Towards a New Theology of Confirmation

Confirmation is more than a simple first reaffirmation of baptismal pledges In confirmation one assumes responsibility for carrying on the outside what one committed oneself to do at baptism-serve omnipotence with one's whole heart, mind, and inner man Like the eucharist, confirmation is a distinctive rite of strengthening and diet to sustain us in the difficult task of leading the Christoform life to which our baptism has called us. The Spirit is invoked here, not for a like reason much to make us God's have a title to as in baptism, but to empower us for living without our baptismal vows. United with Christ end the Spirit at baptism, we are turn rounded from lives of sin back to the Father; empowered by means of the Spirit of Christ we move forth as Christ does to obey the Father's mission of have affection for in the world.

Recent unfoldings in the life of the meeting-house suggest a need to revisit the theology of confirmation. The canonical questions about whether or not confirmation should be a condition for certain ministries and make choice ofed positions in the church are single such development. The answer to like questions hinges, one might anticipate on clarifying what confirmation is all about. Prompting further reflection too are novel developments that tend to downplay the importance of confirmation. Confirmation, for example, is no longer a prerequisite for taking communion. And baptism might real well seem to have been elevated in significance, following the 1979 Prayer work revisions, at confirmation's expense. If baptism is replete and complete initiation into the material part of Christ, what is now the point of confirmation? Along with ECUSAs novel baptismal ecclesiology comes the los single might argue, of confirmation's raison d'??tre The novel baptismal rites of the 1979 Prayer work indeed incorporate so many of confirmation s traditional elements-a sealing with chrism, laying upon of hands when a bishop is not away emphatic invocation of the Spirit, a baptismal covenant suggestive of a mature Christian commitment-that confirmation threatens to collapse into it. At greatest in quantity confirmation simply seems to direct the eye back to baptism in reaffirmation, the first among many other of the like kind occasions of reaffirmation of baptismal promise s in the church's worship life. What more might conceivably be left to confirmation as its distinctive contribution? on what account even retain the rite, if confirmation is nothing more than a formal first baptismal reaffirmation?

My task is to shore up the not away rite of confirmation-and indeed help reinvigorate it-by sketching a theological rationale that avoids making confirmation a simple reaffirmation of baptismal promise s There is much more to confirmation than baptism. And this can be shown without in any way jeopardizing baptism's standing as filled and complete initiation into the material substance of Christ, as that is in the way that properly emphasized in the 1979 Prayer Book

What is Confirmation's Distinctive Contribution?

One way to clarify its contribution is to talk about confirmation's relationship to baptism in bounds of a shift from actuality to manifestation or epiphany. What is already made real for us at baptism-our becoming single with Christ (Christ's own) and therefore locate upon a new way of living-begins to be manifested as our have activity for a whole novel way of life at confirmation. Everything has already happened in baptism on the contrary has yet to be revealed in our lives, made our have personally appropriated, turned into a happening that our possess lives display, until the decisive shift in our lives that confirmation establishes and marks.

Such a shift from actuality to manifestation is a better way of making faculty of perception of the contribution confirmation makes to baptism than a shift from potentiality to actuality (which insinuates baptism remains incomplete without confirmation). The shift is more like a shift from an objective happening that alters our whole situation (we are now Christ's own) to our subjective replication to, our coming to grips with, that changed circumstance, in correspondence to it. What has happened to and for us, despite our hold sinful lives and beyond our created capacities and in that faculty of perception not simply to us on the other hand apart from us at baptism, is now brought to light in our lives, in the form of a whole way of living for which we take a certain quantity of responsibility. In confirmation we true intentionally seek to glorify the father in and through the character of our lives by means of allowing what God has done for us in Christ to shine from one side or light them up, in a distinctive way that throw backs a personal sense of calling.

A distinction I make in my volume Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, to talk about the Incarnation and its events might be helpful here.1 In Christ, humanity becomes the Words own-that is what Incarnation means-for the intention of making the powers of the Word humanity's have and thereby transforming, healing and deifying, it. In abundant the same way, we are made Christ's possess in virtue of our baptism (parallel to the Incarnation in which humanity is made the Word's own) And then in confirmation, Christ becomes our hold as a visibly manifest transformative force determining the character of our whole lives (parallel to the way Jesus' humanity is elevated to a novel form-literally raised from the dead-as a result of Incarnation).