Talk:Puritan Sabbatarianism

Hi St. Anselm

Recognizing your hard work in this topic area, I have a couple concerns with this page being a new article rather than a redirect. (1) There is nothing under the topic "Sunday Sabbatarianism" that would not be discussed under Sabbath in Christianity, and there is sufficient space there to discuss it in full. I already merged your content except for the new graf. (2) In addition to Sabbath in Christianity we also have a Lord's Day article and I am actively working the problem of preventing that from being a content fork also. My interim solution was to concentrate on Sabbath = rest with summary on corporate worship, Lord's = corporate worship with summary on rest. Otherwise they get too repetitive, as would this one. WCF is about public and private worship, and limiting other activity to necessity and mercy, which basically puts it in the all-day category rather than the corporate-worship category (G.I. Williamson calls it "day of rest vs. hour of worship"). I'm thinking Heidelberg is the same. So that tells me the content you are envisioning would be best served in "Sabbath in Christianity" than here. (3) Obviously you're starting from scratch when we already have much content on "Sunday Sabbatarianism" that should be included for balance; it'd be better just to add to that content where it is now than to duplicate or move it. (4) I also don't know why you moved my Sunday Sabbatarian redirect by deleting "#Origin of Sunday rest". Because minorities use "Sabbath in Christianity" to mean either seventh-day or millennial Sabbath, the Sunday Sabbatarian is not the whole article but a subset of that article, beginning with Origin and going through Modern first-day churches. That is the reason the redirect goes to the subsections, not to the lead, which discusses all three views, followed by the Biblical section, which says very little about Sunday Sabbatarianism.

In short, these are rationales that have been worked out due to the wide variety of contributors and POVs necessary. I understand the target article is certainly not yet as clean as your tidy stub here and that is part of the improvement process. For instance, Sunday Sabbatarianism obviously didn't begin until Sunday was a rest day, and yet for the origins we must discuss the older Lord's Day and the older seventh-day rest, so the first topics seen on redirect are not yet the clearest (there may be a quick fix). (Obviously Lord's Day in the 2nd century was not ever considered "Sabbatarianism" because there was no notion of merging it with anything Sabbath-related.) But the concern here is that I don't understand a topic set where a third article on Christian Sunday is useful. With two I can just manage an argument that WP:PRESERVEs prior content. Looking forward to your views. JJB 05:03, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Also, when you say, 'Sunday Sabbatarianism is sometimes called the "Puritan sabbath," and is often contrasted with the "Continental sabbath"', naturally you mean strict Sunday Sabbatarianism because Continental Sabbath involves loose Sunday Sabbatarianism. As I'm indicating, there are a lot more things to contrast with than these two POVs, and as a disambiguator I'm sure you appreciate that. Thus Continental Sabbath is also a subset of this title, not a contrast to it. However I'm not editing this page because I'm continuing to merge to Sabbath in Christianity instead. JJB 20:55, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I think you are misunderstanding the concept of "Sabbatarianism" in this context, and I'm sorry the article has not made it clear. The article is about the WCF-observance, which is often called "Sabbatarian". I created the article when I realised that lots of the usage was going to the Sabbatarians disambiguation page. And if you look at what links to this article, you will see lots of Scottish-related articles. They are all using "Sabbatarian" in the sense of strict, WCF-style Sunday observance. And so I thought (and still think) it deserved a separate article. It is not usually called "Sunday Sabbatarianism" (that's the phrase I used to distinguish it from similar concepts) but simply "Sabbatarianism". So naturally, I oppose the merge. StAnselm (talk) 21:37, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

OK thanks, that's quite clearer. Then I would counsel a move to a more specific (and possibly shorter) title, such as your Puritan Sabbath (Puritan sabbath). I'll do a bit of research on best recommendation. A small article is certainly workable as a topic spinout if the topic you want is solely WCF-observance in this context, but, because of the widespread variance even in Sunday usage noticeable at "Sabbatarians", you will want it more specific than the current title. Even most dictionaries have at least two contradictory defs of Sabbatarian. And I am certainly committed to disambiguating bad links to "Sabbatarians". JJB 22:02, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Marsden mentions the "Puritan sabbath" as a historical factor. But the topic gets significant coverage in the U.K. media, and it's under the title "Sabbatarianism". By the way, I think we need to try to avoid using the word "strict", since other people can observe their version of the Sabbath strictly as well. For example, the continental position is that games are OK, and that work is forbidden - it is not as "strict" as the WCF position, but continentalists will often be very strict about not working. StAnselm (talk) 23:30, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I only see one result for "Sabbatarian" in UK news. StAnselm (talk) 23:59, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't know why this article didn't come up - I found it in looking for references for the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. StAnselm (talk) 03:35, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the usage tips. I'll come back when I have some idea of the best recommendation. JJB 00:53, 28 April 2012 (UTC) Everything is context. At this moment I'm favoring "Puritan Sabbatarianism" with "Reformed Sabbatarianism" a close second. Trouble is (as I've noted for years doing this WP:WPDAB project) that most of the time the context has already specified what Sabbath it is and so people don't disambiguate. (We had Nicholas Bownde as a 7th-day man for three years though he was always a 1st-day man.) If you like a title like that, or are ready to do the move yourself, I'll come back and add content from the other articles on this topic in WP:SUMMARY-spinout style. (I guess spun out from both Sabbath in Christianity and Lord's Day. JJB 02:19, 28 April 2012 (UTC)