Marking Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year

Ses s i on 4: God’ s T imep i ece and God’ s Te l os 99

5. The Middle Ages saw a dramatic increase in both the number of days and complexity of them peculiar to the West, and dates from the 10th century.

a. The Church Year was filled with festivals of saints, some of which were legendary, sometimes even more than one to a day!

b. Festivals were multiplied in terms of medieval doctrines, e.g., All Souls (purgatory) and Corpus Christi (the doctrine of transubstantiation).

6. The Reformers, reacting against these trends, rejected numerous dates of remembrance in the Catholic Christian year (e.g., in Scotland, which only kept the celebration of the Lord’s Day alone ).

7. Even in the midst of this dramatic shift in Reformed practice, there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of lived time for the sake of training the masses in Christian thought and life.

E. Spirituality is directly linked to history, community, and the story of God in prophecy and Scripture!