One of the most high-pressure situations of my life was being the last person in line to get ashes at the Lutheran congregation I belonged to in Mpls. The pastor held out the jar and motioned for me to smudge his forehead. Symmetrical but a little heavy handed.
That is so fascinating. I would have assumed they would be the last ones to embrace stuff like being anointed by priests, being named after the no-priests guy.
While Luther’s rhetoric grew more strident over time, doctrinally Lutheranism is mostly Catholicism with a few big changes (unlike Anglicanism, which is Catholicism with some small changes). Calvin was the more ardent anti-Catholic, and thus Presbyterianism is much more “reformed” than Lutheranism.
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