Grace and peace to you. We write not as opponents but as fellow lovers of the Lord Jesus Christ — crucified, risen, and coming again. We honor much in you: a reverence the modern world has forgotten, a refusal to treat holy things lightly, a devotion that has sent missionaries and martyrs to the ends of the earth. And we owe you a debt few remember to pay — for through the long centuries it was often Catholic hands that copied and guarded the Scriptures, letter by letter, so that we could hold a Bible at all.
It is about that Book that we write. This is not a list of accusations against your Church, and still less against you. It is one question, asked gently and followed honestly: when a teaching of the church and a plain word of Scripture do not agree, which one yields? Everything in this letter turns on that single hinge.
Companion study: How the Trinity Crept Into Christianity
The test: the Word above tradition
The first Christians were praised for one habit above all — they would not take even an apostle's word without checking it against Scripture:
These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
If the Bereans tested Paul that way, no later teacher is above the same test. And the Lord Himself drew the line between the two authorities with great sharpness, rebuking the most religious men of His day:
Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition … making the word of God of none effect through your tradition.
Tradition is not worthless — much of it is wise and beautiful. But it is not the measure. The measure is the Word: "to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them" (Isaiah 8:20). We are not asking you to trust us. We are asking you to do what your own Church's monks made possible — open the Scriptures, and let them have the last word. The rest of this letter is simply one place where that test can be run cleanly.
The day God blessed
Begin where the Bible begins. Before there was an Israelite or a Jew, before there was sin to be saved from, at the end of the creation week God did three things to the seventh day:
And he rested on the seventh day from all his work … And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.
He rested on it, He blessed it, and He made it holy — a gift to all mankind, woven into the world at its making. Later, on Sinai, He wrote it with His own finger into the heart of the Ten Commandments — and alone among the ten, He opened it with the word Remember:
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy … the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God … For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth … and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
This was the day our Lord kept. "As his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day" (Luke 4:16); He called Himself "Lord also of the sabbath" (Mark 2:28) — not its abolisher but its owner. When He died, the women who loved Him "rested the sabbath day according to the commandment" (Luke 23:56) — on the seventh day, even with His body in the tomb. The apostles kept it. And the prophets say it outlasts this world entirely: "from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the LORD" (Isaiah 66:23). From Eden to the new earth, one day is blessed — and it is the seventh.
How the day was changed
Now the honest question: where, in all of Scripture, did God move His blessing to the first day of the week? Search for it. You will not find a single command to keep Sunday, nor one word unhallowing the seventh day. The disciples gathered on many days; no text makes the first day the new Sabbath. The change is simply not in the Bible.
Where, then, did it come from? Here is the remarkable thing — and the reason the Sabbath is the perfect test of our whole question. We do not have to argue it, because Rome answers it herself, openly and without embarrassment:
The Church's own testimony
Roman Catholic catechisms state plainly that it was the Church, not the Scriptures, that transferred the solemnity of the seventh-day Sabbath to Sunday — and Catholic teachers have long pointed to this very fact as proof of the Church's authority to bind and loose beyond the written Word. The change is presented not as a biblical command but as an exercise of the Church's own tradition.
Read that again, because it is doing all the work. Friends on both sides agree on the history: the move to Sunday rests on the authority of the church, not on a word from God. Long before, the prophet Daniel had foreseen a power that would "think to change times and laws" (Daniel 7:25) — we will not press that here; the prophecy is set out elsewhere for those who wish to follow it. The point for now is narrow and undeniable: on the one commandment that says "Remember," tradition and the Word openly disagree — and everyone admits it.
What the test asks of us
So the hinge turns, and the gentle question returns. If the church could move the very day that God blessed at creation — and tells us plainly that it did so on its own authority — then a loving, unavoidable question follows: what else have we received from tradition that the Word never taught?
This is not a trap; it is the Berean's freedom. Every practice, every doctrine, however old or beloved, may be brought to the same light and asked the same question — not to tear down faith, but to anchor it where it cannot be moved. And there is one tradition so deep, so assumed, that it is rarely tested at all. In the spirit of the Bereans, we ask leave to bring even that one to the Book.
The deepest tradition of all
The doctrine of the Trinity — that God is three co-equal, co-eternal Persons in one essence — feels to most believers like the bedrock of the faith, beyond all questioning. Yet measured by our test, it has the same shape as the Sunday change: its defining words are not the apostles' words. The terms in which it is confessed — "one substance," homoousios, three "persons" in one "essence" — were hammered out at the councils of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and Constantinople (A.D. 381), three centuries after Christ, in the philosophical language of the Greek world. The Bible itself never uses them.
What the Bible says is at once simpler and warmer. It names one God, and tells us plainly who He is:
But to us there is but one God, the Father … and one Lord Jesus Christ … this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
One God — the Father; and one Lord — Jesus Christ, His Son, whom Hesent. This takes nothing from Christ. He is fully divine, truly the Son of God, for a son is of his father's own nature; to see Him is to see the Father. And yet He calls the Father "my God" (John 20:17) and says "my Father is greater than I" (John 14:28) — words that are simple if He is the Son, and a puzzle if He is a co-equal Person of a committee. The Spirit, likewise, is the presence and power of the Father and the Son reaching into the heart, not a third Person standing beside them — God's own Spirit, as a man's spirit is his own.
We will not pretend to settle so great a matter in a paragraph, and we do not ask you to think one degree less of the Lord Jesus — we ask the opposite: receive Him exactly as Scripture gives Him, the only-begotten Son of the one true God. This is the deepest place the test can lead, and we would not lead you there and leave you. Below are the studies that walk it carefully, verse by verse. Weigh them as the Bereans did, with the Book open.
Come, and bring the Book
We have asked for one thing only: that the Word be the final word. Not that you love Christ less, nor lay down your reverence, nor despise the heritage that carried the Scriptures to you — but that when the church and the Book disagree, you let the Book decide, as the first believers did. The Lord made that very promise the test of discipleship:
If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
And the rest He offers is not heavy. The Saviour who is Lord of the Sabbath says, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). Come to Him, then, and bring nothing but the Book. Rest in His finished work; rest in the day He blessed; and let His Word, not the traditions of men, be the ground you stand on. Grace and peace be with you.
Go deeper
The two threads of this letter — the Sabbath and the Godhead — are each worked out in full, verse by verse, in the studies below. Open them with the Book beside you.
On the one true God and His Son
On the Sabbath