Commenting on the history of the debate about the propriety of working on a Sunday, Latter-day Saint historian Craig Harline wrote:
Before [the fourth and fifth centuries], any Lord’s Day rest among Christians had been interpreted figuratively, as in “resting” from sin. This was partly because Sun Day was long an ordinary workday, partly because of old Christian prejudices against Sabbath rest, and partly because Christians insisted that they did not need an entirely separate day to remind them to ponder God and timeless things: every day was holy. But after 300, sentiment for more literal rest on the Lord’s Day grew among Christians, with advocates declaring all the while that this of course had nothing to do with a Jewish rest or the Sabbath commandment. More time free from work, they explained was only a means to an end: namely, more time to worship.
A church council at Laodicea in 364 reflected this idea, stating that when possible Christians should physically rest from work on the Lord’s Day in order to worship more, but by no means were they obligated to “Judaize” the entire day with liberal Sabbath-like rest. After worship those who wished to return to work were free to do so. The council’s message was repeated by other councils and such influential figures as Augustine through about 500: more worship, but no Sabbath-like customs. Saint Benedict, the great monastic reformer, confirmed the widespread Christian attitude that work was preferable to idle rest on the Lord’s Day: if required to rest all that day, then his monks, he feared, would fritter the day away, in such case they would be better off working.
The fourth century’s tentative step toward literal Lord’s Day rest soon became decisive steps, especially after Rome fell in 476. Within decades, bishops and councils were urging more genuine rest on the Lord’s Day. Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), in Gaul (roughly modern France), repeated the old horror of Sabbath “superstitions” and rigors, then proceeded more than anyone before him to require literal rest throughout the entire Lord’s Day and to suggest that such was based upon the fourth commandment; the Lord’s Day was simply the better moment to fulfill that commandment.
How did this change happen? One immediate cause in Gaul itself was that new converts from paganism needed extra convincing to switch their favorite day of rest from Thursday, day of the pagan God Jove, to the Christian Lord’s Day. “Church custom” wasn’t enough, but a divine reason, in the form of the fourth commandment written directly by the finger of their new God, would do. In the later sixth century, Archbishop Martin of Braga (in Spain) addressed the same sort of converts from paganism and used explicit Sabbath phrasing: servile work on the Lord’s Day was sin, because the fourth commandment said so. For the first time in Christian history, a church leader had outlawed all such work on the Lord’s day on the basis of the Sabbath commandment . . . . The stricter, more elaborate, work-free Sunday that emerged in Christianity between the fourth and sixth centuries was only reinforced during Europe’s remaining medieval centuries. By about 1200 almost everyone knew the basic requirements of the day: worship and rest. An ever-growing number of rules was designed to enforce them. Yet as the labors of these English peasants suggest, plenty of work took place anyway on Sunday, at least in the countryside.
Throughout the Middle Ages church councils, theologians, and secular rulers all over Europe declared as a commonplace what until around 400 had still been a novel idea in Christianity: the obligation literally to rest on Sunday. The stated purpose of rest remained that people might attend a growing number of services at church. William Langland’s poetic plowman Piers put it thus: “And upon Sundays to cease, God’s service to hear, both matins and mass, and after meat, in churches to hear evensong, every man ought” . . . The church understood these burdens upon pleasants and therefore allowed “necessary works” on holy days. They might disagree with peasants over what “necessary” meant, but when bad weather threatened a harvest, the local priest would likely grant permission to bring it in on Sunday. The church also made concessions by ignoring backyard gardening on Sunday and by designating different levels of holy days: no work was allowed on the chief holy days (Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, Ascension, Christmas, and Epiphany), but on lesser holy days one might work in the afternoon. Still, with so many holy days through the year, numerous exceptions were bound to be granted, especially during the high agricultural season, so that on any summer Sunday in medieval England, in any village, people were likely to be engaged in some sort of physical work for at least part of the day, with the tacit or explicit permission of their priest. Hence, were one to ask a medieval peasant what Sunday meant, then part of that answer, certainly in summer, would have included work—despite all the formal prohibitions against it. (Craig Harline, Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011], 19-20, 28, 30-31, comment in square bracket added for clarification)
Commenting on the early Reformers and their differences on this issue, Harline notes:
[I]n the process of refuting Catholics, Protestants began to reveal angry disagreements among themselves. Martin Luther (d. 1546), for instance, accepted that Sunday worship had been established by the Catholic Church, not divine decree. It didn’t matter on which day Christians worshipped, and Sunday was as good as any. Where Catholics—and now some Protestants—had gone wrong, continued Luther, was in making Sunday a sort of Jewish Sabbath. To Luther, the Sabbath had been invented solely for the Jews; Christians were free from Moses’ Law and required no rules of extraordinary behaviour on Sunday, as every day was holy to them. They were therefore free to rest and recreate after church, but according to daily standards of Christian decorum and not because the defunct Sabbath commandment said so.
Many other Protestants, however, saw the Sabbath as still binding. To John Calvin (d. 1564) the Sabbath was a “perpetual” institution, established at Creation for all peoples and times. This did not mean that specific rules and regulations of the Old Testament Sabbath still applied to Christians. Instead it meant that the lasting spiritual truths behind the Sabbath commandment simply required a new form. That form did not include a “true” day of the week; Calvin agreed with Luther than Sunday was a suitable a day as any for worship. But that new form of Sabbath did include Christian standards of worship and rest on the day chosen. Calvin tried to exclude from those standards both the strict legalism and the excessive levity said to mark the Jewish Sabbath, and thus held up a “moderate” Sabbath. (Ibid., 91)
