By Robin G. Jordan
Next to the Order of the Ministration or the Holy Communion of a Prayer Book a good place to look for clues to the doctrine of the Prayer Book is the Order of Confirmation. Archbishop Cranmer and the English Reformers rejected what J. I. Packer characterizes as a “medieval mistake,” the notion that confirmation is a sacrament. Rather they viewed confirmation as a catechetical rite in which the confirmand made a profession of faith and received the prayers of the church. This is essential the view of confirmation of the 1552-1662 Prayer Books. It is also the view of the Homily on Common Prayer and the Sacraments which the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion describes as containing “godly and whole doctrine” and “necessary for these times” and Alexander Nowell’s Larger Catechism which was commissioned by Convocation and used in universities and grammar schools. The two Books of Homilies and Nowell’s Larger Catechism were used to instruct the English people in the reformed faith of the Church of England.
Archbishop Cranmer’s retention of the rite of confirmation in the 1552 Prayer Book is not evidence that he held a medieval view of the rite as a sacrament but is an application of the principle that he articulates in his essay, “Of Ceremonies, Why Some Be Abolished and Some Retained,” originally published in the 1549 Prayer Book. He saw no reason not to retain the old where it might be well used as long as it contained nothing that was contrary to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures or was reformed to conform to their teaching. The Swiss Reformer John Calvin would also retain the rite of confirmation for similar reasons.
The nineteenth century Oxford movement revived the Roman Catholic sacramental system in the Church of England and her daughter churches. In this system confirmation is a sacrament along with penance, ordination, matrimony, and unction. Its adherents systematically went through the 1662 Prayer and reinterpreted its rites and services to their way of thinking. They would claim that the 1662 Prayer Book taught that confirmation was a sacrament. They ignored the original intended meaning of its texts and read their own meaning into them.
For a discussion of the Holy Spirit and historic Anglicanism, I recommend my article, "Thoughts on the Holy Spirit and Historic Anglicanism." For a detailed history of confirmation I recommend my article, "An Anglican Prayer Book (2008): The Catechism and the Order of Confirmation."
A number of more recent Anglican service books dance around the idea that confirmation is a sacrament. They refer to confirmation as a “ministry,”a “sacramental rite,” or a “sacrament of the church.” In referring to confirmation as a “sacrament of the church” they come dangerously close to if not embrace the Roman Catholic sacramental system. The Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church also refers to confirmation as a “sacrament of the church.”
For this reason the order of confirmation is a good place to look for clues to the doctrine of a Prayer Book. If it treats confirmation as a sacrament, it provides further evidence of the unreformed Catholic doctrinal leanings of the Prayer Book. The Order of Confirmation of the proposed 2019 ACNA Prayer Book does just that.
In the preface to the rite the ACNA's proposed Order of Confirmation goes as far as claiming that the apostles instituted the sacrament. “Confirmation is clearly grounded in Scripture: the Apostles prayed for, and laid their hands on those who had already been baptized (2 Timothy 1:6-7; Acts 8:14-17; 19:6).” It ignores the warning of the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion that confirmation is a "corrupt following of the Apostles" {Article XXV).
What is described in Acts 8:14-17, 19:6 is the apostolic practice of laying on hands and praying for the descent of the Holy Spirit and not a primitive form of confirmation. 2 Timothy 1:6-7 must be understood in the light of 1 Timothy 4: 14: “Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery.” Paul is not referring to confirmation but to a special gift that Timothy received as a consequence of a prophetic utterance. In order to claim that these passages are precedence for the practice of confirming baptized Christians, one must ignore both authorial intent and larger context and rely on tradition rather than sound biblical exegesis in the interpretation of the text. In doing so, one perpetuates the mistake that the medieval church made.
The rite of confirmation is a classical example of the medieval church drifting into a practice, in this case the practice of medieval bishops’ laying hands on the baptized apart from their baptism, and then, after had drifted into the practice, looking for a rationale for continuing the practice. The medieval church turned to the Bible and noting a similarity between the practice of its bishops and the practice of the apostles erroneously concluded its bishops were doing what the apostles had done. As well as the superficial reading of passages from the Scriptures and the allegorization of texts, the medieval church was prone to proof-texting, cherry-picking passages from the Scriptures into which might be read proof of the validity of existing beliefs and practices. Its misinterpretation of Scripture passages quickly hardened into “sacred tradition” which was given greater weight than the Bible itself.
The ACNA's proposed Order of Confirmation contains the claim, “God’s grace is imparted in baptism, through which we are made God’s children by adoption and given the Holy Spirit.” One of the issues that has historically divided Anglicans is the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. Those who subscribe to this doctrine maintain that God’s grace is invariably given in baptism. But this view is not supported by the whole counsel of the Bible.
The New Testament gives accounts of individuals who received the gift of the Holy Spirit before they were baptize—Cornelius and the members of his household, individuals who were baptized and who displayed no evidence of regeneration or the Holy Spirit—Simon Magus, and individuals who did not receive the Holy Spirit at baptism but later—the Samaritan believers.
The sixteenth century benchmark Anglican divine Richard Hooker wrote, “All who receive the sacrament of grace do not receive the grace of the sacrament”—an acknowledgement that God’s grace is not automatically imparted in baptism.
In the nineteenth century the regeneration language of the Orders of Baptism and the Orders of Confirmation of the 1662 Prayer Book and the 1789 Prayer Book became a major cause of controversy with Anglo-Catholics interpreting that language literally and Evangelicals maintaining that the 1662 Prayer Book and the 1789 Prayer Book used the language of charitable supposition. See J. C. Ryle’s essay, "Prayer Book Statements about Regeneration," in Knots United.
In the United States Evangelicals called for the revision of the 1789 Prayer Book. Their proposal was a modest one—the inclusion of an alternative Order of Baptism or alternative wording in the Order of Baptism in the 1789 book—but the proposal drew fierce opposition from Anglo-Catholics. After they suffered a serious defeat in General Convention and were banned from sharing their pulpits with other Protestant ministers and fellowshipping with them, the Evangelicals withdrew from the Protestant Episcopal Church and formed the Reformed Episcopal Church.
In the United Kingdom the Gorham Decision recognized that baptismal regeneration was not the sole doctrinal position of the Church of England. “The validity of the doctrine of the conditional (or hypothetical) regeneration of infants in baptism was declared consistent with the teaching of the Church of England.” See the article, “The Gorham Case,” in A Protestant Dictionary (Charles H. H. Wright; Charles Neil, eds., 1904).
The doctrine of baptismal regeneration is generally associated with the Anglo-Catholic wing of the twenty-first century Anglican Church. The inclusion of this claim in the Order of Confirmation is an important clue to the doctrine of the proposed 2019 ACNA Prayer Book.
A more comprehensive Prayer Book would have avoided such assertions and focused upon the three most important elements of the rite of confirmation—the confirmand’s profession of faith in Jesus Christ, confirmand’s affirmation of baptismal vows made upon his behalf as an infant or child or his reaffirmation of his own baptismal vows, and prayer for the confirmand. As J. I. Packer points out, the laying on of the bishop’s hands is simply a gesture of goodwill toward the confirmand. It conveys no grace.
What is also troublesome about the ACNA’s proposed confirmation rite, indoctrination in the teaching of the ACNA’s unreformed Catholic catechism, To Be a Christian: an Anglican Catechism, is a requirement for its administration. Like the ACNA’s ordinal, the catechism was foisted by the College of Bishops upon the Anglican Church in North America. It has never been approved by the Provincial Council, much less the Provincial Assembly. In a number of places it does not conform to the teaching of the Bible or the principles of historic Anglican formularies—the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, The Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and the Ordinal of 1661. It shows more the influence of the Catechism of the Catholic Church than historic Anglican catechisms like Alexander Nowell’s Larger Catechism.
It would not be impossible to provide the Anglican Church in North America with a more comprehensive catechism, one that provides instruction in the essentials of the Christian faith on which the different theological schools of thought represented in the ACNA genuinely agree and which avoids matters on which they disagree or identifies these areas of disagreement and briefly discusses the position of each school. But it is evident from the ACNA’s ordinal, its catechism, and its proposed Prayer Book that those calling the shots in its College of Bishops have an agenda and that agenda is to give the province doctrine, order, and worship, which are unreformed Catholic and not reformed Anglican. It is time for those fully committed to remaining faithful to the teaching of the Bible and historic Anglican beliefs and practices, to use a hackneyed phrase, “To wake up and smell the coffee.”
Image Credit: All Saints Church, Chapel Hill, Durham, NC
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