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.”

[Gamecock]

Dang. Beat me to it.

[verga]

Thank you for proving me spot on absolutely 100% correct.

[metmom]

It's all about Jesus.....

Colossians 1:27 To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Hebrews 12:1-2 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Philippians 3:8-9 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—

1 Corinthians 1:30-31And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

1 Corinthians 2:2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Philippians 1:21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

[miss marmelstein]

Yes, that is the legend. Her heart refused to burn. In those days, they always cleaned up after an execution to avoid the relics that might survive.

[CynicalBear]

Verily I say you have your reward.

[miss marmelstein]

Normal people have a sense of beauty and ritual. Fear of dead bodies is silly.

[miss marmelstein]

Catholic-haters just gotta hate. Not much you can do about it. I try to imagine a world where art is cursed at and reviled. I would die...

[miss marmelstein]

Death is satanic? Where do you people come up with this jive?

[CynicalBear]

>>Death is satanic? Where do you people come up with this jive?<<

Nice twist on words! It's the veneration of ancestors and worship of relics that is Satanic.

[miss marmelstein]

It’s proscribed for Catholics to get tattoos - we get that from the Jews who are also proscribed.

[metmom]

There’s nothing beautiful about a half decayed and rotten corpse and there’s nothing beautiful about the ritual of desecrating it.

It’s Satanic, plain and simple.

I can see, though that it will do no good to try to convince you that we do not fear death simply because normal people are repulsed by the macabre obsession with dead bodies that some people have.

[verga]

I can see, though that it will do no good to try to convince you that we do not fear death simply because normal people are repulsed by the macabre obsession with dead bodies that some people have.

Then why do the prots keep bringing it up?

[editor-surveyor]

.
Stop blaming God for man’s sins.

.

[miss marmelstein]

Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t make it satanic.

[TheRightGuy]

I had been unchurched for almost 20 years when i returned to me hometown haunts in early ‘95.

I aghast when they promoted an ash wednesday service, mostly because in our neighborhood, lacking indians, we had had always played cowboys and catholics as kids.

I jumped the preacher and asked him what’s up. He told me that somtime in ‘70s the vatican called for a world ecumenical conference aiming to find more common areas for worship between catholics and protestants. A bunch were invited but IIRC only about 6 or 8 attended.

Ash Wednesdsy was approved as optional but noy mandatory for protestants Many have followed suit since.

[TheRightGuy]

I can promise you this; Evangelical churches ARE NOT observing Ash Wednesday.

I belong to Evangelical Covenant Church and indeed they are, not that I'm attenmding

[verga]

Stop blaming God for man’s sins.

Beauty is not a sin, neglecting God given talents is.

[Elsie]

I can point to the OPPOSITE!

[Elsie]

A very beautiful ritual.

---

A young monk arrives at the monastery.

 

He is assigned to helping the other monks in copying the old canons and laws of the church, by hand.

He notices, however, that all of the monks are copying from copies, not from the original manuscript.

So the new monk goes to the Old Abbot to question this, pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up!

In fact, that error would be continued in all of the subsequent copies.

"We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son."

He goes down into the dark caves under the monastery where the original manuscripts are held as archives, in a locked vault that hasn't been opened for hundreds of years. 

Hours go by and nobody sees the Old Abbot.

So the young monk gets worried and goes down to look for him. He sees the old monk banging his head against the wall and wailing. "We missed the R! We missed the R! We missed the bloody R!"

His forehead is all bloody and bruised and he is crying uncontrollably. The young monk asks the old Abbot, "What's wrong, father?"

With a choking voice, the old Abbot replies, "The word was...

'CELEBRATE!'"

[Elsie]

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.

Another Catholic that does not believe the very words of Jesus.

---

Mark 16:14-19

¹⁴ At length he appeared to the eleven as they were at table: and he upbraided them with their incredulity and hardness of heart, because they did not believe them who had seen him after he was risen again.

¹⁵ And he said to them: Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature.

¹⁶ He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned.

¹⁷ And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name they shall cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues.

¹⁸ They shall take up serpents; and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them: they shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover.

¹⁹ And the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God.