Chrismation and Reception into the Church

Chrismation does double duty in Orthodox practice: it completes the initiation of the newly-baptized, and it is also the ordinary means by which many converts from other Christian confessions are received into the Church. This file treats that use, the three modes of receiving converts (baptism, chrismation, confession), and the deep divergence between the unbroken Eastern chrismation and the Western sacrament of confirmation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Reception of Converts

Chrismation is administered not only to the newly-baptized but, in the widespread practice of the Orthodox Church, to converts coming from other Christian bodies who are judged to have already received a valid baptism. Such a convert is not necessarily re-baptized; rather, being anointed with the holy myron, he is sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit and thereby made a full member of the Orthodox Church (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II, on reception by chrismation). The logic follows from chrismation’s meaning as the seal that incorporates a person into the one Body: where a genuine baptism is acknowledged, what is completed by chrismation is the person’s entry into the fullness of the Church and the reception of the Spirit’s seal within her.

The Church has historically recognized three modes of receiving those who come to her from outside, applied with pastoral discernment according to the origin of the convert:

1. By Baptism — the fullest reception, used for the unbaptized and, in stricter application, for those whose former baptism the Church does not recognize.
2. By Chrismation — for baptized Christians of communions whose baptism is accepted; the convert is chrismated (and makes a confession of faith) and so received.
3. By Confession of Faith (and repentance) — the mildest form, used especially for those received from bodies whose orders and mysteries are treated by economy as more nearly complete, who make a renunciation of former error and a profession of the Orthodox faith.

[Disputed: how converts baptized outside the Orthodox Church are rightly to be received, and by what theology. The variation is real and is a matter of live disagreement. (a) A rigorist tradition, appealing to canons that treat all sacraments outside the canonical Church as void — and given sharp expression in the 1755 decree of the Eastern Patriarchs (Cyril V of Constantinople and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Jerusalem) requiring the (re)baptism of Latin and Armenian converts — holds that there are strictly no mysteries outside the Church, so that reception should be by baptism (Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II, discussing the 1755 decree and the rebaptism controversy). (b) A tradition of *oikonomia*, appealing to canons and long practice that receive many converts by chrismation or confession, holds that the Church may recognize the form of a baptism performed outside her and supply its fullness on reception, without pronouncing on the metaphysics of grace outside her bounds (Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II; Meyendorff, *Byzantine Theology*, Fordham, 1974, on sacramental economy). Both practices are in current use in different Churches and jurisdictions, and the underlying question — whether reception by chrismation presupposes that grace was truly present in the convert's prior baptism, or is simply the economical form the Church chooses — remains theologically unsettled. This collection reports the range of practice and does not adjudicate it.]

The point to hold fast is that chrismation, whether given to a baptized infant or to an adult convert, is the same mystery: the sealing of a person with the Holy Spirit and his incorporation into the Body of Christ. Its flexibility in the reception of converts is an application of that one meaning, not a second sacrament.

The Divergence from Confirmation

The most consequential fact about Orthodox chrismation, by contrast with the Christian West, is that it is never separated from baptism. In the unbroken Eastern order the newly-baptized — infant or adult — is chrismated at once, by the same priest, in the same service, and is then admitted to the Eucharist, so that the three mysteries of initiation form a single act (Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, SVS Press, 1974, on the integrity of initiation; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). The Orthodox priest can do this because he anoints with myron consecrated by the bishop or primate (see The Seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit, on the myron): the bishop is present in the chrism even when absent in person, and so the episcopal gift of the Spirit is given to the infant without waiting on the bishop’s own hand.

The Latin West took a different road. There the giving of the Spirit came to be reserved as a distinct sacrament of Confirmation, administered by the bishop himself by the laying-on of hands and anointing, and — as infant baptism became universal and bishops could not be everywhere — increasingly deferred to later childhood or adolescence, long after baptism. First communion, too, was postponed to the “age of reason,” breaking the ancient sequence in which the Eucharist completed initiation (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on the Western separation; see The Rite and Its History, on the unbroken Eastern sequence). Two structures thus diverged from what had been, in the early centuries, a common pattern: the East kept baptism, chrismation, and communion together and let the priest give the Spirit’s seal with the bishop’s chrism; the West kept the sacrament of the Spirit in the bishop’s own hand and let it, and first communion, fall away from baptism in time.

The Orthodox judgment on this divergence is stated soberly. It is not that confirmation is a false sacrament — the Orthodox recognize the Western intent to preserve the bishop’s role in giving the Spirit — but that the Eastern practice better preserves the unity of initiation and the truth that even an infant, being a full member of Christ, is a full member: sealed with the Spirit and communed at the holy table from the beginning, not a Christian-in-waiting admitted to the Church’s central mystery only years later (Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, on the integrity of initiation as a critique of the postponement of chrismation and communion; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). The difference is not a mere matter of timing but touches the theology of the Church: whether initiation is one paschal event making a whole Christian, or a series of graded stages spread across the years of childhood. The Orthodox tradition confesses the former, and its practice of infant chrismation and infant communion is the visible sign of that confession (see Communion and the Life of the Church, on infant communion).

See Also

• The Seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit — the theology of the seal and the myron this file presupposes
• The Rite and Its History — the unbroken sequence of baptism, chrismation, and communion
• Communion and the Life of the Church — infant communion as the completion of initiation
• The Mysteries Across the Tradition — the East–West sacramental divergences gathered and assessed
• Orthodoxy: Baptism and Chrismation — the hub essay this file expands

References

• Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
• Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
• Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
• The 1755 decree of the Eastern Patriarchs (Cyril V of Constantinople et al.) on the reception of Latin and Armenian converts — discussed in Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II.
• Scripture: Acts 8:14–17, 19:5–6; 2 Corinthians 1:21–22; Ephesians 1:13–14.