Why Protestants Should Celebrate All Saints Day

This may be a day or two late, but I figured it was probably still something worth posting. Many protestant churches have their harvest parties, chili cook-offs, and other fun gatherings this time of year and yet ignore the explicitly Christian feast of All Saints Day. The reason for ignoring this holiday probably has many reasons including the extremes of mere ignorance and anti-Catholic bias. It is my contention that even within a Protestant theological structure All Saints can and should serve as a life-giving feast of the Church that edifies believes and draws them closer to God.

Here are a few reason why I think Protestants should celebrate All Saints Day.

- The great cloud of witnesses listed in Hebrews does not end with the closing of the Canon. There have been holy men and women through the centuries that are examples of how one can and should live in faith, holiness, and love for God. In fact All Saints Day is a celebration of the Saints of Scripture as well as those that have lived after.

- The Faith is passed from one generation of faithful Christians to another generation of faithful Christians. While we Protestants may think that we are a "bible only" people, we are not. Without the faithful witness of the Church preserving the teaching and the scriptures we would be lost.

- God has chosen to reveal himself and to pass down the Faith through these faithful witnesses and it is surely good that we remember them and thank him for the faithful that have lived before us.

- Many Protestant congregations and individuals act like the Christian calendar consists of Christmas and Easter while a few others would include Advent and Lent. The Christian calendar provides a life-giving standard of living for the whole year and Protestantism needs to grab a hold of this. We desperately need to orient our lives to God and we need to approach this holistically. In order to orient ourselves in both body and soul we need to take upon ourselves the practice of fasting and feasting with the Church. We need to allow the church to dictate our calendars, meals, and practices. Recapturing All Saints Day is just a part of this larger issue.

- Just as Paul exhorts his readers to imitate him as he imitates Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1) so we too should be imitators of the holy saints that have gone before us, for in their martyrdom and testimony they have shown us how to imitate Christ.

- It's part of the tradition of the Church. Yes, I know this statement strikes at the very heart of Protestantism, but it is nevertheless true. The faithful of the church saw it fitting to include the remembrance of the saints through a feast for our spiritual edification. We cannot be so arrogant to ignore this exhortation. I realize that this sounds odd coming from a Protestant but as Christians we cannot believe whatever we want. We must remember that Christ said the gates of hell would not overcome the Church and as such we must believe what the Church hands to us. We are separated by ages and Holy Spirit has chosen to use the Church as his method for handing the faith from generation to generation.



Those are just a few reasons why we as Protestants must celebrate All Saints Day. We need to remember the Saints, Martyrs, and Ascetics that have gone before us. We should celebrate the feast of All Saints and thank the Father for faithfully handing down the gospel of his Son through these faithful men and women by the power of the Spirit. We should allow their holy lives to inspire us and as we celebrate this feast we should beg the Father to help us live in such a way that all of our life we will inspire future generations into holiness.