History can Confirm

So someone has asked for some thoughts about Confirmation - that ritual of the Anglican (and Catholic) Church that confuses lots of people - and that some credobaptists love to have a go at! After all, isn't Confirmation just proof that our children really missed out on something by not being able to choose to be baptised for themselves? And doesn't this just make a mockery of the gospel that doesn't see us saved by our family affiliations but by each person's individual faith in Jesus as Saviour? As a convinced paedobaptist, I have responses to all the common objections, but I don't want to make them the point of this post. Perhaps for another time... But also, in order to understand Anglican Confirmation properly, baptism isn't the place to start anyway, church history is. Let me explain.

In England the Church is established. Christianity is (currently) the official religion of the nation. The people have lived under Christian monarchs for countless generations and - before the rise and rise of cultural pluralism, mass immigration and hyper individualism - the expectation has been that all English people were Christians. By default, this also meant that they were all also members of the Church of England. Now, we might all agree that there's a level at which this is pretty fanciful stuff: there's never been a nation where all the subjects were truly Christian; this is a sure way to breed rank nominalism; etc; etc. But none of that's really the point for now. The point is just that the English Church has historically been cleaved to the machinery of the State.

Now, this is significant here because it used to be that you couldn't participate in English civic life if you weren't a Christian. Just as there was once a time when women or black people weren't given a vote, so too there was a time when non-Christian people couldn't hold public office or take up a full place in society. In England, a non-Christian used to be persona non grata. So, how then did the State know whether you were a committed Christian or not, given that most everyone was baptised as a baby? It was by Confirmation. The bishop would come and publicly examine the confirmee on their understanding of the basics of the faith as expressed in the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer, and you had to pass to be a full member of the national Church and a full citizen of the State.

Now there's an upshot of all this for anyone who thinks it's worth people learning something about Jesus and Christianity. It's that it meant that in preparation for their big exam, every person in England was schooled in those three formulae, which were, and still are, the basis of the Church Catechism. And consequently, the Church Catechism did, and still does, make up the bulk of the Anglican Church's Confirmation service that's in the Book of Common Prayer.

So, that's where Confirmation comes from. It was a formal rite of passage for both the Church and the State. Now, let's jump forward and ask about today. What's the point of Confirmation in a post-Christendom society where Confirmation no longer confers any privileges at all?

Well, it certainly has less significance now, and its certainly not something that Anglicans consider to be mandatory (unless you want to be ordained). But it still does allow children baptised as infants to make a public profession of their faith if they feel they want to. It's a way they can say to the world that they've owned the faith they were brought up in at a personal level. Of course, their participation in the life of the church might make the same statement anyway. And they can have this involvement because Anglicans don't exclude their children from full participation until such time as they've been through a public ceremony. (Which, in a nice irony, makes us far less enslaved to church ritual than some of the credobaptists at this point!)

But aside from its reduced relevance, there are some real problems with modern day Confirmation. One is that it's often not done 'by the book' and involves no real interrogation by the bishop at all. Sadly this means that it's not always completely clear what the service is meant to be confirming. Is it the fact that the confirmee wants to partake in a ritual of the Church? Is it that their pastor thinks they're a really decent guy or girl? Is it that they want to own their Anglican heritage? Or are we confirming that they believe the basics of the Christian faith as expressed in the Creed, that they they want to uphold the Ten Commndments and that they they've learnt to approach God the Father through the prayer that Jesus taught - without necessarily even referring to those things in the service at all?

Another problem is that sometimes confirmees can simply be going through the motions in compliance with the wishes of their parents or other significant adults. That is, it's no more about them choosing to declare their faith in Jesus than their baptism was (ok - so there's one pitched up for you credobaptists to have a swing at!) But despite these problems, it would be unfair to reject the whole idea of Confirmation because any dimension of religion can be corrupted by hollow ritualism. Everything can be broke.

So then, two sentence summary: Confirmation used to have an important social function as it was the way of entering into full participation in England's Christendom society. Now its significance is much less, although it can be one great way for those baptised as infants to confirm that they love being part of the family of Jesus' saved people.

Anglican Communion

Ok - so this one's a bit sooner than expected. Having been in conversation about the Lord's Supper in Anglican Churches yesterday, I thought I'd put down a few thoughts here.

Although it wasn't the only issue in the Protestant Reformation, the theology and practice of the Lord's Supper was pretty front and centre. It was one of the key issues over which the Church of England separated from the Roman Catholic Church. Without going into all the details, the English rejected the ideas that the body Christ was physically present in the Communion and that the act of taking communion was in any way meritorious. They weren't purely memorialists like the Swiss (although they came pretty close at a couple of points), but believed in a spiritual presence of Christ in the bread and wine that was conditional upon the faith of the recipient.

Interesting as all this is (!), the thing I've been discussing lately is whether or not anyone cares anymore. In the sixteenth century, this stuff was considered to be so important that endless hours were spent developing more and more complex, refined and detailed theologies, and whole movements were prepared to break away from each other over their differing beliefs. Those separations still exist today in the form of different denominations and national churches, but are we still concerned about this big issue that was so important to the split in the first place?

That last question is sparked by two of the approaches that I've seen to the Lord's Supper in Anglican Churches, both of which seem strange to me. One is effectively a return to something like the Catholic Mass, with the sense that more is going on in the Communion than the Reformers would ever have been happy with. I wonder if in some cases, churches that have this 'Anglo-Catholic' approach to the sacraments got there via an attraction to the aesthetic of Catholic worship, rather than a conviction about non-Protestant theology. I suspect that in some cases these kinds of churches don't like the separatist flavour of Protestantism and are wanting to express their endorsement of the 'universal' ideal of the Catholic Church. Although both of these things might be ok as far as they go, I do think that for integrity's sake, once you step over into Catholic sacramental theology, you should probably consider whether or not it's time to leave the Anglican Church and formally join the Catholics.

The second thing that I've seen tends to happen in those Anglican Churches with a more evangelical bent and it's the downplaying of the sacraments altogether. This can even get the point where Communion is shared very infrequently and when it does happen, the minister seems to feel the need to offer an extended apology for it - or almost to even explain it away. I suspect this happens out of a fear that no one present should fall into the trap of thinking that what's going on is the same as what goes on in Catholic Churches and, to be fair, I think for many punters, this distinction is necessary. But sometimes it can get to sounding like the Lord's Supper has been downgraded, which is not at all what the first Protestants did. They didn't marginalise or diminish the Supper, they reformed it - or even attempted to restore it to its proper biblical pattern. They maintained a high view of Communion, even if not a Roman view. The other thing that sometimes happens in these sorts of churches is that a lot of effort goes into explaining what Communion isn't, but not much goes into explain what it is, and why it matters. This is a problem because negative information about something never builds up a positive understanding.

A wise friend once said to me that a person's sacramental theology reveals a great deal about their entire theological framework and I believe that's worthy of some reflection. If you have a semi-Catholic view of the Lord's Supper, do you have a semi-Catholic theology overall? Does that matter? If you have a low view of the Lord's Supper, do you have a low view of theology overall? Does that matter? And if you just have an underdeveloped view of the Lord's Supper, do you also have an underdeveloped theology? And does that matter?

I'm actually putting these as more than just rhetorical questions too. Given that, on the whole, we don't seem as fazed by sacramental theology these days as we were five hundred years ago, does any of it really matter? Was the big Reformation blow-up really a storm in a teacup (or a chalice)? Is the looser grip that we now seem to have on these questions actually a better reflection of gospel priorities? Have we progressed or regressed since the early days of the split with Rome?

Breaking the Silence

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything here but I've noticed that the blog is still getting constant hits - thanks for your interest!

Mainly, the reason I've gone quiet is that I've had my head down the books as I've been trying to complete some study over the past year. But my hope is to revive things again in the months ahead (in reality, probably not much before November).

Any particular Anglican-related matters that I should tackle when I get back to it?