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.”

[verga]

I really have to worry about people that have so much hate in them that they spend what must be hours looking for "Gotchas" about the Catholic Church.

They must be somewhat deranged or just have way to much time on their hands.

I hope a family member has the courage to tell them to get a life.

[metmom]

There’s something about the mindset of someone who thinks that a decorated macabre corpse is *beautiful*.....

Of course as in any objection to something Catholics do, non-Catholics are always accused of fearing it.

Nobody can fear death when they’ve died in Christ and conquered it.

Nor are we repulsed by it.

What repulses normal people is the adorning and *veneration* of death bodies and dead body parts.

It’s not a natural or healthy of Godly obsession.

[metmom]

Whatever happened to *Rest in Peace*?

[verga]

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

I think someone needs to go back and read the description of the Ark in Exodus as well as the dwelling tent. Then you might consider jumping forward to the description of the Temple built by Solomon.

[metmom]

Normal people are repulsed by desecrating dead and decayed bodies.

[CynicalBear]

Why would she want to do that? It’s an apostate organization that leads peoples focus off of Christ. It focuses on rituals and outward acts rather than a personal relationship with Christ and faith and trust on Him alone for salvation. There isn’t anything “nice” to say about that.

[verga]

Whatever happened to *Rest in Peace*?

Whatever happened to answering direct questions?

[metmom]

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

No, I don't HAVE to get used to it because the old me is already dead, and death has no claim on me any longer.

My physical and mortal body will die and my soul, which is spiritually alive, won't be around to know about it.

[editor-surveyor]

.
Those were not human art; they were designed by God.

.

[verga]

I>Those were not human art; they were designed by God.

Inspired by God, built by man, just as ALL sacred art is. Prove otherwise!

[Gamecock]

Not at all, for I know where I will spend eternity!

[editor-surveyor]

.
There can be no “sacred art.”

We are commanded to make no image of anything on the Earth or in heaven.

“Sacred Art” is blasphemy.
.

[redleghunter]

Look up biometrics and EU countries using them for passports.

[redleghunter]

LOL that too. Losing weight solves much. Blood sugar, blood pressure goes down and cholesterol.

His Easter Sunday meal however did not stay down.

[verga]

What God commands or inspires can not be blasphemous.

[verga]

Why would she want to do that? It’s an apostate organization that leads peoples focus off of Christ. It focuses on rituals and outward acts rather than a personal relationship with Christ and faith and trust on Him alone for salvation. There isn’t anything “nice” to say about that.

Maybe I can't find something nice to say about dictator like Hitler, but I can say that the German people have given us tremendous music through Beethoven, Bach and Handel. Maybe I can't say something nice about Islam, but I can say that the woman Muslim neighbor of mine, was pleasant to me.

Any person that is not capable of even one of those actions needs to seriously question their own personal commitment to Christ.

Seriously are you all saying that it is impossible to say: "Mother Teresa did a wonderful of aiding the poor in India and in supporting the worldwide pro-life movement." or "The Catholic Church has inspired some magnificent architecture or done a good job of preserving Objects D'art."

[rwa265]

I really have to worry about people that have so much hate in them that they spend what must be hours looking for “Gotchas” about the Catholic Church.

---

Tim Staples talked about that at a recent conference. He said that when he went to Jimmy Swaggart College, the Catholic Church was denigrated in every class that he attended, with many inaccurate statements being made. By that time Tim had learned many truths about the Church from a Marine buddy, so when he would tell the instructors that what they were saying was untrue, he was harshly criticized.

[verga]

Tim Staples gives a very powerful testimony to Christ and to his own conversion. Anyone that makes the claim that Tim is not Christian in every sense of the word really doesn’t know Christ.

[CynicalBear]

>>Any person that is not capable of even one of those actions needs to seriously question their own personal commitment to Christ.<<

Commitment to Christ? Commitment to Christ is the very reason I can't say anything nice about those who take the focus off Him and put it on something or someone else. Hitler? Are you kidding me? Mother Teresa? Her attitude was that whatever god you served was good enough. I can't even imagine how many souls were lost because she wasn't honest about the only way to salvation. And the Catholic Church and it's "magnificent architecture" and "Objects D'art"? Not hardly.

We're talking about people and their destiny for eternity. Every one of those you mentioned have taken away from the focus on Christ alone. Christ and the apostles didn't go around teaching how to build "magnificent architecture" or create "Objects D'art". They taught a simple gospel of belief and faith on Jesus alone as the only hope of eternal life with Him while denouncing all the earthly pomp and grandeur.

My commitment IS to Christ alone and what will last for eternity. All that "magnificent architecture" and "Objects D'art" will end up in ashes and rubble as it always has in the past.

[blackpacific]

According to legend her heart was was found incorrupt in the ashes, and thrown in the nearby river. Probably still there.