Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

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Appendix 34 What Is the Christian Year? Robert Webber, The Services of the Christian Year (79). Nashville: Star Song Pub. Group, 1994.

The Christian celebrates the saving events of God in Jesus Christ by marking those particular events in which God’s saving purposes were made known. The most common term for the yearly celebration of time in worship is the Christian year. The Christian year, developed in antiquity, was a vital part of worship until the Reformation, when Protestants abandoned much of it because of the abuses attached to it in the late medieval period. Protestants claimed that nearly every day of the year had been named after a saint. The emphasis on these saints and the feasts connected with their lives overshadowed the celebra tion of the Christ-event in the more evangelical pattern of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost celebrations. Consequently Protestants discontinued observing the Christian year and lost its positive aspects as they attempted to remove Roman excesses. The current return to the Christian year among Protestants advocates a very simple and unadorned year that accents the major events of Christ, a Christian year similar to that of the early church. Contemporary liturgical scholarship has pointed out that the focal point and source of the Christian year is the death and resurrection of Christ. Even the earliest Christians recognized that the death and resurrection of Jesus began the “new time.” The fact that two major events of the church took place during Jewish celebrations – Passover and Pentecost – helped the early Christians to associate themselves with the Jewish reckoning of time and yet dissociate themselves by recognizing that a new time had begun. Thus, like the Jews, the early Christians marked time but, unlike the Jews, they marked their time now by the events of the new age. The unique feature of the Christian conception of time is the major moment ( kairos ) through which all other kairoi and chronoi find their meaning. This unique moment is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Thus, in Christianity, all time has a center. Paul developed this notion in his epistle to the Colossians declaring that Christ is the creator of all things (1:16), the one in whom all