The Approach of Winter

At midnight, as Remembrance Day ended and at least four weeks of Code Red lockdown on the province of Manitoba began, it was snowing in Winnipeg.   Within a couple of hours the ground was white and, as of noon on the twelfth, the snow was stilling coming down.    This is not unusual for Manitoba around this time of year.   This city is referred to as "Winterpeg" for a reason.    While the forecast is predicting a rise to low but above freezing temperatures on the weekend and again around Wednesday of next week, overall the highs predicted for the next two weeks are below the freezing point.   Weather forecasting is notoriously unreliable, but at this time of year unforeseen complications often include sudden and quick-moving low pressure systems sweeping the prairies and bringing a ton of wind, snow, and cold along with them.   As we get this taste of the long winter we know is inevitably coming, grocery stores and other businesses fortunate enough to be considered essential by the health bureaucrats and politicians who arrogantly think they have the right to designate other people's businesses and livelihoods as otherwise, have been reduced to twenty-five percent capacity.    This means long lineups, out in the cold, waiting to get into the store to buy what you need to keep you and your family from starving.

 

Let us think about that for a moment.

 

How many of you when you were growing up, heard your mothers say to you, too many times to count, something to the effect of “get inside, do you want to catch your death of pneumonia?”

 

I think it is a safe assumption to say that the vast majority of you would answer “yes.”    Unless you have suffered from a lifelong agoraphobia, in the conventional sense of a fear of the outdoors rather than the more technical clinical sense, chances are good that when you were a child you would play outdoors in cold and wet weather, with little thought to protecting yourself against the elements, prompting such an expression of maternal concern.

 

Now consider the irony.   Brent Roussin, our local public health mandarin, has issued orders that will require people to stand outside in cold and most likely wet weather for long periods of time.   The purpose of these orders is to prevent people from catching their death from the severe type of pneumonia that, in a small minority of cases, those who contract the bat flu virus experience.

 

Who do you trust more, Brent Roussin or your mother?

 

There are those who will answer by saying that this is an unfair question.   Roussin is an expert on these sort of things, after all, and our mothers, except, of course, for the ones who happened to also be physicians and epidemiologists, were not.   All of that, however, is another way of saying “shut up, don’t think for yourself, just listen to the experts and don’t ask questions.”

 

It is also advocating for stupidity.

 

It is obvious to anyone with any amount of life experience and common sense that Roussin’s orders are going to result in more people getting sick rather than less.     Not only are we entering a period of cold and wet weather, in which, thanks to the public health orders we are all going to have to stand outside in long lineups, this is a season in which people always get sick.  It is the period in which sunlight hours are the shortest, everyone has a Vitamin D deficiency and therefore a weakened immune system, and, consequently, the bugs that are always with us are able to do their worst.

 

This is a huge problem for us because, as I have discussed previously, Roussin and the premier’s attitude since the end of September has been one of piling restrictions upon restrictions upon restrictions when the previous restrictions failed to reduce the number of cases, blaming the failure on the disobedience of the public, and threatening and bullying people.  What are the chances that they are finally going to realize – or, rather, admit – that the problem is not with the public, but with this entire approach?   It doesn’t work and no amount of hiring more enforcers, raising the fines, berating and haranguing us, and taking away more of our rights and freedoms, is ever going to change that.    Unless Roussin and Pallister finally acknowledge this, they will just keep piling rule after useless rule upon us.   Since, unlike with the first lockdown, we are transitioning into the period of maximum sickness rather than out of it, that will be going on for a long time.

 

The person whose job it is to raise these kind of questions, challenge the government when its policies and actions are stupid and wrong, and fight the government when its actions infringe upon our traditional and constitutional rights and freedoms, is the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   That may yet happen at the Dominion level, where the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, has been urging the provincial governments to take drastic measures to stop the spread of the bat flu.   I have my doubts.   Erin O’Toole should have spoken out long before now.   The only leader of a Dominion level political party who has consistently spoken out for the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians against these draconian lockdowns has been Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, who has no sitting Members in Parliament.   At the provincial level here in Manitoba, Wab Kinew has been doing the opposite of his job.   He has been demanding more restrictions than those the government has been imposing, criticizing the Health Minister for meeting with and giving a hearing to people who expressed their opposition to such measures, and, most recently, condemning the government for relaxing one of the more odious elements of the recent public health orders, i.e., restricting social interaction to within the immediate household.   I wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Kinew, who is married and has three sons, to think about what such an order would mean to the many people who live by themselves, far more today than in previous times?

 

Lockdowns do a lot of damage and, furthermore, they hurt a lot more people than the bat flu does.   While socialists like Kinew and his echo chamber in the local CBC and most of the “private” media, justify their support of lockdowns in spite of this fact on the grounds that the harm lockdowns do is merely economic whereas the virus kills, this reasoning is entirely spurious.    Enforcing extreme social isolation upon a society where loneliness was already a problem will increase the rates of suicide and addiction.   Note, with regards to the latter, that once again stores specializing in booze and the mind-destroying toxins that can be extracted from certain cultivars of hemp are deemed essential and allowed to operate at a time when all religious services have been ordered to close.   Lockdowns, not to put too fine a point on it, kill.

 

To attempt to stop the spread of the bat flu with a lockdown is a major violation of medical ethics.   It is also incredibly stupid.  That you cannot lock people away from a plague is not exactly a new insight.   It was the point made by Edgar Allan Poe in his The Masque of the Red Death, originally published in 1842.   Perhaps the egalitarian socialists who support lockdowns think they have avoided the hubris and nemesis of Poe’s Prince Prospero by locking away the common people as well as the wealthy, but the harm inflicted by lockdowns falls disproportionately on the poor.    We are, again, entering the winter season.   With the new health orders, homeless shelters are operating at reduced capacity, public places such as libraries are closed to them, as are restaurant dining rooms.   With all the businesses closed and jobs lost due to the earlier lockdown measures and these new ones, I very much doubt there are fewer homeless in this province than at this time last year.   All of these physicians who have been petitioning the government for stricter lockdown measures, as if crashing everything else in an attempt to prevent the hospitals from crashing made any sense, ought to stripped of their medical credentials and busted down to jobs that cannot be done by video teleconference from home.

 

As we enter into winter the demonic spirit behind the lockdowns becomes even more apparent.  With winter comes Christmas.    Indeed, the last Sunday of the current liturgical year, Christ the King, or, what used to be called “Stir-up Sunday” after the first words of the Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for that day, is the Sunday after the next, only a little over a week away.   The lockdown orders currently extend into at least the first two weeks of Advent.   The Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, is scheduled to begin this year right after the time the lockdown orders as they currently stand expire, but if the current four weeks of province-wide Code Red lockdown does not stop the spread of the bat flu, and it is hardly likely that it will, the next thing on deck will be for the same Grinches that stole Easter and Passover earlier this year, to steal Christmas and Hanukkah too.    Having robbed us of the joyous celebration of our Lord and Saviour’s Glorious Resurrection, they appear set to rob us of the joyous celebration of His Nativity and Incarnation as well. 

 

The ordinary thermometer cold of winter is not enough for these people.   They wish to drive the warmth of faith from our hearts as well.

 

 

 

Some Whitsunthoughts

God, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit; Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen. - Collect for Whitsunday, Book of Common Prayer

Today is the major Christian feast day that is traditionally known in English as Whitsunday or sometimes just Whitsun. It is more generally known as Pentecost but I prefer the traditional English name for two reasons. The first is aesthetic - it is far more charming and pleasant to the ear. The second reason has to do with precision. Pentecost, from the Greek word meaning fifty, denotes two distinct, although related, festivals in two distinct religions. It can refer to the Jewish Feast of Weeks, on the fiftieth day after the Jewish Passover, or it can refer to the Christian feast which falls on the fiftieth day after the Christian Passover, Pascha or Easter. The name Pentecost, therefore, requires an explanation of whether reference is being made to the Jewish or the Christian Feast. Whitsunday can refer only to the Christian Pentecost, just as Shabuot or Shavuoth can refer only to the Jewish Pentecost. (1)

The distinction between the two having been made it is important to observe their close relationship and to note similarities and differences. As St. Paul makes clear in the book of Hebrews, the Old Covenant, its sacrifices, and Tabernacle/Temple were shadows, types, and images of the New Covenant, the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and the heavenly Tabernacle not made with human hands. The relationship is not unlike that of the shadows depicting the visual world and the shadow casters depicting the Forms in Plato's famous allegory of the Cave. Not much is said in the New Testament about Christian feasts and festivals for the obvious reason that most - some would argue all - of the New Testament was completed prior to AD 70 when Rome sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. Up to that point Jewish Christians continued, to the extent that the Jewish authorities allowed this, to participate in the worship of Second Temple Judaism, whereas the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem had determined that Gentile converts to Christianity did not have to become Jews - be circumcised, eat kosher, follow the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, etc. - in order to be Christians. St. Paul's epistles, all except for Hebrews being written either to predominantly Gentile Churches or individuals such as Philemon and Bishops Timothy and Titus, stress the doctrine of Christian liberty. Little was written in this period about distinctly Christian patterns of worship common to Jewish and Gentile Christians alike, apart from the Gospel Sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, although it is evident from the Book of Acts that Christians had already begun holding meetings on the first day of the Week in remembrance of the Resurrection.

After AD 70, the worship of Second Temple Judaism ceased to be an option for Jewish Christians, because the Temple and everything that took place there was now gone, and they were persona non grata in the synagogues taught by rabbis who were increasingly hostile to Christianity. It now became important for the Church to develop its own distinctly Christian liturgical calendar for the use of all Christians. The earliest and most important of Christian feast days were Christmas and Easter. Both were established prior to the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, which was the first Ecumenical Council. The evidence suggests that the Church had begun celebrating December 25th as Christmas, calculating the date of Christ's birth through a logic that is internally consistent even if it rests on a somewhat questionable premise, long before Aurelian declared the Festival of Sol Invictus on the same date and that the latter was done to compete with the Church and not the other way around. While the major reason for the Council of Nicaea was to address the Arian heresy an important minor reason was to settle the controversy over the date of Easter.

In some cases the feasts appointed by the Church have a corresponding Old Testament feast and in some cases they do not. This itself illustrates the Apostolic and especially Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty - the Church under the New Covenant was not bound to either follow the Old Testament calendar or depart from it entirely. The feasts that do correspond to Old Testament feasts point back to events which their Old Testament counterparts pointed forward to, thus extending the principle of what St. Paul said in the epistle to the Hebrews. Christmas, although it occurs at approximately the same time as a major Jewish festival - Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, commemorating the rededication of the Temple after it was defiled by Antiochus Epiphanes in the events leading up to the Maccabean revolt - and one which was certainly kept by Jews in the time of Christ (John 10:22), must be counted as a Christian feast with no corresponding Old Testament feast. There is no record of Hanukkah being ordained by God in the Old Testament, even in the Septuagintal books which recount the events to which it points back, and there is no obvious thematic connection between the two feasts.

Easter, on the other hand, very much corresponds to the Old Testament Passover and, indeed, in most countries that do not speak a Germanic tongue is called by a name derived from the Greek word for Passover, Pascha. Here we see most clearly how the principles laid down by St. Paul in Hebrews can be extended in application to Old Testament feasts in relationship to Christian ones. Easter or Pascha is the Christian Passover. Every year in the period leading up to Easter, the Church's lexicons assign Old Testament readings from Genesis and Exodus that relate the events leading up to and including those the Jewish Passover commemorated, whereas the Gospel readings led up to and include the events which the old Passover pointed forward to and which the Christian Passover looks back to - the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which brought to the world deliverance from the spiritual bondage to sin, Satan, death, and hell which ancient Israel's literal bondage in Egypt signified.

Whitsunday is very much like Easter in this respect. The events it commemorates, which are related in the second chapter of Acts, took place on the Jewish Pentecost. The first time this feast is mentioned in the Bible is in the twenty-third chapter of Exodus. Here it is mentioned as the second of the three feasts each year when all Israelite males were commanded to appear before the Lord, which, when Israel was established, and the Temple built, translated into the requirement of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The other two were the Passover itself, and Sukkot or Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles. Neither Shavuoth nor Succoth are referred to by these names yet, in this passage, but are called "the feast of harvest, the first-fruits of thy labours" and "the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year" respectively (v. 16). The pilgrimage requirement explains why Jerusalem was filled with people from all over the Mediterranean world speaking a myriad of languages in the second chapter of Acts. Later in the book of Exodus when the thrice annual assembly of the Israelites is mentioned again, it is called the "feast of weeks, of the first-fruits of wheat harvest" (34:22) but the name is not yet explained.

More detailed instructions with regards to this feast are found in the twenty third chapter of Leviticus and the sixteenth chapter of Deuteronomy. On the day following the first Sabbath of Passover, the day on which they were to first "put the sickle to the corn" (Deut. 16:9), the Israelites were to offer a sheaf of the first-fruits of the grain harvest as a wave offering, along with a number of accompanying offerings (Lev. 23:10-14). Note that the grain harvest in Palestine occurs at about the same time grain is planted in this part of the world. The grain harvest was the early harvest, the spring harvest, as opposed to the late or fall harvest of the fruit. Passover occurs in the month of Abib or Aviv, (2) later called Nisan, which roughly corresponds to late March and early April. The sheaf waved in the first-fruits offering during the week of Unleavened Bread was of barley, the first grain harvested. From this offering of the first-fruits, they were to count seven weeks. At this point in time the wheat was being harvested. Seven weeks are forty-nine days, and the day after the final Sabbath of the seven, would be the fiftieth day. On that morning, they were to offer a "new meat offering unto the LORD" ("meat" here means "wheat meal"), consisting of two leavened loaves of fine flour, along with a whole bunch of other offerings which are spelled out in Leviticus and the twenty eighth chapter of Numbers. These sacrifices made the gathering at the Tabernacle/Temple a practical requirement as well as a commandment in itself. The name of the feast in both Hebrew and Greek is derived from its calculation. The "weeks" are the seven weeks, the "fiftieth day" is the following day on which the Feast actually occurred.

Note that in the instructions in the Torah or Pentateuch itself, it is quite clear that the weeks begin on a Sunday, i.e., the day after the Jewish Sabbath which is Saturday, and that Pentecost would always fall on a Sunday too. This was still the case in the Book of Acts. Pentecost there fell on the Sunday that was the fiftieth day after the Resurrection, which occurred on the Sunday after the Passover, the day of the first-fruits wave offering. Rabbinic Judaism interprets the Torah differently. It now celebrates Shavuoth each year on the same calendar date, the sixth of Sivan which does not fall on Sunday each year and which is the fiftieth day, not counted from the day after the first Sabbath in Passover but from the Ides of Nisan, which is Passover day itself. The Talmudic rabbis justified this by interpreting the sabbath in Leviticus 23 as referring not to the weekly sabbath but to the Passover Day itself as a special day of rest. This interpretation seems forced, and the more obvious understanding of a period of seven weeks beginning on a "day after the sabbath" and ending on a "sabbath" is that the regular sabbath is in view. It is worth noting that the same rabbinic tradition that interprets the Feast of Weeks as falling on the sixth of Sivan also says that this was the day on which the Ten Commandments were handed down. This is not possible without torturing the meaning of the first verse of the nineteenth chapter of Exodus. While that verse does state that the Israelites arrived at Mt. Sinai on Sivan - the third month after leaving Egypt counted by the same method as that by which the Sunday of the Resurrection is counted the third day after the Friday of the Crucifixion, i.e., with Nisan/Friday being the first in the count - but the expression "self-same day" would indicate that it was the Ides of the month or possibly the day after, but at any rate well after the sixth. Furthermore, the Commandments were not given until Moses was summoned up the mountain after the glory of God descended upon it three days after their arrival - the seventeenth of the month at the earliest. Even a Pentecost calculated by the interpretation of Leviticus I have argued for, would at the latest place the feast on the eleventh of Sivan, (3) which is still earlier than Exodus allows the arrival at Mt. Sinai to be. The original association between Shavuot and the Ten Commandments was clearly due to the events occurring in the same month, and only later was it tortured into the idea that they occurred on the same day.

While the observations in the previous paragraph may tend to put the damper on those who like to preach sermons connecting the Old and New Testament Pentecosts through the parallelism of the coming of Law and Grace they do not affect the actual connection that is evident in the Scriptures themselves.

The idea of a grain harvest is the thematic connection between the two Pentecosts. Obviously, this theme was very literal with regards to the original Pentecost. In the second chapter of Acts we see the first-fruits offered to God from a different type of harvest. It was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself who drew the analogy. The ninth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel ends with Him going through the cities and villages, teaching and preaching, and healing people of their sickness and disease and, seeing the multitude coming to Him for these ministrations, saying to His disciples:

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest. (vv. 37-38)

This leads directly to the commission of the twelve Apostles in the next chapter. Similarly, in the fourth chapter of St. John's Gospel, in speaking to His disciples after His encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well He says:

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together . And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured and ye are entered into their labours. (vv. 35-38)

The harvest in both of these passages is a spiritual harvest, in which the fruit of the seed of the Word sown among the people who hear it is reaped in their coming to faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the Christ. In the second chapter of Acts we see the Apostles' reaping precisely this harvest when, after the Holy Ghost descends upon them in fulfilment of the promises of John 14:16-18; 15:26-27; 16:7-13 and Acts 1:8, they speak and are heard by each of their auditors in the multitude in their own tongue, and St. Peter delivers his first sermon calling upon them to turn in repentance and believe in the Christ Who was crucified and had risen, about three thousand so believed, and were baptized into the Church on that very day.

It is because of what happened on the first Christian Pentecost that they day has traditionally been one for baptisms and confirmations. Baptism is, of course, the first of the Gospel Sacraments, the ceremony in which one is initiated into the Christian faith, ritually cleansed, and made a member of the Church. Confirmation, which in the Eastern tradition occurs at the same time as baptism, is the extrascriptural name given to the very Scriptural practice, evident throughout the book of Acts, in which the Apostles, and later those succeeded them in the governance of the Church, lay their hands on the heads of the baptized and pray that the Holy Ghost would come upon them - which is where the association with Pentecost comes in. It is from the practice of holding baptisms on this day, and specifically the white robes traditionally worn by those about to be baptized as well as those doing the baptizing - that the day came to be called "White Sunday" or Whitsunday.

This year there will be few to no baptisms or confirmations on Whitsunday. Even if the Communist health apparatchiks loosened their unjust, totalitarian, evil and Satanic restrictions on the size of gatherings enough for us to obey God's commands and assemble together in Churches again, they would undoubtedly tell us that rituals involving tactile contact like baptism and confirmation could not take place. The only baptisms and confirmations that will take place today, therefore, will be where a bishop has made the courageous decision - one which would undoubtedly be condemned as "selfish" by professedly "Christian" writers such as Rod Dreher - to not render unto Caesar that which belongs to God.

Wherever such courage may be found, there will be seen the work of Him Who descended upon the disciples on the first Whitsunday, empowered them, and united them into the body of Christ which is the Church.

(1) That is, when it is used as the name of a single day. Since the word for "week" in Hebrew is identical to the number of days in a week, the word meaning "weeks" also means "sevens". This is the plural of the name of the Jewish Day of Rest, which simply bears the name of the number of the day of the week upon which it falls, "seven".
(2) The different spellings given for the Hebrew names of months and days reflect the difference between older and more recent rules for transliterating Hebrew into English, not two alternative Hebrew spellings. Obviously, however, whether spelled Abib or Aviv in English, it and Nisan - which can also be spelled with a double s - are alternative names for the same month. Aviv means "spring" in Hebrew and Nisan is a loan-word from Akkadian, dating to the Babylonian Captivity, meaning "first-fruit."
(3) If the 14th of Nisan falls on a Sunday, the first Sabbath in Passover Week would be the twentieth, making the day after the twenty-first. This being counted as the first day, there would be ten towards the fifty in Nisan, twenty-nine in the intervening month of Zif/Ziv or Iyar, leaving eleven for Sivan.

Easter, Christian Liberty, and Religious Nuts

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever. – George Herbert


If you open your Bible to the Gospel according to St. John and turn to chapter ten verses twenty-two and twenty-three you will read the following:

And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch.

The feast of the dedication, which had drawn our Lord to the temple in Jerusalem, is an annual Jewish festival also known as the festival of lights or, more commonly, Hanukkah. Hanukkah is an eight day celebration that takes place roughly around the time that we celebrate Christmas. It begins on Kislev the 25th in the Hebrew calendar and since that calendar is a lunar calendar there is no corresponding fixed date in our calendar which is a solar calendar. It can begin in late November – sometimes, although very rarely, as early as American Thanksgiving – and as late as Christmas, most often falling in early to mid-December.

What is most interesting about our Lord’s observance of this feast is that it is not a feast commanded in the Torah. In the covenant God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai following His deliverance of them from their bondage in Egypt He instituted several holy days and festivals to be observed including the weekly Sabbath on the seventh day of the week (Exodus 20:8-12), Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16, 23:26-32), Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles ( Leviticus 23:33-36), and, of course, the Passover, the annual commemoration of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. Hanukkah is not one of these feasts, nor does the Old Testament record it being commanded or established by God at any later point. In the Bibles that most evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants read, the record of the events which Hanukkah commemorates cannot be found for the festival commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem, following its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt. These events are recorded in First and Second Maccabees, books which were part of every Christian Bible for the first millennium and a half of Christian history, but which have been expunged from the Bibles of evangelicals and fundamentalists, determined to out-Protestant the Protestant Reformers who themselves kept these books in their Bibles, albeit removing them from the Old Testament and assigning them a secondary, less authoritative, place.

I mention all of this because Holy Week is fast approaching and once again I find myself plagued and pestered by a nuisance of an acquaintance with questions about why we have replaced the holy days God has commanded, i.e., in the Old Testament, with “man-made” and “pagan” holidays like Easter. It is not because I think this man deserves an answer that I am writing this. He most certainly does not. The individual in question is a boorish lout who glories in his own ignorance like a sow wallowing in its mire, a legalist and a Judaizer who calls himself a “Spirit-filled Christian” but by this really means nothing more than a religious nut. I am writing this for the sake of those who might be led astray by him or others who think like him.

The holiday which we call Easter in the English-speaking world, and which Germans call das Ostern, is called Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, Pasqua in Italian, and Páscoa in Portuguese. All of these are derived from Pascha, the Latin name for the holiday, itself a transliteration of the Greek name, which is the earliest, Greek having been the language spoken by the Christian church in its infancy. While English may be the most widely spoken of these languages today, in the vast majority of languages spoken by Christians, both now and throughout history, Easter is known by some variation of the original Greek Pascha.

This, in itself, is sufficient to do away with the claim that Easter is “pagan” for that claim rests almost entirely on the English/German name of the holiday. It is claimed that the name is derived from that of a pagan goddess once worshipped by the Germanic speaking peoples who was honoured in the month that corresponds to our April, the month in which Easter usually falls. Whatever truth there may be to this – the etymology has not been established beyond dispute – the holiday that is celebrated under this name by English and German speaking Christians, is the holiday that other Christians call Pascha. Even in English we use an adjective derived from the holiday’s original name when we speak of things pertaining to Easter – “paschal candle”, “paschal bread”, etc. There is nothing pagan about the name Pascha which is a Hellenized spelling of Pesach, the Hebrew name of the Old Testament holiday that in English is known as the Passover.

Although in most languages and parts of the world, the Christian holiday shares the same name as the Jewish holiday that occurs each year at approximately the same time, it is not the same holiday. It commemorates different events than those which the Jewish holiday commemorates although, since the events the Christian holiday commemorates occurred during the Passover season, and the events the Jewish holiday commemorates have been understood by Christians since the days of the Apostles to prefigure or typify the events the Christian holiday commemorates, Christian lectionaries traditionally assign the Exodus to the Old Testament readings in the season leading up to Easter.

In the case of both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Pascha/Easter the holiday commemorates an act of salvation or deliverance through which God established a Covenant. The Jewish Passover commemorates the deliverance of a particular people, the Hebrews or Israelites, from slavery in Egypt. As part of the Covenant that God established with the Israelites after leading them out of Egypt into the wilderness of Sinai He commanded that the Passover be observed every year. It was only this one particular people that a) God delivered in the events commemorated by the Passover, b) that God made this Covenant with at Mt. Sinai, and c) that were commanded to keep the Passover. It was never intended to be a universal holiday, celebrated by everywhere in the world, and indeed, one of God’s very first instructions in establishing it was to forbid foreigners from partaking in it. (Ex. 12:43-45). To be allowed to partake of the Passover, a foreigner had to be formally adopted into the Israelite nation by undergoing circumcision (Ex. 12:48).

The Christian Pascha/Easter, by contrast, commemorates the salvation of the entire world from bondage to sin, death, Satan and hell that God accomplished through the death, burial, and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ. Through these events God established a New Covenant, made not with a particular nation but one in which the entire world was invited to participate through faith. The invitation to partake of this covenant of grace is called the Gospel – the Good News about God’s gift of His Son and the salvation He accomplished through His death and resurrection. The Gospel was to be preached to the people with whom the Old Covenant had been made first but then to the other nations as well because the invitation to partake of the covenant of grace was to be extended to everybody.

The New Testament makes it quite clear how Christians are to view the Exodus and the Old Covenant with all of its sacrifices and ceremonies. The deliverance of the Jews from bondage in Egypt prefigures Christ’s salvation of the world from sin. Jesus Christ Himself is our Passover sacrifice (1 Cor. 5:7). The blood of the lamb, on the lintel and side-posts of the Hebrew houses, which caused the Angel of Death to pass over them is, like all of the sacrifices of the Old Testament, a type, a picture, of the blood of the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) Whose death is the one final sacrifice that effectually takes away the sins of the world (Heb. 10:1-14).

Those, like my obnoxious acquaintance, who mock the majority of Christians for celebrating a holiday that commemorates the greater salvation of which the Old Testament Exodus was a mere type, point to the fact that the Old Testament holidays were commanded by God Himself whereas Easter was instituted by the church and is therefore “man made.” By this language they are obviously trying to evoke Matthew 15 and Mark 7 in which Jesus rebukes the Pharisees because “laying aside the commandments of God, ye hold the tradition of men.” We shall now see why this reasoning is erroneous and why those who take this position are closer in spirit to the Pharisees than those they mock.

In the tenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter was sent to preach the Gospel to the household of a Gentile centurion named Cornelius. They believed, received the Holy Spirit, and were baptized. From this time forward, the Gospel was preached to Gentiles as well as Jews. Soon thereafter, St. Paul and Barnabas made a large number of Gentile converts in several cities in Asia Minor and when they returned to the church in Antioch to report on the results of their evangelistic mission a controversy arose, with some insisting that the Gentile converts had to become Jews in order to become Christians – that they would have to be circumcised and keep all the laws of the Old Testament. An appeal was made to the Apostles in Jerusalem to settle this issue, and the first general council of the Christian church was called there, recorded in Acts 15. St. James presided, St. Peter testified to the vision he had received from God commanding him to take the Gospel to Cornelius (the vision involved a sheet coming down from heaven filled with non-kosher animals, him being ordered to eat, refusing, and then being told “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common”) and the council ruled that a letter would be sent to the Gentile converts giving their judgement:

For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. (Acts. 15:28-29)

St. Paul wrote an entire book of the New Testament, the epistle to the Galatian church, against Judaizers who claimed that Christians, after being justified by grace, needed to follow the Old Testament Law. Christian liberty is also a major theme of his largest epistle, that to the Roman Church, which argues that men are justified before God by grace received through faith, rather than by the works of the law. This Christian liberty is a recurring theme throughout his other epistles as well (see Col. 2:16-17 and Eph. 2:12-16, for example). The law from which St. Paul wrote that Christians are free is not some body of man-made regulations – note that the same epistle to the Romans which stresses Christian liberty requires Christians to obey the civil authorities (chapter 13) - but the body of ordinances handed down to Israel by God Himself at Mt. Sinai.

This liberty does not mean that the Christian has permission to freely go out and sin, to do that which is wrong in itself (Rom. 6:1-2, 11-15). Some acts are right in themselves and others wrong in themselves, universally, and with regards to matters such as these God will hold all men accountable at the Final Judgement whether they have received His Law or not (Rom 2.12-16). Only a very small portion of the commandments in the Old Testament Law are of this type, however. The vast majority of the Law’s commandments pertained to matters of what food to eat, what clothing to wear, what holy days to remember, what sacrifices to make, how to build and furnish the tabernacle, and how to maintain ceremonial purity. It is stated repeatedly throughout the Torah that a principal reason for these detailed instructions was that these things were to keep the Israelites distinct and separate from the other tribes of Canaan and the surrounding lands, because God did not want them to become polluted by their wicked ways, to worship their idols, sacrifice their children, and the like. The law was not successful in this, nor was it ever intended to be, but rather to illustrate by its failure the superiority of the new covenant of grace that would replace it, which covenant would not erect a barrier between God’s people and the nations of the world, but would be universal and open to all.

Of all the New Testament verses on Christian liberty the ones most directly relevant to the subject at hand are the following, written by St. Paul to the church at Colosse:

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ (Col. 2:16-17)

There are two aspects to this Christian liberty. First, the Christian church was not required to keep the holy days ordained in the Old Testament. Second, it was free to establish its own feasts and holy days. Those soi-dissent “spirit-filled Christians” who sneer at the church for doing just that are completely out of touch with the spirit of the New Testament.

By the end of the Book of Acts, Christians had already started to assemble together and break bread on “the first day of the week”, i.e., Sunday, (Acts 20:7) The reason Christians honoured the first day of the week in this way is because it was the day on which Jesus Christ rose from the dead. For the same reason, the earliest Christian holy day, dating back to the first century, is Pascha/Easter, the Christian Passover which annually looks back to the events to which the Jewish Passover looked forward.

Pascha/Easter is the culmination of a week (1) in which the events from the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday), through the Last Supper on the night of His betrayal (Maundy Thursday) and the Crucifixion itself (Good Friday) to the Harrowing of Hell (Holy Saturday) are remembered, itself marking the anniversary of the Resurrection. (2) The bulk of the narrative of each of the New Testament Gospels is comprised of the events of this week. They are the events which are at the heart of the Christian evangel:

Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures (1 Cor. 15:1-4)

Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter, is all about the Gospel. In the annual re-enactment of these events the church brings the Gospel to life to people in a far more powerful way than any sermon ever could.

Indeed, I suspect that this is what those who sneer at Easter as a “man-made” holiday and would seek to shackle Christians with chains forged on Mt. Sinai really object to the most in Easter. Having given their hearts to the Law, they have left no room for the Gospel.

(1) Note the interesting reverse parallelism with the Jewish Passover – which begins a week of celebration.

(2) There was much discussion and debate in the early church over when to celebrate Easter. The biggest disagreement was over whether it ought to coincide with the beginning of the Jewish Passover or with the day of the Resurrection. The latter viewpoint, obviously, won out, leaving the question of what day should be remembered as the day of the Resurrection (should it be held on the same day of the week as the Resurrection, i.e., Sunday every year, or the same day of the month, which would mean it moves throughout the week). The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) set it for the Sunday after the first full moon on/after the spring equinox. Contrary to much of the anti-ecclesiastical conspiracy mongering on the part of so-called “spirit-filled” religious nuts, this had nothing to do with paganism infiltrating the church but was an approximation based upon Scriptural evidence as when the Resurrection occurred. The Resurrection took place on the Sunday after the Passover began. The Passover begins on the evening of the fourteenth of the month of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. This, like the Ides of a Roman month, always fell on the full moon (the months of the Hebrew calendar are lunar months, beginning on the new moon). Nisan, as its original, pre-Babylonian captivity, name of Aviv indicates, was the first month in spring.

The Other War On Christmas

The war on Christmas, as that expression is usually understood, denotes the recent North American phenomenon in which progressive forces, in the name of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and all those other words which serve little other purpose than to hide the spirit of Stalinist totalitarianism behind a smiley face, have sought to re-brand Christmas into a generic “holiday season”. This war is conducted on many fronts and with varying degrees of intensity, ranging from the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays” or something similar to the more heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and civil liberties organizations to drive nativity scenes and any other Christmas imagery that has a direct and obvious connection to Christianity from the public square. Back in the 1990s, Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan began a war against Christmas contest in National Review, to see who could find the most outrageous example of an attempt to suppress the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and put a cheap generic imitation in its place and Brimelow has continued this tradition on his immigration reform website VDare. VDare has done an excellent job of documenting this sort of thing and so we will here turn to look at the other war on Christmas, i.e., that conducted by those who consider themselves to be the faithful, against Christmas, in the name of what they consider to be a sound interpretation of the Bible.



The roots of this other war on Christmas go back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation began as a response to corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X had authorized a campaign in which indulgences would be offered in return for funds that would go to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. This crass effort to sell the grace of God, offended Dr. Martin Luther of the University of Wittenberg, who challenged not only the vulgar indulgence peddling of Johann Tetzel, but the theology that lay behind the very idea of indulgences, on the grounds of the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and, when summoned by the Church to defend himself against charges of heresy, insisted that it is to the Holy Scriptures, as the written Word of God, that the teachings and traditions of the Church must be held accountable.



Dr. Luther had nothing against Christmas, or against most of the traditions of the Church for that matter, but the ball he started rolling picked up momentum which carried it much further than he had ever intended. The Reformation divided Western Europe, in which nation-states had begun to develop in the earlier Renaissance period. Of these, for the most part those with a Latin-based language, like French, Italian, and Spanish, remained Roman Catholic while the national churches in the northern states, with German-based languages, tended to follow one or the other of the Protestant Reformers. There were Protestants, however, who were convinced that Luther, Calvin, and even Zwingle had not gone far enough, who condemned Christendom and its traditions and institutions as hopelessly corrupt, denouncing both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant national churches and who formed sects in which only those whom they considered to be pure in doctrine and lifestyle were welcome, regarding their own sects as God’s elect remnant, and everyone else as being corrupt.



Protestant sectarianism continued to develop further and further away from the mainstream of Christian tradition and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radical Protestant sects developed, like the Rutherfordian Russellites and the Armstrongists which went so far as to reject Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy itself, generally reviving one or another of the ancient heresies in the process. Both the Russellites and the Armstrongists condemned Christmas as a pagan invention of the “Catholic Church” which in their view was a counterfeit church created by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.



This same anti-Christmas view had developed in radical Protestantism much earlier than this, however, by individuals who did not go so far as to reject the Trinity. In the sixteenth century, many of the English Protestants who had introduced moderate reforms in the Church of England during the reign of Edward VI, fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Mary, and there became much more radical in their Calvinism. When these returned to England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had restored the Edwardian reforms, they found these did not go far enough to please them. They demanded that every practice and institution from the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church for which they could not find a text in the Holy Scriptures commanding or authorizing its use be removed from the Church as superstition and popery. Against these fanatics, who came to be known as Puritans, the theologian Richard Hooker, defended the Elizabethan Church of England in his eight volume Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that the Church was at liberty to retain whatever traditional practices and institutions were not explicitly forbidden or condemned in the Holy Scriptures, a view far more compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty than that of the Puritans, although the latter liked to think of themselves as the champions of Christian liberty against a “legalistic” Church. When neither Elizabeth I, nor her Stuart successors James I and Charles I, were willing to give in to their demands, they became increasingly seditious and in the 1640s their rebellion against King Charles I broke out into the English Civil War. They captured the king, had him put on trial before a Parliament from which all but their own supporters had been removed by military force, and executed him. They installed their general, Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Britain, whose tyrannical regime lasted until his death in 1658, shortly after which the crown was restored to Charles II.


During his mercifully brief dictatorship, Cromwell sought to remove everything that brought the slightest amount of colour, light, and earthly happiness into people's lives. He banned games and amusements on Sundays - the only day of the week people were not working from dawn to dusk, stripped the churches of ornamentation and beautiful organ music, forcing everyone to listen to horrible extra long sermons all Sunday morning, shut down theatres, and outlawed Christmas as pagan.

What was Cromwell's problem? Dr. Seuss once speculated concerning a fictional character who bore a remarkable resemblance to Cromwell "It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small." In the case of the real-life, seventeenth century Grinch, Cromwell, whatever role his head and shoes might have played, the problem was that his heart, soul, and spirit had been shrunk, frozen, and killed by a form of extreme Calvinism that combined a Pharisaical spirit regarding religion with a philistine attitude to culture in what was the most repulsive and vile, hell-spawned theology to claim the name of Christianity in vain, until theological modernism began to be spewed forth from the German schools of higher criticism and the North American "social gospel" movement in the nineteenth century.


Unfortunately, the spirit of Cromwellian Puritanism has survived in the misguided zealots who come out every year at this time to inform us that the first five verses of Jeremiah 10 condemn Christmas trees, even though anyone with an IQ over thirty can see that the reference to removing a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold is describing the construction of an idol, not something that is purely celebratory and decorative in purpose and function. They also like to remind us that December 25th was the day in which the Romans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus at the conclusion of the pagan festival of lights, Saturnalia, concluding through some leap of reasoning that it was therefore pagan and idolatrous for the Church to have set the feast day celebrating the birth of the Son of the Living God on this same day. This sort of reasoning, however, would also condemn St. John the Apostle for introducing Jesus as the "Logos" in his Gospel. The idea of the Logos, the Divine Word or Reason, comes right out of pagan Greek philosophy. As the Hellenized first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria pointed out, there was a parallel concept in the "memra", the personalized Word or Wisdom of God of the Targum, the Aramaic rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is quite in keeping with the New Testament concept that Christ abolished the division between Jews and Gentiles in establishing His Covenant and His Church, to understand the Logos of the Gospel to draw from both the Greek and Jewish antecedents. Interestingly, the Jews then, as now, also celebrated a "Festival of Lights", around the winter solstice, commemorating the rededication of the Temple, after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt that ensued. Jesus, according to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, went to Jerusalem for this festival, also called the Feast of the Dedication or Hanukkah, even though this feast would be regarded as extra-scriptural by Puritan theology which does not accept the First and Second books of Maccabees as Holy Scriptures. If there is nothing wrong with St. John synthesizing the Greek logos and the Jewish memra in his doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Word Who was in the beginning with God, and Who was God, and through Whom all things were made, then there is nothing wrong with the Church deciding to celebrate the birth of God's Son, at a time of year which coincides with both the Roman and the Jewish festivals of lights. Indeed, it seems most appropriate.

There is a connection between the two wars on Christmas in that Puritanism, as Eric Voegelin pointed out, was an early stage of the modern revival of Gnosticism, of which the progressive liberalism of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries are later stages. You can read all about that in Voegelin's The New Science of Politics. The original Gnostics, I would note, were the anti-Christs that St. John referred to in his epistles, who denied the doctrine of Christ, specifically the Incarnation, which, of course, is the theological event commemorated in Christmas. The war on Christmas, in its Puritan and progressive liberal forms, is ultimately a war on the Apostolic doctrine of Christ as defended and articulated by the orthodox in the Trinitarian confession of the Council of Nicaea.

So, let me conclude by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.