Abstract
In this article I argue that the rise of secular culture demands a new approach to baptism, especially the baptism of adult converts for whom the claims of Christianity may be entirely unfamiliar and who will in consequence need extensive preparation to make the sacrament sensible and the Christian life meaningful. Towards that end, I review work done on the subject in the Church of Scotland and commend the Roman Catholic Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) as a model for the development of a full catechumenate.
A colleague of mine recently mentioned that he had had a visitor turn up for a Sunday service. Talking to the young man afterwards, he realized the fellow was entirely new to the faith but was nonetheless making inquiries about being baptized. My colleague said to me, ‘One of the readings for the day was from Jonah and, of course, you and I know that story well, but this man would have known nothing of that, it would have all seemed so strange. What could I say to him? We don’t have the language to help people make sense of it all anymore, do we?’ I knew what he meant. I have been similarly struck dumb by a request for baptism from an adult who knows almost nothing about Christianity, much less any of the peculiar doctrines associated with the Church’s rite of initiation. What do we say? As the distance between the Church and the secular culture continues to grow, that question becomes more insistent. Naturally, a request for baptism represents a wonderful opportunity to introduce someone afresh to the Good News, to plant where no one else has planted or to reap the fruit sown by other saints along the journey, but my concern is that in the secular culture of contemporary Britain, the Church is ill equipped to address the question of baptism with any cogency. Perhaps 50 years ago, when the country was at least nominally Christian, there would have been more shared understanding between the Church and the culture, but no longer. Increasingly, my colleague’s encounter will represent the norm instead of the exception, and those few who do follow the mysterious and prevenient leading of the Holy Spirit into the Church will need to learn Christianity from the very beginning. The question is, where to begin?
It is certainly not a new question and not one I intend to address here. Instead, I would like to suggest that the Church must first come to terms with the fact that the target of Christian initiation has moved from infant to adult baptism. It is not a new direction in adult baptism so much as it is a new direction of adult baptism. Year on year, the Church baptizes fewer and fewer babies, a trend that shows no signs of abating, so much so that it is not unreasonable to surmise that the practice may soon cease to serve as the normative pattern of Christian initiation. Taking its place (if anything takes its place) will be the baptism of adult converts to Christianity. As evidenced in the comments made by my colleague, and in my own experience, and in the experience of those ministers whom I interviewed for my recent doctoral studies, this is a trend we are not prepared for. The Church has long tooled itself for infant baptism, and while the necessary inducements for growth in the faith of our children have also largely fallen away, the method and the means for the maturation of adult believers have arguably never been developed in the first place. Adult baptism and discipleship are, in many cases, simply infant baptism writ large, lacking the vision of an intentional and cohesive process of initiation and inculturation that can enable adult converts to live into the baptized life to which they vow in the sacrament.
In this article then, I argue that the time has come for the development of such a process whereby the Church might be more adequately prepared not only to engage in conversation with the young men and women (and old men and old women) who make inquiries about Christianity, but to teach them to speak a new language altogether, the language of faith. I do so first by drawing attention to the work done in my own Church of Scotland on the subject of baptism, and, second, by commending the Roman Catholic Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) as a model by which the wider Church might develop a more comprehensive and effective method of Christian initiation. First though, a word about contemporary culture and the decline of the Church.
At its peak in 1963, the Church of Scotland baptized fully half of the infants born in Scotland, but since then the Church has baptized not only a smaller number of infants, but a smaller percentage of the infants born each year. In 1963, it was almost 48 per cent, but in 2016 it was only 6 per cent. Numbers of adult baptisms have fallen similarly, from over 5,118 in 1962 to 248 in 2016, 1 and similar figures are available from the Church of England. The statistics of church decline and the decline of religious practice are well documented and need little repetition. More importantly, though, 60 years ago the Church could assume a modicum of shared understanding and belief between itself and the culture; Christianity was the presumed cultural and religious norm.
Today’s culture, however, is radically secularized, and those coming for baptism are, at best, two generations away from active church involvement. Many will hold ideas about faith and religion that differ greatly from those esteemed by the Church and may even be wholly antithetical. The religious culture of Britain has become immeasurably complexified and Christianity can no longer pretend any semblance of hegemony, but this is a hard habit to break. New members and baptizands are embraced with a glad welcome and often receive the sacrament of baptism with little if any intentional instruction. When offered, new member classes may introduce a few broad themes of Christian doctrine but rarely call for the kind of soul-searching personal reform that is consonant with a doctrine of baptism described in terms of death and resurrection (Romans 6.3–5), salvation from destruction (1 Peter 3.20–21), or redemption from slavery to sin (1 Corinthians 10.1–2). The Church all too often simply baptizes as a function of joining, with little to commend it as a process of personal transformation. I do not intend these words to sound like a high-handed critique of the work of my faithful colleagues, but rather as a confession that my own practice differs little and remains similarly confusing and distressing. My new members are no more informed than those I interviewed in other churches.
The good news is that there is, at least in the Church of Scotland, a revived interest in the doctrine and practice of baptism. My own PhD is the third in as many years to re-examine the work of the Special Commission on Baptism (1952–63) convened by T. F. Torrance, and, latterly, the decisions of the 2003 General Assembly, a subject to which I now turn.
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At the 2003 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Panel on Doctrine presented a report that called for a momentous change in the Church’s understanding of baptism. The report introduced a number of recommendations that were intended to clarify the administration of baptism, but it differed in significant ways from its predecessors. The first recommendation was a call for the development of a service of thanksgiving for, and blessing of, a child.
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Provision was also made for the baptism of individuals with learning difficulties and the panel broadened considerably the standards of baptismal eligibility, reviving the historical practice of baptismal sponsorship when evidence of parental faith is lacking. However, the most significant departure from historical practice in the Church of Scotland, and one that has been largely overlooked by the Church, is included in the short Appendix A, entitled ‘The doctrine of baptism’. The last two lines of that section read: The primary image of baptism in the New Testament is that of a person being baptised upon personal profession of faith. The primary image of the New Testament is complemented by the image of the baptism of the household upon corporate profession of faith.
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While the move to highlight adult baptism was new to the Church of Scotland, it actually brought the Church more into line with the ecumenical community in which consensus on the primacy of adult baptism has been growing since the mid-twentieth century. This is most clearly articulated in the World Council of Churches’ 1982 report entitled Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry. Additionally, the WCC has provided a number of salient documents over the last three decades on the subject of baptism
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with a view to establishing a deeper level of agreement within the world communion on our common initiatory rite. Baptismal theology and practice are anything but uniform, but great strides have been taken towards agreement and mutual recognition of baptism across the theological spectrum. While the development of this renewed interest in baptism has been influenced by many factors, one could argue that it finds its origins in the work of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church (1962–65) when it called for the restoration of the catechumenate, a decision that resulted in the 1972 publication of the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). In a process known as ‘ressourcement’, the Church recovered the ancient model of baptismal preparation and redeveloped it for modern usage.
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The significance of the RCIA for the Catholic Church – and, indeed, for the Christian Church generally – cannot be overstated. Riggs writes that: With the RCIA came a sweeping reform of baptismal practice, as well as the vision that the ministry of the church lay fundamentally in the ministry of every baptized member of the church.
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There is much to commend the RCIA in the Reformed Church as it takes seriously the fact that those coming for baptism as adults need time, care and a great deal of intentional instruction in the doctrines of the faith and the life of discipleship to Jesus Christ. Most importantly, though, it is based on a model of the catechumenate that was developed in the life of the ancient Church, prior to the advent of Christendom. In the pagan world of the first centuries, extensive teaching was required to make baptism and conversion a sensible experience, and models of catechesis developed accordingly. The early Church prepared its baptizands for a radical departure from a hostile and pagan culture and baptism meant leaving one community and joining another, a transition marked by great ceremony and serious personal reflection from the participants. Catechesis was lengthy and challenging and called for genuine life change, but the Peace of Constantine in 313
It is not for me to decide who among today’s members are ‘christianesque’ and who are ‘genuinely faithful’. It is rather my intention to suggest that today we share more in common with the ancient Church than we do with the Church of the mid-twentieth century: that is, we occupy a similarly marginal space in contemporary culture. Murray helpfully contrasts the two by arguing that the early Church was a ‘minority’ community, but the post-Christendom Church is an ‘ex-majority’ community that has yet to divest itself of the trappings associated with a privileged status in the culture. 13 It retains an air of presumption that its own discursive authority still sets the agenda and mores of contemporary society. But the culture has long since moved on, and the Church waits in vain for the populace to return to its care. Thankfully, the Church in Britain is not persecuted as were the ancient ones. Instead, and arguably worse, it is ignored as an anachronistic irrelevancy. The problem is long years in the making and is unlikely to find resolution before another generation has passed, but if the Church is to reclaim, recover or perhaps rediscover its identity as a unique and distinctive community within the world, it must come to terms with the fact that those coming for baptism and church membership may well have no conception of what it means to profess Christ as Saviour and to live by his example within the community of faith. This transformation is not something that can be accomplished with a six-week new members’ course or by leaving individual ministers to create their own ad hoc curricula. Doing so will only ensure that our baptismal practice remains diverse and confusing, both to the Church and to those receiving the sacrament. There are few tools available for use in pre- and post-baptismal instruction, and the members and ministers of the Church consequently suffer with a deep uncertainty as to the best way forward in making disciples in the twenty-first century. While my research focused on the Church of Scotland, I have no reason to believe that the circumstances are different in other denominations.
For the making of disciples, the Church needs a comprehensive method of explicating the whole of the Christian life to which baptism is intended to lead, and it is my conviction that the RCIA provides an example of just such a method. Because the RCIA model rests on the practice of the ancient, pre-Christendom Church, it has value in our modern, post-Christendom culture. The development of a catechumenate is not a challenge we need to address as individual communions, but one we ought to consider ecumenically, bringing our corporate experience and expertise to the same table. Distinguishing the finer points of our individual theologies could be accomplished ‘in house’ after the main work of a proper catechumenate is finished. The irony of my colleague’s comments is that the Church does have a language, one developed over the centuries in an effort to explicate and justify our faith to ourselves and to an unbelieving world: the language of doctrine. We have simply forgotten how to speak it and no longer take the time or make the effort or realize the need to translate it for others. The death of Christendom has fomented an exciting crisis in which the Church has the opportunity to devise a means of nurturing genuine disciples instead of unwittingly baptizing beliefs and values that are foreign to Christianity. It is not just a matter of teaching a new language, it is a matter of re-learning it ourselves. For the sake of Christ, let’s find a way forward together.