a word before we begin
My Friend, few subjects produce more needless quarreling among good Christians than the calendar. Should we keep Christmas, with its tree and its tinsel and its December date? Is Easter too tangled up with old pagan springtime rites? What about Halloween, with all its darkness? And what of the Jewish feasts; ought a Christian to be keeping Passover and Hanukkah? On every one of these, sincere believers have drawn their swords.
I want to do something a little different in these pages. I am not going to hand you a list of approved and forbidden holidays, because the Word of God does not hand us one, and I will not invent what He did not give. What I want to give you instead is the principle underneath all of it, one clear, freeing, biblical principle that settles every holiday question the same way, and then sets you free to stop quarreling and stop fearing and actually live.
And I will warn you, as I always do: this will likely step on a toe or two no matter where you stand. If you are the sort who frets that everything has a pagan root, I am going to ask you to lay the fear down. If you are the sort who feels you simply must keep this day or that one, I am going to take away your obligation. And somewhere in the middle I am going to say a hard word about the way the church has reduced the living Christ to a single day on the calendar. Stay with me through all of it, because what waits at the end is the best thing the gospel offers on this whole subject: freedom.
Let us begin where the apostle Paul begins, with a believer set genuinely free concerning days.
chapter one
free concerning days
We must settle the foundation first, because once it is settled, half the quarrels simply dissolve. The believer in Christ is free concerning days. Not bound to them, and not forbidden them; free. And that is not my clever opinion; it is the plain teaching of the apostle Paul, who faced these very fights in the early church and answered them with a liberty that ought to have ended the arguing forever.
The first passage is his word to the Romans.
Read that slowly. One believer treats a certain day as special; another treats every day the same. And Paul does not step in to settle which one is right. He says, let each be fully persuaded in his own mind. He hands the matter to the individual conscience before God and refuses to make a law of it either direction. He says the same thing to the Colossians, even more pointedly, and names the very categories we still fight over.
Let no man judge you. Not the man who keeps the day, and not the man who does not. This is the heart of it, and notice that the freedom cuts in both directions, which is exactly why it makes nearly everyone a little uncomfortable. It cuts against the believer who says you must not keep Christmas because of where some custom came from; he is judging you in respect of a holyday. And it cuts just as hard against the believer who says you simply must keep this feast or that observance to be truly faithful; he is binding a conscience God left free. Both have appointed themselves judges over a thing the Lord turned loose.
So plant your feet here before we take another step. On the matter of days and holidays, you are free. You may keep them or not keep them. You may love Christmas and ignore the church calendar, or treasure every season and feast, or treat every day exactly alike, and in none of it are you more or less spiritual than your brother who chose differently, so long as each of you does what he does unto the Lord and is fully persuaded in his own mind. Most of what remains in this booklet is simply working that one freedom out, holiday by holiday, and clearing away the fears and the obligations that have been piled on top of it.
the panic over roots
is waiting for you
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sources & notes
- The claim that December 25 was simply appropriated from the Roman feast of Sol Invictus (or from Saturnalia) is widely repeated but seriously contested. The earliest firm evidence for Sol Invictus being celebrated on December 25 is the Chronograph of A.D. 354, whereas Christian association of the date with the Nativity is attested earlier (e.g., in Hippolytus, early third century). Many scholars now favor the “calculation” or “annunciation” hypothesis, by which the date was reckoned from the supposed date of Christ’s conception and death rather than borrowed from paganism. See Andrew McGowan, “How December 25 Became Christmas,” Biblical Archaeology Review (2002); and Steven Hijmans, “Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas,” Mouseion (2003).
- The English weekday names preserve the names of Norse and Roman deities: Thursday from Thor (Old Norse Þórsdagr), Saturday from the Roman Saturn (Latin dies Saturni); likewise Wednesday from Woden and Friday from Frigg. Standard etymological dictionaries of English document the derivations.
- There is no evidence of a fixed forty-day Lenten fast in the pre-Nicene church; the first clear references appear around the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), and the forty-day observance became widespread only through the fourth century, with later refinements (e.g., Ash Wednesday) added afterward. See the summaries in the standard reference works on the liturgical year and, for the primary evidence, Thomas Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (1986).
- The Greek pascha (πάσχα) is a transliteration of the Aramaic/Hebrew pesach (פֶּסַח), “Passover,” from the verb meaning to pass or spring over (Exodus 12). See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Passover”; cf. 1 Corinthians 5:7.