4 REASONS FOR NOT OBSERVING ECCLESIASTICAL HOLIDAYS

4 REASONS FOR NOT OBSERVING ECCLESIASTICAL HOLIDAYS
Posted on 12/24/2019 by Nate

Presbyterians everywhere know about James Bannerman’s monumental work, The Church of Christ: A Treatise On The Nature, Powers, Ordinances, Discipline, And Government Of The Christian Church, which according to Joel Beeke is the “most extensive, standard, solid, Reformed treatment of the doctrine of the church that has ever been written” and “indisputably the classic in its field.”

Appropriately, and wisely, James Bannerman devotes a section to the utter dismantling of the observance of ecclesiastical anniversary days, falsely called “holy-days.” Bannerman takes up this subject in:

PART III.—MATTERS IN REGARD TO WHICH CHURCH POWER IS EXERCISED
DIV. II.—CHURCH POWER EXERCISED IN REGARD TO Ordinances
SUBDIV. II.—THE TIME FOR PUBLIC WORSHIP
II. Ecclesiastical Holidays

In the background, Bannerman (as a confessional Presbyterian) recognized the fact that Christ alone is King and Head of His Church, and therefore the Church is not allowed to do whatever she wants. Her power is limited by parameters set by Christ, in his Word.

This is why historic, Reformed Protestants have formulated the “Regulative Principle of Worship” (RPW) in their confessions and catechisms. For example, the Westminster Confession of Faith, subscribed by James Bannerman and Presbyterians everywhere, states:

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.

The RPW can also be stated positively and negatively, as in the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s exposition of the 2nd Commandment:

Q. 50. What is required in the second commandment?
A. The second commandment requireth the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire, all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath appointed in his word.

Q. 51. What is forbidden in the second commandment?
A. The second commandment forbiddeth the worshiping of God by images, or any other way not appointed in his word.

Westminster’s Directory for the Public Worship of God also set down the application of the RPW to “holidays,” in “AN APPENDIX, Touching Days and Places for Public Worship”

THERE is no day commanded in scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord’s day, which is the Christian Sabbath.

Festival-days, vulgarly called “Holy-days”, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.

In fact, Bannerman quotes the above portion of the Directory for Worship before doing an in-depth evaluation of the lawfulness of holy-days appointed by church authority.

ONE OF THE EARLIEST CORRUPTIONS
Bannerman introduces the subject of holidays in this way:

The introduction of anniversary days, set apart for special purposes of devotion, was one of the earliest examples of the observance or appointment of uncommanded rites and ceremonies finding its way into the Christian society. Days consecrated to the memory of particular events in the history of our Lord’s life and sufferings, and death, and resurrection, were early introduced and solemnized; and next in order, and following rapidly after them, we find the introduction of days dedicated to the remembrance of apostles, and saints, and martyrs,—a practice which, growing apace, at length filled the year with saints’ days, and has crowded the calendar of the Romish Church with an untold number of fasts, and feasts, and superstitions.

(Loc. 6353)
Bannerman then helpfully points out the two underlying issues. This narrows the field of argument.

There are two elements that enter into the notion of ecclesiastical holidays. First, they are public and general appointments, made binding by the ordinance of the Church upon all its members, and not merely private anniversaries of a voluntary kind, which each man individually may find it to be right or profitable for himself personally to observe; and second, they are stated and permanent appointments by the Church, recurring as regularly in religious service as the weekly Sabbath, and constituting part of ordinary worship, and not merely occasional and extraordinary appointments.

(Loc. 6423)
Regarding the first element, we are not talking about private and voluntary observation. We are talking about the church.

That second element is important to remember, for it will serve as a “warning light.” When the church as set a time of corporate worship for commemoration, and that day comes around every year (an anniversary), then that day has become as regular as the Lord’s Day. That means it does not count as an “occasional day” of thanksgiving. Rather, the regular worship of God has been added to. To state it as simply as it really is: it’s not occasional if it’s a fixed date on the calendar.

James Bannerman then evaluates church-instituted holidays according to the 4 biblical principles that limit church power, applied throughout his book:

Scripture, as the rule for the exercise of Church power
The authority of Christ, as the source of Church power
The liberty and edification of Christ’s people, the grand aim and end of Church power
The true nature of Church power, as exclusively spiritual
Below are excerpts from all 4 headings, to distill his argument.

I. SCRIPTURE, AS THE RULE FOR THE EXERCISE OF CHURCH POWER, FORBIDS THE APPOINTMENT OF ECCLESIASTICAL HOLIDAYS.
Under the Gospel dispensation, and within the New Testament, it cannot be pretended that there is any countenance to be found for the binding obligation of any sacred day except the weekly Sabbath. . . Nor can it be alleged that there is anything in the New Testament beyond a bare permission to the Jewish converts to use such days, and that granted only in accommodation to their weak consciences, and for no more than a time.

(Loc. 6437)
1st, The very terms of the grand Sabbatical law, as announced in the fourth commandment, seem very emphatically to mark out the Sabbath itself as the only day statedly to be separated from other days for the peculiar service of God, and withdrawn, in the ordinary practice of the Church, from common and secular avocations. This is not obscurely intimated in the very language instituting the ordinance: “Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.” The boundary line drawn around that portion of time given to man for his secular and necessary avocations is here as sharply and distinctly marked as the boundary line drawn around the portion of time appropriated to God. . . Ecclesiastical holidays traverse and permanently encroach upon this grand principle laid down in the fourth commandment; and they must therefore be held to be clearly discountenanced by it.

(Loc. 6451)
2d, The Apostle Paul very distinctly includes holidays among the number of the things belonging to the bondage of a former dispensation, not to be considered binding upon those who had entered into the freedom of the Gospel. In his Epistle to the Galatians, much of which is directed to the object of vindicating the liberty wherewith Christ has made his people free through the Gospel, he rebukes the Church of Galatia for the importance they attached to the requirements of the legal dispensation, and among these to the observance of holidays.

(Loc. 6465)
3d, In the Epistle to the Colossians the same apostle comes forth with a no less emphatic condemnation of Church holidays. Referring to the marvellous fulness of those privileges which in Christ and with Him belong to every believer, the apostle condemns the value put on the observance or non-observance of mere outward ceremonies.

(Loc. 6465)
II. THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST, AS THE SOURCE OF CHURCH POWER, LIMITS IT SO AS TO EXCLUDE THE RIGHT OF APPOINTING ECCLESIASTICAL HOLIDAYS.
The observance of that day above the rest, as part of the ordinary worship of the Church, is an act of adoration to Christ, as much as a hymn in His praise would be an expression of adoration to Christ. And who does not see, that upon the very same principle the observance of holidays appointed by the Church, as ordinary and stated parts of Divine worship, is an expression of religious homage to man, who is the author of the appointment,—an unlawful acknowledgment of human or ecclesiastical authority in an act of worship. In keeping, after a religious sort, a day that has no authority but man’s, we are paying a religious homage to that authority; we are bowing down, in the very act of our observance of the day as part of worship, not to Christ, who has not appointed it, but to the Church, which has. We are keeping the season holy, not to God, but to man.

Such uncommanded seasons, observed in religious worship as a part of it, cannot but be an unlawful encroachment upon the authority of Christ. They are instituted, not in His name, but in man’s. They are kept, not in His name, but in the Church’s name. They are holy, and honoured as holy, not because of His authority, but because of ecclesiastical authority.

(Loc. 6493)
III. THE LIBERTY AND EDIFICATION OF CHRIST’S PEOPLE, THE GRAND AIM AND END OF CHURCH POWER, ARE INCONSISTENT WITH THAT EXERCISE OF IT WHICH ORDAINS ECCLESIASTICAL HOLIDAYS.
The appointment of ecclesiastical holidays, as parts of worship addressed to God, is inconsistent with the right exercise of conscience in the matter; and that whether the conscience is offended and grieved by the introduction of human and uncommanded ordinances in Divine service, or whether the conscience, deluded and ignorant as to the sin, has no sense of the injury and wrong done to it.

(Loc. 6507)
. . . That the conscience should be taught and trained, in a matter of conscience, to yield a passive and unconscious submission,—that in the very worship of God the conscience should be instructed to own the obligation, not of God’s authority, but of man’s,—that the act of religious service should be a homage, done, not to Christ, but to the Church,—this is to destroy true and intelligent liberty of conscience; and the deed is all the worse, and not the better, because the conscience is made to feel no wrong, but rather to love the yoke that binds it.

(Loc. 6521)
IV. THE TRUE NATURE OF CHURCH POWER, AS EXCLUSIVELY SPIRITUAL, EXCLUDES THE IMPOSITION OF HOLIDAYS AS STATED AND ORDINARY PARTS OF WORSHIP.
The controversy with the friends of uncommanded ordinances, such as ecclesiastical holidays, in Divine worship, is very much the controversy which the Apostle Paul so strenuously maintained with the Judaizers of his day, who sought to bring into the spirituality and simplicity of the Gospel Church the carnal observances of a carnal economy that had been abrogated. For the Church to appoint and enforce such days, is a departure from the spirituality of that dispensation which is emphatically the dispensation of the Spirit; and a step, and no small one, backward in the direction of that fleshly system that had been done away with. There were under that former economy holy places, more sacred to God and more acceptable in His sight than others. There were holy seasons, in which more than in others the presence of God was enjoyed, and the prayers of His worshippers were effectual. There was a formal consecration of places and times, by which the Jews were taught and warranted to connect the presence of God more particularly with one spot of earth and with certain seasons than with others.

(Loc. 6521)
There is something mysteriously sublime in that peculiar holiness which distinguishes the Sabbath as the only holy day known under the Gospel dispensation, marked out as it is from all time, since time itself began to be numbered; and connecting, as it seems intended to do, the narrow section of time which belongs to the history of this world with that eternity into which it is about to be merged. For the ordinance of the Lord’s Day shall bear witness to His resurrection, as the ordinance of the Lord’s Table speaks of His death, “till He come again.” It was the Sabbath of God the Father at the creation,—a day of His eternal subsistence let down from heaven, and inserted among the days that then began to be counted on the unfallen earth. It was the Sabbath of God the Son at the redemption,—another day of heavenly rest let down from on high, and inserted amid the days of evil and sorrow which this fallen world had so long numbered,—a day on which the Redeemer rested and was refreshed, when His work was done. And now the Sabbath day both of creation and redemption awaits the development of the Divine dispensations, and points forward to a higher, so surely coming, when the earthly day shall be taken up into the heavenly, and become the Sabbath of God the Holy Ghost,—when He too shall rest from His special work, as the Father and the Son rested before, and shall repose and be refreshed in the contemplation and enjoyment, throughout eternity, of His finished work of grace and spiritual renovation.

(Loc. 6550)