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.”

[terycarl]

I’ve heard of an attendance surge at Christmas and Easter but never for Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday, LOL.

FAR BETTER TO BE RIGHT TWICE A YEAR RATHER THAN NEVER...lol.

[redleghunter]

Enjoy! Be happy.

My Catholic friend is fasting on just water for Lent. He did it last year. Apparently some ailments he had for years disappeared.

That’s right just water for 40 days.

[metmom]

Matthew 6:1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

Luke 18:9-14 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

[redleghunter]

Isn’t betting breaking Lent?:)

Come on don’t gamble during Lent. It’s the most popular give up for Irish Catholics:)

[NKP_Vet]

The words of the priest as he put ashes in the sign of the cross on my forehead.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”

[redleghunter]

Oh boy…

[terycarl]

LOL The Catholic Church makes up it’s own truth. It’s like the history books of liberals.

LOL..The Catholic church had the ENTIRE truth one thousand six hundred years before there was a protestant....LOL again.

[metmom]

I recall as a child when I saw people with a black cross on their forehead I thought they were against Jesus so they took a black mark on their head to show that.

Well, there is Scriptural precedent about receiving a mark on your forehead and which side you're on.

I could see people getting duped into taking it with a *Do it this way and make it permanent. Show the world all the time who you're loyal to.*

[metmom]

I know.

Why are you telling me?

[NKP_Vet]

Bet you loved those ashes when you were a kid. And like the other poster said, can you find just one positive thing to say about Catholics? I don’t think you can. Why not prove me and the rest on FR wrong? The constant putdowns really get old when someone knows better.

[verga]

I am not Irish.

[metmom]

The constant putdowns really get old when someone knows better.

[terycarl]

The constant putdowns really get old when someone knows better.

[mrobisr]

So you really want to live according to the OT law, good luck.

James 2:10 New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE)

10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.

[terycarl]

The constant putdowns really get old when someone knows better.

It is an absolute fact thaat people who make bad decisions spend an inordinate amount of time trying to justify them....and it is mostly aimed at justifying the bad decision in their own mind.....PSYCHOLOGY 101

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“For instance, in the Book of Esther, Mordecai put on sackcloth and ashes when he heard of the decree of King Ahasuerus (or Xerxes, 485-464 B.C.) of Persia to kill all of the Jewish people in the Persian Empire (Est 4:1).”

All the early pictures of Mordecai show him with an identical little thumb smudge of ashes in the middle of his forehead.

Will you also be donning your sackcloth - which is equally biblical by your standard - as you wear your smudge??

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“Why not prove me and the rest on FR wrong? The constant putdowns really get old when someone knows better.”

And turn about is fair play NKP! Lead. Let’s hear you say some nice things about protestants and protestantism! :-)

[mrobisr]

Good luck with living according to OT Law. Don’t forget to have your bull, sheep, goat, and pigeon blood lined up also.

James 2:10 New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE)

10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.

[xzins]

Ash Wednesday worship, like Palm Sunday worship, is a Christian tradition. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The real measure of it is aligning it with a biblical view of Christianity.

That isn’t really very hard. It was roughly 6 months before the resurrection when the bible says that Jesus ‘set his face steadfastly toward Jerusalem’ (Luke 11). It reiterates that about 2 months (Luke 17) before his final Passover. He was on his way to the cross. He also instructs Christians to take up their cross and follow him. So, a period of cross-bearing prior to Easter seems biblically reasonable, contrary to nothing biblical I can think of, and not a bad tradition.

As you probably have detected over the years, I’m a strong advocate of true Christian unity. This service is something we all can share. My sense is we should celebrate such opportunities.

[mrobisr]

Apparently not COT made major changes to your denominations way to salvation, so no it wasn’t true for the past xx years.