Participating Witness. Anthony G. Siegrist
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We believe that the practice of discipline in the church is a sign of God’s offer of forgiveness and transforming grace to believers who are moving away from faithful discipleship or who have been overtaken by sin. Discipline is intended to liberate erring brothers and sisters from sin, to enable them to return to a right relationship with God, and to restore them to fellowship in the church. It also gives integrity to the church’s witness and contributes to the credibility of the gospel message in the world.54
In this statement the meaning of the word “sign” is clarified by the fact that discipline is said to “liberate,” “enable,” and “restore.” In this context, the ecclesial practice of discipline is more than a testimony or a memorial: it effects what it signifies. Anabaptists believe that the discipline of the church is a sacrament.
Both historic and contemporary Anabaptism contains elements of theology and practice in which it is recognized that God’s sanctifying task is furthered by the church community. This is the high ecclesiology by which some Anabaptist groups are recognized to be more Catholic than Protestant. The extract above from the “Confession of Faith” is an example of the church’s concrete involvement in liberating individuals from bondage to sin. In this practice, Anabaptist groups approach a clear naming of the church community as a body through which God acts. It might seem as if we need only to apply the theology of church discipline to Christian initiation to recover the objective elements of baptism. In a limited sense this is true, but it is also simplistic.
These contemporary documents do not offer many general statements about the function of the church in the divine economy. At one point the “Confession of Faith” used by Mennonite denominations in the United States and Canada comes close. Under the heading “Discipleship and the Christian Life,” it says, “The experience of God through the Holy Spirit, prayer, Scripture, and the church empowers us and teaches us how to follow Christ.” Despite being one of the strongest statements in this regard, it is important to notice what it does not say: it does not say that we experience the Spirit through the fellowship of the congregation; it does not say that we learn to pray in the congregation; it does not say that we learn to rightly read Scripture by participating in congregational life. This confession does not say these things because it seems not to assume that Christians learn to follow Jesus in the presence of others. In fact, the statement that directly precedes the one just quoted reads: “We believe that Jesus Christ calls us to take up our cross and follow him. Through the gift of God’s saving grace, we are empowered to be disciples of Jesus, filled with his Spirit, following his teachings and his path through suffering to new life. As by faith we walk in Christ’s way, we are being transformed into his image. We become conformed to Christ, faithful to the will of God, and separated from the evil in the world.” This is the lead paragraph in this confession describing “Discipleship and the Christian Life.” It is only in the context of an individualized, spiritual encounter with Jesus that the church is named as a way in which people “experience God.” The nature of response to the call of Jesus as stated here almost disregards the church.
The Brethren in Christ, like other Anabaptists, affirm the church’s role as a disciplining body. Under the heading “Nature of the Church” their denominational statement says, “The objective of church discipline is to restore the erring church member and to maintain the integrity and purity of the church’s fellowship and witness.”55 In contrast to this, the view propounded under the heading “Coming to Faith” describes initiation in faith as an individual process involving personal encounter with God. The Spirit is invoked as the causal bridge between the unseen realm of divine activity and the gritty physical world of repentance and obedience, the church—the visible community of Christ’s followers—fades from view. In a relevant part of the “Coming to Faith” section we read:
The salvation graciously provided by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ becomes effective in our lives by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who prepares us for faith in Jesus Christ. He awakens us to our need, enables us to acknowledge our guilt, and calls us to respond to God in faith and obedience. The response of faith is a personal reliance on God’s grace and a turning from sin to righteousness . . . [Repentance] is expressed in genuine sorrow, forsaking sin, and a change in attitude toward God, preparing for the continuing ministry of the Holy Spirit. Repentance includes a willingness for reconciliation and restitution.
As in the “Mennonite Confession” this portion of the Brethren in Christ “Articles of Faith and Doctrine” fails to parallel what is said about church discipline.
The confession used by the Mennonite Brethren is another example. It declares, “By calling his followers to take up the cross, Christ invites them to reject the godless values of the world and offer themselves to God in a life of service. The Holy Spirit, who lives in every Christian, empowers believers to overcome the acts and attitudes of the sinful nature.”56 Again the place of the church’s mediation of God is filled by an individualistic and incomprehensible spiritual encounter. By describing this as “incomprehensible” I aim to point out the vagaries of the language of the Spirit’s empowerment. It has no specified location, characteristic features, or physical signals. It is not clear when, how, or where the individual meets this empowerment. In other contemporary Anabaptist documents the church’s mediating role is taken not by this sort of encounter with the Spirit, but more brutishly by a sort of individual voluntariety. This language shows up quite clearly in the Brethren in Christ statement when it says, “The response of faith is a personal reliance on God’s grace and a turning from sin to righteousness.” The “Confession of Faith” of the Mennonite denominations includes a statement comparable in tone that demonstrates similar reliance upon the individual’s will: “Conformity to Christ necessarily implies nonconformity to the world. True faith in Christ means willingness to do the will of God, rather than willful pursuit of individual happiness.”
Several important observations can be made at this point. To begin with, though the concept of ecclesial mediation is not foreign to Anabaptism, as the affirmations about the ban and church discipline demonstrate, it is employed inconsistently. Though the church can excommunicate members in the name of God, it does not welcome them or nurture them in that same name. Instead, when Anabaptist churches address these more obviously positive aspects of the Christian life they do not speak of God acting through his people but of either the power of an individual’s will or the mysterious, invisible workings of the Spirit. The question is whether or not this footing provides enough traction to support the rigors of the sort of life intended.
Miroslav Volf notes the ramifications of this challenge in After Our Likeness. He observes, “Because human beings appropriate salvific grace in faith, the understanding of salvation (and thus also of the church) is shaped in an essential fashion by the way the faith is mediated. Hence, an individualistic understanding of the mediation of faith is at once also an individualistic view of salvation, and a communal understanding of the mediation of faith is also a communal view of salvation.”57 Though Volf’s categories of faith and salvation are not the operative ones in our present discussion, his insight about the link between the mediation of faith and the subsequent view of salvation is critical. If Anabaptists understand the process of initiation into the community to be one of personal and entirely spiritual encounter with God, the view of the subsequent life of that community must either uphold this initial encounter or exist awkwardly in dissonance with it. If the church is not a necessary medium through which God initiates new believers, the subsequent life of the believer will remain at odds with the claims the community makes about its role in something like redemptive discipline. The conceptual link with baptism is the belief that it functions in part as a pledge indicating of the candidate’s voluntary submission to the church’s power of the keys. The early Anabaptist leader Balthasar Hubmaier explains: “[W]hen he receives the baptism of water the one who is baptized testifies publicly that he has pledged himself henceforth to live according to the Rule of Christ. By virtue of this pledge he has submitted himself to sisters, brothers, and to the church so that when he transgresses they now have the authority to admonish, punish, ban, and reaccept him.”58 It is crucial to remember that this act of submission is granted to a body in which the candidate has voice. In the Anabaptist tradition it is not an alien clerical structure that claims divine power.
Yet the