WHY DO PRESBYTERIANS OBSERVE HOLY DAYS?
Autor: Marcelo Matos | Publicado: 2012-11-13T15:04:00-08:00


Andrew Webb

Dr. Samuel 
Miller, Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Church Government at 
Princeton Seminary wrote confidently in 1835 “Presbyterians do not 
observe Holy Days.” 1
 Yet some 164 years after the book in which Miller made that bold 
declaration was published, an informal survey of 30 churches in the 
Presbyterian Church in America, the largest of the theologically 
conservative Presbyterian bodies in the United States, indicated that 
83% of the churches do regularly celebrate Holy Days.

What 
happened in those intervening 164 years? Did the practice of 
Presbyterians change significantly in that time or was Miller’s 
declaration inaccurate when he made it? What might have brought about 
such a radical change if it did in fact occur? This essay will seek to 
answer these questions. Because of space constraints, considerably more 
time will be spent examining the history of the development of 
Presbyterian practice in the United States regarding Holy Days than in 
examining the theological foundations for that practice. Nevertheless, 
it is appropriate to begin by discussing the theological reasoning 
behind Dr. Miller’s declaration.

Presbyterians,
 and indeed most Christians, who describe their theology as 
distinctively “Reformed”, believe that the Worship of the Church is one 
of the most important aspects of the Faith. Furthermore they believe 
that this worship must be guided by the theology of the Bible. What 
makes the worship of those whose theological roots are in the Puritan 
wing of the Reformation distinctive, is their belief that the only 
worship that is acceptable before God, is that worship which is 
expressly commanded in His word, the Bible. This Puritan belief is 
succinctly summed up in the most important of the Puritan Creedal 
documents, The Westminster Confession of Faith, in the first section of 
the twenty-first chapter:


The light of
 nature showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty 
over all, is good, and doth good unto all, and is therefore to be 
feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all 
the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. 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 
accordance with their beliefs, the Puritans attempted to ensure that 
only those elements that were directly instituted by God were present in
 their worship. Such worship was distinctively different from that of 
other Protestants such as the Lutherans and Anglicans, who tended to 
believe that true worship consisted of that which was commanded by God and
 anything which was not specifically condemned. Accordingly, outside of 
the Puritan wing of the Reformation, many innovations in worship that 
had been adopted by the Church since the closing of the Canon were 
retained. The fact that the Anglican church in particular retained many 
of these innovations is particularly important, because it was in the 
attempt to thoroughly reform the Church of England that the majority of 
the Puritan battles were waged, and it was out of these battles that the
 Presbyterian Confessional Standards came.

Amongst 
those innovations that continued to be practiced by the Anglican church 
after they broke with Rome, was the observance of what had come to be 
called the Church Year. The Church Year consisted of a series 
of festivals or feast days on which the church traditionally held 
special worship services and employed particular liturgies. While feast 
days were most commonly held to celebrate the birth or martyrdom of a 
Saint, the two most popular feast days in the Anglican Church were 
undoubtedly Christmas and Easter, which celebrated the birth and 
resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Puritans did not observe 
Christmas and Easter because they did not wish to celebrate the birth of
 Jesus Christ, but because they believed that God had instituted a cycle
 not of two special feast days, but of fifty two holy days on which to 
glorify Jesus Christ and to preach on the importance of his birth, 
death, and resurrection.

These fifty 
two holy days were, of course, Sunday – the Lord’s day. The Puritans 
observed every Sunday as the New Testament continuation of the Old 
Testament Sabbath day of rest and worship:


As it is the
 law of nature, that, in general, a due proportion of time be set apart 
for the worship of God; so, in his Word, by a positive, moral, and 
perpetual commandment binding all men in all ages, he hath particularly 
appointed one day in seven, for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto him: 
which, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, 
was the last day of the week, and, from the resurrection of Christ, was 
changed into the first day of the week, which, in Scripture, is called 
the Lord’s day, and is to be continued to the end of the world, as the 
Christian Sabbath.2


For the Puritans, these Christian Sabbaths were the only
 days that were specifically set aside by the Lord for worship. There 
had indeed been specific feast days apart from the Sabbath in the Old 
Testament period, but the Puritans felt that these feast days were part 
of the Ceremonial Law, and as such had passed away when Christ, the 
reality which they foreshadowed, appeared. The Sabbath, on the other 
hand, as both a creation ordinance (cf. Genesis 2:2-3) and part of the 
Moral Law (Exodus 20:8-11) was an occasion to be observed by all of the 
people of God throughout all the ages.

Part of the 
proof for the Puritans that new feast days were not to be created and 
observed was the fact that they had not been invented or observed by 
either the Apostolic or the early Church. The Scriptures contained no 
references whatsoever to the actual dates on which the events which were
 later celebrated were to be observed had occurred. The church did not 
begin to seriously conjecture as to when these events had taken place 
until the third century AD and it was not until the fourth century AD 
that the church began to celebrate the feast of the nativity (Christmas)
 for instance. The placement by the church of this event on December 25th
 had less to do with the date they felt was most likely for the birth of
 Christ, than the desire to undermine the celebration of the Saturnalia,
 a pagan festival beginning on the December 17th, with a rival Christian holiday. The choice of December 25th, the winter solstice, was made because the Roman Emperor Aurelian, had decreed in 274 AD that December 25th was to be kept as a public festival in honor of the Invincible Sun.3 The choice of the 25th
 was therefore both an attempt to challenge the Pagan feast day and to 
maximize on the obvious metaphor between the “invincible sun” of Roman 
Paganism and the “Invincible Son” (Jesus Christ) of Christianity.

But more 
important than the questionable circumstances of their institution for 
the Puritans, was the simple fact that the celebration of these holy 
days had no warrant in the Word of God. On the contrary, the Puritans 
and their descendants were concerned that the Word of God forbade their celebration:


We believe 
that the Scriptures not only do not warrant the observance of such days,
 but that they positively discountenance it. Let any one impartially 
weigh Colossians ii. 16 and also, Galatians iv. 9, 10, 11; and then say 
whether these passages do not evidently indicate, that the inspired 
Apostle disapproved of the observance of such days.4


Another 
concern for the Puritans was the mode in which these Feast Days were 
commonly celebrated. In English society at the beginning of the 17th
 century the celebration of Christmas had become particularly 
scandalous. Far from being a season of dignified worship it had become a
 prolonged bacchanal that seemed to have more to do with the original 
feasting and festivity of the Roman Saturnalia than the celebration of 
Christ’s birth:


Celebrants 
devoted much of the season to pagan pleasures that were discouraged 
during the remainder of the year. The annual indulgence in eating, 
dancing, singing, sporting, card playing, and gambling escalated to 
magnificent proportions.5


Accordingly 
Puritan condemnation of the festival of Christmas in particular often 
focused on the common abuses of the holiday. William Prynne’s Histriomastix (1633)
 for instance commented “Into what a stupendous height of more than 
pagan impiety… have we not now degenerated!” Another common complaint 
was that well over half of the days on the calendar were holy days. This
 seriously cut into the amount of time that could be spent occupied in 
labor. It seemed to John Northbrooke, another English Reformer writing 
in 1577, that the Pope, “not God in his word” had appointed Holy days 
“to traine up the people in ignorance and ydleness, wherby half of the 
year, and more, was overpassed (by their ydle holy-dayes) in loytering 
and vaine pastimes &amp; c., in restrayning men from their handy labors 
and occupations.”6

It should be
 stressed that the Puritans and Presbyterians were not the only 
descendants of the Reformation who held to this belief. Even the 
inheritors of the Radical Reformation, the Anabaptists, Baptists, and 
Quakers loathed Holy days as Papist abominations without scriptural 
warrant. This united support for the abandonment of feast days was to 
prove particularly important in the colonies of New England, where the 
celebration of feast days was to become virtually unheard of outside of 
the few Anglican enclaves that existed.7

While the 
Reformers in the Anglican church corporately decided to retain these 
holy days in 1562 and endeavored unsuccessfully to gain control of them,
 the Puritans decided to strike them from their calendars entirely for 
the above stated reasons.

When the 
Puritans assembled at Westminster in the 1640s to draw up the Standards 
that would define Presbyterian belief for centuries to follow, they did 
not mince words regarding holy days. The Directory for the Publick 
Worship of God, which was a part of the original Westminster Standards 
adopted by parliament, was intended to guide and inform (but not 
liturgically constrain like the Anglican Book of Common Prayer) the 
worship of the Church. Included in the Directory was the bold 
theological declaration:


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.8


The Puritans
 had declared Holy Days theologically unwarranted, and as they began to 
gain the upper hand in the English Parliament, they moved decisively 
against both the public and ecclesiastical celebration of Holy Days. In 
1642 Parliament outlawed the seasonal plays and pageants that 
proliferated around holy days and purposely met on every Christmas from 
1644 to 1652 to show their disdain for what they felt was an unwarranted
 innovation that produced nothing but moral abuses. Finally in 1652 
after the Triumph of the Puritan Statesman Oliver Cromwell and the 
beheading of Charles I, the observance of Holy days was “strongly 
prohibited” and ministers who preached on the birth of Christ on 
Christmas risked imprisonment. Shops were required to keep open and 
Churches were heavily fined for attempting to put up decorations.9

As was to be
 expected, many of the common English people and Anglican clergy, were 
not at all happy with this Puritan suppression of “their holiday.” 
Consequently, after the death of Cromwell and the restoration of both 
the King and the primacy of the Anglican Church, the celebration of holy
 days was once again declared legal. Their celebration returned as a 
permanent part of both the English secular and ecclesiastical landscape.

In Scotland 
however, the Reformation was more thoroughgoing and the Presbyterian 
Church successfully purged holy days almost entirely from their 
landscape. All English attempts to reintroduce them failed miserably, 
and indeed Scotland was not to officially recognize Christmas as a 
holiday until the 1950s – by which time the influence of the 
Presbyterian church on Scotland had long since been waning.

Before the 
short-lived victory of the Puritan armies in England, many Puritans had 
despaired of reforming the Church of England. By the early sixteen 
hundreds the struggle to reform the Anglican church had been going on 
for over half a century with little or no success. Every English monarch
 since Henry VIII had resisted, suppressed, or martyred the Puritans. 
After years of suppression and ecclesiastical maneuvering by Elizabeth 
I, Puritan hopes for reform were rekindled with the accession of James I
 to the throne of England. King James was a Scot who had been trained by
 Presbyterian tutors, so it was hoped that he at last would be the 
monarch who would bring in a thoroughgoing Reformation of the English 
Church. These hopes were cruelly dashed however, when it became 
painfully apparent that the new King despised the Puritans and was 
insistent on preserving or even strengthening the existing status quo in
 the English Church.

For many 
Puritans this was the last straw, their hopes turned either to 
separating themselves entirely from the English Church or establishing a
 purified church elsewhere to act as a shining example. Some emigrated 
to the Holland, where the Reformed faith was more firmly entrenched. 
Other Puritans looked to the new colonies in America. It was here in the
 New World that Puritanism was to reach its fullest expression outside 
of Scotland.

In the 
Puritan Settlements of New England, the celebration of Holidays simply 
did not occur outside of the few Anglican enclaves. The pilgrims who 
emigrated to Plymouth spent their first Christmas in America working in 
the fields. By spending the days on which holy days were observed in a 
cycle of routine work these Puritan settlers showed their utter contempt
 for what were to them symbols of the corruption from which they had 
fled. Attempts by non-Puritans visiting the colony at Plymouth to 
observe Christmas were initially tolerated, but when it was discovered 
that they were actively engaged in games and revelry on this day they 
were angrily told by Governor William Bradford: “Your Conscience may not
 let you work on Christmas but my conscience cannot let you play while 
everybody else is out working”10

After this, 
attempts to celebrate Christmas in the English way were punished, and 
Bradford noted years later that “no one had tried to celebrate Christmas
 since that second year.” Other American Colonies such as Massachusetts 
and Connecticut also outlawed the observance of Christmas and after the 
laws abolishing holy days were passed in England, the Colonies gladly 
followed with their own. Even after the Restoration monarchy forced the 
repeal of these laws in the Colonies in the 1680s, the practice of not 
observing holy days remained. While it may no longer have been strictly 
illegal, socially and ecclesiastically holy days were anathema. The 
Puritan Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and the other Dissenters of 
New England were all unified in their belief that holy days were an 
abomination, and no proper part of the worship of the people of God. 
This common belief was to remain in place well into the 1800s.

Samuel 
Miller appears to be largely correct then when he declared that 
“Presbyterians do not observe Holy Days.” This was certainly the 
understanding of the first Presbyterians, it had been codified in their 
creedal documents, and it had been their practice both in Scotland and 
America for over 200 years. What then happened in the 19th and 20th centuries to change the practice of Presbyterians?

The answer 
to that question is complex, but surprisingly it does not lie in any 
substantial rethinking of the underlying theological presuppositions 
that have guided Presbyterian worship since the Reformation. Rather, as 
we shall see, the increasing willingness of Presbyterians to observe 
holy days was ultimately the result of pressure from the laity, the 
movement towards the adoption of a common liturgy, and the pervasive 
atmosphere of pluralism, ecumenicism, and liberalism in the American 
Protestantism of the 19th and 20th century.

America 
after the Revolution was a very different place from Europe, and even 
from the mother country she had painfully broken away from. Unlike most 
European countries, which had one established state church, America was 
simply awash in different forms of Christianity. Immigrants seeking 
freedom from the Religious persecution of Europe had flooded into the 
New World, and by the 1800s America was a nation unlike any other. A 
large town might have Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Presbyterian 
churches and whilst these churches were initially strongly associated 
with the immigrant populations they served (German Lutherans, French 
Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians) the strong American desire for 
novelty and experimentation gradually began to overcome the initial 
distaste for worshipping outside of one’s own tradition.

Nowhere was 
this attraction more apparent than on Holy Days. By the 1800s the 
initial Spiritual vigor that had marked the first Puritan settlers of 
New England had begun to dampen. Nominalism, legalism, revivalism, and 
heresy were all working to produce moribund and listless congregations 
in what had once been the fiery heart of Calvinism in America. Unitarian
 Universalism, which represented the triumph of rationalism and 
liberalism over the Scriptural faith nurtured by the Reformation, was 
growing in popularity, and by 1805 even the old Puritan bastion of 
Harvard had been overcome by it. In the midst of this sea-change in the 
religious attitudes of New Englanders, both the laymen and clergy of 
Calvinistic denominations began to express a curiosity about the rites 
and practices of different denominations. After over 200 years of 
non-observance, many of the descendents of the Puritans were extremely 
curious about the colorful celebration of holy days in non-Reformed 
denominations. In many cases it was precisely because the Puritan 
victory over holy days had been so complete in the new world that the 
laity and in some cases the clergy were unaware of the theological 
arguments against their observance or of the battles that had been 
fought in Britain over them. Henry Ward Beecher, who was raised in a 
Presbyterian household, wrote in 1874:


To me 
Christmas was a foreign day. When I was a boy I wondered what Christmas 
was. I knew there was such a time, because we had an Episcopal church in
 our town and I saw them dressing it with evergreens, and wondered what 
they were taking the woods in church for; but I got no satisfactory 
explanation. A little later I understood it was a Romish institution, 
kept up by the Romish Church.11


Initially, 
the reaction amongst Reformed clergy to clandestine visits of their 
parishioners to other churches on Christmas and Easter was often to 
oppose it directly: “Congregationalist ministers countered by ordering 
fasts on Christmas Day and tried in other ways to show their disregard 
for the festival. One spent the Sunday preceding Christmas outlining his
 proof that the celebration of Jesus’ birth was ‘Popery and prelactic 
tyranny, a destroyer of consciences.’”12
 But gradually under the influence of social pressure Reformed churches 
began to change their practice. In 1772, for instance, the Baptist 
Church in Newport observed Christmas for the first time in its history. 
One observer of the service, Ezra Stiles who had studied at the then 
Calvinist Yale, remarked “this looked more like keeping Christmas than 
any thing that ever before appeared amongst the Baptists or 
Congregationalists in New England…It is probable this will begin the 
Introduction of Christmas among the Baptist Churches, about one hundred 
and fifty years from the planting of New England and near one hundred 
and thirty years from the foundation of the first Baptist Church in New 
England.”13

Ezra Stiles 
was a clandestine attendee of Christmas services, attending his first in
 1769. Initially Stiles seems to have been driven to attend Christmas 
services solely by curiosity, remarking in his diary that “Had it been 
the will of Christ that the Anniversary of his Nativity should have been
 celebrated, he would have at least let us have known the day.” As has 
proved to be the case time and again however, practice can have a very 
strong influence on one’s belief, and by 1782 Stiles appears to have 
fully acclimated himself to observing Christmas. That year he wrote that
 he did “cordially joyn with the greatest part of christendom this day 
in celebrating the nativity of a divine Savior; altho’ I well know from 
Ecclesiastical History that this is not the true day of his Nativity”14

The 
attraction of the Holy Day celebrations of Anglican and Roman Catholic 
churches for those raised in communities that did not observe them was 
very strong, and this attraction certainly exerted it’s influence on the
 clergy. Thomas Robbins, a Congregational minister, made a habit of 
slipping into an Episcopal Church on Christmas. In his diary he notes 
that on December 25th of 1804 he was invited to a quiet 
“Christmas entertainment” with a number of people who were also from 
denominations that did not technically observe the day. By 1808 however,
 Robbins was already venturing to “preach a little in reference to 
Christmas Day”15

One 
Presbyterian Pastor, the Rev. James Waddel Alexander, was somewhat 
bolder than Rev. Robbins in appeasing his curiosity. He records that on 
Christmas of 1851 he attended no less than nine different churches in 
New York including several Roman Catholic ones.16

But while 
the practice of observing holy days was growing informally amongst 
congregants and clergy in denominations that had formally eschewed them,
 there was as yet no formal acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the 
practice. In many cases the practice of attending a church that 
celebrated a holy day was a guilty thrill that the individual knew the 
guardians of doctrine in their own denominations would frown upon.

It was not 
until the liturgical movement, that a means was created within 
Presbyterianism that might have real success in gaining official recognition for the observance of the Church Year at a denominational level.

Historically
 Presbyterians had rejected written liturgies, the Westminster divines 
had made a conscious decision not to create a formal liturgy that would 
restrict their freedom in worship and for which they saw no warrant in 
Scripture, but they decided instead to write a simple directoryDirectory for Publick Worship,
 which had been considered an integral part of the Standards by the 
Puritans who framed it. This was because of the hostility of many 
American Presbyters to any document that smacked of usurping 
the role of Scripture in guiding and shaping their worship. As a result 
the Adopting Act framed by the Synod of 1729 only “recommended” the 
directory to its members. In 1786 when the Presbyterian church of the 
newly formed Untied States again adopted the Westminster Standards as 
their Creedal statement they opted to “receive” the the Directory as “in
 substance agreeable to the institutions of the New Testament”.17
 that would give guidance to ministers in preparing their worship. The 
colonial Presbyterians had inherited the same distrust of liturgies as 
their Puritan forbears, but their distrust went even further. In 1729 
when the American Presbyterians decided to formally adopt the 
Westminster Standards, they did not officially adopt the Directory for Publick Worship,
 which had been considered an integral part of the Standards by the 
Puritans who framed it. This was because of the hostility of many 
American Presbyters to any document that smacked of usurping 
the role of Scripture in guiding and shaping their worship. As a result 
the Adopting Act framed by the Synod of 1729 only “recommended” the 
directory to its members. In 1786 when the Presbyterian church of the 
newly formed Untied States again adopted the Westminster Standards as 
their Creedal statement they opted to “receive” the the Directory as “in
 substance agreeable to the institutions of the New Testament”.17 

This was an important distinction, for of all the documents produced by the Westminster Assembly only
 the Directory contained an explicit repudiation of the practice of 
observing Holy Days. As we have seen, Holy Days are clearly inconsistent
 with the idea of biblical worship as it is abundantly set forth in the 
Confession, but in later years the concept that biblical worship was 
only that which was explicitly authorized in scripture (this concept is 
often referred to as the Regulative Principle of Worship) was to come under attack within the Presbyterian church.

Until the 
mid 1800s, both the Regulative Principle and tradition were usually 
enough to ensure that the Church Year had no place in the Presbyterian 
Church. In 1837 the Presbyterian Church in the United States had split 
into two separate camps, the “New” and “Old” school. The issues that had
 caused the split had to do with the feelings of ministers in either 
wing towards Calvinism and the traditional polity and practice of the 
Presbyterian church. The New School, which had been profoundly 
influenced by the sweeping revivals of the 18th and early 19th
 centuries, tended to believe that evangelistic considerations 
outweighed issues like strict adherence to Confessional standards. Their
 worship tended to be less constrained by the Regulative Principle and 
more inclined to incorporate elements that were to be found in the 
Protestant traditions that did not descend from Puritanism, or which had
 moved further away from their roots. Despite this tendency towards 
adopting new methods, the New School does not seem to have initially 
been any more eager than their more conservative counterparts to 
incorporate the observation of the Church Year into their worship. 
Before that could happen there was to be a more thoroughgoing revolution
 in Presbyterian attitudes towards worship.

In 1855 a 
book that began to change the way Presbyterians of both the Old and New 
Schools thought about worship was published by a Presbyterian minister 
by the name of Charles Baird. Baird had been heavily influenced by the 
history of the continental Reformed churches, and in particular he began
 to discover that the Reformed tradition outside of England and Scotland
 had a rich tradition of using liturgies. His book Eutaxia, or the Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches,
 was the result of his discoveries. By examining of the liturgies used 
by the likes of Calvin, Knox, and the Huguenots, Baird was able to 
construct an argument for the reintroduction of liturgical worship into 
the Presbyterian Church.

While Baird did not advocate a reintroduction of the Church Year in Eutaxia,
 and his comments on the subject where limited to an observation that 
even Calvin had observed Christmas on a few occasions, his work paved 
the way for two important developments.

The first 
was a reassessment of the use of liturgies in Presbyterianism and the 
second was the opening of a window in which the practices of Reformed 
churches that had pursued a less thoroughgoing reformation of Worship 
than the Scots and English Puritans might be introduced. Both played on 
the growing distaste of some within the Presbyterian church for purely 
extempore worship.

Baird’s book
 was to create an opportunity for other Presbyterians who wanted to 
“improve” Presbyterian worship by making it more liturgical, and in many
 cases, directly tied in to the Church year. One such individual was a 
Presbyterian elder and businessman by the name of Benjamin Bartis 
Comegys. Comegys had no sympathy whatsoever for the older Puritan view 
of worship. His views were highly colored by his romanticism and 
attachment to all things Medieval. His sympathies lay so thoroughly in 
the Anglican camp that one friend commented “A stranger visiting his 
library would probably conclude that it’s owner was a clergyman of the 
Church of England, as few clergymen in this country, even those of the 
Episcopal Church, possessed so complete a liturgical library.”18

This 
combination of Romanticism and sympathy for high-church Anglicanism led 
Comegys to an almost total rejection of the Regulative Principle of 
Worship and in particular the Puritan rejection of Holy Days. 
Consequently, he endeavored to see Holy Days restored, and while he 
agreed that these Holy Days had no warrant in scripture, he pointed out 
that the Presbyterian Church had been gradually introducing other 
innovations that did not square with the regulative principle and that 
“no bad effects have followed.” From this he concluded that the average 
layman (and presumably himself) could not “see why other changes may not
 be adopted.”19

Comegys even
 went so far as to say that preaching was not the primary element in 
Sunday worship: “The grand object of the church service was prayer and 
praise” he hoped therefore to make Presbyterianism into “a people who 
express their devotions in well-ordered prayer and praise.”20 To this end Comegys published An Order of Worship with Forms of Prayer for Divine Service in 1885 and then A Presbyterian Prayer Book for Public Worship.
 His stated intention was to “create a public opinion which will not be 
startled” by the move away from traditional Presbyterian Worship 
according to the Regulative Principle to a more expressly liturgical and
 Anglican model. Both books had an impact on American Presbyterian 
practice that was so deep that one need not hesitate in concluding 
Comegys achieved his stated intention. Needless to say both of Comegy’s 
books included mention of the Church Year. But as yet, there was no official Book of Common Worship that would officially tie the Presbyterian Church to the observation of Holy Days.

The stage 
had been set for the creation of such a book by the publication of 
several smaller books of “forms” of worship by the Denominational press –
 the Presbyterian Board of Publication. The advantage of creating a book
 of forms for worship over a set liturgy was that it seemed to tie in 
better with the Presbyterian practice of not forcibly determining 
exactly how worship should proceed. The first of these books was A. A. 
Hodge’s Manual of Forms published in 1877. Hodge’s manual was 
really quite conservative and certainly did not advocate the observance 
of the Church year in any way. The second of these was Forms for Special Occasions by
 ex-moderator of the General assembly, Herrick Johnson. Johnson’s book 
published in 1889 wasn’t that much more radical than Hodge’s work, but 
it did take another step closer to a set liturgy by including liturgical
 diction in prayer.

While Hodge 
and Johnson were cautiously moving towards a more expressly liturgical 
format in worship, by producing books that were safe enough for the 
denomination to publish, private individuals like Comegys were producing
 other volumes that moved considerably more quickly. Eventually these 
two streams were to merge in the production of an official Book of 
Common Worship. An important agency that was to pave the way for this 
was the Church Service Society formed in 1897 by two 
influential American Pastors – Henry Van Dyke, pastor of the prestigious
 Brick Presbyterian Church of New York City and Louis Benson an 
influential Philadelphian and pastor of another prestigious church in 
the suburbs of that city. Both had worked extensively to privately 
produce liturgical materials that included the observation of the Church
 Year.

The effect of forming the Church Service Society
 was to create an organization that unified the various men fighting for
 the institution of a standardized Presbyterian Liturgy. Most of these 
men were gentlemen of “pastoral, esthetic, and literary inclinations”21 and not the
 foremost theologians of Presbyterianism. One author observed that this 
was because “most of Presbyterianism’s theologians were too busy 
fighting in the opening engagements of the fundamentalist-modernist war 
and defending scholastic Calvinism to take an active part in what became
 a significant movement”22
 While the organization stated their commitment to the Presbyterian 
Standards in their “Statement of Principles” it seems clear that with 
individuals such as Comegys on board, this commitment was to a very 
broad definition of these Standards in regard to worship. The group did 
no more than survey the practices of churches and the way in which 
ministers were trained concerning worship, but the effects of the 
surveys themselves were far reaching. They stirred the Church into 
concerted action on the issue of worship and led several Presbyteries, 
most notably that of New York, to comprehensively examine the issue 
themselves.

The fruits 
of this examination where to quickly become apparent. In 1903 both New 
York and Denver Presbyteries overtured the General Assembly to produce 
forms for public worship. With Henry Van Dyke acting as the chairman of 
the all-important Committee on Bills and Overtures, the committee 
quickly resolved to answer the two overtures favorably and appointed a 
committee to consider the preparation of a simple common book of worship
 for voluntary usage in Presbyterian churches. This measure too was 
approved and eventually resulted in the publication in 1906 of the Book 
of Common Worship. While the General Assembly stressed that the use of 
this book was strictly voluntary and not officially recommended (the 
title page simply stated “Prepared by the Committee of the General 
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. for Voluntary Use”) it
 had far reaching effects – it was, after all, an official publication 
of the denomination. More importantly, as far as the question we are 
considering was concerned, it contained prayers for Good Friday, Easter,
 Advent, and Christmas. Barely 71 years since Samuel Miller had declared
 that “Presbyterians do not observe Holy Days” the denomination had 
boldly proclaimed that this was no longer true.

The 1906 
edition of the Book of Common worship was eventually replaced twenty-two
 years later by the edition of 1932. The 1932 edition continued the 
advance towards a liturgical format and included even more emphasis on 
the Church year, with prayers provided for Lent, Palm Sunday, Pentecost,
 and All Saints’ Day. The 1932 edition was also the first edition to be 
officially accepted by the Southern Presbyterian Church. This was even 
more startling in light of the fact that in 1899 the Southern General 
Assembly had declared:


“There is no
 warrant in Scripture for the observance of Christmas and Easter as holy
 days, rather the contrary (see Gal. 4:9-11; Col. 2:16-21), and such 
observance is contrary to the principles of the Reformed Faith, 
conducive to will worship, and not in harmony with the simplicity of the
 Gospel of Jesus Christ.”23


Apparently 
the intervening 33 years and the obvious influence of the 1906 edition 
of the Book of Common Worship had made a world of difference in Southern
 Presbyterian Attitudes. It is important to note however, that the 
original declaration of the 1899 General Assembly was never repealed.

As the Book 
of Common Worship continued to be revised, subsequent editions indicated
 that Presbyterians continued to become more and more comfortable with 
the observance of Holy Days. The 1946 edition included prayers for 
Maundy Thursday, Ascension Day, Trinity Sunday, and thirteen Sundays 
after Trinity.

By 1955, 
when Northern Presbyterians were once again considering another revision
 of the Book of Common Worship, it had become painfully obvious that the
 Directory of Worship of 1788, which was still technically in force, had
 little or nothing to do with the actual worship of Presbyterians. 
Indeed it was questionable whether the Presbyterian practice could even 
claim to follow the Regulative Principle of Worship outlined in chapter 
twenty-one of the Westminster Confession, especially now that the gap 
between Presbyterian and Anglican worship was rapidly closing. The 
solution, of course, was to revise the Directory for Worship of 1788 and
 to produce a modern edition that would finally put an end to the need 
to give lip service to the principles that had guided the worship of the
 Puritans. Accordingly, the new Directory, published in 1961, stated 
that worship should draw its order and content not only from Scripture but also from the historical experience and resources of Christianity.
 At last the Northern Presbyterian Church (UPCUSA) had altered its 
theological foundations to allow for what they had already been 
officially practicing for over 55 years.

This new 
directory was not accepted by the Southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS) 
however, and the directory they produced was far closer to the content 
and format of the Directory of Worship of 1788. It differed markedly 
from these documents however, in that it too gave a notable prominence 
to the Christian year, but without clearly admitting, as the Northern 
Directory had, that the new worship model followed by the PCUS was not 
strictly scriptural.

In 1973 many
 conservative Southern Presbyterians faced with the prospect of the 
union of the body they belonged to (the PCUS) with the more liberal 
Northern UPCUSA opted instead to withdraw and form a new theologically 
conservative Presbyterian Church. This new church, the Presbyterian 
Church in America, opted not to adopt the liturgically oriented Book of 
Common Worship of the PCUS, its revised Directory of Worship, or any of 
the alterations that had been made to the Presbyterian Standards since 
adoption in 1789. Instead the PCA adopted the 1789 revision of the 
Westminster Standards and set to work on creating their own Directory of
 Worship. The non-binding Directory they created – while it is far more 
liturgical than the original Directory for Publick Worship, and includes
 sample forms for special occasions – does not contain a single 
reference to the Church year. In fact at no point in the history of the 
Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) has the practice of observing Holy 
Days been officially authorized by the General Assembly, nor does 
anything in the Constitution of the Church legitimate the practice. To 
the contrary, since the constitutional documents of the PCA uphold and 
endorse the original Puritan concept of the Regulative Principle of 
Worship as it is set forth in chapter 21.1 of the Westminster Confession
 of Faith, the practice of observing Holy Days in worship is logically 
forbidden as no one has ever been able to prove that the practice of 
their observation was instituted by God in His Word. What is odd in 
light of this is that very few, if any, members of the PCA view the 
observance of Holy Days as an exception to the teaching of the 
Westminster Standards.

So while we 
can answer clearly why Presbyterians who belong to the PCUSA observe 
Holy Days, for they changed their doctrinal standards to allow for the 
practice, one cannot answer that question when it comes to members of 
other bodies that have not, such as the PCA. Their doctrinal standards 
clearly do not permit the practice, and yet it would seem that the 
majority of PCA churches observe Holy Days anyway. Why is that? Well one
 might be tempted to conclude that it is because the General Assembly 
has never tackled the subject, but the far more obvious answer is that they
 observe them because the Church they left observed them and the vast 
majority of modern evangelical churches around them observe them. 
In most cases no-one living can remember a time when Holy Days were not 
observed and most Presbyterian clergymen seem unaware that there was 
once a time when they were not observed. Even the oldest of PCA saints 
might be reasonably tempted to conclude that a notion that Holy Days 
should not be observed represents the thought of a crackpot.

Of course, 
while these conclusions address the specifics of how it was that the 
vast majority of American Presbyterians came to celebrate Holy Days when
 their forbears clearly did not, they do not tell us from whence the 
psychological impetus for these changes comes. Perhaps it was an 
unconscious desire to return to the comforting traditions and symbolism 
of medieval Roman Catholicism, this is for instance, the supposition 
advanced by James Hastings Nichols in Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition.
 Nichols notes that Catholic conceptions and forms of worship 
“established themselves in a few Reformed centers in the day of cultural
 romanticism and political reaction” and from thence “they have 
increasingly penetrated the main Reformed bodies…” Nichols goes on to 
point out that while the Catholicizing tendency has often been blunted 
by the “legacy of anti-Romanism” it has “established it’s right to exist
 in these churches and won official toleration.”24
 It is more likely however that the answer ultimately lies somewhere in a
 statement made almost 200 years ago by French Statesman and observer of
 the new American society, Alexis de Toqueville:


“All the
 clergy of America freely adopt the general views of their time and 
country and let themselves go unresistingly with the tide of feeling and
 opinion which carries everything around them along with it.”



ENDNOTES

1 Samuel Miller, Presbyterianism, (Philadelphia, Presbyterian
Board of Publication, 1835), 73

2&nbsp; Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 7

3&nbsp; Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America, (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1995), 4

4&nbsp; Miller, 72

5&nbsp; Restad, 6

6&nbsp; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites, (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1995), 24

7&nbsp; Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play, (New York, St.
Martin’s Press, 1995), 89

8&nbsp; The Directory for the Publick Worship of God,
Westminster Divines (1645)

9&nbsp; Restad, 8

10&nbsp; Schmidt, 89

11 Restad, 31-32

12 Ibid. 16

13 Ibid. 30

14 Ibid. 31

15 Ibid. 32

16 Ibid. 31

17 Julius Melton, Presbyterian Worship in America,
(Richmond, John Knox Press, 1967), 17

18 Ibid.102

19 Ibid. 103

20 Ibid. 104

21 Ibid. 121

22 Ibid. 121

23 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United
States (Southern Presbyterians), Deliverance on Christmas and Easter
(1899).

24 James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed
Tradition, (Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1968), 153


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daniels, Bruce C., Puritans at Play, New York, St.
Martin’s Press, 1995

The Westminster Assembly, The Directory for the Publick
Worship of God, (1645)

Melton, Julius, Presbyterian Worship in America,
Richmond, John Knox Press, 1967

Miller, Samuel, Presbyterianism, Philadelphia,
Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1835

Nichols, James Hastings, Corporate Worship in the Reformed
Tradition, (Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1968), 153

Restad, Penne L., Christmas in America, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1995

Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Consumer Rites, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1995

Smith, Morton, How is the Gold Become Dim? Greenville,
GPTS Press, 1973

The Westminster Assembly, Westminster Confession of Faith
(1645)Fonte: http://biblebased.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/why-do-presbyterians-observe-holy-days/#more-403

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