Holy Days and the New Testament

Holy Days and the New Testament

Should the church keep a calendar of feasts?

The Lord’s Day

Easter

Pentecost

Holy Week

Lent

Christmas

Epiphany

All Saints, All Souls and Halloween

Ascension Day

Candlemas

Advent

The Marian Feasts

The Transfiguration

The Annunciation

St. Patrick’s Day

Trinity Sunday

Corpus Christi

Valentine’s Day

Thanksgiving

Reformation Day

Every holiday page turns on one question: may the church add to its worship what God did not give, if He did not forbid it? Churches that answer no hold the regulative principle; churches that answer yes, the normative. Catholic and Orthodox churches use neither name: they ground worship in Scripture and in Tradition, the practice handed down in the church.

This site measures worship by the pattern of the New Testament church, and so stands with the first answer, with one distinction it takes from the text. A general command leaves the means to judgment: “teach” names no building, hour or songbook, so those serve the command rather than add to it. A specific command excludes other kinds: the Lord gave the church its day and its memorial, so a second, yearly holy day is another kind of thing, not a way of keeping the first (A2).

The regulative principle

The Westminster Confession (H4) and the strict Presbyterian churches; Reformed Baptists; the Churches of Christ, who hold it in their own form (H5).

The normative principle

Lutherans and Anglicans (who call such things adiaphora, “things indifferent”); Methodists; most evangelicals in practice.

The Lutheran confession keeps church usages that can be kept without sin and serve good order, holy days among them, but forbids binding the conscience with them.

Of Usages in the Church they teach that those ought to be observed which may be observed without sin, and which are profitable unto tranquillity and good order in the Church, as particular holy-days, festivals, and the like. Nevertheless, concerning such things men are admonished that consciences are not to be burdened, as though such observance was necessary to salvation.

Written by John Knox and others for the Scottish Reformation, it judges Christmas and the saints’ and Marian feasts to be abolished, because Scripture neither commands nor warrants them.

Which things, because in God’s scriptures they neither have commandment nor assurance, we judge them utterly to be abolished from this realm

The Dutch Reformed keep the regulative principle in their confession but provide for five feast days: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, the Circumcision and the Ascension. The principle has never been applied the same way in every church that holds it.

The fullest statement of the regulative principle. The Directory for worship (1645) had already set aside festival days as having no warrant in the word of God; the Confession keeps the Lord’s Day as “the Christian Sabbath”.

But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped 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.

In western Pennsylvania, the Presbyterian minister whose work the Churches of Christ trace their plea to gives the maxim “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; and where they are silent, we are silent”, the same year he writes the Declaration and Address. Those churches came to read Scripture’s silence on a practice of worship as leaving it out, and they keep no church holy days.

The church has one day, and it is weekly

The New Testament shows the church gathering on the first day of the week, and gives it no yearly feast (S1, S2, S3).

Luke tells why the church at Troas came together: “to break bread”, “upon the first day of the week” (S1). Paul tells the churches to set aside their giving on that same day (S2), and John calls it “the Lord’s day” (S3). That is the whole calendar the apostles left the church. No yearly feast is commanded, and none is shown being kept: not the birth, not the resurrection as an annual day, not Pentecost. Every yearly holiday on the ruler above was added after the apostles, some within a century or two and some in the last few.

How early a practice began does not make it apostolic. The test is not its age but the text.

Worship is God’s to give

God rejected worship He had not commanded, and Jesus called worship by human precepts vain (S4, S5).

Nadab and Abihu offered fire “which he had not commanded them” (S4). The text does not say God had forbidden it; it says He had not commanded it, and that was enough. Jesus applied Isaiah to the Pharisees: worship that teaches “the precepts of men” as doctrine is in vain (S5).

This does not mean every detail of a meeting needs a verse. A general command leaves the means to judgment: the church is told to teach and to sing, and a building, an hour or a songbook serves those commands. A specific command excludes other kinds: the church was given its day and its memorial, so a feast added beside them is another kind of act, not a way of keeping the one God gave. Declining what the text does not give stands on the text. Binding an incidental as a test of fellowship, on a premise the text never states, would be a fault of its own.

The three texts on days

Romans 14 leaves a believer’s regard for a day to conscience; Colossians 2 and Galatians 4 forbid binding days on anyone (S6, S7, S8).

These three passages come up in every holiday debate, and both sides misuse them.

Romans 14 is about believers who differed over foods and days, most likely Jewish believers who still kept the law’s days. Paul names no day. He does not tell the church to keep one; he tells each believer to be “fully assured in his own mind” and forbids each to judge the other (S6). So it does not authorize a church feast. It does leave a believer free to regard a day “unto the Lord”.

Colossians 2 names the law’s calendar, “a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day”, and calls it “a shadow of the things to come” (S7). No one may judge a Christian for not keeping it. Read with verses 20-23, it sets aside every rule of days and foods imposed “after the precepts and doctrines of men”.

Galatians 4 is Paul’s sharpest word. Gentile believers were taking up the law’s days to stand right with God, and he fears his labor was “in vain” (S8). The text strikes at days made necessary. Whether the days were Jewish or pagan is debated; either way, Paul does not cite it against a believer’s free regard for a day, and neither should we without saying so.

God condemns a practice because He “commanded not, neither came it into my mind”. Silence forbids.

The practice here, burning children, was also forbidden outright (Leviticus 18:21), so this text alone cannot prove that silence forbids. What it does show is how God judges worship: by what He commanded, not by what worshipers devised. The stronger texts for the principle are Nadab and Abihu (S4) and the Lord’s own word on human precepts (S5).

The New Testament gives aims, not a fixed order of service, so the church may arrange its worship, holy days included, within general rules.

Order and decency govern how the church carries out what it was given: who speaks, when, and in what order. They are general rules, and they leave the means to judgment. They do not license a new kind of act, and a yearly holy day is not an order of speakers but a sacred time added to the church’s worship (A2).

The feast of the dedication (Hanukkah) was not commanded in the law, yet Jesus was at the temple during it. So a feast of human origin is not wrong.

John says it was the feast and that Jesus walked in the temple; he does not say Jesus kept the feast, and Jesus taught in the temple at many seasons. Even if He did, it was Israel under the law, not the church of the new covenant. The passage cannot give the church a calendar the apostles never gave it (A1).

Columns

• Catholic
• Orthodox
• Anglican
• Lutheran
• Strict Reformed
• Methodist
• Baptist and free
• Pentecostal
• Seventh-day Adventist
• Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Armstrong Churches of God
• Quaker
• Churches of Christ

A sample, not a census: each column is a family’s usual practice, and congregations within it differ. “Strict Reformed” means churches that hold the regulative principle to the letter; Dutch and other continental Reformed churches keep several feasts (H3). Many cells, especially for the smaller families and the minor feasts, are inferred from a family’s general stance rather than a statement on that day. In the Churches of Christ column, a dash means no religious observance in the church; many members keep Christmas, Thanksgiving and other days at home as family and national holidays.

Study

• Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:2 and Revelation 1:10 all name one day. Why might the Lord have given His church a weekly day and no yearly ones?
• Nadab and Abihu offered what God “had not commanded” (Leviticus 10:1). Where is the line between a means that serves a command and a new kind of act added beside it?
• Romans 14:5 and Galatians 4:10 both speak of days, in very different tones. What is the difference between the people Paul writes to in each?
• Some holidays first appear within two centuries of the apostles, others in the last two. Should that make any difference to whether the church keeps them?

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