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The First Christians Fasted Twice a Week · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made podcast.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr. Jordan Vale.
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  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we're going to look at how the first Christians fasted twice a week.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Quick, honest question.
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  SPEAKER_00: When did you last fast?
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  SPEAKER_00: And not the intermittent fasting,
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  SPEAKER_00: the abstract kind with an eating window and you have electrolyte powder.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean the good old-fashioned spiritual kind.
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  SPEAKER_00: Skipping food on purpose before God for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting
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  SPEAKER_00: to wear a pair of jeans you had five years ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think for a lot of modern Christians,
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  SPEAKER_00: the honest answer is once or at a retreat or years ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fasting sits in our faith like the fine china.
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  SPEAKER_00: Technically, we own it.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's just very rarely used.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, we know Jesus fasted.
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  SPEAKER_00: We know it's in the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: But today, there's no schedule we have, no shape, and no expectation attached to it.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's seen as the spiritual discipline for the especially intense or in January
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  SPEAKER_00: when our church does a 21 days of prayer and fasting.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's look at what Christian history actually tells us.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first Christians fasted twice a week,
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  SPEAKER_00: every week on assigned days, Wednesday and Friday as a whole community.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we have the church manual that put it in writing before some of
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  SPEAKER_00: the New Testament was even finished.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fasting for them wasn't the fine china, it was the Tuesday dishes.
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  SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting about the old manual isn't the command itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's the reason it gives for picking Wednesday and Friday.
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  SPEAKER_00: A reason that involves keeping a rival schedule
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  SPEAKER_00: because their neighbors were already fasting twice a week on different days.
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  SPEAKER_00: So in this episode,
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  SPEAKER_00: we're going to look at the fasting calendar we lost,
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  SPEAKER_00: where Wednesday and Friday came from,
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  SPEAKER_00: how twice a week became 40 days,
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  SPEAKER_00: became a fish fry,
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  SPEAKER_00: became nothing, and what the empty discipline might still know about us.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the world of Jesus, fasting was not a question of whether to do it or not.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was a question of when and of how often, and everybody had an answer.
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  SPEAKER_00: Devote Jews of the Pharisee stripe fasted twice a week, Monday and Thursdays.
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  SPEAKER_00: The market days.
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  SPEAKER_00: By tradition, the days Moses went up the mountain and came back down.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's right there in Jesus' parable.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Pharisee in the temple prays, I fast twice a week.
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  SPEAKER_00: I give tithes of all I get.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he's not trying to invent some kind of spiritual flex.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's reciting a real regiment.
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  SPEAKER_00: His hearers would recognize the way someone today might say they run five miles a day.
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  SPEAKER_00: Good for you.
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  SPEAKER_00: And notice how Jesus talks about fasting.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the Sermon on the Mount, he gives instructions for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: No oil missing faces, no theater, wash up, look normal.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then notice the grammar.
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  SPEAKER_00: When you fast.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not if, not maybe, but when.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's the same grammar he uses for giving and praying.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jesus assumes his people will fast the way he assumes they're going to pray.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the critics asked why his disciples didn't fast while John's disciples did,
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  SPEAKER_00: Jesus' answer wasn't a rejection of the practice, it was a scheduling argument.
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  SPEAKER_00: He says you don't fast at a wedding while the bridegroom is present.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then he added,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away,
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  SPEAKER_00: and then, then they will fast.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the early church read that as a calendar note.
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  SPEAKER_00: The bridegroom has been taken away, so they fasted.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you can watch it in Acts.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church at Antioch is worshiping and fasting when the Spirit says
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  SPEAKER_00: to set apart Barnabas and Saul.
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  SPEAKER_00: They fast and pray again before sending them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul and Barnabas appoint elders in every church with,
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  SPEAKER_00: you probably guessed it, prayer and fasting.
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  SPEAKER_00: Big decisions in the early church came with empty stomachs attached.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was a standard procedure and there was no explanation offered because none was needed.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then comes the document that turns the general practice into a schedule,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Didache, the church's manual that we've seen multiple times on this podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: Written around the turn of the first century,
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  SPEAKER_00: it has a chapter on fasting and it's two sentences of pure sociological gold.
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  SPEAKER_00: Here's the instruction nearly verbatim.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let not your fast be with the hypocrites,
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  SPEAKER_00: for they fast on Monday and Thursday, but you shall fast on Wednesday and Friday.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot going on in that sentence.
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  SPEAKER_00: First, there's the assumption you'll fast twice a week.
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  SPEAKER_00: Like that part isn't really argued or explained.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's just kind of a given.
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  SPEAKER_00: Second, the rivalry, the hypocrites.
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  SPEAKER_00: And here is the manual's sharp word for the synagogue communities
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  SPEAKER_00: whose Monday-Thursday fast was the established schedule.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the young church,
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  SPEAKER_00: who is still defining itself against its older sibling,
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  SPEAKER_00: deliberately picks the other days.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it's the same discipline,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's the same frequency,
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  SPEAKER_00: just different dates on the calendar so that nobody could mistake
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  SPEAKER_00: whose team you fasted on.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the earlier visible acts of Christian identity formation
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  SPEAKER_00: that we possess, which means we know who we are partly by when we're hungry.
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  SPEAKER_00: Third, and this is the part that stuck for a thousand years,
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  SPEAKER_00: the days themselves got theologized.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christians looked at Wednesday and remembered as the day of the betrayal bargain,
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  SPEAKER_00: when Judas agreed to hand him over.
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  SPEAKER_00: They look at Friday and, of course, They didn't need a reminder at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: The week itself became a little bit of a passion play.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every Wednesday you fasted with the betrayed Christ.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every Friday you fasted for the cross.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then Sunday, the weekly Easter, you feasted.
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  SPEAKER_00: And fasting on Sunday was actually forbidden.
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  SPEAKER_00: It ruled the church in force with real energy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the rhythm was the gospel in play.
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  SPEAKER_00: Seven days at a time,
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  SPEAKER_00: betrayal,
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  SPEAKER_00: death, resurrection, every single week written on the body in hunger and in bread.
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  SPEAKER_00: And how seriously did they take it?
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, these twice-weekly fasts even got a name that they borrowed from the army.
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  SPEAKER_00: Station days.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was from the Latin for a soldier's watch.
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  SPEAKER_00: We find Tertullian around the year 200 uses the military language.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Christians keeping Wednesday and Friday was like a soldier standing guard duty.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we find this practice across the sources in the Shepherd of Hermas in Rome,
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  SPEAKER_00: in Clement of Alexandria in Origen.
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  SPEAKER_00: The station fast normally ran until mid-afternoon,
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  SPEAKER_00: the ninth hour, the hour of the Lord's death, and then the eighth.
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  SPEAKER_00: Twice a week, every week, from before some apostles' letters had even finished circulating.
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  SPEAKER_00: So where did it all go?
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  SPEAKER_00: And the interesting answer is that the fast didn't fade because the church stopped caring.
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  SPEAKER_00: It faded first because the church supersized it.
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  SPEAKER_00: As the calendar developed, the little weekly rhythm got a bigger annual sibling, Lent.
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  SPEAKER_00: The 40-day fast before Easter, formalized in the 4th century.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then came other fasting seasons.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was an advent fast, ember days, vigil fast before great feasts.
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  SPEAKER_00: The East kept the Wednesday-Friday discipline alongside all of it,
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  SPEAKER_00: and Orthodox Christians to this day will often still abstain on most Wednesdays
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  SPEAKER_00: and Fridays of the year.
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  SPEAKER_00: The West, though, took a different road.
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  SPEAKER_00: It narrowed.
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  SPEAKER_00: The weekly discipline gradually concentrated on the Friday alone,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it softened from fasting,
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  SPEAKER_00: eating little,
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  SPEAKER_00: to abstinence,
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  SPEAKER_00: eating no meat,
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  SPEAKER_00: By the Middle Ages,
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  SPEAKER_00: Meatless Friday was the near-universal Western Christian practice,
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  SPEAKER_00: so economically significant that it propped up entire fishing fleets.
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  SPEAKER_00: And its ghost?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's still hanging around with you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every Lenten fish fry in a church basement,
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  SPEAKER_00: every fish sandwich that suddenly pops up on fast food menus in spring,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's the last flickering signal of the Didache's Friday,
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  SPEAKER_00: passed down through 80 generations and finally reduced to a menu option.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then came the two-stage demolition.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Reformers...
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  SPEAKER_00: Who were a little allergic to the idea that skipping meat earned merit before God,
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  SPEAKER_00: they tore down the mandatory system.
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  SPEAKER_00: Luther had strong words for compulsory fasting,
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  SPEAKER_00: and Zurich's Reformation famously kicked off with a defiant sausage dinner
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  SPEAKER_00: during Lent in 1522,
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  SPEAKER_00: which remains, I think, the most Protestant sentence I've ever seen.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the Reformers didn't intend to end fasting.
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  SPEAKER_00: Calvin praised it,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Puritans held rigorous fast days,
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  SPEAKER_00: John Wesley fasted twice a week for most of his life,
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  SPEAKER_00: on Wednesdays and Fridays no less,
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  SPEAKER_00: and And at one point,
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  SPEAKER_00: declined to ordain men into Methodist ministry who wouldn't commit to
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  SPEAKER_00: the old station days.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the Protestant plan became voluntary,
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  SPEAKER_00: sincere fasting instead of a mandated, mechanical fasting.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then came stage two.
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  SPEAKER_00: Voluntarily became rare, and rare for many became never.
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  SPEAKER_00: A discipline with no schedule turned out to be a discipline with no practice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Rome, for its part,
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  SPEAKER_00: relaxed the Friday abstinent rules in the 1960s,
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  SPEAKER_00: asking Catholics to substitute another penance.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the substitution mostly evaporated too.
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  SPEAKER_00: Within a century,
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  SPEAKER_00: Western Christianity,
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  SPEAKER_00: Catholic and Protestant alike,
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  SPEAKER_00: had largely arrived at the same destination but by different roads.
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  SPEAKER_00: The fine china is owned but very rarely used.
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  SPEAKER_00: And here's the punchline of the demolition.
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  SPEAKER_00: The secular world picked the discipline up off the floor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Intermittent fasting is now a multi-billion dollar wellness category.
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  SPEAKER_00: Millions of people fast twice a week or more on apps,
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  SPEAKER_00: in communities, with streaks and accountability for the body's sake.
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  SPEAKER_00: The schedule survived, only the direction changed.
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  SPEAKER_00: We fast toward the mirror, now instead of towards God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Which means the Didache's question is no longer whether moderns can fast twice a week.
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  SPEAKER_00: We've shown we can.
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  SPEAKER_00: The difference is what we aim at.
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  SPEAKER_00: And let me land this the way I think the early church would.
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  SPEAKER_00: With the point of the practice rather than the rules of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the rules without the point are exactly what Jesus was criticizing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fasting in the old understanding was prayer, but you were enlisting your body.
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  SPEAKER_00: The stomach is one of the most honest organs you have.
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  SPEAKER_00: It complains audibly, on schedule, and it cannot be reasoned with.
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  SPEAKER_00: The station fast, it creates honesty.
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  SPEAKER_00: Several times a day, hunger would announce itself, and each announcement became a bell.
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  SPEAKER_00: You're near than you pretend to be.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was also never a solo performance,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that's I think one of the biggest differences from our era.
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  SPEAKER_00: The station days meant the whole church was hungry together on the same days,
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  SPEAKER_00: the widow and the bishop on the same schedule.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, please understand,
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  SPEAKER_00: if you're hearing this with a medical condition,
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  SPEAKER_00: a history of disordered eating, or a doctor's contrary opinion,
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  SPEAKER_00: I believe the ancient church itself would excuse you.
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  SPEAKER_00: The old canons excused the sick,
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  SPEAKER_00: travelers,
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  SPEAKER_00: and pregnant, and nursing women because the fast was a servant, never a master.
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  SPEAKER_00: And no tradition alive today is under the Didache's authority on this.
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  SPEAKER_00: Orthodox listeners already keep a fuller calendar than anything I've described.
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  SPEAKER_00: Catholic listeners do retain Lent and Fridays in a modified form.
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  SPEAKER_00: And as for Protestant listeners, the tradition varies.
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  SPEAKER_00: But every one of us is heir to the same lost rhythm.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the rhythm is recoverable.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not the severity, but the schedule.
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  SPEAKER_00: The early church's genius wasn't that its fasting was extreme.
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  SPEAKER_00: A fast to mid-afternoon twice a week is milder than half the wellness protocols
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  SPEAKER_00: that are currently on your phone.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the genius was that it was ordinary.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was expected.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it was woven into the week like laundry.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pointed at the cross and shared.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere this Wednesday around 3 in the afternoon, the hour the old station fast used to break.
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  SPEAKER_00: Take an inventory of your last seven days.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every appetite in your life got fed on time, didn't it?
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  SPEAKER_00: Meals, feeds, streams, notifications.
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  SPEAKER_00: We live in the first civilization in history that never has to feel an unfed desire
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  SPEAKER_00: for even an hour.
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  SPEAKER_00: And by some interesting arithmetic, we're also the most restless one.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first Christians,
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  SPEAKER_00: who had less food than us,
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  SPEAKER_00: way less security than us,
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  SPEAKER_00: and less of, well,
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  SPEAKER_00: pretty much everything than us,
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  SPEAKER_00: voluntarily made themselves hungrier than they had to be, twice a week, forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because the body is bad.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the appetite is a liar that says it's ultimate.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they had a weekly appointment to call its bluff.
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  SPEAKER_00: Betrayal on Wednesdays, the cross on Fridays, the feast on Sundays.
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  SPEAKER_00: They carried the whole gospel in their stomachs one week at a time.
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  SPEAKER_00: So maybe the fine china deserves a Tuesday.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks for listening to Theology Made Podcast.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you found this helpful or encouraging,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on.