Members only: The Twen­ti­eth-Century Bap­tismal Rev­o­lu­tion: Does it Render the Classic Prayer Book Obsolete?

The phrase “baptismal revolution” seems to have been coined by one of the leading liturgical scholars working in the Episcopal Church today, Ruth Meyers, in her 2009 book Continuing the Reformation: Re-Visioning Baptism in the Episcopal Church. Meyers explains that a radical new approach to the sacrament of baptism, first discovered in the heady days of the 1960s, was a decisive factor in the creation of the Episcopal Church’s new liturgy, the book of 1979. Furthermore, Meyers contends, as the 1979 baptismal liturgy has become familiar through repeated use, it has, to varying extents, called forth a new Christian consciousness on the part of Episcopalians, and has led to an understanding of the Church as constituted, not by the Eucharist, as earlier exponents of the liturgical renewal movement had argued, but by baptism.

This new “baptismal ecclesiology” advances three central assertions. First, that baptism is, as the 1979 book puts it, “full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church.” This has obvious corollaries, namely, that baptized infants are full members of the Church and that, since the Holy Spirit is given fully in baptism, the rite of Confirmation should no longer be understood as part of Christian initiation. (There was an attempt when the 1979 book was being drafted to remove confirmation altogether; but this was blocked by the House of Bishops.)

Secondly, that baptism is to be understood as a rite of commissioning for ministry. It has become axiomatic to speak of the “ministry of all the baptized” and to argue for baptism alone as a criterion for fitness for every type of ministry in the Church. This new understanding of baptism was crucially important in the movement that led to the first (then illicit) ordinations of women to the priesthood in the 1970s, and it has proved equally important in ongoing debates about the ordination of partnered gay and lesbian people. Witness the slogan of the pressure group Integrity: “All the sacraments for all the baptized.”