Chapters 8 to 9 - Christ’s Teachings and Today’s Christianity

- 44 - 8. 10 The sending of the Spirit (Confirmation) b. The second sacrament recognized by your church is that of ‘confirmation’. The bishop administers this sacrament by laying his hand upon the confirmed, anointing him and praying for him. It is held that by virtue of this act the ‘Holy Spirit’ comes upon the confirmed, as it descended upon the Apostles on the day of Pentecost. • It is true that Christ promised that after his Resurrection he would send his Father’s spirits to the faithful, but he did not make their sending contingent upon any ceremonies conducted by a bishop. The messengers from God were to come t o a l l who were s p i r i t u a l l y w o r t h y to receive them. Even if there is, in the Acts of the Apostles, a reference to the laying on of hands in connection with the outpouring of the holy spirits, the relationship between these two things was quite different from what is assumed today. • The elder laid his hand upon the person newly baptized or converted in token of his admission to the congregation. Since the elders possessed great psychic powers, the odic power of psychically gifted individuals was so greatly increased by this laying on of hands during their baptism that spirit messages were frequently communicated through them. For this, a proper state of trance was not necessary; the influence of the spirit world was often the same as what you have seen in the case of so-called ‘inspirational mediums’. Persons under this influence uttered words of prayer or glorification of God, a manifestation known to you from the early centuries of Christianity as ‘praying in the spirit’. Frequently also they spoke words of admonition or instruction that deeply distressed their hearers. Furthermore, the laying on of hands was performed with those to whom some special task had been assigned on behalf of the community, to signify that they were to be regarded as instruments of God after having been appointed as such by God’s spirit messengers. When, therefore, the Apostle Paul warns his fellow worker Timothy not to lay hands on people too hastily, he has two things in mind: • One is that Timothy should not assist anyone in becoming a medium unless he has first made sure of his disposition and loyalty to the faith, lest the medium later devote his powers to evil ends and thereby cause serious harm to the spiritual welfare of the congregation. • The second reason is that no one should be sanctioned by the laying on of hands as an instrument for a given mission unless specifically assigned to that mission by a spirit of God. A person on whom only the power of healing had been bestowed could be employed only as a healer, and not, for instance, as a teacher, a duty for which he was neither called nor qualified. I Corinthians 12: 29-30: ‘Are all apostles?’ asks Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians. ‘Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all workers of miracles? Do all have the gift of healing? Do all speak in foreign tongues? Can all translate the foreign language into their mother tongue?’ And when Paul admonishes this same Timothy to fan to a bright flame the gift of God that was in him through Paul’s laying on of hands, he is referring to the gift of teaching. Under the direction of

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