ASH WEDNESDAY: PICKING AND CHOOSING OUR PIETY By Carl Trueman

by HARVEYOPP | Feb 16, 2016 | CARL TRUEMAN

It’s that time of year again: the ancient tradition of Lent, kick-started by Ash Wednesday. It is also the time of year when us confessional types brace ourselves for the annual onslaught of a more recent tradition: that of evangelical pundits, with no affiliation to such branches of the church, writing articles extolling Lent’s virtues to their own eclectic constituency.

Liturgical calendars developed in the fourth century and beyond, as Christianity came to dominate the empire. Cultural dominance requires two things: control of time and space.  The latter could be achieved through churches and relics. The former was achieved through developing a calendar which gave the rhythm of time a specifically Christian idiom. It remains a key part of Roman, Orthodox and later Anglican church practice.

The rise of Lent in non-Roman, Orthodox or Anglican circles is a fascinating phenomenon. I remember being on the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary a few years ago on Ash Wednesday and being greeted by a young man emerging from Miller Chapel with a black smudged cross on his forehead. That the bastion of nineteenth century Old School Presbyterianism had been reduced to this – an eclectic grab-bag of liturgical practices – struck me as sad. Old School Presbyterianism is a rich enough tradition not to need to plunder the Egyptians or even the Anglicans.

I can understand Anglicans observing Lent. Hey, I can even approve of them doing so when I am in an exceptionally good mood or have just awoken from a deep sleep and am still a little disoriented. It is part of their history. It connects to their formal liturgical history. All denominations and Christian traditions involve elements that are strictly speaking unbiblical but which shape their historic identity. For Anglicans, the liturgical calendar is just such a thing. These reasons are not compelling in a way that would make the calendar normative for all Christians, yet I can still see how they make sense to an Anglican. But just as celebrating July the Fourth makes sense for Americans but not for the English, the Chinese or the Lapps, so Ash Wednesday and Lent really make no sense to those who are Presbyterians, Baptists, or free church evangelicals.

What perplexes me is the need for people from these other groups to observe Ash Wednesday and Lent. My commitment to Christian liberty means that I certainly would not regard it as sinful in itself for them to do so; but that same commitment also means that I object most strongly to anybody trying to argue that it should be a normative practice for Christians, to impose it on their congregations, or to claim that it confers benefits unavailable elsewhere.

The imposition of ashes is intended as a means of reminding us that we are dust and forms part of a liturgical moment when sins are ‘shriven’ or forgiven. In fact, a well-constructed worship service should do that anyway. Precisely the same thing can be conveyed by the reading of God’s Word, particularly the Law, followed by a corporate prayer of confession and then some words of gospel forgiveness drawn from an appropriate passage and read out loud to the congregation by the minister.

An appropriately rich Reformed sacramentalism also renders Ash Wednesday irrelevant. Infant baptism emphasizes better than anything else outside of the preached Word the priority of God’s grace and the helplessness of sinlful humanity in the face of God. The Lord’s Supper, both in its symbolism (humble elements of bread and wine) and its meaning (the feeding on Christ by faith) indicates our continuing weakness, fragility and utter dependence upon Christ.

In light of this, I suspect that the reasons evangelicals are rediscovering Lent is as much to do with the poverty of their own liturgical tradition as anything. 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. Yet 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.

I also fear that it speaks of a certain carnality: 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.

Finally, it also puzzles me that time and energy is spent each year on extolling the virtues of Lent when comparatively little is spent on extolling the virtues of the Lord’s Day. Presbyterianism has its liturgical calendar, its way of marking time: Six days of earthly pursuits and one day of rest and gathered worship. Of course, that is rather boring. Boring, that is, unless you understand the rich theology which underlies the Lord’s Day and gathered worship, and realize that every week one meets together with fellow believers to taste a little bit of heaven on earth.

When Presbyterians and Baptists and free church evangelicals start attending Ash Wednesday services and observing Lent, one can only conclude that they have either been poorly instructed in the theology or the history of their own traditions, or that they have no theology and history. Or maybe they are simply exhibiting the attitude of the world around: They consume the bits and pieces which catch their attention in any tradition they find appealing, while eschewing the broader structure, demands and discipline which belonging to an historically rooted confessional community requires. Indeed, it is ironic that a season designed for self-denial is so often a symbol of this present age’s ingrained consumerism.

A PROTESTANT’S PASSION FOR THE VIRTUES OF THOMAS by Carl R. Trueman

by HARVEYOPP | Apr 4, 2015 | CARL TRUEMAN

I discovered Aquinas quite by accident some twenty years ago. Hired to teach Medieval and Reformation theology at the University of Nottingham in the U.K., I found that my one Roman Catholic colleague, a liberal nun, was more than happy to allow me to teach the honors course on Thomas. Thus it was that the most traditional Protestant on faculty taught a regular class on the Angelic Doctor to a room full of mostly traditional young Roman Catholics. 

I have considered Thomas a treasured source ever since. In fact, I believe he is perhaps more important now than ever before, for we live in an age where Christians need to think clearly. Clear thinking depends upon precise categories and distinctions, and Thomas offers such things to his careful readers. 

For example, I noted in passing last week how the collapse of the distinction between love as passion and love as virtue has proved so confusing and catastrophic not simply in society at large but also in the Church. That is a point worth expanding. In the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas treats love as both a passion and a virtue. Love as passion is neither good nor evil because it originates in the appetites, not the reason. We might say love as passion is really love as a feeling. Love as virtue, however, refers to a principle of action rooted in the reason, connects to a wider understanding of human teleology, and thus is intrinsically moral.

We can clarify this distinction between these two aspects by looking at how the word love is used in everyday parlance. I fell in love with my wife because there was something about her which attracted me. Such attraction involved physical sensations. When calling her on the telephone to confirm our first date, I felt a mixture of excitement and desire. The sound of her voice set my heart beating a little faster. There was, and still is, a thrill to being in love with her which involves an attraction that has a physical aspect to it. This is love as a passion.

But love is also a virtue. For I am to love my wife not simply when I find her attractive but even when I do not find her to be so. In fact, perhaps it is especially when I do not find her to be attractive that my love as virtue is to be most clearly demonstrated.  Thus, the woman caring for her beloved husband who is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease or cancer may not feel much positive passion towards him but her actions exhibit love of a depth rarely seen elsewhere. Her behavior is rooted in love as a principle of action. That is what love as virtue means. Indeed, this is surely at the heart of Paul’s understanding of marriage when he comments that husbands should love their wives as Christ loves the Church. After all, Christ gave himself for her in self-sacrifice when she was far from attractive. It was not passion which drove Christ’s passion, but virtue.

Turning now to the modern world, we can see that the concept of love which is extolled as a virtue is in reality almost exclusively that of love as passion. Every time soap operas and sitcoms present love as constituted by physical sex (do they ever do anything else?), love as virtue is reduced to love as passion. Every time daytime talk show hosts make some declaration about morality based upon what they feel in their heart, then passion, not virtue, becomes the criterion of what is good and true. And every time an academic denies that there is an objective telosto human nature, passion masquerades as virtue and ethics is turned into aesthetics.

Perhaps this is the real issue in current debates about marriage. Robert George has pointed out that no fault divorce was the real watershed in the recent legal history of the institution. That changed marriage from a relationship of lifelong commitment to that of a temporary, dispensable, sentimental bond. Yet if we look at this through the lens of Thomas’s distinctions, we can see that no fault divorce presupposes a prior definition of love as primarily passion, not virtue. Thus,  it is arguably not the redefinition of marriage but the redefinition of love which is the real problem underlying society’s current moral malaise. And that redefinition has much wider and more sinister implications. Indeed, as Thomas’s taxonomy helps us to see, it strikes at the very heart of what we consider virtue to be.