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.”

[right way right]

From ashes I came, to dust I shall return.
It's a simple recognition of mortality of our body that leads to the
recognition that I need a savior.
Man has to pervert everything to feed a need to self justify.
I go a Lutheran church I get the ashes I go and I try to sin less, just as we are always suppose to.
Yes Lord, I need your salvation, and look forward to it.
To heck with with what any man thinks.

[RnMomof7]

Says it all

[verga]

As a die-hard fundie Evangelical; I can promise you this; Evangelical churches ARE NOT observing Ash Wednesday.

In your area, that you know of.

[verga]

Most people know that the Bible talks about sackcloth and ashes frequently, correct?

Not the prots, it might in ion the parts they took out.

[CynicalBear]

I guess they have their reward “in full”.

[right way right]

“the church of whats happenin’ now”
Excellent description of the ELCA.
Diittoos.

[RnMomof7]

Ash Wed. is a Pagan practice

The practice of putting ashes on one's forehead has been known from ancient times. In the Nordic pagan religion, placing ashes above one's brow was believed to ensure the protection of the Norse god, Odin. This practice spread to Europe during the Vikings conquests. This laying on of ashes was done on Wednesday, the day named for Odin, Odin's Day. Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia, one of Odin's names is Ygg. The same is Norse for the World Ash. This name Ygg, closely resembles the Vedic name Agni in pronunciation.... http://www.beaconoftruth.com/ash_wednesday.htm

Personally I don't "sweat it"...it is just one more pagan practice of Rome... nothing more to see.. just keep moving

[verga]

And all this non-Catholics starting to participate in Ash Wednesday and Lent and all is just heading toward ecumenicalism and the one world religion.

Or realizing that they need the truth of the Catholic Church.

[af_vet_1981]

As a die-hard fundie Evangelical; I can promise you this; Evangelical churches ARE NOT observing Ash Wednesday.

I've heard of Fundamentalists (usually Baptists for quite some time now) and Evangelicals (many denominations and sects) but never a "Fundie Evangelical." If you're not an Independent Fundamental Baptist how "Fundie" is your flavor of Evangelicalism ?

[GreyFriar]

I was under the impression that Jesus commissioned us to spread His Word throughout the world. thus are you saying that he wants one world government? Or that non-Catholic Christians who join in taking ashes on Ash Wednesday is only to create a ‘one world government?’

[CynicalBear]

The Catholic Church readily agrees it’s take into it’s service pagan practices so it should be not surprise that much of what they do and believe has it’s base in paganism.

[bike800]

The ashes are simply a reminder...”remember man that thou art dust...and to dust you shall return” it is not something that we parade around saying look at me I am ashes or fasting...

[CynicalBear]

>>I was under the impression that Jesus commissioned us to spread His Word throughout the world. thus are you saying that he wants one world government?<<

That's a cute twist on words. Are you not aware that God said there was coming a one world religion and it ain't gonna be good?

[redleghunter]

Our Protestant founders saw fit to protect Ash Wednesday for Catholics. Go for it.

May your Lent be peaceful and contemplative.

[RnMomof7]

The ashes are simply a reminder...”remember man that thou art dust...and to dust you shall return” it is not something that we parade around saying look at me I am ashes or fasting...

Yea I notice how all the Catholics run to the "holy water" font to wash them off so no one sees them ...LOL

[bike800]

If you wear wedding bands you best be ditching them as they are a straight up pagan practice...but hey...some pagan things good...others bad...

[virgil]

I don’t see anything wrong with protestants coming for ashes. I think other churches have the ashes too. Methodists? Anglicans?

[virgil]

God bless you.

[Salvation]

And the truth of the Bible — should they check the book of Jonah, they will find sackcloth and ashes — unless Jonah is not longer in their Bible.

[redleghunter]

I thought Obola was Muslim.