'The judgement and declaration of our Church touching this point, is very sound': the Articles of Perth, feasts of Our Lord, and the Jacobean Church of Scotland
The Articles of Perth, adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1618, restored the observance of the great feasts of our redemption. The Second Helvetic Confession had said of these observances, "we approve of it highly". The opponents of the Articles of Perth, however, invoked the 1560 Book of Discipline, which dismissed these observances as feasts "that the Papists have invented". In particular, opponents viewed the observances as a binding of the conscience:
imposed vpon the consciences of men without the expresse Commandement of Gods Word, as keeping of holy dayes commanded by men, the feast of Christmasse, and other feasts.
In his 1621 account of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth in 1618, David Lindsay - Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38) - exposed how perverse was such a reading of this provision of the Articles of Perth:
The iudgement and declaration of our Church touching this point, is very sound; For whatsoeuer is imposed by men, or by Ecclesiasticall Constitution vpon the conscience to bee obserued, as parts of diuine worship, that is not expresly or by necessary consequence contayned in the Word, is contrary to the wholsome Doctrine; as the Papists did the obseruation of Christmasse, and other festiuall dayes ...
The Articles of Perth do not, quite obviously, make any claim whatsoever that observance of the festivals is a requirement of divine law. Indeed, the relevant Article twice states its opposition to "all superstitious observation". Rather, the Articles understand the festivals to be commendable as a means of recalling "the inestimable benefits received from God by our Lord Jesus Christ". And this is also the understanding of these feasts in the Second Helvetic Confession:
if in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord's nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples.
It was exercising such Christian liberty, Lindsay declared, that the Assembly of the Church of Scotland, like the other "reformed Churches ... & particular Churches of the Realme" accepted the request of James VI/I that the observance of the feasts be restored:
[The Assembly] receiued a free, and voluntary Commission, to vote, as they should bee mooued, and perswaded by the motiues, and reasons proponed at the Assembly; otherwise, they had met with preiudice. And therefore, what they concluded according to their Commission, was not obtruded vpon the Churches against their will, but according to their wills contayned in the Commission.
In Christian liberty, and heeding the legitimate advice of the civil magistrate, the General Assembly restored the observance of the Lord's "birth, passion, resurrection, ascension, and sending down of the Holy Ghost" as a wise and prudent means of celebrating the "inestimable benefits" we have received thereby. This was well within the mainstream of continental Reformed thought, practice, and ecclesiology. The Second Helvetic Confession had provided the theological rationale for Reformed churches retaining such feasts. They were observed in many of the continental Reformed churches. And as for James VI/I desiring their observance, this was not radically different from the role of the civil magistrate in, for example, the Dutch Reformed Church - in stark contrast to the order desired by the Scottish Covenanter tradition. Once again, then, we see that Lindsay and the Articles of Perth stand in the mainstream of the continental Reformed tradition, unlike the odd, eccentric stance of their opponents.
(The picture is of a late 17th century drawing of Brechin, Lindsay's See.)
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