The Bible and... Part6h: Tradition: The Christian Year

The Bible and... Part6h: Tradition: The Christian Year
Monday, June 10, 2024 by Dr. James W. Walraven

Categories: Apologetics / Contemporary issues / Scripture discussion / Spiritual deception / The church / Thought for Today

The Christian Year: Why did celebrating it become a problem?

When looking at the history of the Christian Year, we find that what started out as a feast cycle celebrating the life of Christ, ended up emphasizing just about everything else.

One of the first things to be lost was the celebration of the Easter Season, known as the great 50 days. The Church, especially in the West, became increasingly penitential. Rather than focusing on what Christ had done, the emphasis centered more and more on what we needed to do for Him. We had to demonstrate we were worthy of His forgiveness, we had to make amends for our sins, just accepting His forgiveness was not enough.

The first to go was the last ten days of the Easter Season. The time of joyful anticipation more or less ended after forty days, at the time of Christ’s Ascension. As Lent grew in prominence, even the first forty days came to have less and less importance.

Where the church ended up was forty days of sorrow and woe. Since Jesus gave up His life for us, giving up something for Him assumed ever greater importance (note: the practice can be a good thing, when the primary focus is on what Christ did, His sacrifice, not what we do). For practical purposes, Pascha was reduced to just one day. A huge imbalance resulted: from the original forty days of sorrow, lament, and preparation balanced by fifty days of joyful celebration, to forty days of sorrow and woe followed by just one day of celebration. Sadly, within the Roman medieval Church, salvation became, and remains, blurred: instead of being by God’s grace alone, through faith in Christ alone, with works following as a result (see Ephesians 2:8–10), our works became a component of our salvation (note: not every Roman Catholic believes/practices this).

At least the cycle of life, the Christmas season, more or less kept its original focus and intent. As a much shorter cycle, coupled with the joy of Christmas, it didn’t suffer quite the same fate.

An even bigger problem was the cluttering of the calendar. As previously mentioned, eventually there were about 60 holy days. All kinds of various saint’s days were also introduced, and to this day, within Roman Catholicism there are eighteen feast days for Mary alone. These include: January 8: Our Lady of Prompt Succor; June 27: Our Mother of Perpetual Help; August 15: Mary’s Assumption into Heaven; August 22: the Queenship of Mary; September 8: the Birth of Mary; October 7: Our Lady of the Rosary, among others.

Biblically, who needs any of this? Do we want to adopt practices that not only take away from what Christ has done, but in essence blaspheme His uniqueness? No! It is easy to understand why many segments of what became the Protestant Church made the decision to throw out the Christian Year in its entirety. Unbiblical tradition had come to reign: fertile grounds for the writings of Hislop and others. However, compounding error by introducing new error isn’t helpful.

Nevertheless, there are other concerns regarding the Christian Year as well, concerns we’ll turn to in the next post.

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