Evangelical Angst About Ash Wednesday

Aleteia ^ | February 17, 2015 | DAVID MILLS

[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:
 

American evangelicals are past masters at appropriating anything that catches their fancy in church history and claiming it as their own, from the ancient Fathers as the first emergents to the Old School men of Old Princeton as the precursors of the Young, Restless, and Reformed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as modern American Evangelical.

 
He is a genial and liberal-minded man. His office bookshelf has very large Aquinas and Newman sections along with the works of Luther, Calvin, and their descendants. (He’s just written a book titled Luther On the Christian Life.) I have spent a pleasant night in the Truemans’ home after speaking at the seminary at his invitation. He is generous to Catholics. But Evangelicals observing Lent, this sets him off. “I also fear that it speaks of a certain carnality,” he continues:
 

The desire to do something which simply looks cool and which has a certain ostentatious spirituality about it. As an act of piety, it costs nothing yet implies a deep seriousness. In fact, far from revealing deep seriousness, in an evangelical context it simply exposes the superficiality, eclectic consumerism and underlying identity confusion of the movement.

 
They shouldn’t do this. Their “ecclesiastical commitments do not theologically or historically sanction observance of such things,” he writes in a second article on the website, “Catholicity Reduced to Ashes.” Ash Wednesday is “strictly speaking unbiblical” and therefore can’t be imposed by a church, treated as normative, or understood as offering benefits unavailable in the normal parts of the Christian life. That would be a violation of the Christian liberty the Reformation so stressed (against “the illicit binding of consciences in which the late medieval church indulged,” as he puts it).

The “well-constructed worship service” and “appropriately rich Reformed sacramentalism” render the observance of Ash Wednesday “irrelevant.” Infant baptism, for example, declares better than the imposition of ashes once a year “the priority of God's grace and the helplessness of sinless humanity in the face of God.” The Lord’s Supper does as well.

Worse, Carl argues, these Evangelicals pick from the Catholic tradition the parts they like when that tradition is an indivisible whole. In for a penny, in for a pound seems to be his understanding of Catholicism. He finds it “most odd,” he writes in the second article, that some might “observe Lent as an act of identification with the church catholic while repudiating a catholic practice such as infant baptism or a catholic doctrine such as eternal generation or any hint of catholic polity.” (The lower-case “c” is his but he means the upper-case.) “The notion of historic catholicity itself has become just another eclectic consumerist construct.”

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.”

[caww]

Hey Gamecock...even the thread to your link was interesting...thanks.

[miss marmelstein]

No worship, Dan Brown.

Scared of death and dead bodies? I’m not.

[miss marmelstein]

Obviously, Protestants are afraid and repulsed by death, dead bodies, skeletons and God knows what else. Since Catholics came through the Black Death, perhaps they are inured to the horrors of dead bodies. Certainly, I’m not afraid of them and certainly believe this is a very beautiful and deep ritual.

[caww]

I still can’t figure out why anyone would see this ritual as beautiful except they’ve been so conditioned to body parts and death and copses that ashes would just be one more thing to give the priest a purpose for being a Priest.

If they ever saw the truth the priesthood ceased altogether there would be no catholic church.

[miss marmelstein]

Because our religion is ancient and has lived through tumultuous times - like I said, the Black Death and numerous plagues.

Death is a part of life and you need to get used to it - because like me, you’ll one day be wormwood.

[caww]

Jesus said to bury the dead ....the catholic church digs them up and distributes their body parts throughout their churches...something Jesus would have never supported nor did HE....in fact doing so is opposes what HE said.

Jeffrey Dalmer had no problems with body parts either as other derranged individuals like him. We call them "sick headed"....but attach catholicism to the same practices and suddenly it's holy.

Baloney..its sacrilegious in every way to rob graves...and ship body parts acroos the nation and world for public worship and display.

[editor-surveyor]

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Obviously, Protestants are repulsed by overt paganism.

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[miss marmelstein]

Freeper Protestants are repulsed by death.

[caww]

..."our religion is ancient ....Death is a part of life and you need to get used to it - because like me, you’ll one day be wormwood"......

I'll agree your church pratices ancient pagan ways and rituals...and most of them creep the average person out for their cultish and idolatrist dsplays such as these

[miss marmelstein]

These are very beautiful. I don’t know the history of this - an ossuary, obviously - perhaps there was no room for burial. Quite common if they died during plague years. As I said, they are grotesque and wonderful.

[editor-surveyor]

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>> “Because our religion is ancient...” <<

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Pagan sun god worship?

Yes, over 4000 years old, and still unchanged!

The 40 days of Tammuz, the four points of the sun god cross on your heart, Easter/mary worship, and the burning of the new born babies on December 25, all still perfectly maintained.

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[editor-surveyor]

Pure nonsense.

Paganism is vile, and that is the total of catholic ‘worship.’

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[caww]

No matter how one presents the truth they remain bound under their own self-denial and the tentacles of Romes catholicism...which seeks to keep them bound from the truth.

[CynicalBear]

No, Protestants are against veneration/worship of the dead like the pagans do.

[miss marmelstein]

Catholics do not dig up corpses. They do take relics from bodies, it’s true, and if they can’t fit bodies into cemeteries, they create ossuaries and decorate the dead out of respect and a sense of beauty.

Let me turn your faces purple by the relic I saw in an Italian church of a saint’s tongue. This is very medieval. An outcome of the terrible deaths inflicted upon Europe. I only wish we had a relic of dear St. Joan but we don’t. I would bid a thousand dollars for a tiny sliver of her bones. I have a sliver of St. Gerard who I am named after.

[daniel1212]

Unfortunately most Roman Catholics really don't know for sure what Rome's answers are. Most have a vague idea of a place called 'Purgatory.' They wander through life with an unfounded belief that, if their 'good works' outweigh their 'sins' then they get a ticket to heaven. Others believe that just being a Roman Catholic is all that is required to get to Heaven. Well, not directly to Heaven, but by way of an untold period of time in unmentionable pain and suffering in Purgatory.

I concur except that the idea of a Purgatory being unmentionable pain and suffering is definitely out. More like getting acclimated.

As a poster on Catholic Answers sums up his faith, if not that of all RCs,

I feel when my numbers up I will appoach a large table and St.Peter will be there with an enormous scale of justice by his side. We will see our life in a movie...the things that we did for the benefit of others will be for the plus side of the scale..the other stuff,,not so good will..well, be on the negative side..and so its a very interesting job Pete has. I wonder if he pushes a button for the elevator down for the losers...and what .sideways for those heading for purgatory..the half way house....lets wait and see.... — http://forums.catholic.com/showpost.php?p=4098202&postcount=2

[editor-surveyor]

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Art is humanism, the worship of the creature. Pagan top to bottom.

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[verga]

Metmom I know how you all hate to see direct questions remain un answered Post #96: 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. Please help me lose that bet.