Participating Witness. Anthony G. Siegrist
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in the sacrament, we encounter the present saving action of God. On the other hand, this action of God is not separable from the ceremonial action of the community; it is indeed through the public significance of what the church does that the action of God becomes concretely identifiable and experienceable, and so draws us into lived communion with God.”20 The agency of the church and the agency of God are inseparable since the church makes the sign apparent and God grants that which is signified.
The emphasis is slightly different in Reformed theology where the terminology of “sign” and “seal” dominates.21 In his Institutes Calvin describes a sacrament as “an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith; and we in turn attest our piety toward him in the presence of the Lord and of his angels before men.”22 Thus, in this view, a sacrament is a sign or pledge of inclusion in the grace of the new covenant.
From the view of the church as the enactor of these signs it can be said that through the power of the Spirit the sacraments are a means of participating in the work of Christ. In the sacraments God’s promise of his presence in the midst of the church is taken to apply in a particular way to practices ordained by Jesus.23 For the basic purpose of this typology the determinative characteristic that I wish to carry forward is that through the grace of God a sacramental sign effects what it signifies. Thus, an ecclesial practice such as baptism can be understood to be regenerative when rightly practiced precisely because God works in, with, and under what the church does. A sacramental understanding of baptism places emphasis on the objective nature of the event—something happens to the candidate. This is made most poignant in Protestant sacramental thought, which emphasizes the objectivity of grace by describing sacraments as effective signs. In contrast to the rather vague implications of the Augustinian visible sign, the Protestant description identifies them as events in which God’s grace is assuredly encountered precisely because it is made visible and audible. Though Protestant theology holds that faithful reception is necessary for these rituals to be effective, the origin of their efficacy lies beyond the persons involved. Therefore, as a sacrament, baptism is to be received as a gift. This is most obvious in the case of infants, but in a sacramental view all persons are to come to Jesus precisely as children.
The testimonial approach to baptism is more popular in Anabaptist, charismatic, Baptist, and independent evangelical communities. It is often signaled by describing baptism as an ordinance instead of as a sacrament. It is regularly paired with the celebration of “communion,” instead of the sacrament of the Eucharist. The popularity of this approach among Anabaptists and related groups is due in part to the influence of the sixteenth-century reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli’s view of the sacraments differed from Luther’s in that he was generally much more skeptical about the value of outward signs. Though his position on the sacraments is somewhat fluid, the central feature of his view is that the sign cannot participate in what it signifies. Thus a sacrament is something like a pledge or a badge of allegiance sown on a soldier’s garment. Zwingli writes: “a sacrament is nothing else than an initiatory ceremony or a pledging. For just as those who were about to enter upon litigation deposited a certain amount of money, which could not be taken away except by the winner, so those who are initiated by sacraments bind and pledge themselves, and, as it were, seal a contract not to draw back.”24 A testimonial approach to baptism parallels a memorialist approach to communion, or the Lord’s Supper, as a response to sacerdotalism. In a testimonial construal baptism is taken to be a communicative act, a public statement, on the part of the baptizand in response to the prior saving work of God. As a “testimony” to this work, its effectiveness depends upon the disposition of the one being baptized. In this vein, Baptist theologians Brad Harper and Paul Louis Metzger write: “On our view, water baptism does not regenerate anyone. However, baptism by water serves as a participatory sign in salvation history, functioning as a creaturely pointer to God’s saving actions in our lives.”25 It is important to realize, that although in the testimonial view baptism is understood to be a more subjective practice than it is in a sacramental view, on account of its ordination by Jesus it is still believed to be indispensable for the church.
According to the testimonial view nothing happens to the baptismal candidates in the ceremonial washing; however, their proclamation is a necessary response to what God has already done in their lives. By undergoing baptism they proclaim they have been called, forgiven, and cleansed by God, and they pledge to live in ways congruent with this. Here the notion of “pledge” functions opposite to the way it does in the Reformed view. For the Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz thinking of ordinances as “acts of commitment” actually affirms the original meaning of the term sacrament.26 In a sweeping way the testimonial approach can be distinguished from the sacramental in that, while it assumes that God has acted redemptively in Jesus and that God continues to call people to a saving relationship with himself, baptism itself is a human act alone. Instead of participating in what God does, an ordinance such as baptism is a response to God’s prior gift of faith. In this view even though baptism is generally undertaken in an ecclesial context, it is an individual response that follows a personal faith commitment.
If we shift our focus from this historical topography and consider more specifically how contemporary theologies of believers’ baptism might be mapped, we can observe the timeworn divide from a different aspect. Millard Erickson, a Baptist, describes baptism as “an act of faith and a testimony that one has been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, that one has experienced spiritual circumcision. It is a public indication of one’s commitment to Christ.”27 Meanwhile Joe Jones, from the Disciples of Christ tradition, writes: “As an act of the church [as opposed to the baptizee], the act of baptizing is a legitimate means of grace inasmuch as it leads to the life of appropriating God’s grace in sanctification and emancipation in the life of the nurturing church.”28 In these two examples we see the disparity within the Believers Church family at its widest.
There are those who take mediating positions. Grenz, though a Baptist like Erickson, demonstrates a bit keener attention to the power of symbols. Grenz treats baptism under the heading of “Acts of Commitment.” He understands these acts, baptism and the Lord’s Supper particularly, as oaths of allegiance. These are “enacted pictures or symbols of God’s grace given in Christ,” and through them Christians “act out [their] faith.”29 A third Baptist theologian, Jim McClendon, leans toward the sacramental view when he construes baptism as a “performative sign.”30
Two prominent Mennonite theologians also stand between the far poles marked by Erickson and Jones. In his short book Body Politics John Howard Yoder emphasizes the socio-political function of baptism. He treats four other ecclesial practices similarly. He believes that all are “actions of God, in and with, through, and under what men and women do.” Yoder writes, “Where they are happening, the people of God is real in the world.”31 Yoder’s approach is an attempt to mitigate against a deep leaning within Anabaptist theology toward “rationalism,” a word I use here non-technically, that runs the whole way back to the early Swiss Anabaptists’ affinity with the Zwinglian movement. This sort of rationalism denies out of hand, in ways that go beyond Zwingli, the possibility of Christ’s presence in and through the practices of the church. As I will argue later, this hems in the witness of Scripture and screws down tightly the lid on what we think is possible. A more recent Mennonite treatment of the subject can be found in Thomas