Conformity or intentionality In the New Testament, baptism was something that happened for converts, for example, people who heard Peter on the day of Pentecost, the Ethiopian befriended by Philip, the household of Cornelius visited by Peter. They heard the news of what God had done through Jesus, they opened their hearts to accept its implications, they joined the community of disciples, and they began to experience the power of the Spirit. And baptism was the sign and seal of this conversion.
Over the first three centuries or so, the Christian movement continued to develop its wisdom and skill in making disciples, in a process they called “catechumenate,” a process that climaxed in baptism. Christian contacts with non-believers were cultivated with compassion and in response to their spiritual interest, and inquirers were helped to understand something of the story and lifestyle of believers and the costliness of it. If they still wanted to know more and were prepared to undertake the basic disciplines of the Christian life, they were inducted as apprentices– called “catechumens”–and shared the company of the believers who gathered week by week, hearing the scriptures read and taught. The Christian friends who first connected with these apprentices would become their sponsors, testifying to the seriousness of their interest, and then as the apprentices grew in faith and obedience to the way of Christ, the sponsors would have to testify to the authenticity of their devotion. Only then they could be accepted as candidates for baptism, once it was clear they were ready to make a lifelong commitment.
Candidates would then begin to prepare for baptism through prayer and fast ing and the testing of their hearts. Customarily, this would come to a climax at the Great Vigil of Easter; they would be baptized and brought into the community as full members, sharing at the Lord’s table. Evidence suggests that parents would also bring their children with them to baptism, a family solidarity that the church had always recognized and supported. During the weeks immediately following their baptism, they would be guided into an appreciation of the sacramental life which they now shared.
Such was the care the church exercised in making disciples. By the time candidates got as far as a decision about baptism, their intentions were usually very clear–something of no little importance considering the weighty responsibility they bore as witnesses to Christ in a hostile society.
But then, as if by some special grace of God, the Roman emperor converted, apparently deciding that the Christian faith was the best tool available for uniting his empire. He actively encouraged the public acceptance of the Christian faith, and soon it was no longer costly to be a Christian–in fact it became costly to hold out against it! Soon, candidates for baptism were no longer being scrutinized concerning their real intentions; they were being accepted in droves because conformity had become the new Christian virtue.
Needless to say, it was not long before the majority of baptismal candidates were infants; all the adults had already been baptized. Eventually, baptism became a matter of conformity, and laws were enacted to ensure that people did not hesitate to bring newborns to the font. This made a lot of sense when the whole culture was professedly Christian. Why leave out the children, when they were loved by God as much as anyone else? In the early middle ages, children were also communicants, until clergy began to think that the sacrament of the table was holier than the people who came to eat it, and started worrying about children spitting out the bread or spilling the cup.
But with the Enlightenment, things began to change in the so-called Christian world. There was a growing rebellion against the authority of the church, and more and more people opted out of the Christian faith, some by degrees, some by wholesale rejection of its teachings. It became fashionable to be skeptical, and skepticism was one of the foundations of the emerging new authority: the authority of science. By our own day it has become clear that conformity no longer leads people into church membership; people no longer have to opt out of the church. In fact, they have to opt in, consciously and intentionally, if they are going to be Christians in the modern world. We are back to the position of the early church, at least in this respect. It is vitally important that the way we celebrate baptism should reflect and support this new reality: that people become Christians and members of Christ’s church not by conformity but by choice and intention.
Life-stage sacraments (conformity)
The pattern of sacramental life we inherited is one shaped by the long centuries of Christendom and reshaped in the sixteenth-century Reformation. The historic Book of Common Prayer (including the 1962 BCP of the Anglican Church of Canada) offers us an image of human civilization ordered by God’s grace: morning and evening prayer, by which daily life is sanctified; weekly remembrance of the Lord’s death which won for us this Christian civilization; and a series of pastoral offices: Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony, Churching of Women, Ministry to the Sick, and Burial of the Dead, all of which are geared to the ages and stages of life, sanctifying the times and seasons of our lives from cradle to grave.
The difficulty for us in using such an order today is its assumption of a Christian civilization, in which every citizen will of course share this sanctified cycle of life. When baptism and confirmation are life-stage sacraments, the assumption is that they are celebrated automatically when a person is of the right age. Babies are baptized just because they are babies, even when their parents apparently have no intention of living as members of Christ and his church. Young people are confirmed just because they are the right age, even if their greatest concern happens to be conformity to the youth culture. All of this happens in the radically altered context of a post-Christian culture. In the process, the authentic character of Christian discipleship is quietly betrayed, over and over again, until no one, not even the faithful, really believes what we say any more.
A conversion sacrament (intentionality)
One of the seldom observed characteristics of The Book of Alternative Services and of other contemporary revisions of the prayer book, is that the order of Holy Baptism has been moved out of that series of pastoral services that is tied to the life-cycle and now stands as the first of the two gospel sacraments that define the life of the church. What will our sacramental practice look like if it expresses and celebrates the very real phenomenon of the Gospel taking root in people’s lives? What will have to change in our practice of the sacraments if they are to express intentionality instead of conformity, response to God’s call instead of capitulation to the pressure of grandparents?
We know we cannot go back to the practice of the early church and pretend that we are a mysterious little movement distinguished for its courage of faith and its stamina under persecution. Inquirers do not bring great curiosity about the source of this mysterious power; instead they bring a lot of baggage of expectations from past experience or hearsay, and more often than not, they bring wildly corrupted notions of both the church and the Gospel. So we cannot respond to them in the same way the first Christians responded to inquirers. Nevertheless, something like the ancient church’s care and thoroughness in making disciples is going to be essential in our ministry from here on in.
Some of us have been working very hard over the past few years to reconstruct the shape of that ministry, a contemporary catechumenate, in the expectation that the day will soon come when inquirers will once again approach us to find an experience of God’s grace. They will be people disillusioned with the ratrace of consumer culture and the emptyheaded spirituality of new-age trendiness; they will be suspicious of our institutions, to be sure, but hungry for true wisdom and healing power in their daily living. We need to know how to serve them faithfully, how to guide them beyond cynicism to open-hearted trust in the way of Christ, how to incorporate them, step by step, into a community of faith. And that is what a catechumenal ministry is all about.
In the meantime, this vision calls into question our inherited patterns of ministry to people who bring their babies for baptism. The problem is not theirs, for we taught them the path of sacramental conformity. The problem is ours: it is we who must learn to do better and offer these young parents a path toward responsible participation in the community of the covenant.
Some very large hurdles confront us, however. For one, unless our congregations can share this vision, we will only be spinning our wheels. But involving members of the congregation in sponsoring young families for baptism can certainly help to rebuild the vision within the congregation.
Another hurdle is the clash of expectations. Let me name just two. First, there will often be the clash between the expectations of the parents, who want to know when the baptism can be scheduled, and our expectations that they may need to explore the meaning of discipleship first. Second, there will be the clash between our expectation that we must incorporate them, by hook or by crook, into our common life because we cannot turn them away, and the Gospel’s expectation that only those who take up a cross can follow the way of Christ.
Household Christendom
Another change which The Book of Alternative Services has brought to the tradition of the BCP is that instead of having two rites for baptism (one for children and one for “such as are of riper years”), it provides one rite only, although it shows us how to modify the rite when the candidates are too young to answer for themselves. What this makes clear is that normally candidates are expected to answer for themselves. When this is not possible, we must face some major questions.
Of course, the prayer book knew this all along. In the 1662 BCP catechism, the explanation of baptism applies only to adult baptism, and the question that immediately follows is, “Why then are infants baptized?” The catechism goes on to offer a rationale, but clearly, infant baptism (even if it is the commonest form of baptism) is seen as an exceptional practice, the normative form being the baptism of those who can answer for themselves.
Of course, as we all know, in infant baptism, the parents and sponsors answer for the child, something which they certainly cannot do unless they can first answer for themselves. So our ministry to families bringing children to baptism must begin by preparing the parents to reaffirm their own baptismal covenant.
However, my argument for the appropriateness of baptizing all infants during those long centuries of Christian civilization was that you couldn’t grow up in that culture without sharing in the Christian world-view; you couldn’t be a non-Christian unless you opted out! Nowadays, nobody grows up that way unless they live in a household that has a distinctly Christian culture! Is it possible to imagine such a household whose daily life is so shaped by the Christian story, Christian prayer and Christian assumptions that a young child growing up there cannot even imagine not being a Christian? I propose to call this phenomenon “household Christendom.” And I want to propose that a child born into such a household Christendom cannot conceivably be left out of the Christian covenant. That is the situation in which infant baptism is entirely justified. It is not, however, merely a household in which the parents happen to be churchgoers.
At the beginning, I recalled what the New Testament tells us about the circumstances in which baptism was first administered. People heard the news of what God had done through Jesus, they opened their hearts to accept its implications, they joined the community of disciples, and they began to experience the power of the Spirit. And baptism was the sign and seal of this conversion.
Likewise, infant baptism is the sign and seal of the Christian identity of a child who hears, from its earliest days, the story of what God has done through Jesus, whose heart is led to explore the implications of that story, who is physically included in the community of disciples, and who experiences in a child’s way the power of the Holy Spirit. This, I believe, is the meaning of infant baptism in a post- Christian world, and this meaning must replace the popular notion of baptism as inoculation against God’s wrath.
Thus, the other dimension of ministry to parents who bring their children to baptism must be a ministry that guides them in the quest for a Christian household, one in which their baptized infant will grow up with a Christian imagination, conscious of being a child of God and a follower of Jesus Christ, and unable to imagine not being a Christian.