Participating Witness. Anthony G. Siegrist
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and the ancient Christian practice. It fails to account for passages such as 1 Pet 3:21, which places some constitutive element of baptism in a causal relationship with salvation. This nonessential description leaves Anabaptist communities open to short-sighted redefinitions of the practice, manifested in the last century by the declining age of baptismal candidates.
The second common feature is that the visible church, another central aspect of the Anabaptist tradition, exists in a sort of second class relationship to the individual believer’s relationship with God. At a conceptual level, and in colloquial terms, the church is a bit like a third wheel in an individual’s personal relationship with God. Though the Spirit is said to do many things in the lives of believers and is also described as the Spirit of the church, the Anabaptist documents are careful to avoid stating that the Spirit works in the world through the church. Though the church is affirmed as the body of Christ, the most straightforward way of receiving this proposition—that Jesus remains present to humanity through the church—is mostly dismissed. Instead, the church is said to be the visible representation of Jesus, as though a body were a representation of a mind or a soul. In these documents the presence of the church does not constitute the presence of God in the world. Not only is this logically strained—for how can the Spirit of God be in the church and the church not constitute God’s presence in the world—but this ecclesial marginalization allows for the continuation of a revivalist practice of baptism that loses discipleship in its search for conversion.
Throughout the rest of this volume my evaluation of these contemporary documents will be both affirming and critical. I will affirm the importance of Anabaptist communities continuing to describe baptism as an individual’s pledge to live according to the pattern of the life of the first-century Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. This view correlates with the discipleship emphasis of Matt 28:19–20 and the widely held assumption that baptism is done in part as an act of imitation of Jesus’ own baptism. I will be critical of the fact that the practices and the body ordained by God are not affirmed as ways of mediating divine presence. The work of God in the world is seen to circumvent Christ’s body and to proceed directly to the hearts of individuals. These assumptions are debilitating because they enable a form of discipleship that can ignore God, for if the work and presence of God are both invisible and exclusively personal then they are rightly held in suspicion or even dismissed. If God’s presence is unnameable and his work beyond apprehension, then individuals are ultimately alone in their quests to follow the example of Jesus. If God’s presence and work cannot be understood—even using theological categories—then this God is unpredictable and unreliable, maybe even unidentifiable.
The critical elements of this analysis will make some nervous. I can imagine a critic pointing to 1 Tim 2:5, which reads: “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all . . .” The critic might argue that my thesis could lead to the denial of the universal accessibility of God through Jesus. I believe such fears are misguided since the sort of divine mediation lacking in the Anabaptist statements is not that which would create a barrier between individuals and God, what seems to be Paul’s worry. It is not of the sort that would nullify the life and work of Jesus. The mediation of God’s presence and action that would fill the lacuna in these Anabaptist construals of baptism is that which the writer of this letter to Timothy participated in and the type that the church which produced the Bible remains. These were real, flawed people enabled to undertake the work of God in the world. In them God made his presence and will accessible to others. The form of ecclesial mediation I will argue for is one that upholds the necessity of the church as the body through which God chooses to be present in the world. It is a form that upholds God’s choice to act through the church in baptism both to cleanse and to welcome new members of Christ’s body. It is a form of ecclesial mediation in which God chooses to be present to humanity in much the same way as ancient Israel. At its best Israel was not a barrier between God and the rest of the nations. Israel was the people in which God’s presence was manifest and where God’s will for human sociality could be recognized. Of course Israel was not always at its best, and it was at these times that God’s grace was most evident. God’s non-rejection of Israel despite its unfaithfulness is pre-figured by God’s non-rejection of humanity despite the fall. Jesus himself is the mediator that the writer of 1Timothy speaks about, and Jesus is God’s gracious faithfulness in making Israel a blessing. In this volume I am arguing that baptism must be understood to participate in Jesus’ continued bodily mediation through the church.48
I refer to the lack of appropriate ecclesial mediation in these Anabaptist documents as a lacuna. Just as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, so does a community’s theology. What these contemporary Anabaptist documents assert in place of an appropriate form of ecclesial mediation is the voluntary power of the individual. Instead of God acting through the church in baptism, the individual makes a proclamation of her own. For children to be baptized as “believers” is to have the very concept of belief, which in this case is meant to denote a response to the call to follow Jesus in the community of other disciples, reduced to a very basic mode of self-assertion—the ability to speak. The story that this chapter opened with invites us to challenge the logic that equates voluntariety and speech with belief and discipleship. It also points to the poverty of a cosmopolitan reduction of spiritual life and maybe even the dryness or one-dimensionality of non-sacramental construals of ecclesial practices. As an alternative to this rationalist flattening out of life, revivalism presents the experience(s) of conversion. Contemporary Anabaptism, to speak very generally, vacillates between these two modern postures. And yet as revealing as O’Connor’s story of a child’s baptism might be, it is ultimately a parable of deconstruction. It tugs at the loose threads of our assumptions but knits no new garments. In a parallel way I am suggesting that the baptism of children is a crucial distortion in the implementation of believers’ baptism. It is one that Amish Anabaptists demonstrate is not inevitable. Even though the trend of child baptism can be correlated with the influence of revivalism, Anabaptist theologies of baptism bear responsibility for its perpetuation. Or at the very least they show how much Anabaptists have internalized this theological ambiguity. Lacking a clear affirmation of concrete media through which God is present to the world or acts in it, these communities have made themselves vulnerable to continually marginalizing practices such as baptism—even the church.
1. The following summary is taken from O’Connor’s short story, “The River,” 157–74. O’Connor engages similar themes in a more extended format in her book, The Violent Bear It Away. Fredrick C. Bauerschmidt reflects briefly on O’Connor’s “The River” in the context of baptism in “Baptism in the Diaspora,” 16–61. In “The River” the child’s name and subsequent re-naming is given theological significance. Since I cannot explore this here, I simply avoid mentioning the child’s name at all.
2. O’Connor, “The River,” 163.
3. Ibid., 165.
4. Ibid., 166.
5. Ibid., 168.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 173.
8. Ibid., 173–74.
9. This statement is also known as the “Schleitheim Brotherly Union.” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, s.v. “Schleitheim Confession (Anabaptist, 1527).” http://www.gameo.org. Hereafter all references to this online encyclopedia will be abbreviated GAMEO.