Confirmation

I've noted before some of the very negative things that Calvin sometimes said about confirmation. He was worried that it undermined baptism. However, he apparently argues in his commentary on Hebrews of 1549 that "the teachings of baptisms, and of the laying on of hands" refers to the rite of blessing catechumens, something rather like our confirmation.

see Zachman, Image and Word etc. p317

Confirmation: Calvin didn't give a monkey's

I’m inclined to think we don’t really want to bother with Confirmation for the children of believers. Let them be repenting and believing every day, confessing their sins and declaring their faith every Sunday, witnessing moment by moment with their lives and lips. Confirmation sends the strange signal that they weren’t properly in through their baptism.

Apparently in the Eastern Orthodox church, Baptism, Confirmation and First Communion traditionally take place at the same time.

Anyway, John Calvin had rather less time for confirmation than I do. He said:

“… the devil, miserably rending the Church of God and bringing upon it his fearful destruction (of which the marks are all to evident in most parts of the world), subverting this sacred policy [of Catechism and education of the young]; nor did he leave surviving anything more than certain trivialities, which give rise only to superstitions, without any edifying fruit. Of this kind is that Confirmation, as they call it, made up of gesticulations which are more than ridiculous and suited rather to monkeys, and rest on no foundation.” (p88)

“For they [the Papists] deck out that spurious Confirmation, which they have substituted in its [the Catechism’s] place, like a harlot, with great splendour of ceremonies and splendid pomps without measure. They even, in wanting to adorn it, ornament it with execrable blasphemies, giving out that it is a sacrament of greater dignity than Baptism, and calling only half-Christians those that have not been besmeared with their rank oil. In fact the whole business consists in nothing but theatrical gesticulations, or rather the wanton sporting of monkeys, without even imitative skill.” (pp90-91)

The Catechism of the Church of Geneva that is a Plan for Instructing Children in the Doctrine of Christ (1545), Calvin, John, Calvin: Theological Treatises Library of Christian Classics Volume XXII, Translated with Introduction and Notes by J. K. S. Reid (London, SCM Press, 1954).