Posted on 02/18/2015 3:24:56 PM PST by NYer
You wouldn’t think that anyone would fight about Ash Wednesday and Lent. For Catholics it’s part of what we do. For others it’s something they can use or not as they find it helpful, and increasing numbers do. Down-the-line Evangelical churches have started to hold special services for Ash Wednesday complete with ashes and to treat the Sundays after it as Sundays in Lent. Rather severely anti-sacramental Evangelicals now speak of giving things up and fasting on Fridays.
I find this cheering, but my friend Carl Trueman doesn’t. Carl teaches Church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, the flagship of serious Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) Christianity in America. He’s a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. If you’re thinking of the somewhat wooly-minded, generically Protestant Presbyterians in the church in middle of town, you’re not thinking of Carl’s kind of Presbyterian. The mainline Presbyterians are the ones in tweed and corduroy; Carl’s type are in biker leathers. He’s one John Calvin would have recognized as a brother.
Writing on Reformation21, the website of the Alliance for Confessing Evangelicals, Carl notes that Evangelicals have started observing the season and then lets loose:
He is clearly not pleased and I can see why. The adoption by Evangelicals of some Catholic practices cheers me, however, because it is a gain for them, an expansion of their ways of living their faith, and one that reduces the gap between divided Christians. And, to be honest, because it opens a way for them to understand what the Catholic Church is about.
Carl is right that they’ve picked pieces they like without enough thought about the thing from which they’re picking pieces, but as a Catholic I think that’s a blessing rather than a mistake. He wants them to be more consistent and coherent Protestants and I would like them to be Catholics, and movement from one to the other requires some inconsistency and incoherence, the way a man wanders back and forth in the forest trying to find his way until he sees in the distance the place he is looking for.
The Church offers riches like an over-loaded wagon in a fairy tale, spilling gold coins every time it hits a pothole. Evangelicals can find in Catholic practice many things they can use just by walking along behind it. Though they have in their own tradition ways to express penance and forgiveness, as Carl notes, Ash Wednesday — the whole rite, not just the imposition of ashes — offers them a more dramatic way of hearing the truth and enacting it.
The question for them is how much they can take and adapt to their own purposes without having to face the claims of the Church from which they’re taking the things they like. I think rather a long way, because the Church draws upon a wisdom that it is not exclusively Catholic. You can enjoy the imposition of ashes without asking “Who is Peter?”
But there should come a point where you ask, “What is this thing from whom I’m always taking? What makes it a thing from which I can take so much?” As Carl says, more pointedly: “If your own tradition lacks the historical, liturgical and theological depth for which you are looking, it may be time to join a church which can provide the same.”
Protestants getting ashes at a Catholic Church? That is so weird.
Don’t forget the whistlepig going all Tyson on the dude’s ear!
http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/nbc-news/watch-groundhog-bite-mayors-ear-392483395520
Don’t forget the Red Heifer!
Pope Stephen VI (896–897), who had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied, and thrown in the Tiber.[1]
Pope John XII (955–964), who gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife.
Pope Benedict IX (1032–1044, 1045, 1047–1048), who "sold" the Papacy
Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who is lampooned in Dante's Divine Comedy
Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who complained that he did not hear enough screaming when Cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.[2]
Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), a Borgia, who was guilty of nepotism and whose unattended corpse swelled until it could barely fit in a coffin.[3]
Pope Leo X (1513–1521), a spendthrift member of the Medici family who once spent 1/7 of his predecessors' reserves on a single ceremony[4]
Pope Clement VII (1523–1534), also a Medici, whose power-politicking with France, Spain, and Germany got Rome sacked.
C-B, I have never heard that the Catholic Church as said that those who have never heard of Christ are saved; but then I’m not Catholic. Just a Protestant who believes in Jesus and doing as He taught, as best I can.
G-F
Before saying that, you need to know that Luther did not establish "The Lutheran Church." If you go throughout Germany, you won't find "The Lutheran Church". Luther was responsible for "The Landeskirchen", each government body responsible for the church within their borders. That was the name used in Germany for what we call 'lutheranism'. After hundreds of years those combined into the Evangelische Church....meaning 'Evangelical'.
All over Germany you'll find Evangelische services.
Do they 'evangelize' the gospel of Jesus having died for our sins according to scripture? I wouldn't bet on that, so the issue is whether they are "evangelical" or are just called "evangelical."
Thought you'd find that of interest.
However, the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods of the Lutheran movement in America are very conservative, biblical, and evangelical. I am not part of any Lutheran body.
Please show how the pagans used wedding rings to worship their gods.
"One indeed is the universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved, in which the priest himself is the sacrifice, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine; the bread (changed) into His body by the divine power of transubstantiation, and the wine into the blood, so that to accomplish the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from His (nature) what He Himself received from ours." — Pope Innocent III and Lateran Council IV (A.D. 1215)
Therefore, if anyone says that it is not by the institution of Christ the lord himself (that is to say, by divine law) that blessed Peter should have perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole Church; or that the Roman Pontiff is not the successor of blessed Peter in this primacy: let him be anathema. — Vatican 1, Ses. 4, Cp. 1
They DO?
You interviewed them, as well, I guess...
Metmom, I have a bet with another Catholic FReeper that you can't say something nice to a Catholic about either Catholics or the Catholic Church.
43. In your area, that you know of.
44. Not the prots, it might in ion the parts they took out.
And POUNDS; too!
And then some...
Share with your friends!
Really...
It can be, and by voting and supporting liberalism, which most Caths do, one has have already taken the mark in his heart, but it remains that the emphasis upon formal ritualized religion, including the same redundant "play" every week and liturgical calendar with their extraBiblical elements - and false gospel preaching - fosters perfunctory professions and a mere form of religion.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8)
The life of the church in the NT is one of being led by the Spirit in obedience to the Word (which i fall short in), and there is a reason the Spirit only mentions one specific day that the Christians met on, while observing "days, months, times and years" (Gal. 4:10) was a mark of declension. And the meeting described in 1Cor. 14, in which all men may have something to share by the Spirit, in order, is not something seen in most any church today, due to our need for further reformation.
Someone once said that we should order our lives (in such prayer and faith-dependance upon God) so that if the Holy Spirit was removed, all would fail.
Then there is the story of a Chinese Christian who after visiting many American churches (with their pomp and ceremony, or hype) wryly remarked, "The amazing thing about American churches are the wonderful things they can do without God."
I almost used her pix!
This laying on of ashes was done on Wednesday, the day named for Odin, Odin’s Day. And the German word for the day called Wednesday in English is “Mittwoch” or mid-week, in French it is mercredi; in Spanish, miércoles; and in Hebrew it is pronounced Yom-re-vee-EE.
Nothing related to Odin in those, thus we have merely false linking of doing ashes to worshiping a pagan god based upon the linquistic orgin of a word for a day of the week — pretty weak logic in my view.
It's probably from here:
11 For there is no respect of persons with God.
12 For whosoever have sinned without the law, shall perish without the law; and whosoever have sinned in the law, shall be judged by the law.
13 For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.
14 For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves:
15 Who shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts between themselves accusing, or also defending one another,
16 In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel.
17 But if thou art called a Jew and restest in the law, and makest thy boast of God,
18 And knowest his will, and approvest the more profitable things, being instructed by the law,
19 Art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them that are in darkness,
20 An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, having the form of knowledge and of truth in the law.
21 Thou therefore that teachest another, teachest not thyself: thou that preachest that men should not steal, stealest:
22 Thou that sayest, men should not commit adultery, committest adultery: thou that abhorrest idols, committest sacrilege:
23 Thou that makest thy boast of the law, by transgression of the law dishonourest God.
24 (For the name of God through you is blasphemed among the Gentiles, as it is written.)
25 Circumcision profiteth indeed, if thou keep the law; but if thou be a transgressor of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision.
26 If, then, the uncircumcised keep the justices of the law, shall not this uncircumcision be counted for circumcision?
27 And shall not that which by nature is uncircumcision, if it fulfill the law, judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision art a transgressor of the law?
28 For it is not he is a Jew, who is so outwardly; nor is that circumcision which is outwardly in the flesh:
29 But he is a Jew, that is one inwardly; and the circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.
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