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.”

[Elsie]

God’s days run from sundown to sundown.

Above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic one; your mileage might vary a bit...

[Elsie]

It’s no WONDER that Emo gets quoted in these threads a lot!

[verga]

Nobody is bowing down to Bibles and lighting candles to them, praying to them, making statues of them, etc......

Ya know that is what you all claim, but I know what I have seen with my own two eyes, don't even get me started on the snake handling.

[defconw]

I have the same feeling about St. Patrick’s day. If you aren’t Catholic, why are you celebrating it? Or I ask them if they are going to celebrate St. Joseph’s day! The looks are priceless...

[bike800]

Under that logic people should not have a cross on their person or home...might be worshiping a tree...or put a bible verse on a plaque...might be construed as wood worship...

[metmom]

What teaching is there of Jesus that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic church?

Can you point to the verse?

[caww]

Why should they make such a correction over something practiced from the pagan dark ages?

Your own words called it "a black smudge" ..Further giving it a flowerful ("wonderful ancient tradition") name doesn't change the fact it's still a dirty black smudge.

If one is going to fast (Lent type)..Jesus said to wash one's face and don't flaunt it in public. Catholics do just the opposite, of course, that IS their practice as well.

.."When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face so that your fasting will not be noticed".... Matt. 6:17

[caww]

She’s a real work of art isn’t she...but it sells and people buy it.

[caww]

...”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”....

When you examine non-christian religions they are full of rituals and practices....and redundantancy...the only difference is the type of glitz. All to give an individual a 'false' sense of Worship and security.

The following is a quote from a man who was raised in the Catholic church but left the church as an adult to pursue the real Truth.

"On the question of salvation; "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. Its not a pretty picture of salvation. Not at all. One of the saddest laments of a priest friend (Novus Ordo type) is that Catholics no longer know their own faith!"

[GreyFriar]

Metmon,

I recommend that you ask CynicalBear for the verse, as “What teaching is there of Jesus that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic church?” was his statement inpost # 205, not mine.

[miss marmelstein]

Catholicism is an ancient religion that faces death straight on and in uncompromising fashion. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. A very beautiful ritual.

[verga]

Metmom post #96 is still waiting for your reply: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.

A number of people have stated that I should not hold my breath.

[caww]

.....”Catholicism is an ancient religion that faces death straight on and in uncompromising fashion. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”.......

Sorry to hear that as Christianity is a religion of “LIFE”...with the certainty of eternal life through the finished and completed work of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[CynicalBear]

>>I recommend that you ask CynicalBear for the verse, as “What teaching is there of Jesus that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic church?” was his statement inpost # 205, not mine.<<

LOL Catholics do love to twist words don't they. Post 205 was not my post but yours. Here is my quote from 207.

"Christ never said there was no salvation outside of the "church". He said entrance into His ekklesia was the result of salvation. Big difference which the Catholic Church has twisted."

Is twisting words or attributing quotes not made really necessary to defend the doctrines of the Catholic Church?

[CynicalBear]

And it certainly isn’t a beautiful ritual.

[Gamecock]

Not really...your church digs up corpses and removes pbody parts for display and worship...so that really doesn't fit the idea of ashes to dust.

And will go so far as to dig you up and put your corpse on trial!

[caww]

That was Pope Formosus ... catholics dug up his corpse and put him on trial in the notorious 'Cadaver Synod'..... had conspired with certain men and women for the destruction of the papal see. Then they wonder why people call catholicism a cult that worships the dead.

[editor-surveyor]

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>> “Under that logic people should not have a cross on their person or home.” <<

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Absolutely correct!

The cross has nothing to do with Yeshua, he was not crucified on the four points of the sun, it was a gallow with a crossbar dropped on the top, sometimes called a ‘Tau.’

Everything about catholic ‘worship’ is about Mythra/Tammuz, the “sun god.”

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[editor-surveyor]

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All of God’s events are FOB Jerusalem.

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