In the sixteenth century the English Reformers abolished the imposition of ashes on the heads of parishioners on Ash Wednesday due to the superstitious beliefs that had become associated with the practice. The practice was too closely tied the Medieval doctrines of attrition, auricular confession, contrition, priestly absolution, and penance.
The imposition of ashes was not reintroduced into the Church of England and her daughter churches until the nineteenth century and then by the Ritualists. It was one of the errors in doctrine, practice, and ritual that the Romeward Movement revived to make the Anglican Church more like the Roman Catholic Church in the hopes that they would help to affect a reunion between the Church of England and the Church of Rome.
The 1979 Book of Common Prayer popularized the practice in the Episcopal Church in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
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The episcopal loons continue in the ACNA and AMiA, as usual, predictably, without thought, depth, and sharpness of confessional analysis. What's new? Where are the systematic theologies? What serious systematic has Bob of Pittsburgh offered?
ReplyDeleteThank God for my Dad, the Rev'd Donald Lyman Veitch, a Scholar-Pastor--God bless him--who gave me a Canadian, Presbyterian, Princetonian and Confessional background. Dad was an old school Presbyterian with respect for Anglicans...a "careful and scholarly breed" he intoned. When I became an Anglican in 1980, Dad said, "Son, whatever you do, never surrender the Westminster Standards." Never have, never will. Anglicans have "never matured" confessionally.
Imagine the lads and lasses in the modern American Anglican context? Poor things. What do they have?
Thank God I did not have to rely on confused Western Anglican bishops for an education, including His Majesty's bishops of the REC...a better breed until their colourful capitulations to mishmash-Manglicanism. Pretty sad stuff to rely on them.
Am warning my four children about the modern, wifty, waffly, and non-Reformed American Anglicans. They get it although they are Prayer Book trained kids.
My kids are getting it...steer clear of ACNA and the-essentially--Pentecostalistic AMiA. It is important that they get it and steer wide of the wafflers and Manglicans.
Anyone hear about Todd Hunter, a so-called Bishop in AMiA? 20 months from Vineyard, yapping, hand-waving, Pentecostalistic, revivalistic, Montanistic, and enthusiastic blowhards to an AMiA Bishopric? Eee gads. True to score and expectations for AMiA.
Send me back to the Marines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gNY232UXUw&feature=related
At least with Marines, we had leaders.
These American episcopal loons are too much. The episcopal loons love themselves, but they "ain't no higher" than any other intelligent Presbyter...such as myself or Joe. Or Richard.
Regards to all,
The Rev'd Mr. Donald Philip Veitch