Baptism and the process of Christian initiation

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan-June, 2002 by Paul S. Fiddes

3. Baptism as "complete sacramental initiation"

As an example of a thorough-going attempt at defining the act of baptism as complete Christian initiation, we may consider the Toronto statement on "Christian Initiation in the Anglican Communion" (1991). (13) An examination of this document shows that such a simple and total identification is bound to produce tensions and even inconsistencies. We shall have to ask why, despite evident problems, there is a desire to persist on this course. Believer-baptists who question it may well find that they have stumbled, all unwittingly, not simply into the current liturgical momentum for a "unified rite of initiation", but into an internal Anglican debate.

The statement begins with a summary of "principles of Christian initiation", and the third point makes the unequivocal claim that "baptism is complete sacramental initiation and leads to participation in the eucharist". The rite of confirmation is affirmed as having a continuing pastoral role as a means of "renewal of faith" among the baptized, or a reaffirmation of the baptismal covenant (cf. 3.19-20), but is not to be seen in any way as a "completion of baptism". We notice immediately that there is no room here for the idea that confirmation, or other rites of commitment, might complete initiation while not completing baptism in itself.

This simple identification of baptism and initiation leads to some strains in 1.3, where the report considers the case of those who have received the sign of baptism but have come only later to an "active faith". The "inward part" of baptism is regarded as a "promise of forgiveness of sins, rebirth to new life in Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit", and the report notes that "where baptism accompanies or even conveys a personal experience of conversion to Christ, then that promised gift of God is received along with the outward sign". The logic of this statement ("where baptism accompanies ...") is that when "active faith" does not coincide with baptism but comes later on in someone's experience, the promise must be fulfilled at that moment. The report refrains from saying this explicitly; it affirms only that liturgical celebration of active faith must be "based upon the original baptism". However, if the promise given in baptism is in any sense fulfilled in a later coming to faith, must not the fulfilment be the conclusion of initiation? This would have been the view of the Reformers who framed the Heidelberg Catechism in which, in its section on baptism, the language of promise plays so central a part (Qu. 74). Yet this report denies that "the imposition of hands somehow ... concludes the process of Christian initiation" (1.16).

For all that, however, the authors do not seem to be able to avoid the image of a process of initiation entirely, since they approve "the recovery of the earlier tradition of the church that eucharist is in fact the fulfilment and sacramental completion of the initiatory processs" (3.6)--and this despite the insistence elsewhere in the report that baptism alone is "complete sacramental initiation". If eucharist is after all needed to complete the process, then why not confirmation or some similar occasion for a personal confession of faith? We begin to detect that there may be undercurrents in this discussion, privileging first communion rather than confirmation as, in effect, part of one process, while insisting overtly on there being no process of initiation at all. The desire to admit the baptized to eucharist before confirmation may, perhaps, have "skewed" the perspective on initiation.