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Anglican Confirmation: an Unfinished Reform
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2023
Abstract
Confirmation, one of the seven sacraments in Lombard’s schedule, was retained by the English Reformers, but not as a sacrament and without any distinctive quasi-sacramental grace attributed to it. It became a ceremony to complete the catechizing process for children who, having been baptized as infants, were at the age of discretion now to come to holy communion. The reformers thought that a post-baptismal laying on of hands had been practised from apostolic times, and so commended the ceremony for their church practice. This requirement enabled later generations, such as Gregory Dix, to bid up its significance, teaching that confirmation completes baptism, and thus that water-baptism is of itself incomplete. The underlying premise has been that from the apostles onwards a requisite second initiatory ceremony invariably followed baptism. Both Bible and early church history contradict this thesis, not least the eight post-apostolic authors of the first two centuries who mention baptism. All eight testify to the use of water without any further ceremony. Thus, any insistence upon a two-stage sacramental initiation today lacks historical foundations; Anglicans ought to review residual texts and practices which reflect such a pattern.
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust
References
1 The text of the questionnaire and the answers to it is in Thomas Cranmer, Works: Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1846), p. 80. The division of the replies into conservatives and reformers is made in S.L. Ollard’s chapter, ‘Confirmation in the Anglican Communion’ in (various authors) Confirmation or the Laying on of Hands: Volume 1 Historical and Doctrinal (London: SPCK, 1926), pp. 64-65.
2 The Elizabethans bolstered their reformed use of confirmation by appeal to John Calvin (see Ollard, ‘Confirmation in the Anglican Communion’, p. 96). Calvin taught in Inst. IV.19.4 that in the early church those baptized as infants appeared at adolescence to give account of their faith to the bishop, by whom ‘the ceremony of laying on of hands was also used’. The instances Calvin provides are in fact cases where heretics or schismatics were being reconciled, and, as general early church history, his account must rank as imaginative.
3 The authority given it by its supposed continuity from the apostles is well conveyed by Hooker (see Eccl Pol., V.26.9).
4 The discussion of the 1661 provision here is largely taken from my chapter ‘Anglican Confirmation to 1920’ in Mark Chapman (ed.), Costly Communion (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 11-41 (17).
5 The translation of this sentence was preserved in the later Latin version of W. Bright and P.G. Medd in 1865, although other wording was changed within this very rubric, let alone elsewhere in the rite. Indeed, in the first rubric at the beginning of the rite where the same ‘that so’ occurs, Durel has ‘ut eo pacto’ and Bright and Medd have ‘ut eo consilio’, which strongly suggests that, where they did not change the wording, they firmly endorsed its significance.
6 I have done some research leading to this conclusion in my chapter ‘Anglican Confirmation to 1920’ in Mark Chapman (ed.), Costly Communion (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 11-41 (22-24).
7 The so-called Apostolic Tradition is not now ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome (see Paul Bradshaw, Maxwell Johnson and Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002]) and thus not to the early third century; but the issue is not the date or veracity of the document, but the legitimacy of asserting as a principle that third- or fourth-century practices, not attested in the first two centuries, are nevertheless apostolic uses and therefore part of the givenness of the Christian faith.
8 I have not found the words ‘integrated’ and ‘disintegrated’ in Dix, and suspect the terminology owes much to J.D.C. Fisher. The title of his major work, Christian Initiation: Baptism in the Medieval West – A Study in the Disintegration of the Primitive Rite of Initiation (London: Alcuin/SPCK, 1965) highlights the concept.
9 PECUSA Prayer Book Studies I (New York: Church Pension Fund, 1950) (committee of SLC of Massey Shepherd, Henry Ogilby, Charles Hill) – under ‘Baptism and Confirmation’ ch. II (‘History of the Rites of Christian Initiation’), p. 6.
10 The Episcopal Church Prayer Book Studies 18 (New York: Church Pension Fund, 1970), p. 19. Massey Shepherd remained from the 1950 Commission, and it seems likely that ‘the primitive church’ being cited was Dix’s supposed pattern of Rome in the early third century as exemplified in so-called Hippolytus.
11 From the Introduction to Baptism and Confirmation: A Report submitted by the Church of England Liturgical Commission to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in November 1958 (London: SPCK, 1959), p. ix.
12 Paul Avis, The Journey of Christian Initiation (London: Church House Publishing, 2012).
13 Martin Davie in Paul Avis (ed.), The Journey of Christian Initiation (London: Church House Publishing, 2011), p. 37.
14 From the Introduction, presumably by the ‘compiler’, in Sharon Ely Pearson (compiler), Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Theologies of Confirmation for the 21st Century (New York: Morehouse, 2014), p. 3.
15 The Boston Statement ‘Children and Communion’ IAIC.i (published in Colin Buchanan [ed.], Nurturing Children in Communion [Grove Liturgical Study 44; Bramcote: Grove Books, 1985] and in Ruth Meyers [ed.], Children at the Table [New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1995]).
16 He certainly did know something of Justin when he wrote on the Eucharist against Gardiner in 1551, and it is possible his source had been a manuscript extract from Justin’s works known as the Codex Bobbonianus. This codex, however, only covered 1 Apol. 65-67, and thus did not carry the information about how baptisms were conducted, which came in 1 Apol. 61, and Cranmer may well have been ignorant of it (see Colin Buchanan, Justin Martyr on Baptism and Eucharist [Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study 64; Norwich: Hymns A & M, 2007], p. 6).
17 Thomas Cranmer, Works: Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1846), p. 80.
18 As in 1549, 1552 and 1662 Book of Common Prayer in the post-communion prayer.
19 Gregory Dix, ‘Confirmation, or Laying on of Hands’, Theology, Occasional Paper No. 5 (1936).
20 A public lecture delivered in Oxford in 1944 and published as Gregory Dix, The Theology of Confirmation in relation to Baptism (London: Dacre Press, 1946), pp. 13-14.
21 Gregory Dix, Confirmation Today (London: CIO, 1944).
22 Gregory Dix, ‘“The Seal” in the Second Century’, Theology, LI, No. 331 (January 1948), p. 12.
23 It is often interpreted as being an apostolic action needed to convince the Samaritans that, Samaritans as they were, had a true part in the new Israel of God.
24 It is possible that the unique feature of these baptisms, that is, that the recipients had ‘known only the baptism of John’ in the 50s ad, was what made the event a special case. But it could be, or might also be, that Paul looked for more visible renewing of them in their baptism, and, not seeing that, took a back-up or emergency step just as Peter and John had taken with the Samaritans.
25 Thus Westcott, in commenting on 1 Jn 2.21, says ‘The context shows that the word χρισμα is not to be understood of the material sign, but of the corresponding spiritual reality.’ See B.F. Westcott, The Epistles of St John (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 72.
26 Dix, ‘“The Seal” in the Second Century’, p. 12..
27 In Heb. 6.2 the writer mentions βαπττισμοι, a word different from βαπτισμα, which is used elsewhere in the New Testament, and βαπττισμοι recurs in Heb. 9.10, where it cannot mean ‘baptisms’. So the mention of laying on of hands does not necessarily connect there with baptisms.
28 G.W.H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit: A Study in the Doctrine of Baptism and Confirmation in the New Testament and the Fathers (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1951).
29 James Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit: A Re-examination of the New Testament Teaching on the Gift of the Spirit in Relation to Pentecostalism Today (London: SCM Press, 2010).
30 Everett Ferguson wonders whether the reference (in Eph. 17) to Jesus being anointed on the head (i.e., by the woman at Bethany, Mk 14.3) prior to a reference to Jesus being baptized implies a ‘liturgical sequence’, but this looks extraordinarily far-fetched, and is overtly an instance of attempting to read later practice back into earlier. See Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 209.
31 Everett Ferguson discusses two other passages (in chs. 6 and 16) which, without mentioning baptism, may imply it (see Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church, pp. 213-15), but they have no bearing upon the matter at issue here.
32 Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit, pp. 105-106.
33 See E.C. Ratcliff, ‘Justin Martyr and Confirmation’, Theology 51.334 (1948), reprinted in A.H. Couratin and D.H. Tripp (eds.), E. C. Ratcliff: Liturgical Studies (London: SPCK, 1976), pp. 110-17. He has an earlier essay (‘The Relation of Confirmation to Baptism in the Early Roman and Byzantine Liturgies’, Theology 49.315 and 316 [1946]), reprinted on pp. 118-33. However, ‘early’ in this title does not mean Justin’s First Apology in the second century: it means the Gelasian Sacramentary in the sixth or seventh century. In respect of both Ratcliff and Couratin see my edition, Justin Martyr on Baptism and Eucharist: Texts in Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study 64; London: SCM-Canterbury, 2007), pp. 18-19, 36.
34 Paul Bradshaw, Reconstructing Early Christian Worship (London: SPCK, 2010), p. 85.
35 Everett Ferguson adds a quotation from a (‘probably genuine’) fragment saying that Naaman’s being baptized in the Jordan was a sign for us that we, lepers in our sins, ‘are cleansed from our old transgressions through the holy water and the invocation of the Lord’. See Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church, p. 305, quoting Fragment 34.
36 David Power, in citing Demonstration 3, comments in a footnote: ‘In the time of Irenaeus, in some churches along with baptism there was an anointing with oil, but he himself does not appear to have known of this rite.’ (David N. Power, Irenaeus of Lyons on Baptism and Eucharist (Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study 18; Bramcote: Grove Books, 1991), p. 8, n. 3.
37 Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church, p. 305.
38 Theophilus of Antioch, towards the end of the second century, does refer to being ‘anointed with the oil of God’, and if this implies a separate post-baptismal use of physical oil (which is very uncertain), then such use of oil in the East came a fraction earlier than Tertullian’s witness to a laying on of hands in the West. If, however, he is using it (in line with St Paul’s references to being ‘anointed’) about the inward spiritual gift of baptism, then he increases the number of relevant earliest authors to nine. And if he is referring to the pre-baptismal anointing in the East, then that does not sit well with any two-stage theory.
39 Ely Report, Christian Initiation: Birth and Growth in the Christian Society (London: CIO, 1971).
40 These are to be found in David Holeton (ed.), Growing in Newness of Life (Toronto: ABC, 1993), or in Ruth Meyers, Continuing the Reformation (New York: Church Publishing Inc, 1997), pp. 269-70.
41 The Truth Shall Make You Free: The Lambeth Conference 1988 (ACC, 1988), p. 70.
42 The Episcopal Church of the United States of America, The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), p. 308.
43 The Episcopal Church of the United States of America, The Book of Common Prayer, p. 412.
44 Ruth Meyers points out that the rubric was inserted by the General Convention in 1976 (in other words it was not in the ‘Blue Book’ from the Commission which was being proposed). Its insertion leads her to say: ‘If baptism is full Christian initiation, it is difficult to see what such a rite adds for adults who make a profession of faith at their baptism’ (Meyers, Continuing the Reformation, p. 187). Marion Hatchett describes it more neutrally as a rubrical ‘expectation’ but without much rationale. See Marion Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (New York: Church Pension Fund, 1980), p. 272.
45 David R. Holeton (ed.), Growing in Newness of Life: Christian Initiation in Anglicanism Today (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1993), p. 229.
46 ‘An Appeal to All Christian People’, in Lambeth Conferences 1865–1937 (London: SPCK, 1948), p. 39.
47 In the Church of England, the ‘Chrism eucharist’ text commended by the House of Bishops for use on Maundy Thursday has, in its prayer over the ‘oil of confirmation’, all too strong an echo of a ‘special gift’ of the Spirit being thus conveyed.
48 Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit, p. 316.
49 The explanation was of course defensive against the puritan attempts to remove the sign of the cross – as the sign was itself under attack as superstitious, wherever it came, but this was the only point in the Reformation settlement where the sign was mentioned as retained, and so it attracted opposition.