However, the Christian Calendar is more than a collection of disparate holidays. It is a flowing of seasons, sub-seasons, octaves, tridiuums, holy days, feast days, and days of solemnity which flow in and out of one another. The Calendar is a Story; each section is designed to connect with all the others and create a Narrative. The Narrative is itself centred around the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, and the Person and Work of Christ are designed themselves to be an insight into the very Heart of God as He exists in His Triune Nature throughout all of eternity.
Thus the Christian Calendar is designed to be a pattern of life in which we can peek into the Heart of God. The themes that the Calendar suggests we live in are the themes of the Christian Story. They are not just found in the Story of Christ but throughout all of Scripture, all of history, all of Christian philosophy, all of Christian psychology, all of Christian sociology, all of Christian art, all of Christian theology, and all throughout every aspect of Creation.
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In any retelling of the Christian Story, it is important to begin the Narrative with a basic understanding of God as a Triune God. This is the one element that is completely and totally unique in Christianity. It is also, interestingly, the first thing to be denied by cults, secularized Christianity, and other “post-Christian” religions and philosophies. It is never fully developed but also rarely in conflict with “pre-Christian” religions and philosophies. It is the doctrine that has been both “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.”
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In any retelling of the Christian Story, it is important to begin the Narrative with a basic understanding of God as a Triune God. This is the one element that is completely and totally unique in Christianity. It is also, interestingly, the first thing to be denied by cults, secularized Christianity, and other “post-Christian” religions and philosophies. It is never fully developed but also rarely in conflict with “pre-Christian” religions and philosophies. It is the doctrine that has been both “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.”
This doctrine is indispensable to any understanding of the Christian Story because it contains the two elements of Christianity that one must absolutely have in order to comprehend any of the rest of the Story. It is essential to understand that God is both a passionately relational Entity (in fact, needing relationship for His very existence) and completely and totally Self-Dependent. Very wise theologians have even said that God is a relationship; the Christian concept of God is not One Person but an Essence containing Three Persons.
But I digress. This post is not meant as an apology of the doctrine of the Trinity nor is this blog designed to be theological in nature (I am no theologian or even apologist). The doctrine of the Trinity must simply be accepted before we can understand the Christian Calendar.
With that in mind, the entire Christian Story is about how God relates with Mankind (but only with the understanding that how He relates to us reveals Who He is). He earnestly desires us, and He has made us for Himself. St. Augustine once said, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” God did not make us for Himself in the sense in which we humans may make a cake or a walking stick for ourselves or even in the sinful way in which we usually procreate for ourselves. God is not utilitarian, though He may use us to accomplish His purposes at times; He is relational. He wants desperately, longs passionately, for communion with His creation. This is not possible unless we see God as a Relationship – true Relationship begets true relationship. The Members of the Trinity love Each Other so passionately that Their love overflows, spilling out into Creation. It could not have been any other way.
The Christian Story contains nothing new. It is really just the same elements of any good story. In fact, good stories are good only insofar as they are able to convincingly and artfully recreate the same themes and structure as the Story. The difference between the Christian Story and every other story is that the Christian Story is able to contain all of these elements, whereas a good story will contain some of them.
The Cliff Notes version of the Christian Story is this:
God (the Elohim) took joy in Himselves. The Elohim’s love motivated Them to create something that could be loved in the same way that already existed within the Elohim, so God created Man.* Man was innocent and naïve yet found his fulfilment in walking with God. Man was deceived and chose to reject God. Man became hopelessly sick, stuck in the self-loathing results of his choice but unwilling to return to God, his own pride rendering him incapable of repentance. God promised to intervene and provide a way for Man to find his way back to God. Man waited. God intervened in history, and Man rebelled again. Man continued to writhe in the consequences of his rejection of God. God always promised to intervene. Time and again, history repeated itself. Finally, God (one of the Elohim) came down to Earth and became Man. Man rejected his own so that he could also reject God again, and Man crucified the Elohim-Man. But God promised to restore all of Creation to this Elohim-Man so that it could, in turn, be restored to all of the Elohim. In a glorious display of love and power, the Elohim-Man was raised by God from the dead. He appeared among Man again, and some rejoiced while others hid their faces. Many continued to deny the Elohim-Man. Finally, He left Earth but promised to send Another Elohim. Man waited again. The Elohim-Spirit descended upon Man and indwelt him, drawing all Men to the Elohim-Man. God promised that, through the work of the Elohim-Spirit, the Elohim-Man would gather together a new race of Man as His own and that He would One Day return to rule and reign over all Man and all of Creation. Those who reject the Elohim-Man also reject the Elohim, and God will graciously though sadly provide them with a dwelling wherein they may live separate from the Elohim. Those who ally themselves with the Elohim-Man through the influence of the Elohim-Spirit will One Day live in the midst of the Elohim, fulfilling God’s desire for greater and deeper relationship. For now, though, Man is still waiting.
God (the Elohim) took joy in Himselves. The Elohim’s love motivated Them to create something that could be loved in the same way that already existed within the Elohim, so God created Man.* Man was innocent and naïve yet found his fulfilment in walking with God. Man was deceived and chose to reject God. Man became hopelessly sick, stuck in the self-loathing results of his choice but unwilling to return to God, his own pride rendering him incapable of repentance. God promised to intervene and provide a way for Man to find his way back to God. Man waited. God intervened in history, and Man rebelled again. Man continued to writhe in the consequences of his rejection of God. God always promised to intervene. Time and again, history repeated itself. Finally, God (one of the Elohim) came down to Earth and became Man. Man rejected his own so that he could also reject God again, and Man crucified the Elohim-Man. But God promised to restore all of Creation to this Elohim-Man so that it could, in turn, be restored to all of the Elohim. In a glorious display of love and power, the Elohim-Man was raised by God from the dead. He appeared among Man again, and some rejoiced while others hid their faces. Many continued to deny the Elohim-Man. Finally, He left Earth but promised to send Another Elohim. Man waited again. The Elohim-Spirit descended upon Man and indwelt him, drawing all Men to the Elohim-Man. God promised that, through the work of the Elohim-Spirit, the Elohim-Man would gather together a new race of Man as His own and that He would One Day return to rule and reign over all Man and all of Creation. Those who reject the Elohim-Man also reject the Elohim, and God will graciously though sadly provide them with a dwelling wherein they may live separate from the Elohim. Those who ally themselves with the Elohim-Man through the influence of the Elohim-Spirit will One Day live in the midst of the Elohim, fulfilling God’s desire for greater and deeper relationship. For now, though, Man is still waiting.
*I do not mean this in a masculine sense. “Man” is seen to incorporate both men and women, and I use the “masculine” pronoun to refer to the entirety of the species of homeo sapiens, not the male gender.
This paragraph doesn’t do the Story justice. My skills with words are not sharp enough to adequately convey the desire, passion, and joy, betrayal, pain, and sorrow, hope, yearning, and faith, majesty, beauty, and glory, ecstasy, bliss, and rapture, the utter contentment and peace mixed with the sheer anticipation and longing, the singing, the shrieking, the laughter, the groaning, the sighing, and the silence that the Story contain.
Above all, we who live in a Humanist society must remember that this Story is not ours. It is not, nor has it ever been, about us. These emotions are not ours; we feel them as an aftershock. These verbs are not initiated by us; we only weakly copy them. The greatest heresy of the modern age is our understanding of the impassibility of God. God does not have less human emotion than Man but more. God does not act corporeally because He acts in a much greater sense, with so much more of His being.
I have heard it said that, whenever the Scriptures speak of God having emotions or doing something physically, they are just using anthropomorphisms. Those who teach this mean well, and I do not know if they believe the heresy that their language leads to, but it is the worst kind of heresy. Their language makes God out to be less than Man; they talk as though we have something (emotions, a body) which God does not have. They should rather speak of human experience as a sort of theopomorphism. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, the metaphors of Scripture always reflect a deeper reality than their literal interpretations would imply (which is why, according to Lewis, Hell only becomes a bigger problem if you interpret it metaphorically). If the references to God being angry or jealous or taking delight or crying or having sorrow or having a wing to cover us or changing His mind are metaphors, then that only means He has more of these realities than what our human condition can weakly copy, not less.
I have heard it said that the greatest form of worship is to think God’s thoughts after Him. This is mortifyingly false in its incompleteness – it sees God as only a Mind and tells us to love Him with only our minds. The greatest form of worship is to not only think God’s thoughts after Him but also to feel God’s emotions after Him and to do God’s actions after Him.
That is the aim of the Christian Calendar. It seeks to deliver something that a theological discussion alone or an exegetical study alone simply cannot deliver: the synthesis of mind (reason), heart (emotions), and strength (corporal experience) in worship to God.
That is the aim of the Christian Calendar. It seeks to deliver something that a theological discussion alone or an exegetical study alone simply cannot deliver: the synthesis of mind (reason), heart (emotions), and strength (corporal experience) in worship to God.
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