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Update 41 pages 2-4.
In Update 41:
Burning Boats?
CW Baptism
For infants?
Not out of mind
Baptism & Unity
Praxis Pack
What is Baptism?
Initiation initiatives
The merits of the CW baptism rite
John Hartley looks back at the Church of England Newspaper's columns
Readers of the Church of England Newspaper will not have missed a series of articles and letters about the merits of the new baptism rite. It began with an article by Jeremy Collingwood and Steve Daughtery expressing misgivings about two main features of the service: the nature and place of the undertakings to be made by the parents and godparents, and the extent to which the service proclaims that the candidates are now born again. They also commented on the increased length of the new service, and the presumption (they claimed) that it will take place during a main service of Holy Communion. In these respects the new service is not an improvement on the ASB, so they say.
By contrast, Colin Buchanan in reply maintained that the CW rite does contain some improvements over the ASB, and he was particularly irritated that the two opening questions were ignored by the critics. However, he was careful to admit that he had some points of preference for the ASB rite. (Colin helped write the ASB text and was involved in several points of the drafting of the CW one.)
I’m not a neutral observer, and I wrote two letters too - but here are the main points of what was said and argued on each side.
Length
At first sight it does appear that the CW rite is a great deal longer, and the received wisdom is that whereas you could get through communion with a baptism in 70 minutes with the ASB, it takes 90 using CW (so Paul Bradshaw recorded in Update 37). There are now nine questions instead of six (or, counting it another way, six instead of three plus the whole Nicene Creed instead of the Trinitarian questions), there are three questions at the beginning of the service instead of one, 189 words in the prayer over the water instead of 145 (and a lot of them are longer words too!), there’s an insistence on prayers of intercession instead of allowing them to be omitted (compare CW p346 with ASB p250) and so on. Despite this, Colin claims that the mandatory parts of the CW rite only take about 90 seconds longer than the comparable parts of the ASB - Colin must have tested this to be so sure of his figure!
Perhaps some of what is at issue here is the “feel” of the service: I remember Colin similarly insisting that abbreviating the Eucharistic Prayer at Communion saves virtually no time at all compared with omitting a chorus earlier on in the service. Perhaps another factor is the weight of ideas: the CW rite has been praised for having a “much richer” range of scriptural imagery, which exercises the grey matter as one tries to take in the words.
Strangely, different people find the difference in length leads to opposite conclusions. One vicar admitted to me he has stuck with the ASB because CW is too demanding of unchurched families - is this a strength or a weakness of CW? Another rejoiced because mid-afternoon baptisms now had some real substance to them - is this a “never mind the quality, feel the width” comment? Somehow, one agrees that one wants to say more things about baptism, but one questions whether the baptism service is the right time to say them? If baptism became truly a step along the way in discipleship, it might not be so critical to get all the biblical images in at the same time?
Promises
Jeremy and Steve charged that “the support of children in their Christian growth is left until the Commission at the end of the service, and is there done wrong” in the CW rite. As one who campaigned to retain the words which opened the ASB rite, I sympathise: the Commission states the responsibilities of parents and godparents and then fails to require them to assent to those responsibilities, degenerating into a prayer instead of a question! Colin claims we’ve missed the point. There are in fact two questions in the Presentation, compulsory if infants are to be baptised, which are addressed to the parents and godparents. These are the new focus of responsibilities. To be fair to Colin, Jeremy and Steve really ought to have written about these two questions.
And yet, I cannot help but wonder if Jeremy and Steve have the better of this argument? CW always puts something about the church’s responsibility before that of parents and godparents: in the Presentation, preamble to the Creed, and Commission. Whereas the ASB made a strong link between parents’ and godparents’ responsibilities and the child’s growth in faith, by repeating the phrase “help and encouragement” in the Duties; CW weakens this link by using new words “guiding and helping”, which can easily be read as general care instead of care for spiritual growth.
The two questions in the preamble are themselves a little strange. Colin himself wrote in 1997 (Update No. 31 p7) that the theory would be to address the parents and godparents in their own persons in one part of the service and as proxies in another: so I expected one question asking the parents and godparents about their own belief and practice of the Christian faith, and another about their plans for bringing up their child within the community of faith. The second question obviously fits, but the writers bottled out of the first!
Colin says there is a real argument to be joined ... let’s do so with the whole text in view. But Jeremy’s and Steve’s comment that “the impression will remain ... that parents can avoid the responsibility of believing by passing it on to the congregation” does seem to be valid.
Regeneration
Jeremy’s and Steve’s other big complaint was that the words of the CW rite proclaim baptismal regeneration. “They acknowledge that ‘Scripture uses efficacious language’ about baptism, but think that we should not” is Colin’s summary of their position. Colin points out that the BCP and ASB both use essentially the same language, and that this was the language in use when the Gorham judgement pronounced against inevitable regeneration. At first sight Colin wins this point. Some of us have long been embarrassed about the ASB’s retention of the BCP’s language.
However, in talking to clergy there does seem to be a lot of the Collingwood-Daughtery view at large. Perhaps one question should be whether CW has more language of regeneration in it than the ASB (or BCP) did? The ASB has three mentions: the words addressed to the child (#43), the words of welcome (#58) and the first prayer (#59). (It could be argued that two of these are avoidable by using instead the relevant parts of the ASB Baptism and Confirmation service.) By contrast, CW has about eight such statements: some of them in rather elliptic form, but dotted throughout the service (p345 line 23, p349 line 20, p352 line 12-13, p355 lines 19-22, p357 lines 17 and 21, p359 lines 3-8 and p361 line 5). Is it the frequency of references which gives the impression of doctrinal change?
Of course it is possible to reduce the impact by using alternative words, and Francis Scott’s contribution was very helpful on legal ways of effectively continuing with the ASB. But I ask (in my second letter which the CEN kindly printed) whether we couldn’t find a way of speaking which avoids unwarranted liturgical assurances? I wrote to a theologian asking for some comments on liturgical language in this respect, so although I have had no reply as yet, watch this space, and do let us have your own thoughts on how we express ourselves.
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