Sabbath and Culture

How can we be "in the world though not of it"? Christians are humans like anyone else; we must eat, drink, find shelter, and sustain ties with other people. The Jewish people have preserved their identity and faith amidst diaspora for millennia in the tension between living in one place but belonging somewhere else. The chief gift that has sustained the Jews is the Sabbath; the distinctive behavior of ceasing work every seventh day made them easily recognizable to outsiders. And as it drew them together and set them apart, it safeguarded a sacred place in time for being present with God.

This book proposes the Sabbath as a strategy for living in tension between this world and the next. It steers a careful path between assimilation with the temporal culture and a response to a divine calling to be set apart. Abigail Cutter resources the Sabbath tradition for a Christian ethic of culture—a concept often paired with the word "war." To think about human culture theologically, however, we must consider it apart from political battles and come to a deeper understanding of why Christians’ relationship to culture has proven so difficult to discern. This consideration of what culture means—specifically in our contested age—lays the groundwork for a renewed cultural theology.

Sabbath and Culture centers on two broad, related questions: Who are humans before God? and Who are humans within culture? Engaging the work of H. Richard Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Charles Taylor, Cutter advocates for a social pattern of "tensions in equilibrium" that allows inhabitants of a complex society to imagine the transcendent. The Sabbath has multiple meanings for both Judaism and Christianity; with clarity and candor, Cutter offers a metaphysical-realist vision of how Christians can thoughtfully receive this essentially Jewish practice. Ultimately she shows what the Sabbath means for those of us who wish to live peaceably in a time of deep divisions. The Sabbath, a gift from God, reveals God’s concern for justice and peace among all his creatures. What would it look like for us to heed this call and keep the Sabbath holy?