Is it time to revisit the concepts of Sabbath and Sunday?

I was recently in a fascinating conference conversation with the remarkable Andy Crouch.

Andy is the former editor of Christianity Today and editor of several books – amongst them his 2017 The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place. In the course of his conversation, he mentioned his practice of having a one day ‘Sabbath’ where he does not use social media, internet or ‘devices’. I am increasingly coming across people who think it is a good idea to have one day a week set apart from our usual routine and set apart for the Lord. Whereas it was once fashionable, even amongst Christians to mock the perceived ‘extreme Sabbatarianism’ of the Victorian period, and the Western Isles in Scotland until very recently; now people are beginning to wonder whether we may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Was J.C. Ryle correct when he said that if we lose the Lord’s Day, we will end up losing Christianity in the nation?

Even within the lifetime of many readers there has been a sea change in attitude to the idea of keeping Sunday special. This has been caused by a number of pressures – and I’m not sure which came first, or if one even caused the other. On the theological side, partly due to a reaction to an extreme Sabbatarianism (locking up the swings on Sunday, no travel on public transport, no TV, etc), many evangelicals came to believe that the fourth commandment was the only one of the ten that no longer really applied.