Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process

Liturgical Explorations toward a Realized Baptismal Ecclesiology

Susan Marie Smith

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608997411
  9781498257497
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630878146
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Most people, even non-Christians, know that Christians gather for worship once a week, and that they are right there to support each other when there is a baptism or a wedding or a funeral. But what about other poignant, vulnerable, or life-changing times? How does the church help people handle changes that in the past, in Christendom, were considered "secular"? Does the church have a role at retirement when one's ministry changes, or when a family's children leave home and familiar patterns seem to grind to a halt? Is there any rite possible for someone who is called to Christian ministry but not to ordination? Or to someone whose vows are broken in divorce? Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process asserts that baptism marks the beginning of a process of participation in Christ's ministry, so that no part of life can finally be considered secular. Susan Marie Smith shows how every passage, healing, and ministry vocation is "holy," and she lays the groundwork needed for every church to create the rituals necessary to lament and celebrate the endings and beginnings that happen in every Christian life.

part one

Inherited Expectations of Baptismal Efficacy in the Ongoing Lives of the Baptized

1

“After the Water the Fire”

Experiencing the Spirit of the Baptismal Process after Baptism

This bread signifies to you how you ought to love unity. It was made out of many grains of wheat, which were separate, but were united by application of water, by a kind of rubbing together, and baked with fire. So have you been ground together by the fast and the exorcism, wetted in baptism, and baked by the fire of Christ and the mystery of the Holy Spirit . . . Notice how at Pentecost the Holy Spirit comes: He comes in fiery tongues, to inspire the love whereby we are to burn towards God and despise the world, and our chaff be burnt away, and our heart refined like gold. So the Holy Spirit comes—after the water the fire—and you are made bread, which is the Body of Christ: and here is the symbol of unity.1

This passionate, animated sermon-excerpt from Augustine is about the eucharist, but the imagery is deeply baptismal as well. After the water comes the Spirit with “fiery tongues, to inspire the love whereby we are to burn towards God and despise the world, and our chaff be burnt away, and our heart refined like gold.” The Christian life sounds like a process, intense, hot, that will change us forever—and turn us into food, into bread, but more—we will be changed into Christ, into the very Body of Christ.

Sparked by Vatican Council II (1962–1965), the late twentieth century brought a revolution in thinking about baptism. The major Western Christian denominations revised their liturgical rites of baptism, a process that required rethinking connections between what we believe, what we pray, and what we enact. Saying and doing are not the same, and doing is likely to have a greater impact. Theology that is not translated into action or is not manifest in rite or prayer, art or symbol, is empty theory.

“—and you are made bread.” The fire of Christ and the mystery of the Holy Spirit act. But they do not act theoretically or in general; they act on particular human persons. They act in those persons to “inspire” them so that they will come “to burn towards God.” They act in local communities so that each and all are transformed. Is this a theological statement about God, or is this inspiring poetry that will change the person who hears it?

For years I have understood that the study of “how it is,” though important, is inadequate for drawing a person toward the reality of “it.” The named theology of life after death is nameless before a grieving person, where explanations are insults and compassion requires silence or poetry. Our words about God are lovely in their proper context, but they are shallow in those moments when Godself is needed; then, it is not our words but our compassionate witness to God’s presence or absence that matters. “Theology” is a term that has been applied to the first, to the words about God. A term that applies to the second, the being there, the presence, action, happening, doing, or working, is “liturgy.”

Liturgy is a broad term that, however, has been used with various limits. It has referred only to the eucharist or only to Sunday morning worship. In its broader meaning it has referred to worship and to sacramental enactments, but usually in traditions that hold worship to be authoritative. The study of liturgy as “authorized worship” is evolving. While sacramental theology (= what worship should mean) began very early in the church (e.g., Augustine of Hippo, late fourth/ early fifth century), the study in the Western church of the worship act (= what actually happens in worship) is more recent. Beginning with instruction to priests as to what to do and say during worship, i.e., a study of rubrics (“How do we conduct the rite correctly?”), scholarship moved at the beginning of the twentieth century2 to liturgical history (“What were the texts and sequence of former rites in various provinces?”). In the 1960s,3 a Russian Orthodox priest-theologian, Alexander Schmemann, linked theology with the poetry of human experience by asserting that liturgy, the praise of God, is a source of theology. His assertion is associated with the birth of liturgical theology (“What meaning should a particular rite communicate?”). The development since 1977 of the field of Ritual Studies,4 which enabled insights from the human sciences to affect the study of liturgy, led Mark Searle in 1983 to name a fourth: pastoral liturgical studies (“What meaning does a particular rite communicate to the worshippers?”).5 This more recent field, incorporating ritual theory, focuses on the empirical study of actual worship enactments (which includes factors beyond the text,6 such as gesture, music, and space) and on the lived experience of the particular worshippers (which includes an experience of God that may or may not match the words about God carefully prescribed by the liturgist-theologians). It is pastoral liturgical studies that points to the importance of addressing the pastoral dimension of worship: its effect upon the worshippers. It is the effect of worship upon the worshippers that allows the personal story of a baptismal life to be told. It is the effect upon the worshippers that suggests that baptismal theology ought to take account of the baptized; and it is the effect on the worshippers that leads to the question of the role of liturgy in the ongoing growth and formation of the baptized.

Taking account of the baptized brings into serious relief the foundational issue at the heart of liturgical theology: namely, the relationship of the theology of sacrament to the theology of lived Christian experience. The problem arises because the theologies held close to the bone for most of 1,500 years have been concerned with the church’s sacramental mediation of God’s grace, as distinct from the worshipper’s reception of or response to that grace. Among many reasons why this may be so is the elusive and diverse nature of experience and the difficulty of identifying, much less studying, human reception and response. Human experience varies widely; it is often unobservable; and it is always unmeasurable. While we may, from an experiential point of view, affirm that ritual events mediate a variety of meanings,7 how shall we interpret them or take account of them? Shall the varied meanings of baptism for each individual be considered with the same valence as the church’s intent to unite the baptized with Christ in the paschal mystery? This focuses the problem, for the ecclesial body is not prepared to suggest that baptism, for example, means “whatever you want it to mean” as crass relative individualism would have it. As a bishop from my own Anglican tradition, Colin Buchanan, has suggested, the church is not prepared to offer two baptisms, one for infants and another for adults,8 according to the “experience quotient” of the one baptized. Rather, there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Eph 4:5). Sacramental theology affirms that God acts in baptism, whether the candidate consciously experiences anything or not.

This tension between what occurs and what is experienced is not only a twenty-first-century issue, not only a Western problem, not only a Christian concern. Anthropologists Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff place the question within the study of human ritual and name the axes of the tension doctrinal efficacy and operational efficacy.9 Moore claims that both secular and religious rituals exist within the referential bounds of what they declare and what they demonstrate,10 what they say and what they do. As Myerhoff observes:

What Moore calls the doctrinal efficacy of religious ritual is provided by the explanations a religion itself gives of how and why ritual works. The explanation is within the religious system and is part of its internal logic. The religion postulates by what causal means a ritual, if properly performed, should bring about the desired results. A religious ritual refers to the unseen cosmic order, works through it and operates on it directly through the performance . . . Doctrinal efficacy is a matter of postulation. As the intrinsic explanation, it need merely be affirmed.11

Doctrinal efficacy must be distinguished from social/psychological effectiveness, here called operational efficacy . . . [O]utcome or consequence . . . is attributed to operational efficacy. Results, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Inherited Expectations of Baptismal Efficacy in the Ongoing Lives of the Baptized
• Chapter 1: “After the Water the Fire”
• Chapter 2: Augustine on Baptism
• Chapter 3: Aquinas on Baptism
• Chapter 4: Calvin on Baptism
• Part Two: Further Up and Further In
• Turning to Part Two
• Chapter 5: Baptismal Experience in the Early Church
• Chapter 6: The Catechumenal Process
• Chapter 7: Theology of the Baptized as Growing and Responding
• Chapter 8: Stages of Faith Development
• Part Three: Making Rituals for Baptismal Fulfillment and the Enlivening of the Church
• Turning to Part Three
• Chapter 9: Ritual Theory and Christian Ritualization
• Chapter 10: Praxological Becoming and Ritual Competence
• Chapter 11: Five Principles for Christian Ritualizing in the Baptismal Process
• Chapter 12: The One and the Many
• Bibliography