What Do I Mean by “Sabbatarian”?

A friend recently told me that he did not understand what the word Sabbatarian meant when he read The Good Samaritans. The word deserves more precision than I apparently gave it in the book.

In The Good Samaritans, I use Sabbatarian primarily in its seventh-day sense: a person who recognizes the seventh day of the week—Saturday—as the Sabbath and sets it apart in response to the Fourth Commandment. This is a well-established meaning of the word.¹

But my friend had identified a real ambiguity. Historically, Sabbatarian has also been used for Christians who regarded Sunday as the Christian Sabbath and insisted on its strict observance. Modern dictionaries still preserve both usages.² So context matters.

When I write about Sabbatarian Anabaptists such as Oswald Glait and Andreas Fischer, I am using the term in its specific historical sense: Anabaptists who distinguished themselves from surrounding Christians by returning to the seventh-day Sabbath. Historical literature identifies Glait and Fischer precisely this way.³

The distinction matters because their question was not simply whether Christians should rest one day each week. Their argument went back to Scripture itself:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy…. the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God” (Exodus 20:8–10).

And they looked even farther back than Sinai. Genesis tells us, “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Genesis 2:3). The Sabbath therefore appears in the biblical story before Israel existed as a nation.

Perhaps my friend’s question has given me an opportunity to be clearer. Labels are useful, but they can also become shortcuts that conceal important distinctions. I am not particularly interested in winning an argument over the label Sabbatarian.

The more important question is the one Scripture places before us:

What did God bless and sanctify—and what does He ask us to do with it?

End Notes

1. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “Sabbatarian,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, accessed August 30, 2026; Noah Webster, s.v. “Sabbatarian,” An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828). Webster’s historical definition explicitly includes one who observes the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath rather than the first.
2. Webster’s New World College Dictionary, s.v. “Sabbatarian,” preserves both usages: seventh-day Sabbath observance and strict observance of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath. The latter is commonly distinguished historically as “Sunday Sabbatarianism” or “first-day Sabbatarianism.”
3. George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000), 699–705. Williams discusses Oswald Glait and Andreas Fischer within the sixteenth-century Sabbatarian movement and their advocacy of seventh-day Sabbath observance.