All Saints Day and the church militant

Happy All Saints Day!

Don't be ashamed if you don't know what to do with that greeting, because most of us don't. That's OK. We'll learn a little about this together.

Firstly, one of the main ways that we commemorate this day is by remembering the dead, which is fine, but also incomplete. It used to be that churches in the western world celebrated the Triduum of All Hallows, which was All Hallow's Eve on October 31, All Saints Day on November 1, and All Souls Day on November 2. If you celebrate all three then, yes, All Saints Day can be about the dead and only the dead. However, most Protestant churches don't celebrate all three anymore (if they celebrate any at all), which means that All Saints Day has taken on a new meaning.

On All Saints Day many churches ring bells or speak the names of those who have died in the last year. Again, it's a really nice gesture and those who have passed are certainly included in the saints, but saying names and singing hymns should not be the entirety of our All Saints commemoration. If you're following the traditions of mainline Protestantism (which, if you're Lutheran like me, you probably should consider doing) then the dead are not the only saints. In fact, all people--living and dead--are counted in the saints, and this is why we see no need to celebrate both All Saints and All Souls.

Lutherans believe that we are 100% saint and 100% sinner, and the only difference that death makes in the equation is that it finally sheds that sinful skin that we have worn in this life. So to celebrate only the dead on All Saints Day makes me a little suspicious that this is all just a little synchretistic with the Day of the Dead and other celebrations of that sort. Of course, remembering the dead offers a pastoral service, but if we want to be honest to the way we interpret All Saints Day it should also be bigger than that.

So, if we're all saints (living and dead), what is this day about anyway?


Glad you asked. The tradition handed down to us in Western Christianity is that the church is made up of people living their lives, known as the church militant, and people who have died, known as the church triumphant. Nonetheless, it is one church. So, what we are really celebrating on All Saints Day is the eternal nature of the church as not only an earthly institution but an everlasting covenant between God and human beings--both living and dead. In short, this is the perfect day to celebrate the "one, universal and apostolic church" or, to use the other language of the creeds, "the catholic (small-c) church."

Now, with that in mind, I want to take one last opportunity to address this term: "church militant." We get the triumphant part and have no problem talking about it when a person has died, but this word, "militant," gets people up in arms (terrible pun alert) because of its associations with other words: "military" and "militia." Mainline Christians have gone to great lengths to distance ourselves from the language of spiritual warfare and mostly I think that's for the best. Personally, I find many of the hymns that use that kind of language hopelessly inane. However, we need to be careful here to not throw the baby out with the bathwater (or however that saying goes). The Latin word "militans" has a secondary meaning, "to struggle," which is the way that church militant is intended. It is the church struggling; the church doing its best in this sinful world. And in that way we are doing a kind of spiritual warfare but it is a left-handed, self-sacrificial kind of "militans" that is not really what most of us would consider warfare at all.

So, I suppose we could get rid of this word, "militans," and move on with a kind of watered down All Saints celebration, but I like an alternative. What if, instead of giving up on a word, we get back to what it really means and actually make this a day emphasizing our struggle to live faithfully as saints who are already saved but not yet?

That sounds like a thing worth commemorating.