TJieodore W. Jennings, Jr. The Meaning of ... - Quarterly Review

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to save them from "the wrath to come." Times were very difficult and infants often died. The fear of damnation answered by doctrinal theories of atonement justified the universal baptism of infants. The Reformers would later complain that the work of Christ took on an almost magical quality in medieval Christianity as parents hastened to insure the salvation of their children. The modern church must be sensitive to the parental and pastoral concerns that called forth instant infant baptism. By the end of the sixth century, baptism and confirmation had become two separate sacraments. 27 The church also made a complete shift from the traditional unified rite for adult believers to the baptism and separate confirmation of infants. To be sure, the ritual was somewhat slower to change. The ceremony that had once been designed for adult converts took on an air of unreality when said for infants. However, even when adult baptism ceased to be the rule, and infant baptism became standard, the water-bath was followed by eucharist, with the infant receiving a drop of the consecrated wine. This is still part of the eastern Church's rituals, and it lasted in the West until the cup was taken from the laity in the early Middle Ages. When the consecrated bread became the only form for eucharistic reception open to the laity, the eucharistic aspect of the baptismal liturgy in the West was dropped. 28 Loss of Sacred Memory As the time between the sacraments of baptism and confirmation lengthened, many Christians forgot the traditional purpose of chrismation/confirmation. Eusebius Gallicanus, writing in the fifth century, exclaimed: What good can it do to me, after the mystery of baptism, to have the ministration of confirmation? So far as I can see, we have not obtained everything from the font, if after the font we still need 29 something new. Both Martin Luther and John Wesley inherited this fifth-century confusion. Luther and other mainline continental reformers attacked the Roman Catholic sacrament of confirmation and regarded the rite 30 QUARTERLY REVIEW/SPRING 1993
as adiaphora, that is, a ceremony (not a sacrament) that is permitted but not essential to church life. So much change had taken place over the centuries that the sacred memory of the rite's original meaning was lost to the Reformers. Technically John Wesley was correct, for example, when he wrote: "...Christ did not institute Confirmation; therefore it is not sacrament at all." 31 Centuries of a separated sacrament had altered the purpose of Confirmation to such an extent that the two threshold experiences of Jesus (water-washing and Spirit-anointing) at the Jordan had become irrelevant to its meaning. Reformation Reformulations For over nine hundred years, infant baptism with delayed confirmation was the unquestioned norm for Western Rite churches. In this "Christian" civilization, where every person was baptized as an infant, however, the church was compelled to develop a new rationale for confirmation. The metaphor of following a dying and rising Savior into the paschal mystery of water immersion was clearly suitable for decision-making adults but not for infants. A slightly different heritage of biblical imagery needed to be appropriated, and a change of theological images grounded the separated confirmation rite for both Roman Catholics and Protestants. A richly developed covenantal theology gradually undergirded the concept of confirmation. Children, the church explained, are heirs to the covenant of grace and are entided to baptism as surely as adults. The Pauline concept of "adoption" into the Body of Christ seemed especially appropriate for infants. The atoning work of Christ had always undergirded Christian rites of initiation. The continuing cosmology of a realistic hell compelled the church Protestant and Catholic to declare with Job, "No one is free from uncleanness" (Job 14:4). Even the continental Reformers, when confronted by a rigorous Anabaptist critique, felt persecution was preferable to adult confession and water-immersion. The Protestant town council of Zurich, for instance, "ordered Anabaptists drowned, in cruel parody of their belief." 32 The sixteenth-century Anabaptists abandoned both infant baptism and delayed confirmation. These radical reformers returned to the model of Christian initiation of adults and recognized but one CONFIRMATION: IT S HISTORY AND MEANING 31
Page 1 and 2: Quarterly Review/Spring 1993 55.00
Page 3 and 4: Quarterly Review A Journal of Theol
Page 5: VOL. 13, NO. 1 SPRING 1993 Contents
Page 8 and 9: I have always rather liked the gruf
Page 10 and 11: of discipleship in the New Testamen
Page 12 and 13: imagine a week without visiting the
Page 14 and 15: transform all of life, and all that
Page 16 and 17: Contemporary North American Christi
Page 18 and 19: We must now see what it is that cha
Page 20 and 21: saying "call no one your father in
Page 22 and 23: 13:12). There is no following of Je
Page 24 and 25: Both New Testament discipleship and
Page 26 and 27: 17. "The Duty of Constant Communion
Page 28 and 29: earliest Christian congregations be
Page 30 and 31: his baptism to the experience of Ch
Page 32 and 33: Holy Spirit comes down willingly fr
Page 34 and 35: The Sacramental Nature of the Bapti
Page 38 and 39: aptism—for mature youth and adult
Page 40 and 41: purpose of a rite of maturity is to
Page 42 and 43: church, namely, thatbaptism-chrisma
Page 44 and 45: 31. John Wesley, Works, X: 151. 32.
Page 46 and 47: In Baptismal Covenant I, in the "In
Page 48 and 49: of God without being born of water
Page 50 and 51: they urged a stronger claim for a p
Page 52 and 53: After analyzing how American Method
Page 54 and 55: eferred to as "a symbol of an inner
Page 56 and 57: of baptism is "the washing away the
Page 58 and 59: Although there is only scant likeli
Page 60 and 61: ut the inner man, where we have put
Page 62 and 63: Notes 1. Lawrence Hull Stookey, "Th
Page 64 and 65: 44. Borgen, 159f.; Stein, 319, f, 1
Page 66 and 67: I am not a liturgical scholar or pr
Page 68 and 69: ounden duty...to consecrate our chi
Page 70 and 71: formed in the gospel not only by le
Page 72 and 73: life, for one could always lose gra
Page 74 and 75: However, I have focused on human ac
Page 76 and 77: Osborne, Kenan B. The Christian Sac
Page 78 and 79: It was raining pretty hard one Satu
Page 80 and 81: the same time a young man came to s
Page 82 and 83: theologically unpacked. A pastoral
Page 84 and 85: Elizabeth Achtemeier's Preaching fr
Page 86 and 87:
prophets by the traditions of ancie
Page 88 and 89:
eading; it seems as if one is heari
Page 90 and 91:
Brueggemann's discussion of royal v
Page 92 and 93:
limitations, even in quite valuable
Page 95 and 96:
M. Eugene Boring Interpreting 1 Pet
Page 97 and 98:
particular way. The particularity o
Page 99 and 100:
in the capital of the empire felt m
Page 101 and 102:
location but about the way we relat
Page 103 and 104:
answer: Read. Interpret. Examine. B
Page 105 and 106:
in liturgical settings. Yet all of
Page 107 and 108:
word accomplished by Jesus, who cal
Page 109 and 110:
community that does what priests do
Page 111 and 112:
kings, slavery as a divinely author
Page 113 and 114:
wives and husbands. To each it migh
Page 115 and 116:
etained some of the oral style appr
Page 117 and 118:
Brox, Norbert. Der erste Petrusbrie
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