He Descended into Hell

At the church I pastor, New Life Ithaca, we say the Apostles’ Creed every week. I also say it a couple of more times a week when I pray the daily office. All told, I’ve recited the Apostles’ Creed thousands of times. 

I still remember the first time I said it. I grew up Pentecostal. We didn’t say creeds. I heard more than one preacher say, “No creed but Christ.” But that is itself a creed isn’t it? And we had a declaration of faith, which is a creed as well. But I digress.

The first time I ever said the Apostles’ Creed was at an African Methodist Episcopal Church. The mother of my high school friend Carl had tragically died at a young age and a group of us went to the funeral to support him. The funeral was a traditional liturgical service, as I know now, but very foreign to me then. As a part of the service we recited the Apostles’ Creed. I remember scrutinizing it in my head, especially the parts about believing in the catholic church and that Jesus descended into hell.

I’ve written quite a bit about Catholicity. But what of the descent clause? Did Jesus go to hell?

This Holy Saturday, I thought it appropriate to share a bit of what I’ve learned about this over the years. Holy Saturday commemorates the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection. It has historically been a time that emphasized rest and stillness. But at the same time, it has been seen as the time period when Jesus was “harrowing hell.” According to this ancient view, while Jesus’ body rested in the tomb, his spirit entered hell to declare his victory over Satan and to lead out the host of righteous dead from sheol/hades into heaven. We see in this ancient view, that Jesus did not enter the hell of fiery torment in order to suffer for our sins. He entered victoriously and “led a host of captives in his train.”[1]

While this harrowing of hell, or something like it, may have happened, the Bible does not explicitly say so. The only text that even mentions Holy Saturday is a half a verse at the end of Luke 23:56, “On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.” Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:8 seem to allude to this harrowing, and some take Ephesians 4:9 to refer to Jesus’ descent into hell, the Latin even using a version of the word “inferno”.[2] Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:27 and 2:31 also refer to Christ in hell, using the Greek word “hades” and the Latin word “inferno.” Further, 1 Peter 3:19 states that Christ preached to the spirits in prison. In context this refers to some declaration to the unrighteous regarding his lordship and victory. Psalm 107:16 and Zechariah 9:11 are also mentioned in support of this view as they seem to allude to Christ releasing captives from a deep pit.[3] But none of these explicitly say that Christ entered hell and plundered Satan on Holy Saturday. Again, it may have happened, and I tend to think that it did, but the Bible is not explicit about it.

The phrase in the Apostle’s Creed seems to be modeled after the Latin of Ephesians 4:9, but this is not certain. The Latin for this verse is, “descendit primum in inferiores partes terrae,” while the original Latin for the Apostles’ Creed is, “descendit ad infernos.” Notice that while the word “descended” is the same, the Vulgate uses the preposition “in” while the Creed uses “ad” and the Vulgate uses the word “inferiores” while the Creed uses “inferno”. These words are very similar, but not identical. 

For this reason there have been varying opinions of the meaning of the phrase “descendit at infernos” through the centuries. One view is based on what I’ve been describing, the harrowing of hell. This view was taught by several ancient fathers as well as medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas. Calvin’s view was that the phrase refers to the spiritual torment that Christ underwent on the cross (Institutes II:XVI:10). While this view is attractive, we have to admit that it is novel and not obvious from the Latin text of the creed. Luther’s view was that Christ literally entered into Hell, and many modern Lutherans share that view.

Calvin and later Berkhof point out that the phrase was included later on (Berkhof says that it appeared c. 390, which would date its appearance after even the creation of the Nicene Creed). Berkhof states that Christ could not have descended triumphantly into hell because his victorious resurrection hadn’t occurred yet and because that would contradict the period of rest that Christ’s statement “into your hands I commit my spirit,” implies. Berkhoff takes a view similar to Calvin’s, adding that the descent clause teaches the deepest humiliation of Christ in his death (Systematic Theology, 340-343). The Westminster Larger Catechism, question 50, takes a similar view, stating that the descent clause means that Christ truly died and remained under the power of death until the third day in his state of humiliation.

There is a marked difference between the Reformed view (Westminster and Berkhof) and the traditional view in that the traditional view presents Christ as already victorious while the Reformed view presents him still in a state of humiliation. The Reformed view has merit, as it asks the question, “How could Christ’s soul be victorious in hell while his body lay dead in humiliation?” I think that’s a valid question to raise.

Now to my view. My goal here is not to articulate another version or perhaps a synthesis of the above views, but to present a linguistic point. When we see the word “inferno” in the 21st century, we think of fire. That’s what the word means in English after all. So when we see the phrase, “He descended into hell,” we naturally think of the hell of fire. However, in the Latin usage of the time when the Creed was written the word inferno did not mean that yet. According to the standard Latin lexicon by Lewis and Short, the word meant, “underground, belonging to the Lower Regions.” Thus, “inferno” literally means “underworld”. What would be the biblical analog to this in Greek or Hebrew? It would be the Hebrew word “sheol,” or “place of the dead,” for which the Greek “hades” is used as a translation. None of these refer to a fiery place of the damned, but a place where even righteous souls rest when they die. 

OK, so why not say that then? Why not say, “He descended to the place of the dead?” Well, we are saying that. You see the word “hell” did not have the connotation of a fiery place of the damned until it gained an additional Christian meaning. The Germanic word “helle” simply meant the same as inferno: the underworld or place of the dead. You can see this in the Germanic word for paradise: Valhalla– “-halla” referring to the place of the dead.[4] Thus the English word “hell” in pre-Christian times meant just that: the place of the dead, with no connotation of fire or damnation. With this in mind, we really are saying, “he descended to the place of the dead” when we say “he descended to hell.” And what we mean by that is that Christ really died, i.e. his soul was separated from his body, and while his body lay in the tomb his soul visited the saints in sheol. 

As for the rest, whether he harrowed hell, proclaimed his victory to the damned, and led a host of captives out to heaven, there are scriptures that allude to this. But did it happen on Holy Saturday? I do not know. But I do know this. We will be able to ask him about it someday.

[1] Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:8.

[2] But this translation relies on a dubious textual variant that Metzger, et al. rate as “C”, meaning the originality of the word “regions” is highly suspect and is more likely an explanatory gloss.

[3] John Calvin notes this and argues that Psalm 107 is referring to Israel’s captivity in Babylon and that Zechariah 9 is referencing a release from spiritual prison, Institutes II:XVI:9.

[4] See the entry for “hell” in the Oxford English Dictionary. That entry has a trove of information about the etymology and prior usage of the word. Significant is that in the earliest translations of the Bible into English, the Hebrew word “Sheol” was translated “hell,” meaning the place of the righteous dead.

Just So We’re Clear, Mary Did Know

This is silly. I can’t believe I’m doing this. (So don’t do it, LeCroy.) Sigh. I’m gonna do it.

There’s this song. It’s schmaltzy and sentimental, like many of the contemporary Christian songs I grew up with. If you like this song, I advise you to stop reading. Because I’m going to trash it.

I grew up in the glorious heyday of CCM, and I loved every minute of it. I went to their concerts. I sang their songs in church services and in youth talent competitions. I bought their tapes, read their books, and had their posters on my bedroom wall. Like most Evangelical teen boys growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s I had a crush on Amy Grant. Later I had one on Rebecca St. James. I listened to the local CCM station non-stop, even as a kid sending in some of my meager dollars for their pledge drive. I’m not really cynical or bitter about it. I am mostly appreciative of such a wholesome upbringing in a non-ironic way. The point is, I’m an insider offering insider critique.

Here’s my critique: “Mary Did You Know?” is a terrible song. 

I mean, the tune is catchy enough. It sticks in your head like many of CCM’s greatest hits. There’s nothing like a good spirit-filled musical climax or key change to grease the skids on a flagging worship service (I grew up Pentecostal. Key changes were a means of grace for us. The Spirit seemed to always coincide with the high notes.). Aesthetically, it fits in with the era in which it was written. It’s in the Bill Gaither milieu, so it’s melodically rangy and adeptly uses musical climax to stir the emotions. The original recording was by Michael English in 1991. Michael English is an incredible singer. I saw him live once, because of course I did. You have to give that original a listen. Hoo, boy. It’s fantastic (now I’m being nostalgic and a little bit ironic, but in a good way). The music is Phil Collins and the vocals are Michael McDonald. There’s even a third verse drum entrance crescendo à la “In the Air Tonight.” So, as far as that goes, it’s not bad. In fact if you love 80’s music it’s glorious, if about a decade late as most CCM is.

But the lyrics. Ugh.

The author, Mark Lowry, is a great guy. He’s a comedian and singer who tours with Bill Gaither. But he’s not a biblical scholar or theologian, bless his heart.

I mean, the song is fine. If you like it, listen to it. Like the old adage about wine, if you enjoy it drink it. If you like Boone’s Farm, slurp it up, my friend. No judgment here.

But just so you know: Mary knew.

This is my biggest problem with the song. It’s inaccurate and unhelpful. (But, pastor, I just listen to it because I like the beat). We can go line by line through the song to illustrate this (and don’t worry, I will), but in general it presents a version of femininity in Mary that is not true to her or the other heroines of the Bible. It presents her as a clueless passenger in this journey instead of one of the key players. It woefully downplays the importance of her role. Not only did Mary have the perilous job of carrying the God-Man in her body to full term, consider this: the infant mortality in the Roman Empire was about 30%, and an additional 30% of children did not reach adulthood. That’s only a 40% chance of Jesus living to the age of 20. And that’s not even taking to account the fact that people were out there actively trying to kill him. Powerful people. With armies.

Mary’s job was to feed him, clothe him, and keep him safe. She also taught the young boy manners and took him to church. He learned to speak by imitating her. He had her accent. The Eternal Word of God learned human speech from this marvelous woman by watching her lips and imitating her sounds. And all indications are that she did it for the latter half of his life as a single mother.

She did all of this while remaining faithful. She did not take the apple, as her mother Eve did. She was graced by God and did not waiver. She wept at the foot of the cross when the Apostles fled in fear. She was in the upper room on Easter evening and on Pentecost. She helped Luke write his Gospel. This was a strong woman, who stands at the pinnacle of all the heroines of the Old Testament. Higher than Deborah. Higher than Jael. She may not have crushed heads with her hands, but she raised the head-crusher par excellence. She was a Miriam (that’s her name, by the way) seeing her baby boy down the Nile to safety and then raising him to be the deliverer of her people. She is a leaping, dancing prophetess, singing on the shore of the Red Sea with the drowned army of the enemy lying submerged within. Only that beachhead was not in Arabia but in the hill country of Judea in response to a leaping, dancing fetus and a blessed declaration by her auntie. Yet the song is just as victorious and prophetic as the song of her namesake centuries before.

She knew.

Let’s put this to rest. The image of Mary as a passive, quiet bystander who just happened to be the human incubator of the most high, praised for her purity and her quiet virtue, is a product of wrongheaded ideas about sex, purity, and the human body which sadly dominated the early church and the middle ages. Mary was not virtuous because she was a virgin. She was a virgin because she was virtuous. And she didn’t stop being virtuous the moment she was no longer a virgin. I almost typed when she lost her virginity, as if virginity is a thing that can be lost and when you lose it you are damaged goods. There are some purity preachers who go about the country giving Christian teen girls shiny brand new pennies and telling them not to lose their virginity because then they will become tarnished. They need to keep their pennies shiny and bright so that they can give that gift to their husbands. What a load of hot steaming garbage! If a girl falls into sexual sin she hasn’t become any more tarnished than she already was, for heaven’s sake. She needs to repent of that sin and endeavor towards chastity in the future, but she isn’t damaged goods. The gift that she will eventually give her husband is not her virginity, but her very self and her promise to be his faithful wedded wife. We need to put this thing to bed for good. By the way, those same preachers don’t give the teen boys shiny pennies. What sexist nonsense!

I digress. Though, the image of Mary as meek and mild does come from that same purity culture. I could give you an in-depth history of the development of sexual purity culture, how it began as a result of the cessation of martyrdom and the rise of the monastic class in the early Middle Ages, but I’ll spare you that. The high-point of this insanity is demonstrated in the medieval idea that when Jesus was born he did not pass through Mary’s vagina, but miraculously passed through her belly, leaving her maidenhead intact. I’m not joking. Here’s the point: Mary’s virginity was not a virtue in and of itself. It was important that she be a virgin in order to serve as a symbol of the new creation and to prove that she conceived by the Holy Spirit. To further demonstrate this, Rahab is a mother of Jesus and she was decidedly not a virgin. Her former life of prostitution did not make her unworthy of mothering Messiah.

Mary was not a hapless damsel in distress, the prototypical medieval maiden cloistered in her embroidery with her ladies-in-waiting. She was a warrior princess. She was Eowyn of Rohan singing and slaying. Her Magnificat, sung on that Judean hillside, was a response to the devil whispering to her, tempting her to the apple saying, “No man can kill me.” That song and her courageous life afterward is her reply, “I am no man.”

She knew. Frankly it is insulting to ask her the question.

Let us analyze the lyrics of this song.

“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water?” Well, no, she wasn’t omniscient, but she did tell the servants at the wedding of Cana, “Do whatever he tells you,” (John 2:5). She knew her boy was a miracle worker.

“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?” Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. She named him “Yahweh Saves.” The angel Gabriel told her to name him that (Luke 1:31). And the same angel told her husband this, “He will save his people from their sins,” (Matt. 1:21). I assume she and Joseph talked. Further, Zechariah, after his son John the Baptist was born, sang, “You have raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of your servant David,” (Luke 1:69). Old Zech was long gone when Luke wrote his gospel. Who opened up the family photo album for him? It was Mary. She is the source for the material in the first two chapters of Luke. She knew.

“Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?” Yes, see above.

“This Child that you delivered will soon deliver you?” Yes. She literally named him “Deliverance.” Again, see above. Though I will grant that this is some nice word play.

“Mary, did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man?” Yes, see Isaiah 28:19, Isaiah 61:1, Luke 4:18, and Matthew 11:5. Also see above that she knew he could work miracles.

“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would calm a storm with His hand?” Again, she was not omniscient, but she knew he would have power over nature as the divine Son of God. Gabriel told her that she would be impregnated by the Holy Spirit and that she would give birth to the Son of the Most High. Again, due to the evidence in John 2, apparently, she understood that meant that he had divine power. Elijah and Elisha demonstrated power over nature, so it’s no stretch to think that Jesus would. Plus, Gabriel told Mary and Joseph that he would be called Immanuel, God with us. She knew.

“Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?” Well, technically, he hadn’t done that. He didn’t have legs until he was born. Did she know he was a pre-existent deity? See above.

“And when you kiss your little baby you’ve kissed the face of God?” Ok, here’s the only one where I admit she probably didn’t know this. But maybe she did. All the evidence was there. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did know this. Gabriel did tell them to call him Immanuel, after all.

“Mary, did you know? The blind will see, the deaf will hear, The dead will live again, The lame will leap, the dumb will speak The praises of the Lamb!” Yes. Read the Old Testament prophecies about Messiah. They predict all these things.

“Mary, did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation?” I think she knew this. He was the Son of the Most High God that would rule over an everlasting kingdom (Luke 1:32-33). She knew he was Messiah and she knew all the glorious things described in Isaiah that Messiah would do. Psalm 110 depicts a Messiah who is the dread judge and ruler of all. She knew that he possessed divinity as the Son of the Most High. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that she knew that he would be Lord over the entire creation.

“Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day rule the nations?” Absolutely she knew this. Gabriel told her so, and see everything listed above. Also, take into account the Song of Simeon who declared that he was to be a “light to the nations,” (Luke 2:32). 

“Did you know that your baby boy was Heaven’s perfect Lamb?” OK, this is a good question. Did Mary know that Jesus was the agnus Dei? I think so. She knew that he was going to save his people from their sins. As a well-educated Israelite she would know the only way that could happen was through sacrifice. Further, when John the Baptist came on the scene, the first thing he said about Jesus is that he is the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world (John 1:29). How did he know that? Was it because the Spirit shot him through with an on-the-spot revelation? Or was this a well-known fact in the family from the time of Mary’s visit, Elizabeth’s declarations about Mary and Jesus, and Zechariah’s song? I think she knew.

“And the sleeping Child you’re holding is the great, the Great I AM?” See above. But here’s one more piece of evidence. When Mary visited Elizabeth, Luke records that the baby, John, leapt in her womb and she was filled with the Holy Spirit and started prophesying. The text says she then started singing. What was her song? “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord,” (Lk. 1:42-45). The mother of “my Lord,” she sang. Is that Lord like Master or Lord as a substitute for the word Yahweh? We can’t be sure that they understand it in the latter sense, but it’s certainly possible that they did.

“Oh, Mary, Mary, did you know?”

Oh, yes, yes, she did know.

Let us not forget the conclusion Luke leaves us with after relaying the Marian material to us in his first two chapters, “And his mother treasured up all these things in her heart,” (Lk. 2:51). Mary was not only the mother of Jesus, but she was his first disciple, as she replied to Gabriel, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” (Lk. 1:38). She was a student of her son. She treasured these things in her heart and pondered their meaning. During those long nights of feeding him, of rocking him back to sleep when he woke up crying, she pondered the deeper meaning of these things as she poured over the Old Testament scriptures in her mind. Perhaps this is what gave her the resolve to stay faithful when others failed. When the apostles fled and Peter denied him thrice, she was there at the cross, remaining with him till the bitter end. She was there at the tomb on Easter morning. She was there in the upper room at Pentecost. What gave her that faith, that strength, that resolve when others doubted, disbelieved, denied, and fled?

She knew.

Image: Virgin Mary and Eve, Crayon and pencil drawing by Sr Grace Remington, OCSO, © 2005, Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey. Printed versions of this incredible image can be purchased here.

Visit New Life Presbyterian Church for more articles and teaching from Tim LeCroy. New Life is a church worshiping in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York serving both the Cornell University and Ithaca College communities.

Semper Reformanda: The Origins of the Slogan and Its Meaning

Today is Reformation Day. Today we mark the occasion of Luther attaching his ninety-five theses in a letter he sent to Albert Archbishop of Mainz protesting the sale of indulgences that he had authorized throughout Germany. Earlier that year Luther had been disturbed by reports of local townspeople who had visited a nearby area to hear the indulgence preacher Tetzel and purchase indulgences from him. They reported to Luther that they were able to obtain forgiveness of sins without true contrition or amendment of life. This resulted in Luther poring over the issue for several months, composing his list of theses for academic disputation and conversing with various parties via letter. In the early fall of 1517, Luther composed his treatise on indulgences and then on October 31 attached the theses to the letter he sent to Albert. A printer in Basel got a hold of the theses, started printing them, and they went viral. Truly without Luther’s direct involvement, the theses spread all over Europe and became the spark for a much needed and long awaited reformation of the church.

One of the slogans closely associated with the 16th century Reformation is Semper reformanda. It also happens to be the title of this website. It is commonly accepted that this is a reformational slogan that distills and embodies the ideals of the Reformation. Some may even be under the impression that the Reformers themselves employed the term. However both Luther and Calvin opposed the notion of continual reformation, albeit for slightly different reasons. Luther firmly believed that the medieval world and life view was necessary for the proper ordering of government, church, and society and for the godly lives of individuals. Thus for him a total reformation was not in order, only on certain specific terms that he laid out in his writings and pursued in his ministry. Similarly, Calvin did not believe that continual reformation was a good thing. He believed that the church needed reform, but once the reform was completed, no further tweaking would be necessary.

Yet, we can’t say whether or not Calvin or Luther would have approved of the slogan because it did not exist in their day. There simply is no documentary evidence of the slogan existing until the nineteenth century. 

This brings up several questions that bear answering: What are the origins of the slogan?  Which version of the slogan (there are several)? What does the slogan mean? Lastly, given these things, is it a useful slogan for us to employ?

The Historical Origins of Semper Reformanda

The historical origins of the slogan are a bit murky. The earliest recorded use of the phrase with both the adverb “semper” and the future passive participle “reformanda” was by The Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper, who in 1892 used the phrase “ecclesia semper reformanda.” [1] Ten years earlier Herman Bavinck used the phrase, “Ecclesia Reformata et Reformanda,” which is close, but lacks the adverb “semper.” If we combine these two phrases, we can see how the fuller phrase “Ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda” came to be.

To be sure, there are older usages of the words “reformata” and “reformanda” to refer to the church, but none that put the adverb and the future past participle together into one aphorism as Kuyper did. Some have placed the origins of the phrase with one Jocodus van Lodensteyn in 1678. However, while van Lodensteyn did use both verbs “reformata” and “reformanda” to refer to the church, it was not done so in a single aphorism and the adverb “semper” is absent. [2]

From Bavinck and Kuyper the phrase took on several different forms until it was popularized by Karl Barth in 1947 as “Ecclesia semper reformanda.” [3]

How then did we come to think of it as an ancient Reformed slogan? Well, certainly the notion of the church being reformed and reforming has been expressed since the 17th c., with Johannes Hoornbeecks in 1660 and Jocodus van Lodensteyn in 1678 being the prime examples. Indeed as far back as 1610, Friedrich Balduin of Wittenburg wrote “semper in Ecclesia opus esse Reformatione, quia semper occurrunt corruptelae morum et doctrinae.” [4] Indeed when Kuyper used the phrase in 1892 he seemed to think of it as an already established expression, perhaps due to the similar usages I’ve pointed out above. Yet the biggest reason why it is considered ancient seems to be the declaration by Peter Vogelsanger, editor of the journal Reformatia, that it was an “ancient formula.” [5] That mistake was repeated by no less of a scholar than Olaf Pedersen in 2007. So we see that the notion of an ancient origin for the slogan is rather persistent and difficult to weed out. 

Which Version of the Slogan?

The ideas contained in this punchy Latin aphorism are so relevant and powerful that folks have continued to add to it and tweak it over the years. Anecdotally, I’ve seen the phrases, semper reformanda, ecclesia semper reformanda, ecclesia semper reformanda est, ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda, and ecclesia reformata semper reformanda, in addition to other variations on these four words that I’m sure have been tried. Further, I’ve seen the phrase secundum verbum Dei tacked on, no doubt in order to place limits on the extent and basis of the said reforming. I’m sure there are other variations. However, it is clear that the phrase we are working with (the canonical one, if you will) is ecclesia semper reformanda.

The Meaning of Ecclesia Semper Reformanda

Now that we have settled on a version of the slogan, what does it mean? The typical translation we hear is “always reforming,” but this is simplistic. “Reformanda” is a gerundive participle in the future tense and with passive voice. The participial aspect implies a continuous or progressive nature to the reform: the Church is reforming. The passive aspect adds a sense that someone or something is doing the reforming of the Church: the Church is being reformed. The future tense combined with the participle communicates the essential nature of the continuing reform: the Church must be being reformed. Lastly, the adverb “semper” adds a temporal modification to the reforming action: the Church always must be being reformed. That’s a bit clunky, but that’s how the phrase breaks down. 

What of the other additions? “Reformata” seems to be an acknowledgment that we inhabit the Reformed church and that even though that word is in our name, the church still needs to be reformed. The sometimes addition of “secundum verbum Dei,” simply clarifies that any reforming must be according to God’s word and not according to some other standard. This is likely employed because some have used the slogan as impetus for moving past the teachings of the Scriptures. Neither of these additions is essential for the aphorism.

One last matter bears attention: who is doing the reforming? I’m sure many think of human agents doing the reform, but this seems not to fit with what Jesus himself has said about the Church in the Scriptures. In Matthew 16:8 he declares, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” teaching us that King Jesus is building the church. And in John he speaks of the help of the Holy Spirit, first in 14:26, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you,” and likewise in 15:26, “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.” Lastly, according to Revelation 2:1, King Jesus walks among the golden lampstands, actively governing the Church. Indeed, the head of the Church is Christ (1 Cor. 11:3, Eph. 4:15, 5:23). So it seems best to think of Jesus Christ himself, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, as the one who is reforming the Church.

The Usefulness of Semper Reformanda as a Slogan

Given all of this, is a neo-Latin aphorism something we should employ in reference to the Church? Interestingly, as Perisho points out, many of the first and second generation reformers rejected the idea of the need for continual reform. For them the church was Reformata: no future reforms necessary.

Yet the idea of Semper reformanda still has great appeal to many. What rationale can be given for the need for continual reformation in the church when our forefathers taught there was no need? In the process of researching this topic I found the writings of one of the earliest  theologians to speak of the idea of Semper reformanda: an early 17th century German Lutheran named Friedrich Balduin of Wittenburg. [6] He was a doctor and professor of theology at Wittenberg (Luther’s university), and a church overseer. In 1610 he wrote a commentary on the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, and in his comments on  Malichi chapter one, he wrote this, “Admonemur nos hac inscriptione, semper in Ecclesia opus esse Reformatione, quia semper occurrunt corruptelae morum et doctrinae,” which I’ve translated: “We are admonished by this inscription, the work of Reformation in the Church is always needed, because the corruption of morals and doctrine there always occurs.” [7] Notice the reason for reform is not out of a need for continual tweaking of the faith, but because of the continual digression of morals and doctrine. He goes on to point out the various reformations in the scriptures as proof that the church will always be in need of reform– before the Babylonian captivity: Joash, Asa, Hosea, Hezekiah, Josiah; post captivity: Joshua and Zerubabel; the reformation Malachi was instituting in his prophecy; and the Great Reformer Jesus Christ who sought to reform the church in Jerusalem. 

Balduin offers a fascinating observation that shows us that the church will always be in need of reform due to continued corruption of morals and doctrine. And if the Church in the time of the Bible always needed reformation, shouldn’t we expect that the Church in our time will need it as well? Reformed Christians believe that sin and corruption will remain in us until the return of Christ. Indeed, Luther’s first of the ninety-five theses was, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent,” he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Applying this doctrine more broadly, I think Balduin gives us the answer: the Church always needs reforming because the Church is always deforming. In other words, due to the sin and corruption of its members, the entire life of the Church is to be one of repentance.

Semper Reformanda!

[1] This is pointed out in a library guide by Steve Perisho of Seattle Pacific University, who cited a book review in an obscure Dutch journal named Documentatieblad nadere reformatie. The review was by J. N. Mouthaan, and the book reviewed was Hermeneutica sacra: Studien zur Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, a book of essays. The specific essay reviewed was “Ecclesia semper reformanda,” Eine historische Aufklärung. Neue Bearbeitung,” by Theodor Mahlmann. Mahlman’s main thesis was that Karl Barth coined the term in 1947, but Mouthaan disproved that. See https://spu.libguides.com/DCL2017/Reformation#s-lg-box-wrapper-18675181.

[2] See Kevin De Young, “Semper Reformanda,” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/semper-reformanda/, and W. Robert Godfrey, “Semper Reformanda in its Historical Context,” https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/semper-reformanda-its-historical-context.

[3] Karl Barth, “Die Botschaft von der freien Gnade Gottes,” Theologische Studien 23 (1947).

[4] “The work of Reformation in the Church is always needed, because the corruption of morals and doctrine there always occurs,” https://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/vd17/content/pageview/7332325. 

[5]  For the above examples and more, please see the excellent library guide compiled by Steve Perisho, Theology and Philosophy Librarian at Seattle Pacific University. He has done us all a great service with his compilation: https://spu.libguides.com/DCL2017/Reformation#s-lg-box-wrapper-18675181. 

[6] See: Theodor Mahlmann, “Balduin, Friedrich”, in: Religion Past and Present. Consulted online on 31 October 2022 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1877-5888_rpp_SIM_01435> First published online: 2011. See also: https://www.biblicalcyclopedia.com/B/balduin-friedrich.html; and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Balduin.  

[7] See: https://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/vd17/content/pageview/7332324.

Visit New Life Presbyterian Church for more articles and teaching from Tim LeCroy. New Life is a church worshiping in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York serving both the Cornell University and Ithaca College communities.

Advent Is Not Christmas, Part 2: The Historical Development of Christmas and Advent

“I Hate Christmas.”

I once read an article in the Washington Post whose title was, “I hate Christmas.” It wasn’t entirely what I expected: an atheist curmudgeon annoyed by the ubiquitous seasonal Christian messaging, wishing that everyone would get off his god-free lawn. While there was a little bit of that in the piece, it was mostly centered around the fact that because the author grew up poor, he could never experience Christmas the way movies, tv shows, pop songs, commercials, catalogs, and even friends and family taught him he was supposed to experience it. His family could never afford the lavish feast, the tree surrounded with all the items on his Christmas wish list, or even a very nice tree. He now shuns Christmas along with its gatherings, festivities, gifts, and cheer, instead spending all the money he can afford buying toys for poor children so they can have the Christmas he never had.

I finished the article thinking that the author hadn’t rejected Christmas, he had rejected what Christmas has become: a commercialized cornucopia of instant gratification. What he had actually offered was a valid critique of Christmas and a call to recenter on its true meaning. After all, what more pure symbol of the Christmas spirit is there than sacrificing financially to provide gifts to poor children? St. Nicholas, anyone?

Afterward, I perused a bit of the comment section (yes, I know you are not supposed to read the comments). Many commenters agreed with the author. Some agreed because they were of other religions or were atheists (what I thought the article was going to be about). Others, though, didn’t reject Christmas but rather the spectacle that it has become. One commenter replied, “Only 2-ish weeks before the schizophrenia is behind us. My favorite day of the year is January 1, when it’s all over.”

Christmas Isn’t the Problem

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas. If there was a hidden camera in my house it would catch me randomly singing, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” My wife and I have curated the biggest (and best) Christmas display in a three or four block radius (in our estimation… opinions may vary). I love the feasting. I love the gift-giving. I love the Christmas liturgies, hymns, and candlelight services. I love all that because I love the message of Christ born to set his people free. I love the message of Immanuel, God-with-us, that the God of the Universe took on every bit of our broken humanity so that he could redeem it all. I love it because the incarnation is the only sufficient answer to the problem of evil in this world, as the best philosophers have realized, St. Augustine at the head. I love it because he became sin, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God. That’s the reason I’m singing, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” That’s the reason why I’ve lit my yard up in multicolored c-9 ceramic bulb nostalgic glory. That’s also the reason why I’m ecstatic that the whole world pauses once a year to celebrate the fact that God was born into the world.

And yet, I resonate with what that Washington Post author wrote. Because he’s right. The Christmas message is not what Hallmark, Home Depot, Honda, Hanes, Harley-Davidson, Hurley, and Hasbro are selling us. We have gotten off the rails, or jumped the shark, or whatever metaphor you want to use, in our overindulgence of the Coca-Cola commercialized version of Christmas. The songs, ads, and store displays start before Halloween now. That’s three full months on a peppermint Red Bull IV drip of wall-to-wall Christmas experience. There’s no expectation. There’s no preparation. There’s no self-denial. It’s just CHRISTMAS!!!!!, full-bore, full-tilt for three full months until December 26 when they turn off the spigot and we collapse into full-on exhaustion. No wonder some people hate it.

But that’s not the way Christmas was designed by those that developed the church year centuries ago. Yes, there was feasting. Yes, there was decorating and singing and gift-giving. But preceding it was a period of longing, expectation, and self-denial focused on something entirely un-Christmassy: the second coming of Christ. In other words, there was the season of Advent. And Advent was not Christmas.

Perhaps refocusing on the wisdom of those that created the autumnal portion of the Church calendar could help us in our current predicament. What can we learn by sitting at their feet?

The Creation of the Christmas Season

The Advent/Christmas cycle of the church year is a creation of the church itself. This is an important point to note, especially for Protestants. In part one I argued that the springtime cycle of the church year has biblical and patristic roots. Because of those clear biblical roots and direct one-to-one correspondence between Passover/Easter and Pentecost, those two feasts have always been celebrated by the Church from its earliest days. In fact, the only question about early observance of the Spring calendar was when Easter would be each year. To be fair, Lent was a creation of the early church, but its antiquity far outstretches that of Advent and Christmas. Lent, or something like Lent, has been a part of the church from at least the second century A.D.

However, when we come to the fall cycle of the church year, though we do have a clear mandate for a Fall festal calendar, we do not have a clear one-to-one correspondence of OT feasts to NT ones. For that reason, it took a few centuries for unanimity on the fall calendar to develop. I want to briefly trace that development and the reasons for it.

The first part of the season to develop was Christmas Day. The origins of Christmas are a bit murky when compared to Easter, but there are some clear historical markers. The first thing to note is that Christmas was not an appropriation of the Roman feast of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). First of all, that was not an ancient Roman feast, having been created in 274 by the Emperor Aurelian in a political effort to spark belief in the re-birth of the Western Roman Empire that was crumbling under his feet. It makes no sense for Christians to have appropriated a recently created Roman feast that had no popular following. Sol Invictus is a historical artifact, nothing more. However, Christmas is of Roman/North African origin, and there is some evidence, from no less than St. Augustine, that the celebration of Christmas in North Africa predates the Donatist schism. That would place observance of December 25 as the Feast of the Nativity well before Emperor Aurelian’s creation of Sol Invictus and suggest that the emperor was instead responding to the threat of Christianity by choosing that date.

Why then December 25th? What we need to understand is that the selection of exact days of the year when things occurred was not an essential quality of the church calendar. As I covered in part one, the essential quality of the church calendar was to create a yearly festal calendar for the New Covenant church based around the events of the life of Christ. We do not know when Christ was born, though some have made the case that it was exactly on December 25, and it may have been. However, dates were selected based on their significance in relation to the created year (see part one on day four of creation). We need to think of the church year not as historical reenactment, but as a yearly sermon series. Its purposes are for discipleship, not for reliving the historical record.

So why December 25th? The reason, it seems, is based on two notions. First is the ancient Jewish idea that the prophets and patriarchs were born or conceived on the same day that they died. Second, was the apparent Patristic conviction that major events in salvation history should align with the Solar calendar, and thus fall on a solstice or equinox. Both of these notions led to the idea that the best placement for Christ’s conception was on March 25th, which happens to be when the church commemorates the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38), and thus his nativity was placed nine months later on December 25th. Whether or not these are the exact days on which these events occurred is largely irrelevant for the purposes of the church year. The point is that these texts are read and taught on those days and their significance in salvation history is celebrated. A church could choose to read the texts surrounding Christ’s birth in July and celebrate it then. As I said in part one, the calendar is a matter of adiaphora. However, if a church did that, that church would not be in step with the rest of the church throughout the world. If catholicity has any value, then keeping the calendar of the universal church should have some weight. As St. Athanasius once wrote concerning the observance of Lent, “while all the world is fasting, we who are in Egypt should not become a laughing-stock, as the only people who do not fast, but take our pleasure in those days… exhort and teach them to fast forty days. For it is even a disgrace that when all the world does this, those alone who are in Egypt, instead of fasting, should find their pleasure.” The early church certainly took their liturgical unity very seriously. Indeed, it was one of the main reasons the Council of Nicaea was convened.

Christmas to Advent

By the late fourth century the celebration of the Nativity was universally accepted, in East and West, on December 25th. In a compromise to earlier Eastern traditions of celebrating the day on January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany was accepted in the West around the same time. In this conception the liturgical year then began on December 25th and there was no preceding season.

Over time a preparatory season developed in the Western Church. It seems to result from areas, like Spain and Gaul, who were more influenced by the East. In the East, Epiphany is a major occasion for baptism, second only to Easter. In fact, to this day, some Eastern traditions will do a kind of “polar bear plunge” on Epiphany as they mark the baptism of our Lord. In Spain and Gaul it was understood that if baptisms were going to occur on Epiphany, there ought to be a corresponding preparatory fast akin to the one that preceded Easter. In fact, Lent as a fast has its origins as a preparatory fast for those who would be baptized on Easter Sunday, and gradually that practice filtered to the church-at-large, especially as infant baptism became the universal practice after the 4th century. Thus, in Spain and Gaul in the 5th and 6th centuries we find the prescription of a preparatory fast for monks in the season leading up to Christmas. However, that fast was not for the general public. The earliest tradition held that the fast would begin after the Feast of St. Martin on November 11, thus it was colloquially called St. Martin’s Lent. For this reason, the earliest forms of Advent consisted of six weeks, not four as it is today.

As they often do, monastic practices filter out to the rest of the church, albeit in a less strenuous form. In that way, the six week Advent began to be practiced in the liturgy of the churches of Spain and Gaul from the 6th and 7th centuries. As we can for many things, we can thank Gregory the Great for shortening Advent from six weeks to four. He was a notorious simplifier of which even Marie Kondo would be proud.

As to the content of Advent (and the eventual naming of the season) there were two separate strains. In Rome, where Christmas was the greater emphasis, the season leading up to that day was more focused on the first advent of Christ. However, in Gaul the focus was entirely on his second advent. In the Bobbio Missal, composed in the early 7th century, the gospel Lessons for Advent are Luke 21, Matthew 11, Matthew 3, and Matthew 24. These are all focused on the second coming and the need to repent ahead of the final judgment. Can you imagine showing up to church the Sunday before Christmas and getting a sermon from Matthew 24 about the tribulation and the second coming of the Lord as lighting split the sky? Such was the tradition in ancient Gaul. These brothers and sisters did not sentimentalize Christ’s birth!

The two strains of focus on either of the advents of Christ demonstrate the shift from the early church’s emphasis of the Parousia being focused around Easter to the early medieval church moving it to the close of the year. The early church had an imminent expectation of the return of Christ, and thus the Parousia was located liturgically in the Spring of the year, with Christ’s resurrection. However, as the centuries rolled by, the church shifted its expectation and began to focus more on a far fulfillment of Christ’s return. For this reason, church leaders began to move the season focusing on the Parousia to the close of the solar year as a reflection of Christ’s return at the end of history, thus putting a tidy bookend on the liturgical calendar. In this conception, as the solar year begins at the winter solstice with the renewal of the Sun, so the liturgical year begins at the solstice with the celebration of Christ’s birth. Then at the close of the year, as the Sun’s light is fading, the church shifts focus to the second coming as the close of history. Then at Christmas the cycle begins again. Thus was the early Gallic conception of the church year.

(As a side note, in this conception Easter is located at the Spring equinox, the exact point in the year when light overcomes darkness. The early church saw this placement of Easter as a non-negotiable due to the declaration of Yahweh in Exodus 12 that the Passover was to mark the beginning of months in perpetuity. Easter must then be after the equinox, because Christ overcame darkness for good on that day. Thus, we see how in its final form the church year closely fits the creational intent reflected on Day Four of creation, that the Sun, Moon, and Stars were to mark the festal seasons. For more on that see part one.)

In the 8th and 9th centuries, the Carolingians of the Frankish empire melded both Gallican and Roman traditions into the one Pan-European tradition that we have inherited. This applied to nearly all aspects of the liturgy, but for our purposes also included prescriptions for Advent. Pepin the Short, Charlemagne, and their advisors thus combined the Roman conception of Advent with the Gallican one, beginning the season with an overt focus on the second coming and then ending Advent with the text of Gabriel’s visit to Mary. In this new form, Advent still has a strong emphasis on the second coming of Christ, but it moves toward the incarnation in its final week. This compromise was not simply for pragmatic reasons. The Carolingians were acutely focused on discipleship, and thus expert liturgists, like Alcuin of York, brilliantly shaped the season that we inherited to include important concepts of the expectant hope of Christ’s return, the eschatological duty to watch, pray, and prepare, and the final judgment. Without Advent’s focus on these themes, the broader plan of the church year has a large catechetical lacuna. The Carolingians remedied that, and for this reason their calendar stuck in the west, and eventually in the east as well.

 Longing for His Appearing

Thus we see that Advent is not Christmas. Advent is a separate liturgical season that focuses on important themes that every Christian disciple should be shaped by. Focusing on these themes, especially the longing for the return of Christ, properly situates our joy and cheer when he is born on Christmas Day. Instead of an empty season of buying, buying, buying, and more buying, Christmas then becomes a day for truly celebrating, because Jesus is the answer to all our prayers of longing for the world to be different than it is. Forgoing full-on Christmas celebration until after the Feast of the Nativity on the 25th is then a practice in festal patience. Feasting is a positive value because we have a reason to feast! Continuous feasting without real reason to do so or any pause to watch, reflect, and prepare leads to debauchery. The Bible is not against feasting, it is decidedly pro-feasting! However, the scriptures also place the festal observance on concrete points in salvation history along with other times to reflect, to fast, and to pray.

The waning of the year is a natural point to pause and recenter our lives on the longing for his appearing. As the light fades (some of us feel this physically in our bodies) we are naturally reminded that history has an end point. We also become acutely aware of the eschatological principle of the already/not yet. Increased darkness leads to watchfulness; this was especially so in humanity’s pre-industrial eras. The lighting of candles and the longing for dawn is a natural response this time of year. This is reflected in Advent’s focus on our longing for his appearing, especially the placement of Matthew 11 in the second Sunday of Advent. In this text, John the Baptist is rotting in prison and in his misery he sends messages to Jesus asking, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we seek another?” What a profoundly honest question to ask in a time of darkness! That has to be the theme of our Advent expectancy!

Christ’s response to John does not berate him or cast him away. Instead, he castigates those who think that a man of faith like John should never doubt. His answer to John focuses on the concrete events of Christ’s life that show he is the fulfillment of prophecy, that he, in fact, is the One.

This is the movement of Advent. It begins with the promise of his return to set all things to right. Then it moves to the response of faithful believers in the midst of a very broken world, “Are you really the one?” or, “Are you ever going to deliver us?” Then we move in week three to the triumphant John, preaching repentance ahead of the judgment of the Lord. Finally, we have the announcement by the Angel of the one to be born who will set his people free.

That’s Advent! It’s not what our culture has made it to be, and frankly many people have grown to hate. Advent, in its design, is a season to reset ourselves and to renew our joy in the midst of a dark season. This is why the liturgy for the third Sunday in Advent begins with these words, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, Rejoice!” This is the hinge on which the Advent season turns.

Gaudete! Y’all rejoice! Not out of a naïve sentimentality or due to a blind consumeristic obsession, but because though we’ve been honest and realistic about the brokenness of our world, we’ve found again a reason to hope!

I wonder if that Washington Post author would still hate Christmas if the church still led in observing Advent in this way? I wonder if folks would still long for January 1 when it will all be over, if we still kept the distinction between Advent and Christmas? We in the USA talk about there being a war on Christmas in our culture. But what if I told you that many European believers think that it is America that is truly waging the war on Christmas? As the observance of Santa Claus circles the globe haven’t even we in the church lost sight of what Advent and Christmas were originally designed to be?

One more time, Advent is not Christmas. 

Visit New Life Presbyterian Church for more articles and teaching from Tim LeCroy. New Life is a church worshiping in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York serving both the Cornell University and Ithaca College communities.

Advent Is Not Christmas: Part 1

I have a pet peeve. Actually, I have several. This one has to do with the way that many churches do Advent, that is, as an extended time of Christmas. Their focus is on the first Advent of Christ, and the time is spent covering the biblical material leading up to his birth. Christmas carols and hymns are sung from the first Sunday of Advent onward and there is no distinctive Christmas season. In other words, Advent is Christmas.

There is just one problem. Advent is not Christmas.

Before I get any further I need to make several disclaimers. First, the purpose of this essay is not to shame anyone or call anyone out. I’ve observed this practice enough to not have any one particular church in mind. In fact, the church I attended this week on the First Sunday of Advent did it correctly. So, I’m not calling anyone out in particular and neither do I have any recent experience in mind. Second, my goal is not to cause anyone to feel ashamed or to cause any immediate, drastic changes in your church. My purpose is to educate and train. The church year is a secondary (or even tertiary) matter, and there’s no reason to go to war over how anyone does the church year (or doesn’t).

That said, if we are going to do the church year, I think that it ought to be grounded in what the Scripture teaches and what the church has observed over the centuries, and that as Reformed Christians we ought to have a good rationale and purpose for doing it.

In this essay, part one of two, I will cover the broader biblical and historical aspects, that is – the Biblical and Patristic Roots of the Church Year. Then in part two I will get into the nitty gritty of why Advent is not Christmas (and why that matters).

The Church Year is Grounded in God’s Word

The church year is not just a cool thing that trendy churches are now doing. While I think it’s good that all kinds of churches are getting in touch with the roots of historic Christianity, as we do that we need to understand what we are doing and why. Ancient does not necessarily equate to good and helpful, and we need to understand what unhelpful aspects may have developed in ancient practices so we can avoid them. When it comes to the church year, we are not just appropriating church tradition. It turns out that, as in many other things, the church’s tradition is grounded in God’s Word.

There are some folks (I happen to be one of them) that believe that whatever we do in the worship of God should be grounded in God’s word. In other words, we can’t do whatever we like in our worship of God. The Bible teaches us how we are to worship, and our worship should be regulated by God’s Word. This idea is referred to by Reformed theologians as The Regulative Principle of Worship.

There are three places we can find the church year grounded in God’s word: the creation narrative, the Mosaic law, and in New Testament observance. The first is in creation itself. In Genesis chapter one we find that light is created on the first day, but the Sun, Moon, and stars aren’t created until the fourth. Light existed before day four— it evidently was a manifestation of God’s glory. Much like the waters were gathered on day three to produce the dry land, the light is gathered on day four to produce the Sun, Moon, and stars. The Sun is said to rule over the day, and the Moon to rule over the night. The Sun, Moon, and stars are given to “to separate the day from the night,” and to serve as indicators of “signs and for seasons, and for days and years,” (Gen. 1:14). The Sun marks the day, the Moon marks the month. The stars mark seasons. Together, all three help us mark years. But did God create all this just for telling time?

The text says they are for “signs and seasons, and for days and years.” Why is the word “signs” in with “seasons, days, and years”? It seems to show that the heavenly bodies will not just mark the passage of time, but that they serve as important markers throughout the year. The word sign used there appears several times in the Old Testament, but two of its usages are as a pledge of the covenant (circumcision, rainbow, and Passover are all signs) or as a marker of divine action. One way to think of these celestial signs are as creational ebenezers, heavenly stones of remembrance, that move us to mark the mighty deeds of the Lord in worship as we move through each year of our lives. Further, the word used for “seasons” here is almost always used in the Old Testament with a connection to worship. It can mean an “appointed place,” in which case it almost always refers to a particular spot in the Temple/Tabernacle, or to the Tent of Meeting itself. As an appointed time, it most regularly refers to the time for appointed feasts. This is how the BDB Hebrew Lexicon defines this usage in Genesis 1, preferring the translation, “for signs and sacred seasons.” This is also the case in Psalm 104: 19, which should be translated, “He made the Moon to mark the sacred seasons.”

This creational feature is encoded in the worship of the Old Testament Church. We find a series of yearly feasts prescribed in the Mosaic law. These feasts are largely agricultural, but they follow the cycle of the year. The movement of the Sun, Moon, and stars in their yearly cycle set the dates for the great festivals, especially those of the springtime.

Exodus 12 describes both the ritual of the Passover meal and the day that it is to be observed. The LORD tells Moses that this month, the month they were delivered from Egypt, is to be counted as the first month in their ecclesiastical calendar. We find that several other important events happen on the first day of the first month, including the day when the waters were dried after the Flood (Gen. 8:13) and the day when the desert Tabernacle was erected (Ex. 40:2, 17). The first day of the first month has also been traditionally thought to be the first day of creation. The first month of the year was calculated based on the first ripening of the barley harvest, a marker of springtime (see Leviticus 23). The first new moon after this marked the beginning of the first month. Then the next full moon marked the Passover. This is why to this day we calculate Easter based on the first full moon after the spring equinox. But more on this later.

After the Passover, the people of God were to celebrate Pentecost, which was dated 50 days after the Passover (Lev. 23:15-16). Thus, Passover and Pentecost were the two great feasts of the springtime. There were also two fall feasts, which are described in Leviticus 23: Trumpets and Booths (also called Ingathering in Ex. 34:22). All four of these festivals marked significant events in the Exodus story. Two other feasts were added to the calendar at later points. The feast of Purim celebrates the deliverance of the people of God as told in the book of Esther. It is held yearly in the last month of the ecclesiastical year (Adar, see Est. 9:18ff). Hanukkah, an early winter feast, was added during the intertestamental period in the month Kislev to celebrate the Maccabees’ deliverance of the people from the Seleucids. Every year the people of God were to celebrate these feasts with eating and drinking and worship services. These feasts had three aspects. First, they were thanksgiving feasts, based on the agricultural calendar of ancient Israel. Second, they were memorial feasts marking out significant moments in salvation history. Third, they were formative feasts, teaching the people of God important theological truths. These three aspects, thanksgiving, instruction, and formation, will be criteria that we refer back to when evaluating Advent in part two.

In the New Testament we find that the people of God are still celebrating these feasts and references to them are sprinkled throughout. Passover is connected with Jesus’ death and resurrection. Pentecost, the day when the Law was given at Sinai, is connected with the coming of the Holy Spirit in the upper room. We also find Jesus attending Jerusalem for the Feast of Booths (John 7:2, 10), Dedication (Hanukkah) (John 10:22), and apparently also Purim (John 5:1-2). The only feast that is not mentioned explicitly in the New Testament is Trumpets along with its Day of Atonement. Perhaps this is because Passover and Eastertide are going to subsume them in the New Covenant. 

Even after Christ’s death and resurrection we have references to the OT feasts in the New Testament. We cannot discount the fact that God chose the Mosaic feast of Pentecost to send the Holy Spirit upon the believers in the Upper Room. This seems to point not only to a New Covenant fulfillment of that feast, but to a continued New Covenant observance of it. Further, we read in Acts 20 that Paul desired to reach Jerusalem by Pentecost. He also mentions Pentecost in 1 Corinthians 16. With these positive participations in the ecclesiastical calendar, we find nowhere in the New Testament that the yearly calendar is to be abrogated. We find other aspects of the Mosaic law are abrogated: bloody sacrifices, circumcision, food laws, other holiness separation laws related to purifications and clothing, and others. But we do not find any abrogation of the ecclesiastical year. Instead, we find an encouragement from Paul to keep the feast, not the old feast of unleavened bread, but the new Pascha, that we now call Easter (1 Cor. 5:7-8). There Paul gives us the theological content of the Old Testament feast (cutting off the old leaven of malice and wickedness) and connects the Old Testament feast of Pascha to the sacrificial death of Christ on the Cross.

The Early Church Celebrated the Church Year

It’s hard to overstate just how important the leaders of the post-Apostolic church were in building the faith that we all profess and practice. Paul uses the metaphor of the Temple structure to describe how our faith has been established. In Ephesians 2:20 he states that our faith is, “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.” In Paul’s conception though, the apostles, prophets, and Christ don’t make up the entire structure. They are the foundation, but the subsequent generations make up the rest of the building. Peter agrees, saying that we are “living stones” making up the structure of our faith, with Christ as the cornerstone, (1 Pet. 2:5). By the time the Apostles left the scene in the late first century, the foundations were laid, but the early church had to continue building.

The first Christian leaders after the Apostles understood this. The earliest extant Christian document outside of the New Testament, the Didache, purports to hand down instructions from the Apostles themselves on how the church should be organized. As it was written in Syria around 80 A.D. this is not a fantastic claim and should be taken seriously. Clement of Rome, writing to the church at Corinth around the same time, described the problem of who would be the successors to the Apostles and carry on their leadership of the church. In chapter 44 of his letter he writes that the Apostles had designated ordained presbyters to be the successors to their ministry. Ignatius of Antioch, writing after the turn of the century, writes that the people should be subject to the bishop led presbytery, that bishops and presbyters are in tune with one another like strings on a guitar, and that the bishops have the mind of Christ (Ig. Eph. 2:2, 3:2, 4:1). Some scholars have posited that Clement and Ignatius present alternative visions for church government in the early church, but I believe they represent an identical polity, one that is a hybrid of episcopal and presbyterian systems. But I digress.

Those early Christian leaders also addressed the problem of the apostolic vacuum by arguing that the writings of the Apostles were inspired and should be the basis for the fledgling faith. Both Ignatius and Clement demonstrate an awareness that what Peter and Paul wrote was inspired by God and thus authoritative, but that what they themselves were writing was neither inspired nor authoritative in the same way (1 Clem. 47:3, Ig. Ep. 12:1-2, Ig. Rom. 4:3). Thus, while the ordained presbyters were the successors to the Apostles in leading the church, they were bound by the writings of the Apostles in scripture as to what doctrines they elucidated and in their leadership of the church.

These two pillars of early Christian theology lead to the calling of the great ecumenical councils to deliberate and articulate the content of the faith in the presence of heresy. Those first four councils were the weight bearing joists and beams, laid on the foundation of the Apostles, that would support the faith for centuries and even millennia. The Niceno-Constatinopolitan Creed and the formulations of Ephesus and Chalcedon serve as our theological floor to this day. As the preamble to the Athanasian Creed would later expound, no one can be considered a Christian who does not profess the faith that those four councils describe.

But what does all this have to do with the church year? Did you know that when the Council of Nicaea was called in 325 A.D. one of the primary issues it met to deliberate on was the yearly day of the celebration of Easter? One of the more significant controversies of the early church was whether Easter should be celebrated on a fixed date (like Christmas is now) or whether it should be movable based on the calculation of Jewish Passover. The first issue discussed in the published canons of the council does address the issue of the Trinity, but the final act published was the solution of the Holy Pasch (see Decrees of the Ecumencial Councils by Norman P. Tanner). The council decided that Easter should be determined each year according to the practice of the Romans, which practice was developed based on the occurrence of the first full moon after the spring equinox. To this day this is how we determine when Easter will be.

The Nicene deliberation demonstrates two things for us. First is that for the earliest Christians celebration of the springtime ecclesiastical feasts was not a question of if, but when and how. Second, this demonstrates how important the concept of unity was for them (see John 17:20-26 and Eph. 4:3-6 for the reason why), and that unity was based on tangible, observable practices like worship and the celebration of ecclesiastical feasts.

In fact, the Church Fathers felt strongly that the church year should be practiced as a practical feature of the unity of the church. Athanasius of Alexandria is known first for his ardent defense of Nicene Orthodoxy and secondly for his being the first full articulation of the New Testament canon in 367 A.D. Yet Athanasius was also an ardent supporter of the church year, arguing that the 40 day fast of Lent should be a feature of the church’s worship throughout the world. The fact that the council of Nicea refers to the observance of Lent as a given further demonstrates this. (Please see my earlier essay on the origins of Lent for more information.)

Therefore, in addition to laying down our ecclesiological and theological framework, the Church Fathers bequeathed to us the Christian calendar. They redemptive historically transmogrified (to borrow a phrase from two of my seminary professors Jack Collins and Michael Williams) the springtime feasts of the Old Testament into a Christian liturgical calendar. The feast of Unleavened Bread became Holy Week and then Lent. The Day of Atonement became Good Friday. Passover and Trumpets became Eastertide (in fact the vast majority of the world still refers to what we call Easter as Pashca). Pentecost became, well, Pentecost, but the shift moved from Sinai to the New Sinai of the Upper Room and the coming of the Holy Spirit. That the New Testament writers place so much emphasis on the fact that these major events in salvation history occurred on these festal days, also arguing that the sacrificial system of worship itself was transmogrified and brought into the New Covenant in Christ, bolsters what the Church Fathers did. As in the case of canon, presbyterate, and creed, the Apostles laid the foundations for the church year, and the Church Fathers built upon it a sturdy floor for us to stand upon. In fact, continuing with our building metaphor, we might see that patristic doctrines of polity and scripture built the basement walls, the creeds of the councils laid the floor joists, and the liturgy of the Fathers created the weight bearing walls. What remained for later generations was to “dry in” the frame and then to provide the interior design of the place, making the house of our faith into a beautiful dwelling place for us with our God.

The Reformers Accepted the Early Church’s Calendar

To bring this forward a thousand plus years (I promise I will go back and fill in the medieval gaps in part two) the Reformers accepted the calendar that the Church Fathers developed. Even our Reformed forebears kept the major “evangelical” feasts, emphasizing that communion should be received on those days. For certain, the Reformed rejected the late medieval excesses of Lent, throwing out with that dirty bathwater the baby of patristic Lenten practice, but they did not reject the calendar outright. Martin Luther did not reject it at all, but reformed it, as was his practice in general. But even the Reformed kept the major feasts, while rejecting Lent and being more skeptical of Advent. All the Reformers were keen to reform the calendar of late Medieval excesses with its proliferation of Saints Days, which they felt distracted from the central story of Christ and his life. For this reason they accepted the framework of the church year that emphasized the major events of Christ’s life (birth, death, and resurrection) along with the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Upper Room. We see the pre-Puritan Reformed position clearly in Heinrich Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession where he writes: 

If in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, we approve of it highly. but we do not approve of feasts instituted for men and for saints. Holy days have to do with the first Table of the Law and belong to God alone. Finally, holy days which have been instituted for the saints and which we have abolished, have much that is absurd and useless, and are not to be tolerated. In the meantime, we confess that the remembrance of saints, at a suitable time and place, is to be profitably commended to the people in sermons, and the holy examples of the saints set forth to be imitated by all.

For certain, Calvin was more critical of the church year than Bullinger, but he seems to be more concerned with perfunctory performance of them and those who we colloquially call “Chreasters”. Calvin’s Geneavan churches did keep the major holidays, and he preached sermons on their topics (the Nativity of Jesus on Christmas, for example) and served communion. His objections seem to be for pastoral reasons, specifically, that people were only showing up for major holidays and thinking their observance of them was enough for them spiritually. In spite of this, Calvin said that he did not think that observation of the major holidays should be abolished unless the majority of the church agreed.

This Evangelical (story of the gospel) Church Year is a concept I believe that we can all center around. Whether we choose to retain the Puritan rejection of all days save Sunday, go the Lutheran (as in Martin, not the denomination) route of major holidays with their seasons, or walk the Reformed middle way of Bullinger, hopefully we can see the biblical and patristic roots of the church year. In this we can have charity towards our brothers and sisters who observe certain days along with those who do not. Afterall, this is what is laid down by Paul in Colossians 2 and Romans 14, establishing the Apostolic principle that the Church year is a matter of adiaphora not dogma. Paul says we should not despise each other based on our observance of these days and that we should find our central unity not in them but in Christ.

While exercising this charity, the question remains whether the dominical and apostolic exhortations to maintain the unity of the church around the one faith, along with the practical applications of Christian formation that the church year presents, demonstrate the wisdom of the early fathers in building those weight bearing walls. I’m obviously arguing that case, while extending charity to my brothers and sisters who disagree and hoping for theirs in return.

In part two I will discuss that if we accept the wisdom of the Fathers and choose to observe the winter cycle of Advent and Christmas, we should do it in ways that are keeping with the patristic and biblical principles regarding the Church year, and that means, ultimately, that Advent is not Christmas.

Visit New Life Presbyterian Church for more articles and teaching from Tim LeCroy. New Life is a church worshiping in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York serving both the Cornell University and Ithaca College communities.

A Reformed Defense of the Church Year

As we draw near to a new church year with the season of Advent approaching we are once again reminded that not all Reformed churches practice the Church Year and some even argue against its usage. The most common reason given against Reformed churches engaging in this practice is based on the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW), that nowhere in the Bible does it say churches should do such things. Adherents of this strict version of the RPW argue that nothing that is not explicitly commanded in scripture should be done in worship. Thus, since there is no command to do the church year in the Bible, Reformed churches should not do it. However, in this essay I will argue that the Scriptures do present a case for observing a yearly calendar of worship, and that the New Testament writers instead of abolishing it, move it to a secondary matter that churches may or may not participate in. Despite this, we see that the uniform testimony of the Early Church is for the observance of the Church Year, and that the Reformers did not abolish it, but worked to curtail its late medieval abuses.

The Church Year is Grounded in God’s Word

The church year is not just a cool thing that trendy churches are now doing. While I think it’s good that all kinds of churches are getting in touch with the roots of historic Christianity, as we do that we need to understand what we are doing and why. Ancient does not necessarily mean good and helpful, and we need to understand what unhelpful aspects may have developed in ancient practices so we can avoid them. When it comes to the church year, we are not just appropriating church tradition. It turns out that, as in many other things, the church’s tradition is grounded in God’s Word.

There are three places we can find the church year grounded in God’s word: the creation narrative, the Mosaic law, and in New Testament observance. The first is in creation itself. In Genesis chapter one we find that light is created on the first day, but the Sun, Moon, and stars aren’t created until the fourth. Light existed before day four— it evidently was a manifestation of God’s glory. Much like the waters were gathered on day three to produce the dry land, the light is gathered on day four to produce the Sun, Moon, and stars. The Sun is said to rule over the day, and the Moon to rule over the night. The Sun, Moon, and stars are given to “to separate the day from the night,” and to serve as indicators of “signs and for seasons, and for days and years,” (Gen. 1:14). The Sun marks the day, the Moon marks the month. The stars mark seasons. Together, all three help us mark years. But did God create all this just for telling time?

The text says they are for “signs and seasons, and for days and years.” Why is the word “signs” in with “seasons, days, and years”? It seems to show that the heavenly bodies will not just mark the passage of time, but that they serve as important markers throughout the year. The word sign used there appears several times in the Old Testament, but two of its usages are as a pledge of the covenant (circumcision, rainbow, and Passover are all signs) or as a marker of divine action. One way to think of these celestial signs are as creational ebenezers, heavenly stones of remembrance, that move us to mark the mighty deeds of the Lord in worship as we move through each year of our lives. Further, the word used for “seasons” here is almost always used in the Old Testament with a connection to worship. It can mean an “appointed place,” in which case it almost always refers to a particular spot in the Temple/Tabernacle, or to the Tent of Meeting itself. As an appointed time, it most regularly refers to the time for appointed feasts. This is how the BDB Hebrew Lexicon defines this usage in Genesis 1, preferring the translation, “for signs and sacred seasons.” This is also the case in Psalm 104: 19, which should be translated, “He made the Moon to mark the sacred seasons.”

This creational feature is encoded in the worship of the Old Testament Church. We find a series of yearly feasts prescribed in the Mosaic law. These feasts are largely agricultural, but they follow the cycle of the year. The movement of the Sun, Moon, and stars in their yearly cycle set the dates for the great festivals, especially those of the springtime.

Exodus 12 describes both the ritual of the Passover meal and the day that it is to be observed. The LORD tells Moses that this month, the month they were delivered from Egypt, is to be counted as the first month in their ecclesiastical calendar. We find that several other important events happen on the first day of the first month, including the day when the waters were dried after the Flood (Gen. 8:13) and the day when the desert Tabernacle was erected (Ex. 40:2, 17). The first day of the first month has also been traditionally thought to be the first day of creation. The first month of the year was calculated based on the first ripening of the barley harvest, a marker of springtime (see Leviticus 23). The first new moon after this marked the beginning of the first month. Then the next full moon marked the Passover. This is why to this day we calculate Easter based on the first full moon after the spring equinox. But more on this later.

After the Passover, the people of God were to celebrate Pentecost, which was dated 50 days after the Passover (Lev. 23:15-16). Thus, Passover and Pentecost were the two great feasts of the springtime. There were also two fall feasts, which are described in Leviticus 23: Trumpets and Booths (also called Ingathering in Ex. 34:22). All four of these festivals marked significant events in the Exodus story. Two other feasts were added to the calendar at later points. The feast of Purim celebrates the deliverance of the people of God as told in the book of Esther. It is held yearly in the last month of the ecclesiastical year (Adar, see Est. 9:18ff). Hanukkah, an early winter feast, was added during the intertestamental period in the month Kislev to celebrate the Maccabees’ deliverance of the people from the Seleucids. Every year the people of God were to celebrate these feasts with eating and drinking and worship services. These feasts had three aspects. First, they were thanksgiving feasts, based on the agricultural calendar of ancient Israel. Second, they were memorial feasts marking out significant moments in salvation history. Third, they were formative feasts, teaching the people of God important theological truths. These three aspects, thanksgiving, instruction, and formation, will be criteria that we refer back to when evaluating Advent in part two.

In the New Testament we find that the people of God are still celebrating these feasts and references to them are sprinkled throughout. Passover is connected with Jesus’ death and resurrection. Pentecost, the day when the Law was given at Sinai, is connected with the coming of the Holy Spirit in the upper room. We also find Jesus attending Jerusalem for the Feast of Booths (John 7:2, 10), Dedication (Hanukkah) (John 10:22), and apparently also Purim (John 5:1-2). The only feast that is not mentioned explicitly in the New Testament is Trumpets along with its Day of Atonement. Perhaps this is because Passover and Eastertide are going to subsume them in the New Covenant. 

Even after Christ’s death and resurrection we have references to the OT feasts in the New Testament. We cannot discount the fact that God chose the Mosaic feast of Pentecost to send the Holy Spirit upon the believers in the Upper Room. This seems to point not only to a New Covenant fulfillment of that feast, but to a continued New Covenant observance of it. Further, we read in Acts 20 that Paul desired to reach Jerusalem by Pentecost. He also mentions Pentecost in 1 Corinthians 16. With these positive participations in the ecclesiastical calendar, we find nowhere in the New Testament that the yearly calendar is to be abrogated. We find other aspects of the Mosaic law are abrogated: bloody sacrifices, circumcision, food laws, other holiness separation laws related to purifications and clothing, and others. But we do not find any abrogation of the ecclesiastical year. Instead, we find an encouragement from Paul to keep the feast, not the old feast of unleavened bread, but the new Pascha, that we now call Easter (1 Cor. 5:7-8). There Paul gives us the theological content of the Old Testament feast (cutting off the old leaven of malice and wickedness) and connects the Old Testament feast of Pascha to the sacrificial death of Christ on the Cross.

The Early Church Celebrated the Church Year

It’s hard to overstate just how important the leaders of the post-Apostolic church were in building the faith that we all profess and practice. Paul uses the metaphor of the Temple structure to describe how our faith has been established. In Ephesians 2:20 he states that our faith is, “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.” In Paul’s conception though, the apostles, prophets, and Christ don’t make up the entire structure. They are the foundation, but the subsequent generations make up the rest of the building. Peter agrees, saying that we are “living stones” making up the structure of our faith, with Christ as the cornerstone, (1 Pet. 2:5). By the time the Apostles left the scene in the late first century, the foundations were laid, but the early church had to continue building.

The first Christian leaders after the Apostles understood this. The earliest extant Christian document outside of the New Testament, the Didache, purports to hand down instructions from the Apostles themselves on how the church should be organized. As it was written in Syria around 80 A.D. this is not a fantastic claim and should be taken seriously. Clement of Rome, writing to the church at Corinth around the same time, described the problem of who would be the successors to the Apostles and carry on their leadership of the church. In chapter 44 of his letter he writes that the Apostles had designated ordained presbyters to be the successors to their ministry. Ignatius of Antioch, writing after the turn of the century, writes that the people should be subject to the bishop led presbytery, that bishops and presbyters are in tune with one another like strings on a guitar, and that the bishops have the mind of Christ (Ig. Eph. 2:2, 3:2, 4:1).

Those early Christian leaders also addressed the problem of the apostolic vacuum by arguing that the writings of the Apostles were inspired and should be the basis for the fledgling faith. Both Ignatius and Clement demonstrate an awareness that what Peter and Paul wrote was inspired by God and thus authoritative, but that what they themselves were writing was neither inspired nor authoritative in the same way (1 Clem. 47:3, Ig. Ep. 12:1-2, Ig. Rom. 4:3). Thus, while the ordained presbyters were the successors to the Apostles in leading the church, they were bound by the writings of the Apostles in scripture as to what doctrines they elucidated and in their leadership of the church.

These two pillars of early Christian theology lead to the calling of the great ecumenical councils to deliberate and articulate the content of the faith in the presence of heresy. Those first four councils were the weight bearing joists and beams, laid on the foundation of the Apostles, that would support the faith for centuries and even millennia. The Niceno-Constatinopolitan Creed and the formulations of Ephesus and Chalcedon serve as our theological floor to this day. As the preamble to the Athanasian Creed would later expound, no one can be considered a Christian who does not profess the faith that those four councils describe.

But what does all this have to do with the church year? Did you know that when the Council of Nicaea was called in 325 A.D. one of the primary issues it met to deliberate on was the yearly day of the celebration of Easter? One of the more significant controversies of the early church was whether Easter should be celebrated on a fixed date (like Christmas is now) or whether it should be movable based on the calculation of Jewish Passover. The first issue discussed in the published canons of the council does address the issue of the Trinity, but the final act published was the solution of the Holy Pasch (see Decrees of the Ecumencial Councils by Norman P. Tanner). The council decided that Easter should be determined each year according to the practice of the Romans, which practice was developed based on the occurrence of the first full moon after the spring equinox. To this day this is how we determine when Easter will be.

The Nicene deliberation demonstrates two things for us. First is that for the earliest Christians celebration of the springtime ecclesiastical feasts was not a question of if, but when and how. Second, this demonstrates how important the concept of unity was for them (see John 17:20-26 and Eph. 4:3-6 for the reason why), and that unity was based on tangible, observable practices like worship and the celebration of ecclesiastical feasts.

In fact, the Church Fathers felt strongly that the church year should be practiced as a practical feature of the unity of the church. Athanasius of Alexandria is known first for his ardent defense of Nicene Orthodoxy and secondly for his being the first full articulation of the New Testament canon in 367 A.D. Yet Athanasius was also an ardent supporter of the church year, arguing that the 40 day fast of Lent should be a feature of the church’s worship throughout the world. The fact that the council of Nicaea refers to the observance of Lent as a given further demonstrates this. (Please see my earlier essay on the origins of Lent for more information.)

Therefore, in addition to laying down our ecclesiological and theological framework, the Church Fathers bequeathed to us the Christian calendar. They redemptive historically transmogrified (to borrow a phrase from two of my seminary professors Jack Collins and Michael Williams) the springtime feasts of the Old Testament into a Christian liturgical calendar. The feast of Unleavened Bread became Holy Week and then Lent. The Day of Atonement became Good Friday. Passover and Trumpets became Eastertide (in fact the vast majority of the world uses the name “Pascha” for what we call Easter). Pentecost became, well, Pentecost, but the shift moved from Sinai to the New Sinai of the Upper Room and the coming of the Holy Spirit. That the New Testament writers place so much emphasis on the fact that these major events in salvation history occurred on these festal days, also arguing that the sacrificial system of worship itself was transmogrified and brought into the New Covenant in Christ, bolsters what the Church Fathers did. As in the case of canon, presbyterate, and creed, the Apostles laid the foundations for the church year, and the Church Fathers built upon it a sturdy floor for us to stand upon. In fact, continuing with our building metaphor, we might see that patristic doctrines of polity and scripture built the basement walls, the creeds of the councils laid the floor joists, and the liturgy of the Fathers created the weight bearing walls. What remained for later generations was to “dry in” the frame and then to provide the interior design of the place, making the house of our faith into a beautiful dwelling place for us with our God.

The Reformers Accepted the Early Church’s Calendar

To bring this forward a thousand plus years, the Reformers accepted the calendar that the Church Fathers developed. Even our Reformed forebears kept the major “evangelical” feasts, emphasizing that communion should be received on those days. For certain, the Reformed rejected the late medieval excesses of Lent, throwing out with that dirty bathwater the baby of patristic Lenten practice, but they did not reject the calendar outright. Martin Luther did not reject it at all, but reformed it, as was his practice in general. But even the Reformed kept the major feasts, while rejecting Lent and being more skeptical of Advent. All the Reformers were keen to reform the calendar of late Medieval excesses with its proliferation of Saints Days, which they felt distracted from the central story of Christ and his life. For this reason they accepted the framework of the church year that emphasized the major events of Christ’s life (birth, death, and resurrection) along with the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Upper Room. We see the pre-Puritan Reformed position clearly in Heinrich Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession where he writes: 

If in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, we approve of it highly. but we do not approve of feasts instituted for men and for saints. Holy days have to do with the first Table of the Law and belong to God alone. Finally, holy days which have been instituted for the saints and which we have abolished, have much that is absurd and useless, and are not to be tolerated. In the meantime, we confess that the remembrance of saints, at a suitable time and place, is to be profitably commended to the people in sermons, and the holy examples of the saints set forth to be imitated by all.

For certain, Calvin was more critical of the church year than Bullinger, but he seems to be more concerned with perfunctory performance of them and those who we colloquially call “Chreasters”. Calvin’s Geneavan churches did keep the major holidays, and he preached sermons on their topics (the Nativity of Jesus on Christmas, for example) and served communion. His objections seem to be for pastoral reasons, specifically, that people were only showing up for major holidays and thinking their observance of them was enough for them spiritually. In spite of this, Calvin said that he did not think that observation of the major holidays should be abolished unless the majority of the church agreed.

Westminster on the Church Year

As an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America I have taken a vow to “sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures,” and when I was ordained the Book of Church Order required me to declare any differences I had with the Westminster Standards. I did not declare a difference with the Standards on the issue of the Church Year, nor do I believe I needed to. The Westminster Standards are silent on the issue of the church year: the words “Easter,” “Lent,” and other direct references to the Church Year are not to be found. In fact, I argue that as a consensus document, the Assembly gave latitude on the issue within certain parameters. Those parameters are described in chapter 21: “On Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day.” That chapter lays down the boundary that all religious worship is governed by God’s Word, specifically:

the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.

Thus, whatever form of the Church Year PCA churches employ, it must not be according to our imaginations, but prescribed in God’s word. I have attempted above to argue that the Church year is prescribed by God’s word and that the New Testament gives freedom to do it or not do it as a secondary matter, in line with Bullinger’s quote above.

But we must ask ourselves, exactly what does the above quoted portion from WCF 21.1 intend to govern? Does it intend to forbid a seasonal set of scripture readings, prayers, and topical sermons? Does it intend to forbid certain church decorations or the lighting of candles? Some would argue that it does, but I don’t think it is explicit in the text. On the contrary, the Confession in chapter one states that, “there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the word, which are always to be observed.” This seems to apply to church decor and lighting and doesn’t explicitly forbid symbolic approaches to church decor and lighting as long as they are “according to the general rules of the word.”

WCF 21.5 states that, “The reading of Scriptures with godly fear; the sound preaching, and conscionable hearing of the Word, in obedience unto God, with understanding, faith, and reverence; singing of Psalms with grace in the heart; as also, the due administration and worthy receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ; are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God.” What is the church year but a set of scripture readings, prayers, thematic sermons, and church fellowship events? Certainly, worship services reflecting the Church Year can be pared down to such ordinary aspects. Further, the same paragraph gives permission for churches to designate seasons, stating, “solemn fastings, and thanksgivings upon special occasions, which are, in their several times and seasons, to be used in an holy and religious manner,” (emphasis added). Thus the Confession gives permission for churches to observe seasons, as long as they adhere to the guidelines given elsewhere in the Confession. Indeed, chapter 62 of the Book of Church Order, though unconstitutional, provides guidelines for churches to observe days of fasting and thanksgiving. I see no reason why observance of the church year cannot fit under that umbrella.

Conclusion

The Evangelical (story of the gospel) Church Year Bullinger presents is a concept that we can all center around. Whether we choose the Puritan rejection of all days save Sunday, go the Lutheran (as in Martin, not the denomination) route of major holidays with their seasons, or walk the Reformed middle way of Bullinger, hopefully we can see the biblical and patristic roots of the church year. In this we can have charity towards our brothers and sisters who observe certain days along with those who do not. After all, this is what is laid down by Paul in Colossians 2 and Romans 14, establishing the Apostolic principle that the Church year is a matter of adiaphora not dogma. Paul says we should not despise each other based on our observance of these days and that we should find our central unity not in them but in Christ.

While exercising this charity, the question remains whether the dominical and apostolic exhortations to maintain the unity of the church around the one faith, along with the practical applications of Christian formation that the church year presents, demonstrate the wisdom of the early fathers in building those weight bearing walls. I’m obviously arguing that case, while extending charity to my brothers and sisters who disagree and hoping for theirs in return.

Visit New Life Presbyterian Church for more articles and teaching from Tim LeCroy. New Life is a church worshiping in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York serving both the Cornell University and Ithaca College communities.

A Biblical and Confessional Case for Requiring Background Checks for Church Officers

At last year’s General Assembly, an overture requiring background checks for church officers was defeated in the Overtures Committee. I don’t recall many of the arguments stated in the course of debate, but one I do remember was when a pastor stood up and said that we didn’t need background checks because no one knows a pastor better than his elders.

As the DASA report points out, “perpetrators are masterful at deceit and manipulation.”[1] In the report, we specifically tackled the myth of seemingly knowing a person:

7. I know him, and he couldn’t be an abuser!

Even specially trained individuals suggest it can be very difficult to identify an abuser in public settings. Image management is “used every day by abusers throughout the world.” Abusive people are very manipulative in their relationships. Deception is how they maintain power; therefore, they are well-versed at how to convince others of their innocence.[2]

Again, I will continue to commend the DASA report for reading and study as we consider these weighty issues.

One argument against requiring background checks that I have seen recently is another version of the grassroots argument. You can read it here. Additionally there have been some pretty extensive debates on x.com under the #pcaga hashtag.

While I do recommend that you read the article and form your own opinion, I will summarize the central argument as this: background checks are good, but we shouldn’t require them because that would be requiring a church to spend money, which is a violation of BCO 25-10. While others on x.com have adequately refuted parts of this: BCO 25 is about real property, the BCO and RAO require other expenses like paying for officers to attend the meetings of Presbytery and GA and printing and binding your minutes for review, etc.

However, here I want to briefly deal with a Biblical and Confessional rationale for why we should require background checks for not only church officers (that’s a good start) but also for anyone who will be in direct contact with children on a regular basis.

A Biblical Argument for Background Checks

Let us begin with a key scriptural mandate. Deuteronomy 22:8 states, “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it.” Building a parapet on the roof of your house is a reasonable protective measure. It will not prevent any and every possibility of a person falling from your roof, including someone intentionally trying to throw themselves off the roof, but it is required in scripture because it will save lives and it is a reasonable expense to undertake.

This is also true of background checks. Like parapets, there are different kinds of checks of varying quality and comprehensiveness. Some, like running a name through a state police database, may only cost $20. A full record search of federal, state, and local databases and court records may cost around $200. In the same way there are flimsy parapets and there are very sturdy well made ones that are harder to get over.

Background checks are also similar to parapets in that a background check, even the most comprehensive one, will not identify every predator. That’s because the person hasn’t been arrested and convicted, or, if they have, they’ve pled down to a lesser offense. Thus, a background check will not identify every predator, just like a parapet can’t stop everyone who is hellbent on throwing him or herself off a roof. Nevertheless, building a parapet is a biblical mandate because it is a reasonable expense to make in order to prevent some injury and death. We can reasonably apply this biblical principle to background checks, therefore I fully support an amendment to our BCO to require them for officers.

The Confessional Argument for Background Checks

Now onto the confessional mandate for background checks. We begin with our duties and sins forbidden as church leaders under the fifth commandment:

WLC 129  What is required of superiors towards their inferiors? A. It is required of superiors according to that power they receive from God, and that relation wherein they stand, to… protecting, and providing for them all things necessary for soul and body: and by grave, wise, holy, and exemplary carriage, to procure glory to God, honour to themselves, and so to preserve that authority which God hath put upon them.

WLC 130  What are the sins of superiors? A. The sins of superiors are, besides the neglect of the duties required of them… careless exposing, or leaving them to wrong, temptation, and danger; provoking them to wrath; or any way dishonouring themselves, or lessening their authority, by an unjust, indiscreet, rigorous, or remiss behaviour.

It is our duty as leaders of the church, under the Fifth Commandment, to protect those under our care and not to carelessly expose them to danger. Not obtaining a comprehensive background check for anyone who is going to be in authority in the church is a violation of the Fifth Commandment, and thus it is completely appropriate for the Constitution of the PCA to require that expense.

Lastly, we will move to the Sixth Commandment.

WLC 135  What are the duties required in the sixth commandment? A. The duties required in the sixth commandment are, all careful studies, and lawful endeavours, to preserve the life of ourselves and others by… avoiding all occasions, temptations, and practices, which tend to the unjust taking away the life of any; by just defence thereof against violence,… and protecting and defending the innocent.

WLC 136  What are the sins forbidden in the sixth commandment? A. The sins forbidden in the sixth commandment are… the neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life,… and whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any.

I focus on the Sixth Commandment here because all forms of abuse essentially boil down to a violation of the commandment not to murder, as I discuss in the DASA Report.[3] A further confessional mandate for requiring background checks for church officers is found under the duty to preserve life, by both avoiding practices that endanger life and acting to preserve it. Further, a willful neglect or withdrawal of lawful and necessary means of preserving life is a grave sin. A comprehensive criminal background check would absolutely prevent a known predator from doing more harm. If a known predator came to your church, a background check would enable you to identify him and take proper protective measures. It’s true, as I state above, that background checks will not catch every predator, but they will identify some of them and it is unconscionable not to use that tool to protect the flock of Jesus Christ from wolves intent to do them harm.

Because I do believe that neglect of this particular measure to protect life is a sin, I also believe that our Constitution should mandate background checks for church officers.

Postscript

I have heard some say that there are people who appear on sexual offender registries that are not predators. This is where I will put in a plug for one of the DASA Report’s items of advice to churches and presbyteries:

5. That competent third parties be engaged by Presbyteries, churches, and other PCA ministries when allegations of abuse arise.[4]

 If, in the course of obtaining a background check or running a name through a registered sex offender database, your church finds out that someone has been convicted of a crime related to abuse, and that person claims that it was a misunderstanding or youthful indiscretion, or whatever, you should never take that person at their word. There is too much at stake! You should then find someone who knows what they are doing (me, for example) and let them help you navigate the process of determining exactly what happened so you can make a better judgment and set good policy going forward. If it truly was that a guy mooned someone 20 years ago, that can obviously be forgiven and the person restored. But how will you know unless you look deeper into the matter? This is the moment to obtain police reports, sentencing statements, and charging documents. These will tell the fuller picture. Then get some help determining what your next step should be. With this information and assistance your Session or Presbytery can make the best possible decision in the interests of justice and protection of the flock of God.

[1] M49GA, p. 1139. See also pp. 962, 964, 1007, 1009, 1047, 1053, 1061, 1062, 1082, 1105, 1116, 1139 1198, 1239, and 1247.

[2] Ibid., p. 1221.

[3] “The locus of many sinful behaviors falling under the heading of abuse is found in the sixth commandment,” M49GA, p. 974

[4] Ibid., p. 951.

On the use of Police Reports in PCA Church Courts

In the debate over whether non-theists should be allowed to testify in PCA courts, one of the most common objections is that the change is unnecessary because police reports can be admitted into evidence.

This response reveals both an unfamiliarity with the DASA Report and a lack of experience in real life situations of investigating and adjudicating abuse in the courts of the church.

In this essay I will give six reasons why we cannot solely depend on police reports to provide the church with evidence in our judicial proceedings and thus why we should be willing to admit the testimony of any relevant and competent person.

I will be citing statistics detailed in the DASA report. As a person with a scientific background and a PhD in the humanities that demanded rigorous documentation of all my claims and sources, I personally tracked down the source of every statistic and searched for many others that further demonstrated the claims we were making in that report. The DASA report provides documentation and links, most of which cite peer reviewed academic journals or the studies of government agencies. If there was a claim that I could not find a solid source for, it was not included in the DASA report.

1. The vast majority of assaults go unreported to police.

The DASA report points out that only 310 out of every 1,000 (that’s 31%) of sexual assaults are ever reported to police.[1] According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, only 37% of rapes are ever reported to police.[2] The same fact sheet states that only 12% of child sexual assaults are reported to police.[3]

This means that somewhere between 63% and 69% of sexual assaults do not have police reports. 88% of child sexual assaults do not have police reports. For the vast majority of sexual assaults, police reports simply do not exist. We cannot depend solely on the existence of police reports in the investigation and adjudication of abuse claims in the church courts.

Somewhere between 63% and 69% of sexual assaults do not have police reports. 88% of child sexual assaults do not have police reports. For the vast majority of sexual assaults, police reports simply do not exist.

2. Police reports are difficult to obtain.

In my practical experience the police are not enthusiastic to support a church investigation or judicial proceeding. Even when a police report exists, it may be difficult or impossible to obtain. In order to obtain a police report a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request will likely have to be made, even for the reporting victim to obtain the report. I am highly skeptical of the willingness of police officers or district attorneys to hand over evidence or serve as witnesses in a church judicial proceeding. This is especially so in areas of our country that have a higher non-Christian population who are becoming more and more suspicious of the church.

3. Assaults reported to police rarely end in conviction or go to trial.

As detailed in the DASA Report, assaults reported to the police rarely result in any meaningful justice for the victim, “Statistically, 50 out of 310 sexual assaults reported to law enforcement result in criminal charges. Approximately 25 will result in conviction and jail time. One study concluded that only ‘1.6% of all complaints ended in a trial.’ Of the many studies, it is clear that statistically a sexual assault case is not likely to make it to trial.”[4]

To state this more plainly: only 5% of sexual assaults will ever result in criminal charges. Only 2.5% will ever result in a criminal conviction. Because many of these are plea deals, only 1.6% of sexual assaults ever make it to trial.

Combine this with the fact that false reports of sexual assault fall in the range of 2%-8% and you have an enormous miscarriage of justice in our country.[5] If the offender is a church member, or especially a church leader, it is incumbent on the courts of the church to be able to hold the offender accountable and to protect victims even when the secular authorities do not.

Only 5% of sexual assaults will ever result in criminal charges. Only 2.5% will ever result in a criminal conviction. Because many of these are plea deals, only 1.6% of sexual assaults ever make it to trial.

4. Police reports have not been adjudicated by judge or jury.

The information in a police report is the opinion of one or several arresting officers. While the witness claims made within it are usually made with under the penalty of perjury, the veracity of the police report has not been adjudicated by a judge or jury. As pointed out above, only 1.6% of sexual assaults ever make it to trial. Only 8% of police reports result in criminal convictions, meaning that a judge or jury has substantiated the report or that the defendant has pleaded guilty.[6] That means that 92% of police reports lack any external verification beyond the opinion of the arresting officer and the threat of perjury.

The point is this, police reports do not give any official determination of the veracity of the claim. If I were the defense representative in a church court proceeding I would vigorously point out the weakness of such evidence. 

5. Police reports cannot be cross examined.

Building on point six, even if a police report exists, how will the defense be able cross examine such a report? BCO chapter 35 on evidence does not envision a piece of paper alone serving as evidence to an offense. That chapter is entirely predicated on witnesses, meaning people. BCO 35-7 gives the right of the defense to cross examine a witness. How will the defense cross examine a police report? If the report is entered into evidence via another witness- a member of the church investigative committee, for example- how will that cross examination proceed? It could only proceed along the lines of how he obtained the report and so on. Again, if I were the defense representative in such a proceeding, I would vigorously protest that I do not get to cross examine the police officer who made the report!

Further, what if the police officer that made the report is a non-theist? How will I know if I cannot cross-examine him? Doesn’t that get us back in the same situation we started in? It would be better just to be able to call any competent witness and allow the court to judge his or her credibility as BCO 35-5 states.

6. Church courts prosecute offenses that the secular authorities do not prosecute.

The last reason I will present for not solely depending on police reports is this: secular authorities do not prosecute all the matters that the church court is called to prosecute. Because of our moral teachings, laid out in the exposition of the Ten Commandments in the Larger Catechism, there are a whole host of offenses that are not considered criminal in the legal codes of most civil jurisdictions. For example, the secular authorities would not currently prosecute someone for adultery or possession of pornography because these offenses are not currently crimes. As a result, no police report would exist for these offenses.

Now imagine that an unbelieving neighbor witnesses a husband repeatedly berating his wife and children. The neighbor could serve as a corroborating witness to the testimony of the wife as stipulated by BCO 35-4. But during the preparation for trial, the neighbor says that she cannot take the oath in good conscience because she does not believe in God or the existence of Hell. Since the secular authorities are highly unlikely to criminally prosecute verbal and psychological abuse, no police report will exist. How is the church court to proceed? What if the wife wants a divorce, how will the church court decide the matter in absence of a theist to testify? Surely you can see the conundrum here.

Conclusion: Non-theists with relevant information should be allowed to testify in PCA courts

BCO 35-5 states that the court must judge the credibility of any witness. Why not allow any competent witness with relevant information testify and allow each court to judge his or her credibility? I struggle to see the problem here.

Some have characterized this issue as “Admitting Atheists to Church Courts.” This is a highly prejudicial summary, which makes it sound like atheists will be granted standing in church courts to make complaints or file charges. This is not what is being proposed. Instead, we are asking that non-theists be allowed to offer eyewitness testimony when they are called by an officer of the court, their credibility to be judged by that court. If such a person were to be caught in a lie in that proceeding, the non-theist could be sued in civil court for defamation. Furthermore, God will hold that person accountable for their lies at the Final Judgment whether that person believes in God or not.

What about the following scenario? A young woman is raped by a church member, and in the course of her treatment in the hospital consents to a rape kit being performed by the ER nurse. Later, for some reason, the young woman decides not to file criminal charges against her rapist.[7] However, because she is encouraged to do so by a fellow church member that she opened up to about the rape, she discloses the offense to her pastor. There are no other witnesses and the accused church member claims the encounter was consensual. The only other evidence is the rape kit and the ER nurse who performed it. The same problems stated above for police reports now exist: how can the report be entered into evidence, even if it can be obtained? How can the report be cross-examined? Let’s say that the ER nurse is willing to testify, however when being prepared by the prosecution she discloses that she cannot in good conscience take the oath because she does not believe in God or the existence of hell. Where do we go from there?

In absence of any judicial action by the church, the rapist cannot be expelled from membership or the church building. Where does that leave the victim? She must either continue to attend worship with her rapist, causing her to be repeatedly retraumatized by her rapist, or she must leave for another church. The Christ-honoring result should be that the rapist is excommunicated, he is expelled from the church building, and the victim is surrounded with love and support by her pastor, elders, and fellow church members.

Here is another scenario, which sadly occurs all too often today. Let’s say that a young woman is repeatedly assaulted by a church leader; and the trauma of her abuse- and the church’s lack of response to it- results in her losing her trust in God such that she declares herself to be an atheist. Let’s say another victim of that same leader surfaces, who still has standing in the church courts and wants to take the case to trial. The testimony of the first victim could offer corroborating evidence of the second victim. Yet, because she is an avowed atheist- as a result of her horrific abuse mind you- she cannot testify in a PCA judicial proceeding.

Anyone who is willing to be imaginative can continue to come up with a host of likely scenarios where it would be legitimate and necessary for a church court to admit the testimony of a non-theist.

Let us not wait for a horrible instance like these to occur before making the needed changes. Let us be proactive in protecting the sheep of the church and holding the wolves accountable.

[1] M49GA, p. 1120. Clicking on the link in footnote 190 will take you to the fact page: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system.

[2] The NSVRC was cited in the DASA report, but not this particular fact sheet. The fact sheet is well documented with reputable studies supporting their figures. “Statistics about sexual violence,” National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2015, accessed here: https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf.

[3] Ibid.

[4] M49GA, p. 1120. There are a multitude of reasons why factual accusations of sexual assault do not make it to trial due to prosecutor discretion. As stated below in note 5, only 2%-8% of sexual assault claims are false.

[5] M49GA, p. 1220, footnote 272.

[6] Doing the math from the above statistic, 25 out of 310 police reports resulting in conviction comes out to 8% of police reports.

[7] A Department of Justice study found the following reasons why victims did not report sexual assault: 20% feared retaliation, 13% believed the police would not do anything to help, 13% believed it was a personal matter, 8% reported to a different official, 8% believed it was not important enough to report, 7% did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble, 2% believed the police could not do anything to help, 30% gave another reason, or did not cite one reason. See “The Criminal Justice System: Statistics,” RAINN, accessed at https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system, footnote 5.

Five Misconceptions of Reformation Day

For many people the date October 31 is significant not only for being the Eve of All Saints (All Hallows Eve, Halloween) but as a commemoration of the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. These theses were a list of arguments against the abuses of the papacy as it was in the early 16th century, largely centering on the sale of indulgences by the Roman Church. The 95 theses were quickly copied and distributed with the emerging printing press, and soon became a manifesto of sorts for the reform of the church in Europe.

There is a lot of interest in the Reformation and Luther this time of year. Along with this interest and discussion comes several of the myths or misconceptions about the Reformation that have been perpetuated over the years.

As a historical theologian I am not only interested in these misconceptions for accuracy’s sake (though I do care about accuracy) but also because I believe that holding to faulty conceptions about the Reformation does harm to the actual intentions and aims of the Protestant Reformers. For this reason, I am going to briefly address 5 of these misconceptions and discuss why correcting them is important.

  1. That Nailing the 95 Theses to the Church Door Was an Act of Protest

We have likely seen the images. The defiant young Luther in his billowing monastic robes, brandishing his hammer, brazenly nailing his protest to the door of the institution that he was fed up with. But this isn’t what happened. By late 1517 Luther certainly had issues with the Church, and especially with the sale of indulgences that was being preached in German lands by Tetzel, but his theology of justification was not yet fully formed and he had no intention yet of starting off a firestorm of reformation. What he did want to do was start a local theological reform emanating from the university he taught at along the lines of what he was reading in the writings of Augustine. So when he nailed his theses to the door, he was instigating a formal academic theological discussion, or disputatio (disputation). He nailed it to the door of the church because that’s where you put notices. It was like a bulletin board. He was calling for an academic exercise, not necessarily trying to kick off a widespread church reform, even if God eventually used it for that end.

Why does this matter? For one it helps us to see just how hungry the entire continent was for reform. Luther’s theses happened to hit a nerve. They went viral. But often, just like today, things go viral that we wouldn’t expect or could foresee. Who would think that a syllabus posted on an academic bulletin board would be what God would use to start the reform? But that’s what happened. It wasn’t the first university that God used to reform the church, and it wouldn’t be the last.

2. That the Reformation Commenced Immediately After the Nailing

First of all, the Reformation was already underway! Zwingli had already been preaching the gospel and reforming the church for several years before he heard of Luther. And for Luther, it would take 3 or 4 years before his ideas were fully formed and he started calling for widespread reform in his writings and subsequently began receiving condemnation for them by papal opponents. No one woke up on All Saints Day in 1517 thinking that the Reformation had started. One could argue that a more significant date for the beginning of the Reformation would be the Diet of Worms in 1521 and Luther’s subsequent exile. Before that, things were largely academic. After the Diet, things got real. But whatever moment we choose, the nailing of the theses has been invested with meaning well beyond warrant.

Why does this matter? It matters for a number of reasons. First of all, it leads us to discount the reforming movements that were started by earlier leaders like John Wycliffe (14th c.) and Jan Hus (15th c.). It also leads us to neglect the fact that the Reformation was a widespread grassroots movement that would have likely happened independent of Luther. Furthermore, Luther’s ideas were not even fully formed in 1517, as you can see for yourself by reading his early treatises on the sacraments. The real call for reform by Luther begins in 1520 and takes off in 1521 after his exile. Before this, not much reform had really taken place. Liturgical reforms didn’t take place until 1523. Luther was still living as a monk in 1524, and didn’t marry until 1525. Zwingli had already beaten him to that by a year.

3. That Luther Was the First Reformer

I’ve kind of already busted this myth. Luther was not the first or only reformer of the Church. Reform has always been a key element of church life going well back to the first millennium. Ambrose (4th c.) and Augustine (5th c.) were reformers. Benedict (6th c.) and Gregory the Great (7th c.) were reformers. The Carolingians (8th-9th c.) were reformers. Bernard of Clairvaux (12th c.) was a reformer. Gregory VII (11th c.) , Innocent III (13th c.) and St. Francis of Assisi (13th c.) were all reformers. They all faced significant issues in the Church that need to change and they addressed them through a combination of moral, missional, theological, and ecclesiological reforms.

But even closer to the time of Luther, he wasn’t the first or only. John Wycliffe had been writing about similar issues in England from the 14th century. Jan Hus had a very similiar program of reform in Prague in the 15th century. Ulrich Zwingli was already at work in the Swiss Churches and Martin Bucer in the Western German churches. Luther stands in as one of these great reformers, and while  the most influential and important, he was by no means the first or the only.

Why does this matter? Again, we do ourselves a disservice in our appreciation and study of the Reformation if we do not also heed the events and theologies of the other reformers. Luther was building on Augustine. Hus was building on Wycliffe. Bucer had heard Luther speak, but was already well on his way. Zwingli was spurred on through study of Augustine and of the Bible. We need to both give credit to all these reformers and study their ways and means. It will help us in our modern day need to continue reforming the church and to address the issues of our day.

4. That Luther Did it All on His Own

Luther was a towering personality. And he was a great theologian and leader. But he needed lots of help along the way. We might tend to think that it was the merit of his message that caused his success and the success of the Reformation, but that would again be a misconception. There’s little separating the teachings and reforming actions of Hus and Luther. Yet the reason why Luther succeeded when Hus didn’t was that Luther had strong military and political support from his local rulers. Frederick of Saxony was interested in humanism and church reform from the 1480s. He founded the University of Wittenberg to that end and invited Luther and Melancthon to come teach there. When Luther was under threat from his excommunication, Frederick hid Luther and protected his life during his exile. He funded Luther’s translation of the New Testament into German. He and other German princes continued to support his reforms and caused them to be able to take place. The German Reformation probably doesn’t take place, at least as we know it, without Frederick of Saxony. The same can be said of Zwingli in Zurich, Cranmer in England, Knox in Scotland, and Calvin in Geneva. Without the support of their local rulers, none of it ever happens. Hus was burned at the stake and his reform was quashed because of a lack of political support. By God’s providence Luther got what Hus didn’t. But we shouldn’t think that Luther was a better man because he succeeded. He got by with a lot of help from his friends.

Why does this matter? This helps us see the grassroots nature of the Reformation. It was a groundswell, bottom up movement. The papacy was incapable of reforming at the time even though there had been calls to reform for over 100 years. The leadership was corrupt. Luther in many ways served as a mascot and leader for the reform, but it would not have happened without the enthusiastic support of so many. When the leadership is against you and threatening you with death, it shifts the movement underground. But underground movements can be the most powerful. As soon as you forbid something, everyone wants to have it. That’s what happened during the Reformation.

This is also why Calvin addressed King Francis of France with his prefatory address in his Institutes. It may not make much sense to us now because of our strict separation between church and state, but Calvin knew if he could gain the King of France as a convert, the church in France could be reformed. In fact, the only places where the Reformation flourished were places where local rulers supported it in some way. Governments can have a major effect on the flourishing or suppressing of the faith.

5. That the Reformers Intended to Split From the Catholic Church

This is the most important and often most misunderstood aspect of the Reformation. The Protestant Reformers, Luther included, wanted to reform the Church, not to split from the church. That means that they wanted to remain Catholic and reform the Catholic Church. This was their goal at the outset and remained the goal well into the 16th century. Even Calvin held out hope for a general council that would meet to reform and reunify the church. There were many who hoped that Trent would be that council, but alas, it was not able to be that. Its hardline approach drove a wedge between them and the Protesting churches, and still functions as a dividing wall to this day.

Furthermore, we should not see it as the Protestants splitting from the Catholic Church and forming a new church, with the old church remaining being the Catholic Church. Rather, we should see both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic traditions as heirs of the Western Catholic church, both having formerly been a part of it and split from it by dividing from each other. The Reformers argued this extensively, and they did not shy away from calling themselves “Catholic.”

The Reformation was very local. In local areas (cities, regions, countries) it wasn’t as if the local churches split and some of them were now Protestant. No, in local areas, all the churches continued on as they had for 1,000 years. Some were reformed according to the tenets of the Protestant Reformation. Others were reformed according to the program that Trent laid down. Regardless, both church traditions, Protestant and Roman Catholic, are properly heirs of the Catholic Church.

Why does this matter? It matters because Protestant churches today need to see themselves as the heirs of the Ancient and Medieval Church. When we look back in history, we need to understand that it is “us” that we are reading about, not somebody else. Augustine belongs to “us” as much as he belongs to Roman Catholics. Francis belongs to “us”. Anselm, Bonaventure, and Thomas belong to us. That’s our family and our tradition. We need to realize that and reacquaint ourselves with the riches of the theological tradition that is ours. The Protestant Reformers did not reject the past. Luther engaged to reform the German church according to the Bible and the teachings of Augustine. Calvin loved Augustine and greatly appreciated Bernard, Anselm, and Chrysostom. The Reformation was not a rejection of the past, but actually a return to the truth of the early traditions of the Church. Ad fontes (to the sources), meant not only to go back to the Bible, but to return to the Church Fathers. As Protestants, we need to hear this. We need to embrace our rich family story. We need to sit at the feet of our Fathers and Mothers. We are the Catholic Church.

October 31, 2022 addendum: I originally wrote this article back in 2017. As I’ve continued to study these myths over the past four years I’ve become increasingly convinced that Luther may not have actually nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to the church door on October 31 at all. It is possible that the Theses were posted on that door at some point, but the historical evidence for the significance of the October 31, 1517 date is that on that day Luther sent a letter to Albert the Archbishop of Mainz, who had employed Tetzel to preach his indulgences and was himself delivering the money to Rome, complaining of the sale of indulgences in Saxony. Attached to the letter was the Ninety-Five Theses. When Albert received the Theses he circulated it ostensibly to get help in debunking Luther’s iron clad arguments. From this, a printer in Basel got a hold of the Theses, printed the document, and the rest is history. Thus, October 31 is a significant date for the history of the Protestant Reformation, however, it may not be because Luther did any nailing of theses to doors on that day. Sorry to ruin it for you.

Work and Pray

Ora et labora: pray and work.

This was the motto of the medieval monk. This simple phrase moved the life of prayer from the realm of the ascetical heroism of the few to a life that was both accessible to normal Christians and helpful for society. Monks were called to a life of prayer, and pray they did.

But they also worked. They built. They planted. They copied texts by hand. They pastored churches. But in all that work their rhythm of life was set to the meter of daily prayer. Seven times a day, the monks would pray. Their life was one of meditation on God’s wondrous works. Their work flowed out from their prayers and enabled their work to be a vocation, a calling, that was defined by God’s goodness and love for the world, not one motivated by greed, success, pride, or jealousy.

It was not always this way for monks. The ancient monks of the Egyptian desert did not place work as a priority. Their goal was an ascetical ascent to God. Yet the goal of 6th century monastic father Benedict of Nursia was to set prayer and work in harmony. In order to do this he lessened the monastic requirements on prayer to make them more reasonable. He increased the provision for sleep, food, and drink so that the monks could be productive. His goal was not to ascetically bludgeon evil out of the monk, but to set the monk into an ordered life that valued work as an objective good and recognized the necessity of prayer in the life of the worker.

In essence, the daily prayer patterns that Benedict developed for his rule were designed to be a pattern of prayer that the worker could manage. It was intended to be reasonable and doable. It was intended to uplift and encourage, not berate and punish.  

The monk’s life was, as one commentator on The Rule of St. Benedict put it, “an intensely lived Christianity.” Their life was more intense in prayer and in the denial of some worldly goods. Yet the monastic call to prayer was never just for monks, it was for all, even if monks were the only ones ever to fully attain to it. St. Francis, after visiting the Sultan of Egypt remarked at the devotion of Muslim peoples and their commitment to prayer. In a letter to Christian rulers he suggested that cities emulate the Muslim public calls to prayer with a bell or a trumpet or some sort of public audible sign so that Christians everywhere would be called to pray. In the early Church, Hippolytus of Rome encouraged all Christians to pray, at least some kind of prayer, seven times a day according to the Psalmist who wrote, “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous rules,” (Psalm 119:164).

The Protestant Reformation, one might say, was not an effort to do away with all the emphases of monasticism entirely, but to return the positive aspects of monastic spirituality to all the people. This was in effect to turn the entire Christian church into a monastery, a “School for Christ,” as Benedict of Nursia himself put it, and as Knox notably called Calvin’s Geneva a thousand years later. The Reformation was about returning the spirituality of the Church back to the people. It did not intend to remove anything from the richness of the faith.

The phrase ora et labora, pray and work, shows us the goodness of work. It also communicates the need for prayer. All of us work. We work and work and work. There is no end to our work. But is our work good?  Do we have this notion that work is secular and prayer is sacred? Do we drive a hard division in between our work during the week and our prayers on Sunday? The scriptures tell us that our work is good. The Christian faith has not driven such a hard wedge between the sacred and the secular. While prayer is not needed to sanctify work, (work is a created good), returning prayer to work reinforces work’s goodness and helps to push against the forces of this world which seek to turn our work toward evil and unhelpful and unhealthy paths.

Ora et labora also shows us the need for prayer in our lives. We need to pray. Paul says, “Pray without ceasing.” Yet do any of us really know how to go about doing that? Daily prayer on the pattern of the divine hours gives us a pattern for prayer that we can keep.

Work needs prayer. Prayer needs work. We cannot continue to do our best work unless we stop to fill our tanks with the spiritual fuel of word and prayer. The best work is done from a tank that is filled to the top, a goblet of goodly wine that is full to the brim and overflowing, as David wrote. This is a kind of prayer, you see, not just for the various prayer needs of our lives, but a formative prayer: a prayer that forms, shapes, molds; a prayer that fills us and renews us and restores us. There is room in that prayer for petitioning God according to our needs. But the main force of the daily office is to fill our tanks, to nourish and strengthen us, to make us better Christians out in the working world.

Ora et labora. Pray and work.

This essay originally appeared at Mere Orthodoxy. Please visit their great website.