because Sabbath is mentioned in its superscription. This “Sabbath Psalm” displays Sabbath as “a matter of actively and gratefully receiving what God has already done and anticipating what God will do” (32), which is opposed to work, control, and independence, and is active, not a static structure like a dream home.
Part two’s journey through scripture is the longest portion of the book, where the authors return to the beginning and traverse the entire Bible, making several stops in the story. First, they see Genesis 1 as not about God creating order out of chaos, but rather about God filling a void and dwelling with wildness. As those in God’s image, then, humans are not intended to order chaos, but rather to act as royal advisors in the divine council, maturing children of the king at the palace where Sabbath is God’s enthronement and rest is received as a gift. Rather than receiving rest, however, humans sin and the results include distorted relationships, God’s discipline of loving exile, and two households—one that receives God’s discipline of wandering and moving toward maturity and rest (Seth’s) and another that does not (Cain’s). These two households are thematic as the authors repeatedly ask to which household our actions show we belong.
Wagenfuhr and Erickson develop the household theme through the Torah, showing how God dwells with a household of people who bear signs that point to God, like the rainbow, circumcision, and Sabbath. Sabbath shapes both economy and all time (around the daily sufficiency of manna), community (the decalogue commands to give rest to all), and identity (a sign of God’s covenant). For those in God’s household, God does not require a blood sacrifice for belonging, but rather kipper, an animal killed for dinner, with its blood as a sign of belonging and a detergent that cleanses people and places.
The authors pick up all these themes in the New Testament, when the Lord of the Sabbath arrives as the master who gives rest and proclaims Jubilee (Luke 4:16–21), creating an interdependent economy. Jesus receives the cup of human wrath on the cross, and like the kipper sacrifice, his blood “defeats the power of sin by cleansing or decontaminating God’s throne on earth, the center of God’s power” (163). The final stops on the biblical journey are Revelation and Hebrews. Revelation anticipates the Sabbath Psalm’s vanquishing of God’s enemies and establishment of the divine council where humans feast and enjoy God’s rest, while Hebrews reminds us that we are still at dusk between the sixth and seventh day, following faithful formation in the time that remains.
The last portion of the book is application, or “Sabbath Now,” where the authors explain “embassy ecclesiology” and Christians as ambassadors of rest. Sabbath people are a people of belonging with an economics of community sharing. Again, they claim a unique approach to both a theology of work and Sabbath, because they are promoting a big-picture way of communal being rather than individual spiritual disciplines. The Sabbath Gospel claims, “God is destroying the dream homes of the world in order to fashion a people of a renewed bloodline who inhabit a different economy, a household order of mature children ready to sit on his divine council and rule the world with him by giving rest rather than taking it” (243).
Rest: A Theological Account
Euntaek David Shin’s Rest: A Theological Account is similarly intended for scholars and students. Shin seeks to create a constructive theology of rest to combat the overall restlessness of the human experience. He describes the book’s content as “an evocation of our triune God, who frees us from restless enslavement to limitlessness and leads us to the enjoyment of finitude” (xiii). The book’s four longer chapters are a complex combination of philosophy, biblical exegesis, and theology. Like Wagenfuhr and Erickson, Shin does not begin with Genesis or a weekly discipline of Sabbath rest. His first chapter, “Divine Economy and Human Finitude” defines restfulness as “a concept that encompasses a physiological and psychological state characterized by a sense of peace and joy in the absence of fatigue and anxiety” (4). Its first component is dependence on God and it is subjective, momentary, and partial, especially if others are not also resting.
Using the stories of Noah and Ruth, Shin’s second chapter, “Our Created Home,” develops our relationship and responsibility to the created world and to one another. He writes, “Restfulness is achieved when we are satisfied with the fruit of our work and when those fruits are shared with others” (56). The next chapter, “Eat, Drink, Enjoy,” develops restfulness as “accepting one’s portion as God-given” (75), a portion that is unequally distributed and meant to be shared. Our restlessness comes from constant dissatisfaction and a desire for limitlessness. This is where Shin brings Sabbath into the conversation, for “accepting portions gives us the courage to cease from our work” (89).
Shin’s final two chapters, “Healing Memories” and “The Beatific Vision,” seek to create a somewhat practical picture of restfulness for Christians. Whereas memories of the past and future projections (what Shin calls memories of the future) can leave us restless, he proposes Psalm-singing to help us remember with God, thus consecrating memories and healing the pain associated with them. With healed memories, we practice restful living which gives God pleasure and therefore allows us to experience a more complete beatific vision; Shin proposes that seeing God makes us happy, and we are even happier because God is happy with us because of our restful living. His final pages are spent explaining the entirety of the text with one concept: Kierkegaard’s purity of heart. Shin concludes with the core logic of a theology of rest: “the priority of the triune God’s economy and our response to it as finite creatures with faith, love, hope, and charity” (183).
The Sabbath Way
Old Testament professor Travis West’s The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection and Delight is quite different from the first two books, in part by its intention for a broad audience. Unlike the first two, West focuses not only on an overarching life perspective that he calls “the Sabbath way,” but also concludes each chapter with Sabbath practices. His book is beautifully organized in four parts: “Sabbath and Work,” “Sabbath and Time,” “Sabbath and Community,” and “Sabbath and Creation.” Each part contains three chapters, beginning with “orienting” or how culture forms us, “disorienting” or how the Sabbath is countercultural, and “reorienting” or how to pilgrimage toward Sabbath delight. West inspires and invites his audience to consider and practice the Sabbath Way through biblical exegesis, word studies, personal stories, embodiment, and an interesting personification of Sabbath as a compassionate friend. Like the centrality of Sabbath to the gospel in Sabbath Gospel, all of life centers on Sabbath for West; we don’t fit Sabbath into our lives, but our lives fit and grow around it.
West orients us to a typical experience of work in our culture, defining it as things done daily. We derive identity and value from work and yet work is disconnected from our bodies and neighbors. Sabbath disorients work-as-identity, honors our bodies and our limits, and helps us be fully ourselves. West writes that even though we are terrified that if we do nothing (rest) then we are nothing, Sabbath is a gift to remind us that we already matter, even if we do not produce. West reorients our perspective on work by inviting us to honor our limits, connect to delight, and embrace nonproductivity.
He then turns to time, asserting that we wear busyness as a badge of honor and have a scarcity relationship with time, often thinking of it economically as “we spend time, save time, use time, waste time, borrow time, can’t afford the time . . .” (86). Sabbath disorients this, and West characterizes time in multiple metaphors, including a flower centered on Sabbath and a rowboat where we look backward as we move forward and see time as more cyclical than linear. A reorientation of time shows it is love, presence, patience, and unearned play. For West, the purpose of time is encounter.
The third part of The Sabbath Way is about community, and West first orients the reader to our lack of community and the sources of our loneliness epidemic. He disorients our loneliness with belonging, stating that “the fundamental message of the Sabbath is that you are loved as you are; you are enough as you are; you belong as you are” (152). West’s reorientation is to the beloved community where Shalom, Justice, and Sabbath are the three-legged foundational stool. The realities of these values and the beloved community are incomplete now, but we “participate in and contribute to collapsing the distance between the already and the not yet” (171), in part through small acts like keeping Sabbath.
Orienting us to our culturally-formed relationship with creation in part four, West states, “No other generation in human history has so thoroughly ignored and overrun the inherent limits of both land and animals by denying their birthright to Sabbath rest” (181). We lead lives of scarcity that drive consumer greed, and we do not share well. To disorient this, West turns to part of Sabbath’s purpose, which is “to mitigate the human temptation to dominate and exploit the world” (191). Domination and exploitation are treated by the antidotes of wonder and gratitude. In the final reorientation, West invites us to a delightful and playful fictitious three-course sequence offered by the “Sabbath Institute of Grateful Living (or SIGL, which rhymes with giggle)” (206), and highlighted by professors like Annie Dillard, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. The reader finishes the book not only having read about Sabbath delight but having experienced it as well.
