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The vast majority of Christian communities began baptizing infants at some point during the four centuries after the faith transcended the boundaries of its Jewish origins. In the West, pockets of dissent existed throughout the Medieval era, but it was the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century that forcefully reopened the question. In the wake of works critical of received sacramental theology such as Martin Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Anabaptists of that period searched the Scriptures with newly critical eyes.1 Following the models of Luther and Ulrich Zwingli they arrived at a position more discontinuous from the received tradition than did any of the Magisterial Reformers. Debate and contradictory practice persists within Christianity to our own time. A variety of strong biblical and theological arguments have been advanced on both sides. The exchange between Oscar Cullman and Karl Barth is a classic example.2 The clash of theological giants, to say nothing of the endless debates in the pew and on the web, has failed to settle the issue. And even though some representatives of both sides have lately exhibited remarkable flexibility, the disagreement remains intractable.

The Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry document, produced by the World Council of Churches in 1982 and still one of the most important contemporary statements on baptism, engages this obvious ecumenical problem. It affirms the goal of mutual recognition of baptism across lines of church division and advocates that, where it is possible, “mutual recognition should be expressed explicitly by the churches.”3 Toward this end it advises,

In order to overcome their differences, believer baptists and those who practice infant baptism should reconsider certain aspects of their practices. The first may seek to express more visibly the fact that children are placed under the protection of God’s grace. The latter must guard themselves against the practice of apparently indiscriminate baptism and take more seriously their responsibility for the nurture of baptized children to mature commitment to Christ.4

This is valuable counsel expressed in an important forum, yet it is also demonstration of the fact that despite important commonalities, the deep differences over baptism are not going to be resolved in the near future. It is now time to forgo attempts to prove one traditional form of the practice right or wrong and to pursue instead how baptism might aid us in the task of being faithful Christian communities in an era marked by fracture. Even though sociological and political tectonics may yet destabilize the divide, the working assumption of this book is that the gift of unity on this issue has not yet been granted to the church. Each way of understanding and practicing baptism possesses an internal theological coherence, but neither can be rightly elucidated according to the assumptions of the opposing view. This is evidenced by the protraction of the debate and the ancient legacy of each tradition. Therefore, even though the divisive practice of baptism presents the issue with which this book wrestles, my argument will be developed in such a way as to avoid both tired polemics and undue ecumenical optimism.

Tradition is better understood as a vine than as a tree. At least that is what one inheritor of the Radical Reformation legacy, Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, has suggested. His point is that a productive vine’s health is not maintained through untended organic growth. It requires careful pruning.5 This is the type of work I intend to take up here. Even though the major division over baptism is not one that can be “fixed,” attentive pruning of each branch is needed. In the context of North American Anabaptism, developments related to the practice of baptism require just such attention. This is because the working theology of baptism suffers from a deficient account of divine action, especially as mediated through the church. This project’s goal is to develop resources to mend this weakness, and in so doing to strengthen the key Anabaptist distinctive of believers’ baptism. Toward this end I will draw not only on the Anabaptist tradition, but also on a range of theological resources related to the sacraments and ecclesiology. This project probes the integrity of the current practice and theological construal of believers’ baptism within the wider web of Anabaptist life and thought. In response to problematic developments I will attempt to ground baptism in a doctrine of God and an ecclesiology that is practical and Trinitarian, concrete and Anabaptist. The jumble of genealogies and contemporary alliances that make up Christianity is so deep and impenetrable that to speak of any substantial theological project as merely Christian is simply unworkable; therefore, readers should know that this book’s argument is intentionally developed within the Anabaptist tradition. Yet I do hope this volume contributes to the ecumenical conversation on baptism, and throughout it I will offer hints about ways my analysis might apply beyond its intended focus on the beliefs and practices of North American Anabaptist communities.

Assumptions

This book is an exercise in constructive theological reflection. I could elaborate on this in various ways, but Thomas Aquinas captures many of the implications near the beginning of his Summa Theologica when he writes, “As other sciences do not argue in proof of their principles, but argue from their principles to demonstrate other truths in these sciences: so this doctrine does not argue in proof of its principles, which are the articles of faith, but from them it goes on to prove something else.” 6 It seems to me that Thomas worked under the assumption that the creator of the universe is indeed self-revealing and has commissioned human creatures to reflect on this fact. Working within such a frame allows the theologian to move with all due humility beyond description of historical or social phenomena toward constructive and normative applications. In recent Anabaptist scholarship the church’s practices have often been analyzed from historical or sociological perspectives. In this project I intend a deeper, dogmatic treatment. This means that my analysis and constructive proposal will not shy away from the center of Christian theology—the doctrine of God. This does not mean that the themes opened up here are hopelessly abstract. This book is after all intended for the betterment of concrete worshiping communities and the ways they respond to the One without whom nothing would be.

Several other assumptions support the argument of this book. One stems from the observation that the communities I seek to address are still trying to find ways to adjust to their post-Christendom context. Gone are the days when churches could pretend to control the society in which they found themselves. A related observation is that this project is being undertaken in an age of dying denominationalism. This is one of the reasons for my deliberate ecumenical tone. I assume that even though theology rightly acquires local inflection, listening to the voices of the broader tradition, past and present, is an essential part of the theologian’s task. As we attend to voices less like our own, our most pressing concerns are given new texture. It is precisely such cross-tradition pollination that holds the promise of a Christianity capable of bearing faithful witness to Christ in this new and relatively uncharted age after the death of Christendom.7 Specifically in this case, if it was not for the witness of pedobaptist traditions the critique that follows might never have been conceived. One final assumption is worth naming directly: initiatives of repentance and reconciliation between denominations that at one time denounced or even fought one another represent new conversations and point to avenues of learning and unity that did not exist a mere fifty years ago.8 The appreciation given to believers’ baptism by the Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry document, as well as the impact of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults developed by the Roman Catholic Church demonstrate parallel liturgical developments. It is with these factors in mind that this project’s focus on contemporary Anabaptism will be deliberately interwoven with ecumenical threads that were simply not available to a previous generation of scholars.

Themes

This book is about the church’s practice of baptism. In various ways the argument that follows will position itself conceptually with reference to two traditional ways of understanding the practices of the church. I will refer to these as the “testimonial” and “sacramental” approaches. In the former, the ordinances are understood to point to the work of Christ and involve Christians subjectively. In the latter, God is understood to make direct use of these rites to affect Christians more objectively. Both reject an approach that might be called “spiritualist.” In the spiritualist perspective, all rituals and practices are viewed with suspicion. Rites such as baptism are considered unnecessary or virtually so because the core of the Christian faith is believed to be interior, to be occupied with analyzing the invisible soul’s posture before the invisible God. The conceptual fulcrum that activates spiritualist approaches to traditional church practices is the assumption that the eternal/temporal and holy/profane dichotomies are equivalent to a spiritual/physical dichotomy. The spiritualist approach was embraced by some early Anabaptists and forms of it are still upheld among branches of the Religious Society of Friends, the Salvation Army, and some Evangelical and Anabaptist groups. Spiritualism in its various forms holds that physical acts like rituals are at best a distant outworking of the more meaningful and determinative inner life, which is thought to have access to God that is direct and unmediated.

Most streams of Christianity have rejected the spiritualist approach. One reason for this is that it does not seem to take seriously enough the Eucharistic command of Jesus to “Do this in remembrance of me.”9 More generally, spiritualism appears insensitive to God’s approval of the material world and the embodied character of human creatures. Despite the fundamental nature of these critiques, the place of formal practices in many Anabaptist congregations remains tenuous. Irma Fast Dueck, writing from her vantage point as a faculty member at a Mennonite university, has noticed among her students what she calls an ongoing “lack of ritual sensibility.” She suggests, “There may be an implicit assumption that somehow the rites and rituals of the church belong to less mature stages of human development, destined for obsolescence by the triumph of reason. Or perhaps there is a suspicion of rituals and the rites of the church as somewhat pagan, magical, or idolatrous. Or, quite possibly, the way we engage in the ritual fails to capture the theological imagination of those observing the practice.” She concludes, “No matter what the reason, many of those in the Believers Church tradition are left to sustain meaningful baptismal practices against this lack of ritual sensibility.”10 This project will endeavor to overturn such minimizations of baptism, seeking to cultivate what Fast Dueck calls a “baptismal ecology.” This means that I will attend most closely to the dynamics of the two central Christian construals of baptism, the testimonial and sacramental approaches.

The disparity between these two ways of construing Christianity’s central rites marks the divide of vast ecclesial watersheds. Each encompasses both great rivers of tradition and numerous lesser streams of practical and ideological variance. There are also commonalities. In the first place, both affirm that baptism is a sign. Its function is not limited to the physical dirt or germs that water might remove. In other words, both affirm in some way the twin Augustinian descriptions of a sacrament as a “visible sign of an invisible grace” and as a “visible word.”11 Second, each affirms, though in significantly different ways, that baptism involves the coming together of the actions of God and those of human creatures. Neither position denies the importance of human dependence on God or God’s empowering recognition of human activity. Third, both affirm the public nature of baptism. Baptism is understood to be public in that it is never practiced by a lone individual and always invokes the historical and concrete nature of the church. Fourth, both acknowledge the importance of a relative similarity in form. For most Christian communities, regardless of whether they involve infants or not, baptism involves a ritual washing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The fifth and final basic commonality is the assumption that baptism is carried out in obedience to the command of Jesus. The divisive question is what this means. Thus in a parallel debate about communion, Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Luke are much debated: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”12 The tension lies between the words “is” and “remembrance.” Despite the significant commonalities, the testimonial and sacramental approaches diverge.

Sacramental theology, to even the initiated, can appear to be more than a neatly defined watershed; including the Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Catholic traditions, it seems to be a whole world unto itself.13 One access point into the jumbled folds of this landscape can be found in Robert Jenson’s claim: “The word in which God communicates himself must be an embodied word, a word ‘with’ some visible reality, a grant of divine objectivity. We must be able to see and touch what we are to apprehend from god; religion cannot do without sacrament.”14 The Anglican Book of Common Prayer provides another point of entry through its commonly affirmed definition that sacraments are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”15 In a sacramental understanding of baptism the individual is acted upon; she receives a gift.

The etymological background of the term “sacrament” is slippery. Though it seems to originally have been used to refer to the oath of allegiance given by a soldier to his commander, its common usage in the Christian tradition, with the exception of Tertullian’s early employment of the term, bears little resemblance. The language is conflicted significantly because of the Vulgate’s use of “sacrament” in instances when a more apt translation might be something like “mystery.” Most scholars agree that although the notion of a sacrament is older than Augustine’s use of it, his rather fluid theology of the sacraments is the baseline for subsequent development in the West. The Augustinian view is that a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace, and each one pertains to the magnum sacramentum mysterium, Christ and the church. In the twelfth century Hugh of St. Victor added nuance to the traditional Augustinian description by providing, according to Leonard Vander Zee, “a distinction between what might be called a general sign, one thing merely pointing to another, and a sacramental sign, which also confers the reality to which the sign points.”16 Seven sacraments were then thought to fall under the standard medieval definition of a “sign which brings about what it signifies.” This was made more pointed through the traditional phrase efficient significando, which presses sacraments “bring about what they signify precisely by signifying it.”17

The nature of the sacraments was furiously debated during the Protestant Reformation, both in the parting of ways between the reformers and medieval sacramental theology and between the Protestant leaders themselves. Most famous is the contentious debate, only distantly related to this project, about the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Though Luther rejected descriptions dependent on Aristotelian metaphysics, he opposed Zwingli’s more radical approach. For Luther the concept of promise was central to his understanding of the sacraments. In The Babylonian Captivity he argues that even though all of Scripture can be described as either a command or a promise, “[I]t has seemed proper to restrict the name of sacrament to those promises which have signs attached to them.”18 Ultimately, this means that there are only two sacraments. In this same text Luther rejects the traditional sacramental assumption that the sacraments are effective in themselves, ex opera operato, or “by the work performed,” because he believes that a sacrament is only effective if it is received in faith.19 Despite these and other ways in which Luther revised sacramental theology, for contemporary Lutherans it remains of paramount importance that God acts “in, with, and under” these rites. David Yeago further explains this axiom: “On the one hand, the reality of the sacraments cannot be accounted for simply in terms of their efficacy as human communal acts of verbal and more-than-verbal communication; 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 Finger’s A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology. In this book he covers baptism under the heading, “The Communal Dimension.” Here Finger follows the early Anabaptist leader Pilgrim Marpeck in seeking to articulate an understanding of the sacrament that links the inner baptism of the Spirit with the outer baptism of water. He pairs this approach with contemporary ecumenical developments to describe the possibilities of a growing convergence between historically divided Christian communities.32 Finger raises concerns about the risks of a traditional Anabaptist emphasis on the voluntary individual. His concern is one that this project will attempt to take seriously. It echoes that of the systematic theologian Robert Jenson, who writes, “baptism, first, lets the gospel be unconditional and, second, prevents the separation of faith from community.”33 Both Yoder and Finger are willing to use sacramental terminology.34 Their work, along with that of a few others, hints at another of this book’s themes, which is that Anabaptist theology invites an approach that is not easily captured by either of the pure traditional types. The description of baptism toward which the following chapters move will be attentive to the gifts that various approaches bring to the contemporary church. It will gather momentum by striving to resist the temptation to consider baptism abstracted from the actual existence of the church or detached from its proper dogmatic location.

To take up the theological task is to work within the medium of words. This can only be done with a combination of boldness and humility, endeavoring to point toward a God who is not embarrassed to be described with such tools but whose being such tools are incapable of spanning. In preparing this manuscript I have often been reminded of these limitations. In spite of this, I seek to use certain terms in deliberate ways. For example, the terms “Jesus” and “Christ” will be used interchangeably to communicate the assumption that the Jesus of history is not separable from the Christ of faith. The term “church” will be used at times to indicate the community catholic and at others to describe local congregations. I am unconvinced that a neat separation of the two is relevant to the ontology of Christ’s body. When I speak of the church in a nonspecific way I usually intend the reference to be broadly understood, not merely referring to what occurs under the official auspices of specific denominations. The term “practice” will be often used to describe baptism in a generic sense. The terms “sacrament” and “ordinance” will be used with the specificity described earlier: the term “sacrament” applied to the practice in question to indicate that it effects what it signifies and the term “ordinance” when it functions only as a testimony to the work of Christ. If the terms “sign” or “symbol” are used in technical ways this will be noted. Beyond these specific terms I will employ some variety in references to baptism (i.e. “rite,” “ritual,” “ceremony”) to avoid a false confidence in the categorical distinctions of pure types. It seems to me that behind official denominational statements and confessional clarity churns the instability of congregational life in which the church’s practices are understood in numerous ways and with little consistency. I hope the raggedness of terminology at times communicates this.

At other points in this book the inconsistency of language is more regrettable. For example, while inclusive language will be used with respect to humanity, masculine pronouns are sometimes used with respect to God as this seems to be the only way to maintain the personhood and relationality of the Trinity. My assumption, though, is that such terms function analogically to describe the relationships of the triune God. They say little if anything about God’s gender or disposition. Lastly, at various times the focal community and thematic anchor of this study will be described as Christian, Believers Church, Anabaptist, or Mennonite. Some readers might even find evidence of my roots in the Swiss Mennonite tradition. These communities and the terms employed to name them are used to narrow or broaden the field of discourse at important points. The narrowing is not intended to be exclusive, but rather to clarify the participants in the conversation and the dynamics under analysis. It is impossible to fully represent the diversity of views held by those within any of these groups, and therefore it should be recognized that ultimately the argument presented here is my own.

Sequence

This project will proceed in three stages. The first, consisting of the first two chapters, is descriptive and analytical. Here I make the case that believers’ baptism must be reconceived. The first chapter focuses on the problematic phenomenon of young children being baptized in Anabaptist contexts and explores the theological assumptions that enable it. The second chapter furthers the analysis of the first by critiquing two alternatives to ecclesial mediation, which is the conceptual correction I propose. It also presents an outline of this concept in dialogue with the work of Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder. Though the analysis of denominational statements and confessions at various points in these first two chapters risks being tedious, it is essential to my approach that this book grapple with the practices and beliefs of actual communities instead of merely batting about the views of one theologian or another.

The second stage of the project will pick up where the constructive gestures in the first leave off and work toward an understanding of baptism through the larger topic of the relationship of the church to the second and third persons of the Trinity. The third chapter considers the work of Pilgram Marpeck alongside that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to explore how Anabaptist communities might affirm that the church’s life is in some sense sacramental, that it constitutes God’s effective presence in the world. Here I propose that baptism be understood as a participating witness, a revision of Marpeck’s view. The next chapter opens with a description of a highly formative Anabaptist text, the Martyrs Mirror, and argues that God’s work through the church cannot be divorced from questions of the Spirit’s presence in this conflicted body across time. I suggest that even though this issue has been particularly challenging for Anabaptists, addressing it is crucial for a coherent construal of baptismal practice. Both of these chapters attempt to anchor believers’ baptism in the doctrine of God.

The third stage of this project moves from the theology proper discussed in the previous two chapters to a set of concrete recommendations. In this fifth and final chapter, I expand my description of baptism as a participating witness and, in conversation with ancient sources, propose a way of practicing baptism that can better serve the church and its new members.

My aim in this book is to make a contribution to the practical and intellectual life of the church. While the Anabaptist tradition claims roots in the Radical wing of the Protestant Reformation, it tacitly claims historical affinity with various movements and groups reaching back to the first century. Despite this long legacy of lived Christianity, Anabaptists have produced little critical theological reflection. I hope to contribute here to the newly blossoming body of literature written by those reflecting on Christian belief and practice from an Anabaptist perspective. A logical implication of this project for the Anabaptist community would be the conviction that our politics and ethics should be formed, and indeed could be greatly enriched by, bringing to bear a broader set of doctrines and practices than the more traditional, and I think highly reductive, methodological axioms of biblicism or non-violence. The ethical undissmissablity of non-violence will not be challenged here; however, it has become clear that this ethic alone is inadequate for developing a positive account of the life of Christian communities. The fruitfulness of the memory inherited in the full range of practices that make up Anabaptist life must be re-investigated to resource Christian faithfulness in our emerging post-Christendom context. Furthermore, since a broad group of Christians share the practice of believers’ baptism with Anabaptists, I intend this work to participate in conversations ranging across traditional lines of division because such networks are increasingly needed to sustain the performance of the Christian life.

The current disinclination of younger people toward denominational loyalty and the ongoing decline of previously dominant denominations make the future shape of the church in North America difficult to discern. However, cross-pollination between traditions and an ongoing transience among members likely means that old boundaries between communities will become fuzzier. As the rigidity and independence of traditional theological streams fragments, an opportunity will exist for Anabaptist theology to have a significant voice in describing how local church communities can maintain integrity in a disestablished context. In this spirit, this project hopes to bend itself toward anticipating the needs of Anabaptist-like communities that are at the forefront of a re-formation of the Christian tradition. In addition, I hope that this book will contribute to a growing body of scholarship related to Christian liturgy and practices not confined to communities that practice believers’ baptism. Specifically, I hope to further the possibility of a form of ecumenical engagement that moves beyond, while not dismissing, the traditional contentious, polemical debates. Finally, my hope is that this work of Anabaptist theology will contribute to a renewed practice of believers’ baptism and a greater understanding of the significance of related practices. In such a spirit this project inquires after the apostle Paul’s unitary vision, in which baptism plays a crucial role: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”35

1. Luther, Babylonian Captivity.

2. Cullman, Baptism in the New Testament; Barth, Regarding Baptism.

3. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, 6.

4. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, 6.

5. Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 69.

6. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.q1.a8 (5). Numbers in parentheses refer to the page number(s) of the ET.

7. On this point George Lindbeck’s work is especially helpful. See especially “Ecumenism and the Future of Belief.”

8. Here I am thinking of both official acts of reconciliation and ongoing unofficial dialogues between various Anabaptist groups and the Roman Catholic, Swiss Reformed, and Lutheran churches. For one concrete example see G. Schlabach, ed., On Baptism. Also see Enns, “Believers Church Ecclesiology,” 107–24.

9. Luke 22:19. Unless otherwise noted, biblical quotations are taken from the NRSV.

10. Fast Dueck, “(Re)learning to Swim in Baptismal Waters,” 240.

11. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 279.

12. Luke 22:19; Matt 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; 1 Cor 11:24–25.

13. A helpful overview of the history and lines of tension in the sacramental tradition can be found in Fahey, “Sacraments.”

14. Jenson, Visible Words, 28.

15. Book of Common Prayer, 857.

16. Vander Zee, Recovering the Sacraments for Evangelical Worship, 29.

17. Yeago, “Apostolic Faith,” 2:177.

18. Luther, Babylonian Captivity, 124.

19. Ibid., 67.

20. Yeago, “Apostolic Faith,” 177.

21. As derived from Rom 4:11.

22. Calvin, Institutes, 1277.

23. See for example Matt 18:20 and John 14:17.

24. As quoted in Stephens, Huldrych Zwingli, 183.

25. Harper and Metzger, Exploring Ecclesiology, 141.

26. Grenz, Theology for the Community, 516.

27. Erickson, Christian Theology, 1110.

28. Jones, A Grammar of Christian Faith, 2:667.

29. Grenz, Theology for the Community, 516.

30. McClendon, “Baptism as a Performative Sign,” 403–16; also see his Doctrine, 2:386–406.

31. Yoder, Body Politics, 72–73.

32. Finger, Contemporary Anabaptist Theology, 158–83.

33. Jenson, Visible Words, 147.

34. Yoder, Body Politics, 72–73, 44–46; and Finger, Christian Theology, 2:331–51, as well as Contemporary Anabaptist Theology, 158–83.

35. 1 Cor 12:12–13.