Continuing the Reformation: Re-Visioning Baptism in the Episocpal Church

Continuing the Reformation: Re-Visioning Baptism in the Episcopal Church. By Ruth A. Meyers. New York: Church Publishing Co., 1997. xvi + 294 pp. $29.95 (cloth).

In the cycle of my courses at The Church Divinity School of the Pacific, I lead a seminar approximately every two years on the rites of Christian initiation in Anglicanism. By a very happy coincidence, Ruth Meyers's book was published only a few weeks before the course was to begin. Over the past decades, I have collected a large body of documents and articles as well as books on the subject, so that each time I do the course I look for a new way to structure the material so that students may gain as firm a grasp of the issues as possible. I decided this time around to use the sequence of chapters of Continuing the Reformation as the "spine" of the course and to relate the body of assigned readings to the series of subjects addressed by Professor Meyers in her book.

This decision turned out to be a very positive contribution to the course in that the students found Meyers's unfolding of the sequence of issues a source of clarity in dealing with the debates which have gone on within the Church during the past several decades of a variety of issues such as the often meandering meaning of confirmation in the general tradition of the Church, and specifically the debate within Anglicanism about the relation of confirmation to the baptismal water rite. Behind the texts for the rites of baptism and confirmation in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer there is an inheritance of debate and conflict which contributed greatly to the precise forms which those texts have taken both in the American Church and also in other provinces of the Anglican Communion. In spite of a greater depth of attention to these issues in the past two decades since the BCP appeared, there continues to be a great deal of confusion about the stand which the 1979 rites take on these issues and, as well, how they must be viewed in their wider implications.

Professor Meyers's book provides a very useful foundation for understanding both the evolution of the process of the reform of the initiatory rites and also the larger theological and pastoral implications of the reform. The book should be required reading for all candidates for ordination in the Episcopal Church, and for laity who are involved in catechumenal programs and other areas of adult formation. Even for persons (whether lay or ordained) who have closely followed this evolution during recent decades, and for whom much of this material would already be familiar, the book will be found quite useful for its clarity in laying out the range of interrelated issues.

Different reviewers will, of course, focus on different aspects of the rich content of this book. And so, I trust, I may lift up for particular attention an aspect of Professor Meyers's book which is of particular concern to me, and which, I feel, has significant implications for the Episcopal Church as we move into the new millenium. In two chapters of the book, chapters two and nine respectively, Meyers discusses the emergence of a eucharistic ecclesiology and of a baptismal ecclesiology. On the surface, it would be easy to see these two as aspects of the one process of renewal, but Meyers is correct in discussing them separately. For those of us who entered the Episcopal Church in the decades immediately prior to the authorization of the 1979 BCP, the centrality of the eucharist in Sunday worship was something which we took for granted: this was simply the Church as we knew it. The appearance of the series of Prayer Book Studies beginning in 1950 (the first being on Baptism and Confirmation, it is interesting to note) also made us at least dimly aware that prayer book revision might be on the horizon. Certainly the recovery of the centrality of the eucharist in the general life of the Episcopal Church was a matter of great importance. But I have come to see that this in itself could be realized without any menace to the clerical ecclesiology which was generally taken for granted. Although there developed a greater sense of lay involvement, the presiding role of the priest in the eucharist kept the ordained person in a primacy of place which could encourage perhaps a strong eucharistic piety, but which might remain insensitive to the wider implications of that piety for the life of the world.

It is in this perspective that Meyers's discussion of the relation of the baptismal rite to the recovery of a baptismal ecclesiology is so important. An authentic baptismal ecclesiology in no way diminishes the central role of the eucharist as the Church's "principal act of Christian worship on the Lord's Day." But it does lead us to recover the awareness that it is the whole gathered assembly which "celebrates" the eucharist when they gather under the pastoral leadership of the ordained person. Further, a baptismal ecclesiology also leads us to a deepened awareness that it is that whole assembly which is sent forth from the eucharist to be the Body of Christ in the world, to be each one "another Christ" in the place where they live and work and serve. The recovery of that larger vision of the vocation of all Christians to live out their thanksgiving to God in the service of God's world is the primary imperative, I believe, for the Church in the decades ahead. Ruth Meyers has given us in Continuing the Reformation a valuable foundation for understanding and claiming the wonderful transformation which our initiatory rites signify.