By getting rid of the church year and all Christian holidays, the Puritans left a vacuum that would ultimately be filled by the non-religious ordering of time, thus reintroducing the idea that there exists a secular world that functions separately to religious categories. Of course, it should not be overlooked that the Puritan antipathy to the church calendar was not initially motivated by a dualistic impulse. In fact, quite the contrary: their rejection of Christmas and all other religious holidays was rooted in the notion that the entire years was sanctified. Nevertheless, the Puritan’s strict adherence to the regulative principle, whereby all things not explicitly prescribed in scripture as part of worship were therefore forbidden from worship, helped (when combined with numerous other social, political and religious factors) to create a duality in the culture that emerged in their wake, especially in North America. By relinquishing the Christian narrative from the calendar, the Puritans created the template for a culture that would be evacuated of its religious moorings. First this would manifest itself in a sense of culture as an autonomous institution running parallel to the church; secondly, culture would become a system in actual competition with the church. By rejecting the church year as one legitimate way to tell and retell the story of redemption, the Puritans helped to underscore the sense of evangelical religion as disembodied, detached from the space-time continuum.
To read more about the church year, see my previous blog post "Church Calendar."
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You wrote, "the church year as one legitimate way to tell and retell the story of redemption". I was just telling my wife this evening of this very asset to following the ecclesiastical annual cicle. Funny you should mention it....
ReplyDeleteThe overall apologetic of the Puritans was that if something was "catholic", meaning if the Roman Church did it, it was wrong. Like all "art" there is nothing "necessary" about the church year. It is not commanded. It is "not biblical." This is an example the problem with the Regulative Principle. It's like objecting to sending candy and flowers to your wife because it's not in the contract, it's not written down, it's not "necessary" ("I don't have to tell her I love her because I act like it every day.") Special days are not necessary like anniversaries and birthdays if we love somebody because every day is special. But if every day is special then no day is special. The liturgical calendar is an application of an example. God showed Israel how to sanctify space and time by ritual and worship. If Israel was discipled by living through the Exodus story in prescribed special days, why wouldn't the church disciple all nations by a liturgical calendar of living through the story of Jesus who is the gospel? The example and pattern is given in the OT and so there was no command needed in the NT. This is the problem with "NT Christianity". Ultimately if falls into some form of Marcianism. When St. Paul wrote "All scripture is inspired and profitable..." he was referring to the OT because the NT was in the process of being written. Protestants too easily forget this. Ultimately such legalism is doomed to fail because it cannot handle the tridium of culture - Is it true? Is it good? Is it beautify? There are so many necessary things we do that are "un-biblical" because they are good and beautiful and some others because they are true. Perhaps this is best seen in the Puritan war on Christmas. Not even truly informed Roman Catholics really "believe" that Jesus was born on December 25th. That is besides the point. It is not about the literal event. It is about the universal symbolism that disciples the whole of man. It is the truth of poetry which is a very different thing than the truth of prose or of a dictionary or of some recipe or law book. Truth, beauty and goodness because it is all about love goes way beyond just the literal facts. This is why all forms of Puritan experiments are doomed to fail. As part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church they are a valuable voice to purify and reform what can get muddled. Once they separated from that universal body they only became another schism, lost their grounding, and I believe lost their calling. They ultimately couldn't qualify as "church" qua church because they became a split, not to say they weren't Christians and better ones than most, but they lost their connection to the whole (IMHO). PML+
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