Confirmation is more than a simple first reaffirmation of baptismal dedicates In confirmation one assumes responsibility for carrying without what one committed oneself to do at baptism-serve god the father with one's whole heart.

Confirmation is more than a simple first reaffirmation of baptismal dedicates In confirmation one assumes responsibility for carrying without what one committed oneself to do at baptism-serve god the father with one's whole heart, mind, and source of action Like the eucharist, confirmation is a distinctive rite of strengthening and nourishment to sustain us in the difficult task of leading the Christoform life to which our baptism has called us. The Spirit is invoked here, not for a like reason much to make us God's hold as in baptism, but to empower us for living disclosed our baptismal vows. United with Christ between the sides of the Spirit at baptism, we are make go rounded from lives of sin back to the Father; empowered on the Spirit of Christ we move forth as Christ does to besufficient for the Father's mission of delight in in the world.

Recent progress to maturitys in the life of the body of christians suggest a need to revisit the theology of confirmation. The canonical questions about whether or not confirmation should be a condition for certain ministries and make choice ofed positions in the church are united such development. The answer to like questions hinges, one might think on clarifying what confirmation is all about. Prompting further reflection too are modern developments that tend to downplay the importance of confirmation. Confirmation, for example, is no longer a prerequisite for taking communion. And baptism might self-same well seem to have been elevated in significance, following the 1979 Prayer part revisions, at confirmation's expense. If baptism is satiated and complete initiation into the visible form [i]or[/i] frame of Christ, what is now the point of confirmation? Along with ECUSAs fresh baptismal ecclesiology comes the los common might argue, of confirmation's raison d'??tre The strange baptismal rites of the 1979 Prayer volume indeed incorporate so many of confirmation s traditional elements-a sealing with chrism, laying onward of hands when a bishop is at hand emphatic invocation of the Spirit, a baptismal covenant suggestive of a mature Christian commitment-that confirmation threatens to collapse into it. At principally confirmation simply seems to gaze back to baptism in reaffirmation, the first among many other so occasions of reaffirmation of baptismal devotes in the church's worship life. What more might conceivably be left to confirmation as its distinctive contribution? for what purpose even retain the rite, if confirmation is nothing more than a formal first baptismal reaffirmation?

My task is to shore up the existing rite of confirmation-and indeed help reinvigorate it-by sketching a theological rationale that avoids making confirmation a simple reaffirmation of baptismal dedicates There is much more to confirmation than baptism. And this can be shown without in any way jeopardizing baptism's standing as glutted and complete initiation into the visible form [i]or[/i] frame of Christ, as that is in the way that properly emphasized in the 1979 Prayer Book

What is Confirmation's Distinctive Contribution?

One way to clarify its contribution is to talk about confirmation's relationship to baptism in expressions of a shift from actuality to manifestation or epiphany. What is already made real for us at baptism-our becoming united with Christ (Christ's own) and therefore appoint upon a new way of living-begins to be manifested as our confess activity for a whole modern way of life at confirmation. Everything has already happened in baptism however has yet to be revealed in our lives, made our be in possession of personally appropriated, turned into a happening that our acknowledge lives display, until the decisive shift in our lives that confirmation establishes and marks.

Such a shift from actuality to manifestation is a better way of making mind of the contribution confirmation makes to baptism than a shift from potentiality to actuality (which insinuates baptism remains incomplete without confirmation). The shift is more like a shift from an objective happening that alters our whole situation (we are now Christ's own) to our subjective answer to, our coming to grips with, that changed circumstance, in correspondence to it. What has happened to and for us, despite our be in possession of sinful lives and beyond our created capacities and in that brains not simply to us if it were not that apart from us at baptism, is now brought to light in our lives, in the form of a whole way of living for which we take a responsibility. In confirmation we same intentionally seek to glorify the most high in and through the character of our lives by way of allowing what God has done for us in Christ to shine by the and of or light them up, in a distinctive way that cogitates a personal sense of calling.

A distinction I make in my part Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, to talk about the Incarnation and its chain of cause and effects might be helpful here.1 In Christ, humanity becomes the Words own-that is what Incarnation means-for the view of making the powers of the Word humanity's have and thereby transforming, healing and deifying, it. In frequently the same way, we are made Christ's acknowledge in virtue of our baptism (parallel to the Incarnation in which humanity is made the Word's own) And then in confirmation, Christ becomes our allow as a visibly manifest transformative force determining the character of our whole lives (parallel to the way Jesus' humanity is elevated to a of the present day form-literally raised from the dead-as a concatenation of Incarnation).