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]

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

Well!

I, for one, disagree with them!

[Elsie]

Makes sense.

Messes up our SUNRISE services here though...

[Elsie]

Since Catholics came through the Black Death, perhaps they are inured to the horrors of dead bodies.

Since Catholics endlessly repeat...

Hail Mary; Mother of GOD, Pray for us...

...they get the idea drummed into their heads that she is Omnipotent and CAN actually hear and pray for them.

[Elsie]

that she is Omnipotent ...

I mistyped.

I've been corrected over and over that she is NOT Omnipotent; but merely TIMELESS in Heaven.

Carry on...

[Elsie]

Scared of death and dead bodies? I’m not.

Good girl!

I'm so fearless I eat the FLESH of dead bodies!!!

I'll probably consume a fair sized chunk, medium rare, tonight!

[Elsie]

Freeper Protestants are repulsed by death.

So true!

Why; we'll even go so far to pray that it'll be far removed from some of our FR Catholics!!

[miss marmelstein]

I wonder if evangelicals are allowed to study art in college? Or do their art books ignore all medieval and Renaissance painting?

[Elsie]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fi30b_x0vSs?rel=0&start=1&end=200

[Elsie]

The Catholics love and appreciate art.

Our Father; who art in Heaven...

[Elsie]

A monstrance or ostensorium is a vessel used in Roman Catholic churches to display the consecrated Eucharistic host, during Eucharistic adoration

Would THESE work just as well?

 

http://eganchurchsupply.com/cs/bread.htm

[Elsie]

Would THESE work just as well?

Is the 'magic' located in the Bread?

In the special incantation over the Bread?

Or in the mouth and soul of the eater of the Bread?

[Elsie]

I would bid a thousand dollars for a tiny sliver of her bones.

I have a bit less than a sliver of bones and I'll let you have it for a mere $499.95!

[Elsie]

I have a sliver of St. Gerard who I am named after.

My ex-brother-in-law has a scar; delivered by the mouth of a St. Bernard.

You can see that for FREE!

[tioga]

Trifecta Catholics....Ash Wednesday, Easter Sunday and Christmas masses. RME

[Elsie]

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.

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 named Martin Luther.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Thank you for praying that I would live. I think we're 'bout halfway there!

"Reports of My Death..."

[Elsie]

Whatever happened to answering direct questions?

[verga]

I wonder if evangelicals are allowed to study art in college? Or do their art books ignore all medieval and Renaissance painting?

I have a personal preference for Botticelli, of course as Catholics we realize that an increase in the appreciation of humanism leads to an increase in the appreciation of the divine.

We are able to understand that God gave us beauty to be able to celebrate His creation and appreciate Him more.

[Elsie]

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

Me; too!

With 85% of ALL Mormons!!

HEAVEN-The Mormon church teaches there are three levels of heaven (three "degrees of glory"):

• Telestial - where unbelievers go
• Terrestrial - for religious people who aren't Mormons and for Mormons who have not met the requirements of the Church.
• Celestial - for Mormons who have kept ALL of the laws and ordinances of their church. What will the celestial heaven (kingdom) supposedly be like for a good Mormon? He will be a god, he will rule over a planet with his wives and spirit children.