Lent

Lent is the forty-day fast that Western church tradition keeps each year in the weeks before Easter, historically linked to Christ’s own forty days of fasting in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-2). Its length and manner varied sharply among the earliest churches, some fasting a single day and others the full forty, a diversity already noted in the second century.¹ Reformed confessions decline to impose it on believers, holding that acceptable worship is limited to what God has himself prescribed in Scripture, and that Lent is “attested by antiquity but not at all in the writings of the apostles.”²

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter naming Lent specifically, but its chapter on worship states the regulative principle that has governed how Reformed Baptists answer the question:

the acceptable way of worshipping the true God, is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imagination and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.³

The same chapter allows “solemn humiliation, with fastings, and thanksgivings, upon special occasions” as a legitimate part of worship, but ties this to occasions the church discerns as they arise rather than to a fixed date on a calendar.⁴

The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), one of the wider Reformed confessional family, addresses Lent by name and reaches the same conclusion by the same logic:

The fast of Lent is attested by antiquity but not at all in the writings of the apostles. Therefore it ought not, and cannot, be imposed on the faithful.²

The same chapter draws a line between two kinds of days claimed by the church calendar. It commends keeping the Lord’s nativity, passion, resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit “in Christian liberty,” while rejecting Lent and the saints’ days on confessional grounds:

we do not approve of feasts instituted for men and for saints. Holy days have to do with the first Table of the Law and belong to God alone.⁵

Historical Development

Patristic origins and regional variation

The earliest witnesses to a pre-Easter fast describe no single, apostolic pattern. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, reported disagreement over both the fast’s length and its origin:

Some think that a fast should be observed one day only, others two days, but others more, and some forty days. This diversity in keeping this fast did not first begin in our times, but long before us by those, as I suppose, who did not simply keep to what had been delivered to them from the beginning, but afterwards fell into another custom either through negligence or ignorance.¹

Centuries later that regional variation still had not resolved into a single practice. Citing the church historian Socrates, Calvin reported that “the Romans had only three weeks, but their fast was continuous, except on the Lord’s day and the Sabbath,” while “the Greeks and Illyrians had, some six, others seven, but the fast was at intervals,” with just as much disagreement over which foods a faster could eat.⁶

Medieval expansion and Reformation rejection

Calvin traced the eventual fixed forty-day season to an “excess” in extolling fasting as one of the cardinal virtues, in which “the vulgar imagined that they thereby perform some excellent service to God, and pastors commended it as a holy imitation of Christ.”⁶ Rules governing which foods were permitted hardened over the following centuries into what Calvin called “impious laws…binding the conscience in deadly chains,” and he cited Jerome’s complaint, in a letter to Nepotian, that some of his own contemporaries mocked the discipline by procuring elaborate delicacies while still counting themselves rigorous fasters.⁷

The Reformation-era confessions rejected the practice outright rather than reforming its rules. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) declared it unattested in apostolic writing and therefore not binding on believers,² and the Second London Baptist Confession (1677, republished 1689) folded fasting generally into its own chapter on worship without naming Lent among its occasions.⁴

Opposing Views

Sixteenth-century Reformed writers reported that Lent’s defenders argued chiefly from Christ’s own example. Calvin described the reasoning current among “pastors” of his own day: they “commended it as a holy imitation of Christ,” treating the season as a yearly re-enactment of Christ’s forty days in the wilderness before he began his public ministry.⁶

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t fasting forty days honor Christ’s own example in the wilderness? Calvin answered that Christ’s fast was never offered as a pattern to repeat on a fixed schedule. Christ “did not fast repeatedly,” which he would have had to do had he meant to lay down a law for an annual fast, but fasted once, at the outset of his ministry, in order to authenticate his gospel as coming not from men but from heaven, much as Moses fasted forty days once, when he received the law, without that fast ever becoming a recurring observance among Israel (Exod. 24:18; 34:28).⁶ Calvin noted that none of the prophets who followed Moses, nor the apostles who followed Christ, ever instituted a similar fast in imitation of either.⁶

Doesn’t the antiquity of Lent’s observance count as evidence the apostles themselves instituted it? The confessions answer that antiquity is not the same thing as apostolic origin. Irenaeus’s own report shows the fast arising from custom rather than command: churches of his own generation already disagreed over whether to fast one day, several days, or forty, a disagreement he traced to churches that had “fell into another custom” rather than kept a single practice “delivered…from the beginning.”¹ The regional variation Calvin documented between Roman and Greek practice, centuries later, shows the same absence of any single received rule.⁶

Doesn’t observing Lent simply fall under the church’s own liberty to call for fasting, the way any special occasion would? The Second Helvetic Confession draws the line at exactly this point: it approves commemorating events in Christ’s own life “in Christian liberty,” but treats a fixed, calendar-bound fast differently, since it holds fasting itself to belong “upon special occasions” that arise rather than to a date fixed permanently in advance.⁵⁴ Holy days, the confession states, belong to the first table of the law and to God’s own appointment, not the church’s.⁵

Related Doctrines

References

Irenaeus, Fragment 3, quoted in The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 24, “Of Holy Days, Fasts and the Choice of Foods,” sect. “Lent”: “Some think that a fast should be observed one day only, others two days, but others more, and some forty days. This diversity in keeping this fast did not first begin in our times, but long before us by those, as I suppose, who did not simply keep to what had been delivered to them from the beginning, but afterwards fell into another custom either through negligence or ignorance.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 24, “Of Holy Days, Fasts and the Choice of Foods,” sect. “Lent”: “The fast of Lent is attested by antiquity but not at all in the writings of the apostles. Therefore it ought not, and cannot, be imposed on the faithful.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677; republished 1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” par. 1: “the acceptable way of worshipping the true God, is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imagination and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677; republished 1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” par. 5: “solemn humiliation, with fastings, and thanksgivings, upon special occasions, ought to be used in an holy and religious manner.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second Helvetic Confession, chap. 24, sect. “The Festivals of Christ and the Saints”: “we do not approve of feasts instituted for men and for saints. Holy days have to do with the first Table of the Law and belong to God alone.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 12, sec. 20: “Then the superstitious observance of Lent had everywhere prevailed: for both the vulgar imagined that they thereby perform some excellent service to God, and pastors commended it as a holy imitation of Christ.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Calvin, Institutes, 4.12.21. ↩