Is the International Date Line a Snare of Satan?
by Carsten Thomsen | 23 June 2023 |
While listening to the Adventist Today Sabbath Seminar taught by Reinder Bruinsma on June 10, I enjoyed the lively discussions in the chat regarding which of the 28 beliefs were fundamental.
I chipped in on the discussion on the issue of when the Sabbath starts, with an uncertain memory of statement from Ellen White I believed I’d once heard, that the date line was an invention of the devil.
After writing it, I was struck with fear that I might be promulgating fake news from my ossifying brain. I googled Ellen G. White’s writings on-line, and got nothing.
Call a friend
Taking a clue from an old TV show called ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?,” I called a friend, Ellen White scholar Ron Graybill, who himself called another friend, and together they came to my rescue with the following:
The only thing I could find on it is in 3SM from Lt. 118, 1900, and she calls it “day line” rather than “dateline.”
Sister T has been speaking of you to me. She says that you are in some confusion in regard to the day line. Now, my dear sister, this talk about the day line is only a something that Satan has devised as a snare.
Then, go to Google Books and search for the term “day line.” You will find it used in Canright’s Seventh-day Adventism Renounced, p 181, and you will see why Ellen White said what she did about it.”
I hadn’t remembered it exactly right, but I breathed a sigh of relief that Ron Graybill had saved me from spreading fake news.
A geographical case study
My mental recorder rewound back to the 1980s, when I traveled too much. On a wintertime SAS flight to Japan, we departed Copenhagen about 3 p.m Saturday afternoon heading straight north over the North Pole to Anchorage. Meal service started quickly and my Orthodox Jewish seatmate was offered his kosher lunch. He refused, requesting it to be served after sunset.
But the SAS stewardess (as they were called in ancient times) pointed out that it was pitch black outside. Obviously, the sun had already set and it was now Saturday night. But my seatmate pointed out that the Sabbath rules for Jews applied to the time of sunset in the departure city, which would be 20 minutes from now—at which time he could enjoy his lunch.
For me, it was Saturday night, and I took a nap as we crossed the North Pole. After an eight hour flight we landed in Anchorage, at 11 a.m. Sabbath morning—four hours earlier than leaving Copenhagen. I could have gone to church again, at the same time, on the same day!
Not only being a guilt-ridden Adventist legalist—wondering if I should be flying on Sabbath—but also an engineer, I knew that passing precisely over the North Pole was extremely unlikely. If we flew on the right side of the North Pole, we would have passed through a rapid succession of time zones moving us into Sunday followed by a backward crossing of the international dateline so I could celebrate Sabbath again.
If we had passed to the left of the pole, it would have been Saturday night followed by a rapid reversal of time leading to Saturday morning—in this case, without crossing the dateline backwards. In practice, we would just be chasing the sun, as on the Copenhagen to Los Angeles nonstop flight where you sometimes see the sun stuck just over the horizon, struggling to set for up to 6-8 hours—just as in the Bible.
The next leg of my trip Saturday afternoon to Tokyo crossed the date line, and after a slight bump as we crossed the dateline (that’s a joke) and voila! It was Sunday afternoon. Without a sunset!
The moral of the story is threefold:
- Perhaps I should have followed Matthew 24.20: “Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath.” I violated both.
- Or I could have obeyed Ellen White and not flown in an airplane at all—she condemned both bicycles and airplanes.
- The “day line” may indeed be an invention of the devil: it surely creates complex and possibly insolvable dilemmas.
Flying past Mecca
This started another train of thought. I began to think about Muslims who could have similar issues when traveling on Fridays.
I remembered a recent Qatar flight where the in-flight display showed the distance and angle to Mecca (Makkah).
Along with instructions on how to pray on-board.
I couldn’t help thinking that despite the differences in our cultures and religions, we all go to great lengths to define orthodoxy.
The quest to get it right
It appears that the argument about the Sabbath on a round earth has gone back and forth among us, between rule and principle, command and application. As early as 1856 a Review and Herald article reports that a committee of church leaders felt the problem of the Sabbath in the far north needn’t be a stumbling block.
We have not as yet heard of any Sabbath-keepers north of the arctic circle; and, doubtless, when it becomes duty, in the providence of God, for any to reside there, there will be some way devised so that they will not be obliged by so doing to break one of Jehovah’s plain commandments.
On a much later occasion, however, Ellen White herself expressed personal reservations about Sabbath-keepers living in such climes at all!
In the countries where there is no sunset for months and again no sunrise for months the period of time will be calculated by the records kept. But God has a world large enough and proper and right for the human beings He has created to inhabit it without finding homes in those lands so objectionable in very many, many ways (Letter 167, 23 Mar. 1900).
When I looked up the Canright reference that Ron Graybill had suggested, it appears that Ellen was not as intransigent as she’d sounded there. Canright explains that in a meeting in 1886, believers from Sweden and Norway were troubled by the difficulty of Sabbath-keeping in northern latitudes.
It was seriously discussed as to whether they must not change and reckon the day not from sunset as now, but from 6 P.M. Mrs. White and son were there and favored the change. I was on a committee of the General Conference to investigate the matter. We decided against the change and it was abandoned.
Again we see the fluctuation between the ideal and the practical. For myself, now older, and perhaps wiser, I rest in peace in the words of Jesus:
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath (Mark 2:27–28).
Carsten Thomsen is a retired engineer active in the Nærum church in Denmark.
