“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”



–Abraham Heschel

The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man



Why am I writing about Sabbath? Sabbath is relevant to the Jesus-follower for several reasons:

Many of the most important disputes recorded in the accounts of Jesus’ work involve the Sabbath.

In the history of the wider Jesus movement, Sabbath arises repeatedly among the waves of disagreement about the responsibility of Christians to identify with or reject Jewish symbols and practices.

There have been many attempts to co-opt, reject or redefine the practice of Sabbath in particular (as opposed to “Judaizing” in general) in the development of various Christianities (one thinks of the Puritans, for example).

Recent Christian scholarship (both historical and biblical) seems to have revived discussion of the Sabbath in conjunction with research on the “historical Jesus” and early Christianity’s Jewish roots.

Various constructions of Sabbath practice have arisen in modern theological contexts, whether as part of the fundamentalism(s) of the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Armstrongite tradition in the United States, or as part of more contemplative and/or “progressive” revivals.

But the main reason I am writing about Sabbath is because I grew up in a fundamentalist church intent on trying to reconstruct some kind of Christianity “true” to some aboriginal version. For them, that includes sabbatarianism, or rest and worship on Saturdays (in addition to… other stuff). And since I’ve left(/was dis-fellowshipped from) that church and its traditions, I have continued to observe Sabbath in some capacity. It has been such a regular habit my entire life that I was loathe to simply give it up. It remains meaningful to me, even though that meaning has changed and continues to change. And as I struggle to define just what exactly my faith is now (if I can even call it that), Sabbath is one practice and set of symbols I have given focus to in my research and my thinking, and something that I’d like to share.

I am convinced for now that Sabbath is a worthy practice, a worthy set of symbols for me, and for any Christianity willing to criticize the advanced capitalist hegemony in which we live and move and have our being, as it were.

Any Christian theology or ethics of Sabbath must take into account the lived material conditions of the world in which we discuss it. Sabbath arises in the Hebrew Bible within the context of a subsistence mode of production, and later within a tribal mode of production. Therefore, the central question for us is this: What is an appropriate interpretation of Sabbath under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism?

In my mind, the more specific question is this: To the extent that Sabbath is a response to and critique of the material conditions of subsistence, (i.e., labor), does Sabbath provide us with the materials of an anti-capitalist practice? I think it does.

Sabbath in Early Christianity

Sabbath is established in the Hebrew Bible as a weekly sacred practice. In basic terms, every seventh day (beginning at sunset on the sixth day and ending at the following sunset), Israelites are to abstain from the subsistence labor they perform for the other six days (what counts as such labor is of course has always been a subject of debate within Judaism). In Exodus, Sabbath is presented as a form of imitatio dei, “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it” (20:11). In Deuteronomy, the rationale is more materialist, as a way to “remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (5:15). Therefore Sabbath is presented in the Hebrew Bible as at once a positive and a negative symbol: on the one hand as an imitation of the divine, a re-membering of the chosen community; and on the other hand as a rejection of and protection against exploitative forms of social (re)production. In other words, Sabbath is on the one hand the devotion of time to the worship of Yahweh, and on the other hand it is the abstinence from labor. In the prophets, Sabbath appears both as a symbol of the peace of the Messianic age and as a means of drawing in the socially marginalized to the Messianic community (e.g., see in particular Isaiah). More on that later.

The Sabbath features in the Gospels of the Christian Testament repeatedly, often as the setting for controversial miracles and statements and therefore also as a site of dispute. Jesus’ interpretation of Sabbath can fairly be summed up in two passages from Mark: first, the declaration that “the Sabbath was made for the sake of the human, and not the human for the sake of the Sabbath,” followed by the rhetorical question, “Is it allowed on Sabbath to do good or to do ill? To save life or to kill?” with the implication that Sabbath is a time for doing positive good and contributing to the welfare of the community rather than simply avoiding forms of profane work. As others have argued, Jesus is therefore seen not as “doing away with” the Sabbath as such, but as reinterpreting it (a claim that is rightly subjected to scrutiny by Jewish scholars, particularly when the gospels unfairly frame the Pharisees as legalistic egoists). For Jesus, Sabbath is still a time convening with others to worship (cf. Luke 4:16); but it is also a time for the work of healing and hospitality.

The non-Gospel writings in the Christian Testament are not clear on Christian practices regarding the Sabbath, though we can assume it was practiced at least among Jewish Christians. And if Acts is to be believed, the synagogue was a prime site of evangelization and preaching throughout Asia Minor and Greece in the early days of the movement. In the essay collection From Sabbath to Lord’s Day (1982), R.J. Bauckham writes that the early churches seem to have shared no unified view on Sabbath practice:

There were legalistic Jewish Christians who regarded the observance of the whole law as a matter of salvation, but there were also Jewish Christians who themselves continued to keep the Sabbath as a matter of national mores but laid no such obligation on Gentile converts. There were Gentile Christians who adopted the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, while others regarded themselves as entirely free from the commandment either on the grounds of its being a specifically Jewish law or following the Pauline argument that the Sabbath was a shadow of the reality that had now come in Christ. Simply because the Pauline view is now in Scripture, we may not assume that it was the view that prevailed in the early church. Paul himself urged tolerance of those who observed “days” without thereby compromising the gospel (Rom. 14). In particular we should not underestimate the appeal Sabbath observance had for many Gentile Christians. Imitation of the Jewish Sabbath was evidently widespread in the second-century Roman world, though we should also take into account the prevalence of anti-Semitic feeling, which would turn Gentiles against an institution so obviously characteristic of the Jews. (“Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church,” R.J. Bauckham, 1982)

Because of the Sabbath’s Jewish provenance, the practice obviously carried tensions within it for an increasingly non-Jewish movement that came to see itself as distinct from its Jewish religious counterparts who did not acknowledge Jesus as the promised messiah. This is no small issue even in the canonized Christian Testament, as much of the material goes about reacting to questions of how “Jewish” the Gentile converts ought to be. But Sabbath as a particular point of contention is seen more frequently in non-canonical documents.

S. McKinion, editor of Life and Practice in the Early Church (2001), points out that it seems many early Christians continued observing Sabbath in addition to coming together on Sunday for a meal and distinctly Christian worship.

Because the earliest Christians were adherents to first-century Judaism, they gathered on the Jewish Sabbath, as they had prior to their conversion to Christianity. In addition, these Christians…also met with one another on Sunday. They began to call Sunday the Lord’s Day [κυριακη ἡμερα] because Jesus was resurrected from the dead on the first day of the week. (S. MicKinion, Life and Practice in the Early Church, 2001)

The essays in From Sabbath to Lord’s Day attempt to reconstruct the origins of Sunday worship in the early churches. Its authors seem to agree on the whole that many communities observed both Sabbath on the seventh day and specifically Christian worship and the commemorative Eucharist meal on the first day of the week, which was itself not considered a day of rest. Between apparently decreasing tolerance of Jesus-followers in synagogues on the one hand and increasing proportions of non-Jewish Jesus-followers on the other, many Christians seem to have sought a way to keep Sabbath in synagogue and meet together for specifically Christian communion. Eventually, Sunday was associated with Jesus’ resurrection, making it a sort of feast day, in the words of Ignatius (100s C.E.):

Let us therefore no longer keep the Sabbath after the Jewish manner, and rejoice in days of idleness; for “he that does not work, let him not eat.” For the holy Scriptures say, “In the sweat of your face you will eat your bread.” But let every one of you keep the Sabbath after a spiritual manner, rejoicing in meditation on the law, not in relaxation of the body, admiring the workmanship of God, and not eating things prepared the day before, nor using lukewarm drinks, and walking within a prescribed space, nor finding delight in dancing and plaudits which have no sense in them. And after the observance of the Sabbath, let every friend of Christ keep the Lord’s Day as a festival , the resurrection-day, the queen and chief of all the days of the week. (Ignatius, Letter to the Magnesians, long resension, potentially mid 300s C.E.; emphasis added)

Ignatius’ letter, which takes a consistent stand against traditional Judaism as being relevant to Christianity, nevertheless assumes that his audience is observing both Sabbath and ἡ κυριακη ἡμερα (the Lord’s Day) on Sunday, though he disagrees with their applying Jewish rules to Sabbath observance. There is a shorter version of the letter, dated to the early 100s C.E., that does not go into such detail about this difference between Sabbath and Lord’s Day, whereas the longer recension cited above is said to date possibly from the late 300s C.E. If this is the case, it would then seem to imply that some Christians may have been observing both days even as late as the 4th century. Other documents, such as Justin Martyr’s mid-first-century Apology, describe Christian worship practice in detail and yet neglects any mention of Christian observance of Sabbath.

Suffice it to say, given the early church’s propensity not to hold ethnic non-Jews to the requirements of Jewish law (cf. Acts 15, Romans 3), it would stand to reason that an increasingly non-Jewish movement would entail less and less pressure to observe Sabbath, at least as long as the community was coming together on Sunday for worship anyway. It would be much later that any Christian thinkers would begin to argue that the Lord’s Day was the new Christian Sabbath; and even so, that interpretation, like seventh-day sabbatarianism, would be far from widespread.

(For more on Christian arguments for interpreting the Lord’s Day as a Christian Sabbath, see “Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church” in From Sabbath to Lord’s Day. For more on the early church’s differentiation between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians regarding law observance, see for example Mark Nanos’ paper “Paul and the Jewish Tradition: The Ideology of Shema“.)

Sabbath as a Zombie

For the most part Christianity as a set of disparate institutions has tended to reject the Sabbath as such, even if forms of sabbatarianism appear here and there in the modern era. As far as I can tell, the modern exceptions seem to have been distributed mostly among evangelical protestants and fundamentalists, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Church of God Seventh Day, and the offshoots of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, all American in origin.

(The Seventh Day Baptists, which are said to number some 50,000 worldwide, were originally 17th-century British separatists, but the denomination is still evangelical in color.)

Many of these groups make sabbatarianism a matter of identity as part of a program of return to some aboriginal and therefore true Christianity (making their tradition the only legitimate one). Ignoring the fact that the more scholars learn about the early church, the more we must say churches and Christianities in those centuries and in our own time, therefore confounding any claim to purity; it remains the case that Sabbath is used by these groups to demarcate the inside from the outside, those construed as “true” from those said to be “false” or “nominal” Christians.

This is a revival on the order of a theological zombie. The Sabbath is hostile and toxic, a reanimated corpse with no consciousness. Rather than bringing more abundant life, it is wielded as a technology for demarcating the living from the dead by fiat, constricting the desires of its hosts to mere obedience. But the zombie turns on both its maker and those on the outside and furthermore succeeds only in making the distinction between living and dying ambiguous and terrifying.

For those in the church I grew up in, Sabbath (along with the other doctrinal and theological zombies animated from their reconstructions) was ultimately a threat: a rule you must observe in order not to be relegated to eternal annihilation at the end of history, which is fast approaching. Even if there is a certain joy to be had among those who “live together in unity”–i.e., those who wholeheartedly assent to the same authorities–for those on the margins the understanding that these commandments are the walls that keep out the Other and the sword that is ready to cut off the wayward is acute.

As Elaine Pagels, among others, has shown, apocalyptic fundamentalists (such as the Worldwide Church of God and its offspring) have historically tended to be comprised of the minority religious group (Jewish or Christian, as the case may be historically) which comes to see itself as the chosen faithful in opposition to the secular, compromising majority. This was (and is) true for the Armstrongite groups I grew up in. After leaving, I was able to sample a few other sabbatarian groups, including the Church of God Seventh Day (which Armstrong predictably denounced when he became convinced of his own certainty in the mid 20th century). One common thread between these groups was a sense of specialness, a sense that the church is “called out of the world,” not as a community among other communities, but as the only true community. The true church. Sabbath is for them a marker of their chosen status, their unique faithfulness. Another common thread was, to understate the fact, a strong identification with the United States as an ideally conservative Christian nation also chosen, in a different but parallel dispensation, by God himself, whose divine blessings the wicked liberals, gays and atheists (aided in former times by the Communists and black people) threaten to disinherit. This end is both gleefully anticipated, as it is a sign of the second coming, and vehemently grieved, because of the churches’ ideological commitments to the “lost cause” of Christian nationalism and the implicit support for white supremacy.

Modern attempts to somehow “restore” or “reconstruct” an original Christianity (an impossible task at best, a disingenuous one at worst) represent, in my view, nothing less than a regressive reaction to the conditions of advanced capitalism and the effects of its extreme alienation upon religion and the individual. Sabbath is one such reconstruction for these fundamentalist groups.

The postmodern neoliberal condition of increasing economic precarity, impending climatic destruction, heightening rates of exploitation and alienating conditions of existence have only increased anxiety among the propertied (mostly white) middle classes, to say nothing of those on the (very large) bottom and margins who cry out not only against the exploitation of global capitalism but also against all the antagonisms that paradoxically hold up its conditions while chafing against its poisonous effects: misogyny, homophobia, racism and their offshoots. But the margins always cry into unwelcoming ears.

The conservative evangelical brand of Christianity that I grew up in is one reaction-formation, as it were, to these material conditions, but not from the margins, but from the center and the right: a uniquely American series of phenomena interpreting new legalisms into the “belief statements” of a Christianity increasingly used to seeing itself as a victim for being justly criticized for its complicity in and apathy to injustice. Fundamentalism being a species of this genus, sabbatarianism has presented one way in which those aroused by the suspicions delivered by the evangelists of bad news can rearrange the time and space of life to shield against the consciousness of the exploitation and precarity that they sense, even if they do not directly experience it. (It is a mistake, as many sociologists have pointed out, to assume that it is the poor who primarily form the body of evangelicals and fundamentalists).

And so the meaning of Sabbath, whose biblical expression is articulated consistently in terms of emancipation and welfare, is reanimated by this viral Christianity into a kind of monster at the gate.

(Re)contextualizing Sabbath

What if Sabbath was always a means of social and cultural control, a burden, a barrier between Us and Them?

I doubt it, if only because of the visions of radical rest, acceptance, justice and emancipation that many, both Jewish and Christian, both now and throughout the past, have given us. But it is impossible to retrieve or reconstruct some aboriginal Sabbath practice. The lifeworld(s) of Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy is(/are) radically inaccessible to us. We have a set of commands, of legislation, of rules, of symbols, of stories, but no idea what Sabbath as a practice looked like “originally.”

We have the literary to guide us and our recognition that Sabbath is directly tied to the mode of production in its time and place, like any cultural formation. And Sabbath is particularly concerned about production, since its basic format is a cease from work.

“Labour is a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature.” So says Marx in the first volume of Capital. Labor, the process of transforming the environment into discrete usable and consumable things (what Marx calls “use values), is part of what makes us human. But the conditions of labor change. Marx continues: “An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity”–that is, under capitalism–“from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage.” So then, the meaning of Sabbath, a practice intimately to do with labor, will never be the same from time to time, from place to place. Practicing the Sabbath of an ancient mode of production now, in advanced capitalism, is impossible, strictly speaking. We must interpret it for this time and place.

What is the meaning of Sabbath within the capitalistic mode of production? Let’s start with the biblical texts.

Sabbath occurs in two principal contexts within the books of Moses, when it is not associated with the high holidays:

Weekly Labor Sabbath: “Observe the sabbath day to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you, so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you” (Deut. 5:12-14). “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day” (Ex. 20:11). “[For] you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm” (Deut. 5:15). Septennial Land Sabbath: “The land shall have a sabbath to the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its crop, but during the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard. Your harvest’s aftergrowth you shall not reap, and your grapes of untrimmed vines you shall not gather; the land shall have a sabbatical year. All of you shall have the sabbath products of the land for food; yourself, and your male and female slaves, and your hired man and your foreign resident, those who live as aliens with you. Even your cattle and the animals that are in your land shall have all its crops to eat” (Lev. 25:2-7).

The weekly Sabbath serves as a worship day and a memorial of Israel’s emancipation from coercive exploitation. The weekly Sabbath is a practice for all life in the community: every class of person and every animal. No living thing is made exclusively for labor. Every life deserves rest.

It shouldn’t be lost on us that the Sabbath command, which explicitly memorializes emancipation from slavery, nevertheless acknowledges and extends to slaves in the new community. Sabbath is not for perfected communities, but should rather be an emancipatory practice itself, as will be discussed below.

The septennial land Sabbath also extends emancipation to the environment. The agricultural community abstains from agriculture, and for a year, the land rests from cultivation and all the produce belongs to all classes of people and animals. In a sense, the ownership of the means of production is paused during this time.

This yearly moratorium on accumulation and exploitation of the land is also tied to yet another curb on accumulation in the form of “jubilee.” Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 outline how every seventh land Sabbath (i.e., every 50th year) marks the beginning of a period of debt cancellation for the poor, emancipation from slavery or indenture, and the return of land property to original owners.

While we have no way of knowing whether these radical practices of regular social redistribution were ever observed, their presence in the biblical literary corpus offers a pool of meaning we can interpret anew under the conditions of a very different mode of production, where the profit motive rules, and the means of production lie exclusively in the hands of capitalists, forcing all who wish to live to sell their labor power for wages and submit to exploitation and alienation of their work from its product.

Walter Brueggemann interprets the Sabbath under capitalism as a symbol and a practice of resistance against anxiety, coercion, exclusivism and the profit motive. Sabbath, the cessation of labor and rejection of the pressure to produce, accumulate and otherwise contribute to the expansion of capital, “summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses … along with anxiety and violence” (Sabbath as Resistance, 2014). Additionally, Brueggemann underlines Sabbath’s own emphasis on the care of the community and the environment. He sees it as “an act of both resistance and alternative” to life that is defined, as ours is, “by the production and consumption of commodity goods.” On the contrary, Sabbath is a memorial, a reminder, that we are (or could be) “subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness,” necessarily tied together in common humanity; therefore, he says, “Sabbath is a practical divestment so that neighborly engagement, rather than production and consumption, defines our lives.”

Brueggemann’s interpretation analyzes Sabbath through four passages which he connects to the present system of capitalism by way of analogy and metaphor:

Sabbath as resistance to anxiety. Exodus 20:12-17 list the commands following the Sabbath command, prohibiting dishonor toward parents, killing, adultery, theft, false witness and coveting. By interpreting these commands as premised upon Sabbath and the imitation of a God who rests rather than (like the character of Pharaoh) “jacking up the production schedule,” producing anxiety through acquisitiveness and exploitation, Brueggemann argues that these commands can be seen as emancipations brought about by the absence of anxiety and the rejection of the commodification of life. He says that those under the system of anxiety “are bound to dishonor parents and all non-productive kin; are bound to engage in killing violence, because the others are a threat; are bound to reduce sexual interaction to exploitative commodity; are bound to usurp from others if it is something they want; are bound to engage in distortion and euphemism to gain advantage; are bound to be committed to acquisitiveness.” Sabbath is therefore a practice of neighborly living and a rejection of the “death system” of capital.

Sabbath as resistance to coercion. Deuteronomy 5’s version of the Sinai commands adds to the enumeration of every social class and animal with the phrase “that they may rest like you.” Additionally, the purpose of Sabbath is described here as a memorial of past enslavement and emancipation from Egypt. Brueggemann interprets this equality in rest as a leveling practice in the face of inequality: “Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all of social live away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity. Such solidarity is imaginable and capable of performance only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken.” The equality of rest on Sabbath puts into question inequality on all other days.

Sabbath as resistance to exclusivism. Isaiah 56 applies Sabbath to the messianic age as a means of including the marginalized into the new community, namely, eunuchs and foreigners. Brueggemann points out that this passage from the prophets directly contradicts the Deuteronomic codes for the purging out of certain classes from membership in the community, opting instead for requirements other than “purity”: “They made Sabbath the single specific requirement for membership. That is because Sabbath represents a radical disengagement from the producer-consumer rat race of the empire. The community welcomes members of any race or nation, any gender of social condition, so long as that person is defined by justice, mercy and compassion, and not competition, achievement, production or acquisition. There is no mention of purity, only work stoppage with a neighborly pause for humanness [i.e., Sabbath].”

Sabbath as resistance to the profit motive, or split allegiances. The prophet Amos attacks those who “who trample the needy, to do away with the humble of the land,” and say “When will the new moon be over, so that we may sell grain, and the sabbath, that we may open the wheat market, to make the bushel smaller and the shekel bigger, and to cheat with dishonest scales, so as to buy the helpless for money and the needy for a pair of sandals, and that we may sell the refuse of the wheat?” (8:4-6) Brueggemann sees a description of the profit motive of capitalism in this passage: “In the end the poor are made into a tradable commodity. They are reduced to an equivalency for a pair of shoes or a silver coin. Everything has become a commodity; and there are no more neighbors!” What marks the situation is that the rich are observing Sabbath and holidays (new moons) but with their economic enterprises foremost in mind. Their acquisitiveness distorts and destroys the meaning of their piety, and so they do not actually rest on Sabbath, because they despise it. Brueggemann concludes: “To serve God and wealth at the same time is impossible. It is like keeping Sabbath and at the same time planning for commerce. … Doing tasks of acquisitiveness while trying to communicate humanly is the true mark of the ‘turn to commodity.’ We all become commodities to one another, to be bought and sold and traded and cheated.”



Brueggemann’s reading of the Sabbath provides an outline for an anti-capitalist interpretation of the stories, symbols and practices contained within its biblical context, recontextualizing it for the present period of global neoliberal capitalism, where people find themselves radically alienated from each other and from themselves. Sabbath, in his view, is a practice of re-membering (a term I’ve picked up from the liturgy of the local Mennonite church and quite like): of knitting together the community by regularly and intentionally divesting from what he calls the “rat race” in order to reorient ourselves toward God and the community bearing her image.

Sabbath Practice

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –



Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –

I, just wear my Wings –

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton – sings.



God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I’m going, all along.



–Emily Dickinson

Sabbath is at once a theological and a material practice. We’ve seen its political meanings as a set of practical symbols, and how it reflects the idea of a God interested in the emancipation of the human from exploitation, enslavement, accumulation and toxic motives: “a God-who-rests,” as Brueggemann phrases it.

But Sabbath is a lived and fleshy practice. How might Sabbath practice look under capitalism?

Negatively, Sabbath is the abstention from labor. But of what kind? The biblical context focuses on the means of subsistence, mentioning the lighting of fires, for example, but also agricultural labor, which would of course be tied to commerce. We do not gather crops and produce our own means of subsistence under capitalism. So, Sabbath in the present might involve the insistence on abstaining from wage labor. To the extent capital dominates all life within its sphere, this opens up a number of potential questions. I might abstain from wage labor, but is not my own bodily reproduction itself tied up in the expansion of capital? Under capitalism, isn’t R&R simply a way to restore my labor power for the resumption of my wage work? At what point does “rest” from capital accumulation begin and end?

Where social reproduction itself is colonized by capital, it matters what kind of social reproduction that rest from wage labor frees us to do. We can outline a direction drawing from the texts we’ve perused up until now.

Whereas capitalism atomizes individuals from themselves and their communities, Sabbath is a space of time to reproduce the human self as a whole. A period of intentional divestment from the demands of capital, from the demands to produce and to consume and to groom ourselves for better production and consumption, can free us for a deeper revival of ourselves.

Similarly, this intentional period opens up the possibility of action toward the active re-membering of the community in solidarity through service, social action and acts of hospitality. For Christians, the stories of Jesus’ repeated use of Sabbath time for healing of the sick and concern for “the least” within the community indicate that Sabbath, as a weekly act of respiration, as it were, makes space for the breathing-in of concern for social welfare and the breathing-out of intentional action on behalf of the needy and the exploited.

Sabbath of course contains a theological component. To the extent that Sabbath is symbolically an imitation of a benevolent creator, such a time makes possible the contemplation of and participation in the environment, its care, its appreciation.

As time intentionally made sacred, Sabbath offers the space for devotion and worship, but as a practice, its materialist basis–its involvement with labor, emancipation and community–should not be diminished. In my upbringing, Sabbath was a period for ascetic spiritualism, focused on attendance at church in order to receive orthodox teaching from the pulpit. This disciplinary process was foregrounded over and above the emancipatory potential of this sacred time. Not only that, but as a sectarian fundamentalist church, the group I was raised in practiced Sabbath as a time of insularity, focusing upon the in-group and collectively participating in the shunning of those deemed to be outside and therefore not part of the “true church.” Given our foregoing interpretation of Sabbath, such an approach limits Sabbath’s enormous symbolic and practical potential at best, and at worst collapses it into a toxic means of in-group discipline and social management.

Such an attitude toward Sabbath both produced and was produced by an nihilist apocalyptic worldview, wherein social action–let alone anti-capitalist or revolutionary social concern–is deemed unnecessary at best and treacherous at worst, given the divine hand over the course of history. To make the world better, if not an impossible proposition, is at least to delay the inevitable evil that must reach its bloody height before Christ returns in glory and bloodshed (and to collect the elect).

Perhaps, as Dickinson’s poem suggests, Sabbath can serve as a means of challenging and deconstructing existing theological and religious habits that serve to manage human beings and further alienate them from each other.

It is certain, at least to me, that authentic Christianity under capitalism must consider itself to be against capitalism and all accompanying forms of injustice; the hope for a new and better world, however it might come about, implies such an attitude, to say nothing of the testimony of Jesus’ own radical approaches toward exploitation, poverty, wealth and social welfare. Sabbath provides a tool for (re)interpreting Christianity and for giving space to the impulse to act radically and empathetically in spite of and perhaps in small victory over our alienation.