Participating Witness. Anthony G. Siegrist
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two most prominent alternatives to affirming the church’s mediatorial role. I have alluded to these in various ways, yet considering representatives of these two alternatives will strengthen my case that a more directly affirmed concept of ecclesial mediation is necessary to rightly practice believers’ baptism.
Alternative One: Human Agency in Place of Divine
Stated rather crudely, one alternative to ecclesial mediation is to deny that individuals need the assistance of God to live righteously. “Righteous character” is how Thomas Finger describes the goal of salvation in the view of most early Anabaptists. He suggests they, like many Catholics, were more concerned with the goal of salvation than with the process through which it was achieved.59 This first alternative to ecclesial mediation extends, even caricatures this by denying that divine assistance is needed to achieve this goal. Here the powers of reason and the will form the gravitational field within which the human creature subdues unrighteousness. Nothing more than a clear-eyed, rational view of ethics is needed to produce the cruciform life. This alternative is ready at hand for Anabaptists because of the tradition’s humanist roots.
Balthasar Hubmaier’s emphasis on commitment is one example of a theology of baptism shaded this way. In his 1525 treatise, On the Christian Baptism of Believers, he describes the rite as “an outward confession or testimony through which visible brothers and sisters can know each other . . .”60 Summarizing Hubmaier’s view, Wayne Pipkin writes, “In the act of baptism one commits oneself to be a follower of Christ—if necessary, to the point of martyrdom.”61 The relevant idea here is that as a product of the will, commitment represents a cognitivist understanding of discipleship that privileges the role of reason. This strips baptism of any objective, effective, or performative power. It is only semiotic. For people like Hubmaier, who retained much of his Catholic training, this was tempered by a high ecclesiology so that baptism was not distanced from Christian formation. However, the same assumption cannot be made of contemporary Anabaptism where this medieval ecclesiology has been replaced by a revivalist ecclesial minimalism. The denominational statements surveyed earlier demonstrate the results of this quite clearly. This rationalist emphasis loses sight of the goodness of creation and the ability—even the preference—of God to make use of common elements and practices such as those by which the church is constituted.
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