For the last week or so, I have confirmed 36 youths. In Norway, confirmation is very important. In fact, it’s such an important part of Norwegian culture that other denominations also have confirmations and even non-Christian and non-religious groups have rites they call ‘confirmation.’1 But there is a tendency to see confirmation as an intellectual achievement, as confirmands needed to show their knowledge. In fact, the modern school system started in Norway in the 18th century to aid confirmation in the Church of Norway (CofN). And you often needed to be confirmed to work.2 In many ways, confirmation had become a hybrid of confirmation and a Bar/bat mitzvah.
For this reason, unfortunately, many Norwegians have been taught that confirmation is about the confirmands confirming their commitment to the faith. And in some sense, that used to be true. But in 1920, at the latest, something happened, at least according to the liturgical books, if not always in practice. But even if confirmation went back to be an act of blessing, unfortunately not much changed culturally. After my own confirmation, on 3rd May 1998, I also thought that I was the one to confirm my own faith. And yes there is, of course, an element of commitment in the liturgy. We recite the creed, preceded by the renunciation or renouncing. We say “I renounce the devil and all his deeds and all his being,” before reciting the Apostles’ Creed.3 This is recited by all present, confirmands included. But regardless of this element of commitment, this reciting is not the actual act of confirmation. While confirmation means, well, confirmation, the subject of this act is God, not the confirmand.4 Even if there is an element of commitment, the act is God’s. So just like we should say ‘when I was baptised’ and not ‘when I baptised myself’ (which I hear quite often, ufortunately), we should say ‘when I was confirmed,’ not ‘when I confirmed myself.’ And this is quite clear from the CofN.
On the Church’s website, we read (translated from Norwegian): “In the Church of Norway, confirmation is an act of intercession. The word ‘confirm’ means to confirm or strengthen. It is not a prerequisite for confirmation that the confirmand must confirm something, it is God who confirms his promises as they are given in baptism.”5 Likewise, in the CofE liturgy, when the confirmand approaches the bishop, the latter says, “(Name), God has called you by name and made you his own,” before he lays his hands on the candidate, praying, “Confirm, O Lord, your servant with your Holy Spirit.”6 This is the traditional, ecumenical, and Catholic understanding of confirmation. In the act, we are confirmed in our baptism by God – as the Church has always taught and as the CofN teaches. I think it is important to emphasise this ecumenical perspective, especially since we are actually in communion with the CofE. In the Porvoo communion, it has been emphasises that all member churches acknowledge each other confirmations: “A person who is confirmed in any of the Porvoo churches, whether by a bishop or by a priest, is considered to be confirmed in all other Porvoo churches.” And this must necessarily mean that these churches share a theology on confirmation. We in the CofN also quite consciously distinguish between the year before confirmation, where we teach the students, and the act of confirmation. It is not and exam, and I try to make this clear to my confirmands, even if it doesn’t always sink in.
And this ecumenical understanding of confirmation is also deeply biblical. A central text is Acts 8:14-17, where we read about people in Samaria who had come to faith and had been baptised:
Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.7
Confirmation, then, is the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is, in a sense, a completion or confirmation of baptism. I do not think, and the Church’s interpretative history has not thought, that this means that the Christians in Samaria had received an inadequate baptism but that when they were confirmed, they were given the Holy Spirit in some distinct sense.8 Some, as in the Eastern Orthodox churches, receive this right after baptism, as its completion, while others receive it when they are close to adulthood (or sometimes into adulthood). But regardless, we must emphasise that confirmation is not a demonstration of knowledge, or even principally a ‘coming-of-age ceremony,’ though there can be an element of that, at least in the West, and certainly not an act of the confirmands themselves. God, sending the Holy Spirit, is the subject of the act. To put it in Christian Neoplatonic terms, confirmation is theurgy. It is a divine act whereby God confirms the confirmand and upholds His promises by imparting on him or her His Holy Spirit. This, of course, does not mean that we remain completely passive in all respects, as we can live the life which flows out of this divine act but it is, and remains, an act of God.
Notes:
The Norwegian Humanist Society started with ‘confirmation’ in 1951. For more information, see these Wikipedia articles, in Norwegian and in English (with a specific section on Norway).
See this article from Store norske leksikon (‘Great Norwegian Encyclopedia’).
Original: “Eg forsakar djevelen og alle hans gjerningar og alt hans vesen.” See the collection of liturgies at the CofN website. As far as I can tell, the Church of England (CofE) does not use this kind of renunciation in connection to the creed, though before baptism, we find that the one being baptised, or his or her parents and godparents speaking on their behalf, answer “I renounce them” to this question, posed by the one who baptises: “Do you renounce the deceit and corruption of evil?” See Common Worship: Christian Initiation (London: Church House, 2006), 67. I think that the CofN could benefit from adopting the practice, of the CofE, where the confirming bishop introduces the creed, saying: “Brothers and sisters, I ask you to profess together with these candidates the faith of the Church,” before asking three questions: “Do you believe and trust in God the Father? … Do you believe and trust in his Son Jesus Christ? … Do you believe and trust in the Holy Spirit?” To all three, all present are to reply with the corresponding part of the creed. See Common Worship: Christian Initiation, 115.
This is a central feature of Lutheran theology, that God is the principal subject of the liturgical act, especially the sacraments. For a discussion of this, see Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 121-137.
Original: “I Den norske kyrkja er konfirmasjonen ei forbønshandling. Ordet konfirmere tyder å stadfeste eller styrke. Det er ikkje ein føresetnad for konfirmasjonen at konfirmanten skal stadfeste noko, det er Gud som stadfester lovnadene sine slik dei vert gitt i dåpen.”
See Common Worship: Christian Initiation, 118.
If not otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations follow The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition, Catholic Edition, Anglicized (Nashville, TN: Catholic Bible Press, 1995).
Later, the rite developed to include anointing. See these Wikipedia articles, on Confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church and on Chrismation (mainly in the Eastern Orthodox churches). For Pseudo-Dionysius’s thoughts on the matter, see his Celestial Hierarchy (De coelesti hierarchia), IV (472C-485B). For critical editions of the Greek text of the Areopagite, see Corpus Dionysiacum I, ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990) and Corpus Dionysiacum II, 2nd ed., eds. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). There are two complete translations in English, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, in collaboration with Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987) and The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, 2 vols., trans. John Parker (London: James Parker and Co., 1897, 1899). If not otherwise noted, I use Parker’s translation, though if I find it necessary, I will alter the translation. See Kjetil Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation: On Theurgic Participation in God (PhD dissertation, Durham University, 2021), 4, n2.
Really interesting to read!