Posted on 10/31/2013 10:10:25 AM PDT by Gamecock
Halloween has become the second highest-grossing commercial holiday after Christmas. But this festive day also carries a lot of baggage. Scholars Ralph and Adelin Linton write:
Among all the festivals which we celebrate today, few have histories stranger than that of Halloween. It is the eve of All Hallows—or Hallowmas or All Saints' Day—and as such it is one of the most solemn festivals of the church. At the same time, it commemorates beings and rites with which the church has always been at war. It is the night when ghosts walk and fairies and goblins are abroad. . . . We cannot understand this curious mixture unless we go back into history and unravel the threads from which the present holiday pattern has been woven.
The brief account seeks to vindicate Halloween from its "Satanic" and barbaric origins. While the dark side of Halloween may have been overemphasized, Christians must still acknowledge that the holiday originated (at least) in pagan and mythical practices. The extent to which such practices can be categories as "Satanic" is a debate of semantics. Is Roman mythology "Satanic"? Perhaps, or perhaps not.
Regardless, the origin of Halloween is certainly in the realm of non-Christian spiritualism. As such, Christians should be careful in their approach to Halloween.
Halloween for Christians
Christians haven't always been sure what to do with this holiday of apparently pagan origins. Is it unredeemable, such that any Christian participating in the holiday will necessarily compromise their faith? Is it something Christians can participate in as a cultural celebration with no religious ramifications? Or is there the opportunity for Christians to emphasize certain aspects of our own faith within the holiday?
1. Should Christians renounce Halloween as "the Devil's day"?
One of the most famous recent examples of Christian interaction with Halloween comes from Pat Robertson, who called Halloween the "festival of the Devil." As such, he claimed that participating in Halloween is wrong for Christians.
In renouncing this holiday outright, Robertson fails to ask the following question: To what extent does something's evolution from pagan roots entail that its present practice is tainted? As Albert Mohler notes, there's been a shift from pagan ritual to merely commercial fascination with the dark side. Robertson misses that for most people in America, Halloween is about candy. A quarter of all candy sold annually in the United States is for Halloween night! Granted, dressing up as witches and goblins can be a tricky issue, but to think that putting on a scary mask or makeup opens you up to the dark side is a bit naïve.
In addition, there are two built-in problems with a blanket-rejection position. First, those who insist on rejecting certain holidays aren't being consistent. Should we reject other holidays because there's a propensity toward excess? In other words, if people are inclined toward gluttony on Thanksgiving or Christmas, shouldn't those holidays be renounced as well? After all, gluttony is a sin. Second, many times the reject position assumes the evil of the extrinsic world will taint the faith of a Christian. But Jesus says the exact opposite (Mark 7:21-23). The fruit of our lives (whether in holiness or sin) is always inextricably tied to the root of our hearts. If our hearts are prone toward sin in certain ways, we will find a way to sin. Sin indeed corrupts, but the sin is not so much "out there in the world" as is in the heart of every person. The reject position falsely assumes sin is mostly what we do rather than who we are.
2. Can Christians participate in Halloween wisely?
An informed understanding of the history of Halloween and the biblical freedom Christians have to engage cultural practices (1 Cor. 10:23-33) leads to the conclusion that we can follow our conscience in choosing how to approach this holiday.
Even so, how Christians ought to go about relating to or participating in Halloween is still a tricky subject. In order to navigate the waters successfully, one must always distinguish between the merely cultural aspects of Halloween and the religious aspects of the holiday. In the past the church has tried with varied results to subsume the religious aspects of Halloween by adding a church holiday. If we engage, care must be taken. There's a big difference between kids dressing up in cute costumes for candy and Mardi Gras-like Halloween parties, offensive costumes, and uninhibited excess. It's too simple, then, to make a blanket judgment to reject or accept Halloween as a whole. There certainly should be no pressure to participate.
For those still bothered by Halloween's historical association with evil spirits, Martin Luther has some advice on how to respond to the Devil: "The best way to drive out the Devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." Perhaps instead of fleeing the darkness in fear, we should view Halloween as an opportunity to mock the enemy whose power over us has been broken.
6:10 today, 6:09 tomorrow.
Celts did it too.
:)
Using that logic why don't we choose a day to dress up as child molesters to mock them too?
Satan is more powerful and more destructive than any child molester, yet anybody in their their right mind would recognize that dressing up as a child molester is bizarre, creepy, scary and insensitive behavior. Yet somehow many Christians have accepted the notion that it's perfectly okay to do this when it concerns the devil.
The Romans had a lot of contact with the Celts long before the church got really rolling.
Did you know that London is actually Lugdunum and was a thriving place before the Romans popped in with their roads and plumbing?
The sacred stones, hot springs and groves were Celtic holy places before Romans even existed.
History gets rewritten...a lot.
No, God gave it to the Jews to celebrate the harvest.
Yehova said that he cares
Show me where it says that God cares if I celebrate the birth of His Son on the actual day of the man-made calendar on which he was born. Besides, it may be more historically accurate to say that Jesus was born sometime around the time of Sukkot, but you don't know what day He was born on, either. Do you think God is concerned what day of the year you celebrate the birth of His Son? Or the fact that you celebrate it?
So when it originally started as the first Sunday after Pentecost, and is still celebrated then by Orthodox...
Perfect!! I love that you bring up the celebration of The Savior’s birth, then someone objects, whining “straw man” at the same time making up a calendar “argument” that you ALL READY dealt with, ignoring your point of celebrating The Savior’a coming. Talk about straw men!
Like the December 25th Christmas, Halloween was established by the LATE Church, sometime after the 4th century, as a Christian purpose put to, and to compete with, already established local European festival days - in Halloween’s case, local harvest/end of summer festivals.
The accutrements of “All Saints Day” is of institutional church origins, not local customs of the original harvest festivals. However, depending on the area, many of the “end of summer” and “harvest” festivals, before and without Christianity, coincided with practices that believed that the souls of the dead return on one special night or day of the year, and those beliefs are ancient and predate Christianity and are found in cultures all over the world. “All Saints Day” was coined by the institutional church to try to supplant the original beliefs about the dead that held October 31/November 1st as that special night/day each year when the souls of the dead returned - briefly.
So again, we have a case of the institutional church vying for attention and respect and following, within cultures, by creating its own practices to compete with already established local festivals.
In the case of Halloween though, it never seemed to have greatly fulfilled the hopes for it that the institutional church wanted for itself - Halloween as another “sacred” day.
The only victory that Christain culture has had over the pagan origins of Halloweeen (origins from before the instiutional church gave it that title) is not that Christians repsectfully and liturgically celebrate “All Saints Day”, but the entire day, including its “dark side” is not taken seriously by most people.
The dead are neither greatly celebrated or feared and being “fightened” arrives via pranks and manufactured scare tactics and not real beliefs in “the walking dead” or fairies or ghosts, nor a belief that naming it “All Saints Day” actually made it more religious - NOT.
I’ll get carsick if I keep this up.
See y’all when I get home.
Not to mention the early churches were built right on top of the old pagan holy places.
They had no choice but to ‘attend’.
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No, Sukkot has absolutely nothing to do with any harvest, it was at every moment in time the prophesied day for the birth of our savior. It is a commanded feast for every person and nation on Earth.
>> “Show me where it says that God cares if I celebrate the birth of His Son on the actual day of the man-made calendar on which he was born” <<
Yehova does not honor man's calendar, he goes by his Biblical calendar:
Zec 14:18>> " Do you think God is concerned what day of the year you celebrate the birth of His Son? Or the fact that you celebrate it?" <<
And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain; there shall be the plague, wherewith the LORD will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.
14:19 This shall be the punishment of Egypt, and the punishment of all nations that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.
Yes, there is not the slightest question.
If that were the case, then there would be a combination of the days ordained by YHWH and the pagan days that you assert were adopted as we went along - But that is *not* the case - Not a single day that YHWH ordained is observed at all, to include the weekly Sabbath.
Moreover, not only are they not observed, but they don't even come to mind - Most Christians have no idea what they even ARE, not to mention when they are, with no idea of what they represent - The reason YHWH hallowed them is to put them in our memory, because most everything that matters happens on_those_days... But Christians who are content to bow to the pope and observe the pagan holidays and the pagan sabbath will not see the end coming. The distraction and substitution keeps them from seeing the truth. 'Anti' can mean 'alter', you know.
No, YHWH says, "these are MY feasts," not 'these are your feasts'. And everyone who is under the covenant is to keep them.
To mention in advance one critical point of difference, the colonists assumed that there was a right way of doing things. Any modern reader who lingers on the passage I quote in the Introduction in which John Cotton evokes the colonists' determination to establish "purity" is abruptly confronted with this assumption. Purity is purity, and purity is God's law, a premise Cotton translated into the argument that Scripture mandated how the true church should be organized and religion practiced........As I have learned from trying out some of this book on other historians, the Puritanism in these pages does not coincide with the entrenched opinion that the movement was authoritarian or "theocratic." For persons of this mind-set, the most "Puritan" aspect of my story may be the migrants' confidence in the "saints" and the attempts to establish "godly rule" (Chapter Three). But in contrast to interpretations that focus on social discipline or the suppressing of dissent, I bring other aspects of Puritanism as we now understand it into the story, including the currents of popular or insurgent religion that can be discerned in fears of "arbitrary" rule and ecclesiastical "tyranny," the emphasis on participation, and the importance given to consent. Nowhere do I presume that Puritanism embodied a particular political ideology, and nowhere is it translated into social control or top-down authoritarianism, for reasons I spell out in the Introduction and in more detail in succeeding chapters....
.......the Puritans had "a more elevated and complete view" of our social duties than the Europeans of that time. They took care of the poor, maintained their highways, kept careful records and registries, secured law and order, and, most of all, provided education for everyone — through high school. The purpose of universal education was that everyone should be able to read the Bible to know what's most important — his or her duties to their Creator — for themselves. Everyone must read in order that no one be deceived or suckered by others. This noncondescending egalitarianism was the first source of the American popular enlightenment that had so many practical benefits. "Puritan civilization in North American," our outstanding novelist/essayist Marilynne Robinson observes, "quickly achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, longevity, and mass prosperity, or happiness, as it was called in those days"....
....In Robinson's Calvinist view, generosity, liberality, and nobility are all synonyms in the Bible, and they express even better than charity the virtue that distinguishes who we are. What's left our culture, with our surrender of the common celebration of Sunday — what impressed Tocqueville as our most precious inheritance from the Puritans — is the respect, and so the time, for the disciplined reading and reflection required for us to practice the social, civilized virtues that are the truest source of our happiness.
-- David D. Hall, Preface, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New EnglandAfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011.
>> “No, God gave it to the Jews to celebrate the harvest.” <<
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Ya gotta admit that one was creative! :o)
They would rather sniff sulfur smoke for eternity than give up their entrenched paganism.
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