Outer Rim Territories

Firs, a bit of the history of Halloween…

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

It’s Halloween, one of the oldest holidays in the Western European tradition, invented by the Celts, who believed Halloween was the day of the year when spirits, ghosts, faeries, and goblins walked the earth. The tradition of dressing up and getting candy probably started with the Celts as well. Historians believe that they dressed up as ghost and goblins to scare away the spirits, and they would put food and wine on their doorstep for the spirits of family members who had come back to visit the home.

Pope Gregory III turned Halloween into a Christian holiday in the eighth century, and people were encouraged to dress up as saints and give food to the poor. But when Irish Catholics brought the Celtic traditions to the United States, Halloween became a holiday for them to let off steam by pulling pranks, hoisting wagons onto barn roofs, releasing cows from their pastures, and committing all kinds of mischief involving outhouses. Treats evolved as a way to bribe the vandals and protect homes.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that Halloween became a holiday for children. In 1920, the Ladies’ Home Journal made the first known reference to children going door to door for candy, and by the 1950s it was a universal practice in this country. By the end of the 20th century, 92 percent of America’s children were trick-or-treating. Tonight, about 70 percent of American households will open their doors and offer candy to children, and Halloween parties are becoming increasingly popular among adults. It’s the one day a year that people can freely dress as the opposite gender, as criminals, superheroes, celebrities, animals, or even inanimate objects. But retailers report that the most popular costumes remain some variation on witches, ghosts, and devils.

…and a bit of good advice from Albert Mohler on where our hearts and minds should be on this day, the Festival of the Reformation…

Christianity and the Dark Side — What About Halloween?

Halloween has become downright dangerous in many neighborhoods. Scares about razor blades hidden in apples and poisoned candy have spread across the nation in recurring cycles. For most parents, the greater fear is the encounter with occultic symbols and the society’s fascination with moral darkness.

For this reason, many families withdraw from the holiday completely. Their children do not go trick-or-treating, they wear no costumes, and attend no parties related to the holiday. Some churches have organized alternative festivals, capitalizing on the holiday opportunity, but turning the event away from pagan roots and the fascination with evil spirits. For others, the holiday presents no special challenges at all.

These Christians argue that the pagan roots of Halloween are no more significant than the pagan origins of Christmas and other church festivals. Without doubt, the church has progressively Christianized the calendar, seizing secular and pagan holidays as opportunities for Christian witness and celebration. Anderson M. Rearick, III argues that Christians should not surrender the holiday. As he relates, “I am reluctant to give up what was one of the highlights of my childhood calendar to the Great Imposter and Chief of Liars for no reason except that some of his servants claim it as his.”

Nevertheless, the issue is a bit more complicated than that. While affirming that make-believe and imagination are part and parcel of God’s gift of imagination, Christians should still be very concerned about the focus of that imagination and creativity. Arguing against Halloween is not equivalent to arguing against Christmas. The old church festival of “All Hallow’s Eve” is by no means as universally understood among Christians as the celebration of the incarnation at Christmas.

Christian parents should make careful decisions based on a biblically-informed Christian conscience. Some Halloween practices are clearly out of bounds, others may be strategically transformed, but this takes hard work and may meet with mixed success.

The coming of Halloween is a good time for Christians to remember that evil spirits are real and that the Devil will seize every opportunity to trumpet his own celebrity. Perhaps the best response to the Devil at Halloween is that offered by Martin Luther, the great Reformer: “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.”

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther began the Reformation with a declaration that the church must be recalled to the authority of God’s Word and the purity of biblical doctrine. With this in mind, the best Christian response to Halloween might be to scorn the Devil and then pray for the Reformation of Christ’s church on earth. Let’s put the dark side on the defensive.

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§ 2 Responses to “On the Eve of All Saints”

• Brent A says:

  4 November, 2007 at 11:05 am

  My church, a more conservative offshoot of the Presbyterian Church, makes a big focus on the Protestant Reformation itself. To this end, it speaks of Reformation Day for Oct 31st. Not sure that Martin Luther would approve, but it is at least a step in the right direction. -Brent

  Reply
• Christopher Gillespie says:

  4 November, 2007 at 1:26 pm

  Brent,

  I think one of your own, D.G. Hart, wrote a nice article for one of our journals “Logia”. From the 1999 Reformation issue:

  Celebrating Reformation Day is an activity typically reserved for Lutherans. After all, October thirty-first marks the day when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the castle church door and launched the Protestant Reformation. James Nuechterlein, a Lutheran historian who now edits the journal First Things, recalls that when he was a child Lutherans “enthusiastically celebrated” October thirty- first. The services he remembers were “unabashed exercises in Protestant triumphalism.” The reason for such enthusiastic cel- ebration owed to the marginal status of the German-Americans who comprised the majority of American Lutherans. “Protestantism in those days,” Nuechterlein explains, “still con- stituted the vital center of American religious culture.” Lutherans, in turn, “were located some distance from the cen- ter of that center—which was occupied, more or less in order, by Episcopalians, Presbyterians—mainline, that is, not Orthodox—Methodists, and Congregationalists.” But on
  Reformation Day, Lutherans “could escape our marginal status and enter fully into the grand anti-papist communion” of American Protestantism.

  In some ways it is ironic that Presbyterians celebrate Reformation Day since it is a day of greater importance to the theological descendants of Martin Luther. I wonder too if part of
  the reason why members of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) would observe Reformation Day has to do with their own feelings of cultural inferiority. Lutherans may have been at the margins of American Protestantism, but at least they could point to professors of church history like Sydney Ahlstrom and Jaroslav Pelikan at Yale, Martin Marty and the University of Chicago, and Lewis Spitz at Stanford, who had moved from the province of Lutheranism into the centers of American learning and mainstream Protestantism. George Marsden, who now teaches at the University of Notre Dame, is the closest the OPC has come to producing a scholar to achieve national recognition in the United States. All the more reason, then, for Orthodox Presbyterians to celebrate Reformation Day with gusto because
  for one brief day they go from a denomination in need of expla- nation to the central current of western history since the six- teenth century.

  The desire to feel important, even if only for one day, may also explain why on Reformation Day Presbyterians often hear glow- ing and inspiring words about the genius not only of the
  Protestant Reformation but of the Reformed tradition more narrowly. Of course, Calvinists trace their lineage back to Luther’s initial discovery of the doctrine of justification by faith,
  a doctrine on which Presbyterians and Lutherans agree, a doc- trine that moved the likes of Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, and Martin Bucer to initiate even greater reforms in the church. But
  those greater reforms are just the point where Presbyterians and Reformed begin to part company with Lutherans. Martin Luther, some Calvinists argue, only went so far and not far
  enough at that. So the Calvinist wing of the Reformation pushed beyond Luther’s initial efforts and reformed all aspects of the church, from its theology all the way to its polity and worship,
  according to the Word of God. And for some Presbyterians and Reformed, this reform effort did not stop with the church. It kept on going all the way out the doors of the church and into
  the markets and city councils of Western Europe, thus trans- forming the life and culture of the West.

  This is how Christopher Dawson described the difference between Calvinism and Lutheranism:
  there lies the spiritual world of Calvinism and the Free Churches, which is . . . completely different in its political and social outlook from the world of Lutheranism, and which has had a far greater influence and closer connection with what we know as western civilization without further qualification. . . . The genius of Calvin was that of an orga- nizer and legislator, severe, logical, and inflexible in pur- pose, and consequently it was he and not Luther who
  inspired Protestantism with the will to dominate the world and to change society and culture.

  So much for Lutheran triumphalism.

  See! It’s not just Lutheran afterall! :)

  Reply

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