to hold the Lord’s Supper four times a year, including on Christmas Day, but this was now changed and moved to the Sunday closest to December 25.34
Calvin was more relaxed on the issue of holy days than Farel or Bucer. He and others viewed the “evangelical feast days,”35 as they called them, not as a part of the Christian’s accomplishment of his or her salvation, as viewed by the Church of Rome, but as celebrations of the salvation that Christ had already accomplished for them in his incarnation (Christmas), death (Good Friday), resurrection (Easter), ascending to the Father (Ascension), and giving of his Spirit (Pentecost). He subsequently recommended that Christmas Day be observed in the morning only and that shops and trades resumed work as normal in the afternoon. These views are expressed in two different letters he sent, one from Geneva, dated January 2, 1551, to John Haller, pastor in Bern (previously an understudy to Bullinger in Zurich),36 and the other from Lausanne, dated March 1555, to the leaders of Bern.37 However, although Calvin permitted the retention of Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, and Ascension, the Council of Geneva disagreed with him and subsequently re-introduced the ban on all these “holy days” once again. Although the Council, during and after Calvin’s life, sought at times to reintroduce former practices, including reintroducing holidays such as Christmas into the church calendar, the Company of Pastors consistently rebuffed the attempts.38
Calvin’s Commentaries on the Bible are appreciated the world over; however, we only have them because he did so much consecutive preaching, selecting a Bible book then preaching through it week by week, chapter by chapter, and verse by verse. One of the benefits that Calvin received in Geneva was the appointment of a stenographer to record his sermons. As Calvin worked his way slowly and systematically through one book of the Bible at a time, he produced 123 sermons on Genesis, 200 sermons on Deuteronomy, 159 sermons on Job, 176 sermons on First and Second Corinthians, and 43 sermons on Galatians.39 Often, each year when it came to December 25, Calvin did not take a break from the book he was preaching through but continued unabated, irrespective of how relevant or irrelevant the verses were to Christ’s birth.
Following Calvin’s death in 1564, there was growing pressure from the Genevan population to reinstate holy days, including Christmas. This occurred in the context of a Roman Catholic resurgence that had a significant military dimension to it.
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), composed by Heinrich Bullinger (Zwingli’s successor in Zurich) and received by many Reformed churches, did not disapprove of Christmas, leaving it as a matter of liberty of conscience for churches to decide.
Theodore Beza (Calvin’s successor in Geneva who visited Zurich to liaise with Bullinger in compiling the Confession) wrote to Knox, requesting Scottish approval for the Confession. The General Assembly in Scotland replied with a letter of “general” approval. Nevertheless, the
Assembly could scarcely refrain from mentioning, with regard to what is written in the 24th chapter of the aforesaid Confession concerning the “festival of our Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, ascension, and sending the Holy Ghost upon his disciples,” that these festivals at the present time obtain no place among us; for we dare not religiously celebrate any other feast-day than what the divine oracles prescribed.40
The Dutch Reformed churches had been in the habit of keeping Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide (Pentecost) as days of religious worship. The Provincial Synod of Dort, 1574, enjoined the churches to do this no longer, but to be satisfied with Sundays only for divine service. One common factor that the Reformers constantly had to address was the attitude of the populace and the secular governments, who desired and stipulated respectively that certain feast days such as Christmas had to be observed. This often was not the preference of the church, but the church had to accommodate itself to the secular authority (another upshot of the unnatural relationship between church and state created by Rome).
In April 1605, the two-hundred strong Genevan Council requested the Company of Pastors to clarify their view respecting Christmas reinstatement. The Company responded by rejecting any such reinstatement and appealing to the happy memory of Calvin. They warned that the reinstatement of religious festivals would cause scandal and give the impression that Geneva was sliding back toward the Papal Church.41
This tension over holy days is evidenced by the following quote from the Dutch Calvinist theologian, Gisbert Voetius (1589–1676), in 1659 on Christmas and Good Friday:
Such articles are not characteristic or intrinsic or voluntary impulses proceeding from the heart of the church; but occasional, extrinsic (just as an eclipse is a characteristic phenomenon of the moon), imposed from the outside, burdensome to the churches, in and of themselves and in an absolute sense unwelcome. Synods were summoned, compelled and coerced to receive, bring in and admit these articles, as in the manner of a transaction, in order to prevent worse disagreeable and bad situations. . . .
Synods did not willingly furnish or institute [the annual observance of days] because they saw in them a better way or more edification. But they were instituted because of the necessity and imposition of them by the magistrate and the people, when after all attempts at stopping the observances, and the decree of Synod of 1574 to lay them aside, at a certain point of time they were not able to abrogate them—a fact they admitted in 1578.42
Francis Turretin (1623–1687), the acclaimed Reformed theologian in Geneva did not oppose Christmas, adopting a similar view to Bullinger. Both on the continent and in Britain, a struggle was emerging in Protestantism between those who viewed holy days as positively unscriptural and those who viewed them as convenient. The Anglican Church (in large part an artificial creation by Henry VIII to facilitate the success of his marital aspirations) also retained Christmas. As we noted in the Lutheran excursus above, although it developed a Protestant theology, the Anglican Church kept much of Roman Catholic liturgy, including festivals celebrating aspects of Christ’s life and the feast days of many saints. It gave special emphasis to the celebration of Christmas. In a subsequent chapter, we focus more closely on the attitude to Christmas in the church in Britain. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced many Christmas hymns in German. Among the most famous is, “Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen” (“All My Heart This Night Rejoices”), which was written by Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676). In addition, music by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), and Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) was adapted and used in Christmas carols. As an aside, the term “carol” is derived from Latin and from the old French “carole” meaning a circle-dance. In the Middle Ages, the use of these dance songs expanded in the religious realm as processional songs at Roman Catholic festivals. Their use fell into sharp decline following the Reformation, until being revived again in the nineteenth century by prominent composers.
In colonial America, the practice of Christmas all depended on the origin of the settlers. Those from Puritan England banned it and so it was outlawed in Boston from 1659 to 1681. The ban by the Pilgrims was only revoked in 1681 by an English governor and it was not until the 1850s that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region. In contrast, other parts such as New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, that were predominantly Moravian, openly kept the festival.
Rev. Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 the metamorphoses of the pagan holiday into a Christian one, in a pamphlet he published criticizing Christmas in his own day, A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs Now
