Participating Witness. Anthony G. Siegrist
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The liturgy drives home the point that with God’s help, the candidates, or tauflingen, are expected to cultivate lives characterized by humble piety and discipleship.20 The tauflingen are baptized by the bishop, but not in the grandeur of a cathedral or even a local church, for they find these buildings prideful and contrary to the witness of Scripture.21 Amish Anabaptists hold their meetings, even the vital baptismal services, in homes or barns.
Despite the obvious social distinction of Amish communities, their attempt to remain faithful to the biblical description of baptism and their interpretation of the Anabaptist tradition leads them to preserve the ordinance as a rite of paramount importance for the definition of their life together. Baptism is not just an individualized expression or a happenstance marker of spirituality. Even so, Amish do not feel the need to buttress the practice with an elaborate sacramental theology. To the extent that baptism participates in salvation, it does so through the life of community. This means that Amish practice represents a coherent form of Christian initiation that skirts wide the temptation to use baptism to incorporate children into the community’s life. Their children learn and worship as members of their families before they make the decision to officially join the community as adults, which the vast majority does.22 Furthermore, the prominence of children in these communities demonstrates to other Anabaptists that children can be included and nurtured spiritually without being baptized. The continuity of the way Amish Anabaptists carry this out is an ongoing counter-witness to the child baptism of more acculturated Anabaptists.
Some readers may object at this point, saying that the Amish cannot serve as examples for other contemporary Christians since they, horse-drawn carriages and all, live an eighteenth-century sort of life. This sort of objection, however, misses the obvious: the Amish do live in the twenty-first century. They have not arrived here by time machine and they do not reject culture as such—that would be impossible. In one way or another they face all the same challenges that other members of society face. They simply make intentional choices as a church community, sometimes quite baffling to outsiders, about their use of technology and their participation in various cultural trends and institutions. This intentionality enables their ongoing intelligible practice of believers’ baptism. Near the conclusion of his influential book, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre somewhat hesitantly compares the current state of affairs in the West to the decline of the Roman empire—the beginning of the “Dark Ages.” MacIntyre writes, “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.”23 My suggestion is that Anabaptists have examples of just such “forms of local community” closer at hand than we might think. The Amish posture toward modernity is certainly not perfect. However, if we cease to gawk and romanticize, if we cease to be embarrassed by these Christian sisters and brothers, we might see within this remnant of an old monasticism something instructive for the new.
Baptism in Doctrinal Context
In the story with which this chapter opened, voluntary baptism is displayed in revivalist mode, yet both the preacher and the child in O’Connor’s story betray sacramental expectations in that they assume something will happen when one is dunked in the river. In O’Connor’s fictional world this expectation has devastating consequences. In the world of contemporary theology this sacramental earnestness troubles the ecclesial divide over these traditional rites. A child, barely old enough to comprehend what is going on, is “voluntarily” baptized without catechetical training, and this baptism is terribly effective. This image raises the question of precisely what it means to be voluntarily baptized, and whether or not this is equivalent to the Anabaptist practice of believers’ baptism. Pursuing these questions will begin to expose shortcomings of some versions of current baptismal practice. To do so requires us to first consider some points of relationship between Anabaptism and the revivalist movement in North America.
Symptoms of Theological Confusion
The relationship of Anabaptism and revivalism is important for at least two reasons: First, the very existence of some Anabaptist denominations—the Mennonite Brethren are one example—is due to a convergence of traditional Anabaptism with one stream or another of revivalist pietism. Second, in North America the infusion of revivalist thinking and methodologies into the Anabaptist world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries parallels the declining age of baptism.
Like the beginnings of the Mennonite Brethren in nineteenth-century Russia, early encounters between Mennonites and revivalists in North America led to the creation of several new associations. The life of Martin Boehm, an eighteenth-century Mennonite preacher from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is a good example. Boehm took up preaching at mass meetings and was summarily censured by the established Mennonite structure. Upon departure from the Mennonite community in 1800 Boehm went on to become one of the founders of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. This denomination had so many ex-Mennonites that they were sometimes referred to as the “New Mennonites.”24 The influence of revivalism was challenged by the more staid Mennonite leadership both because its ecclesiological assumptions upset long standing forms of church order and because its piety was more emotional than many were used to. The antipathy, however, did not last. According to Harold Bender it was the direct influence of Dwight Moody upon John F. Funk that led to the first North American Mennonite Church revival meeting in 1872. Working with Funk was another prominent Mennonite revivalist, Daniel Brenneman. Brenneman’s “progressive” evangelical ideas led him to the same fate as Boehm’s—expulsion from the Mennonite Church. In contrast, Funk remained a member of the Mennonite Church and went on to run a highly influential publishing house whose reach spanned the continent. These two figures show the changing dynamics of the late nineteenth century that marked a shift in which revivalist methods found increasing acceptance. Mennonite revivalism reached its pinnacle in the 1950s under the leadership of well-known preachers such as George B. Brunk II, Howard Hammer, Myron Augsburger, and Andrew Jantzi. During this period mass revival meetings were held by Mennonites and other Anabaptists in tents and halls across the United States and Canada. The movement exerted significant influence. At one revival campaign put on by the Brunk brothers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania 15,000 people were reported to have attended the final meeting.25
Though it was widely recognized and appreciated that these crusades sparked renewal and signaled a new emphasis on evangelism in Mennonite communities, not everyone was supportive. Several revivalist themes were believed to be at odds with traditional Anabaptist Christianity: the focus on the individual, the prominence of the themes of evil and God’s wrath, as well as conversions that were not linked to church membership. According to Beulah Stauffer Hostetler, the primary concern was the way these meetings encouraged the baptism of young children. In fact the Mennonite Church began a formal inquiry into the issue in 1953 and adopted an official statement in 1955.26 The 1955 statement titled “The Nurture and Evangelism of Children” recommends that baptism be reserved for those who have reached the age of accountability, which it describes as “about twelve years of age or above.”27 The document recognizes the religious experience of younger children and their place in the church, but it denies that they are in need of conversion or are appropriate candidates for baptism. It is evident that Mennonite leaders in the twentieth century were aware of and concerned about the shifting baptismal practice. In the same spirit, Marlin Miller, writing nearer the end of the twentieth century, reflects on the ambiguous legacy of revivalism: “Revivalism’s emphasis on conversion and a voluntary response to the Gospel renewed the view that baptism as a public sign should be preceded by a voluntary and personal faith. Revivalism’s preoccupation with an individual’s crisis conversion has, however, diminished both the direct relation between baptism and church membership and the understanding