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Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.

(Matt 19:14)

Flannery O’Connor was a Catholic Christian and one of the most distinguished twentieth-century American writers of fiction. One of her short stories, “The River,” provides a provocative and disturbing picture of the baptism of a child. O’Connor’s story functions like a parable, drawing our attention to the issues raised by the baptism of children. I recount it here not as the basis for an argument, but as a heuristic for investigating what is at stake in this book’s thesis.1

“The River” takes place, as many of O’Connor’s stories do, in the religiously flamboyant American South. It begins with a young boy, a child of dissolute parents, being taken by his sitter to a “healing,” an informal revival service featuring a charismatic traveling preacher. On the way there the sitter told the boy that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus. This was a surprise, as the boy had always assumed it had been a fat doctor with a moustache. He thought that maybe his parents were joking about the doctor. O’Connor tells us, “They joked a lot where he lived. If he had thought about it before, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like ‘oh’ or ‘damn’ or ‘God,’ or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime.”2 The preacher’s rhetorical gifts and rumours of his healing powers had begun to attract a following. A crowd of curious onlookers gathered at the side of a river to observe this spectacle. The banks of the river served as a sort of outdoor amphitheatre accentuating the dynamism of his words; the river itself became a metaphor for the preacher’s pronouncements. He spoke to the gathering crowd: “There ain’t but one river and that’s the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood. That’s the river you have to lay your pain in, in the River of Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of Love, in the rich red river of Jesus’ Blood . . . !”3 He told the people that the river was the one that healed the leprous, gave sight to the blind, and even brought the dead to life. “This old red river is good to Baptize in, good to lay your faith in, good to lay your pain in,” he told them.4

As the singing and preaching reached a natural pause, the sitter called out to the preacher, telling him that the child with her was in need of his help. In trying to figure out what exactly the boy needed, the preacher asked him if he’d ever been baptized. The child, lacking any real religious schooling, didn’t know the meaning of the word. “‘If I Baptize you’, the preacher pronounced, ‘you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that’?”5 The child said, “Yes.” He didn’t want to go back to his parents’ apartment; he wanted to go under the water. Events unfolded quickly: “Suddenly the preacher said, ‘All right, I’m going to Baptize you now’, and without more warning, he tightened his hold and swung him upside down and plunged his head into the water. He held him under while he said the words of Baptism and then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child . . . ‘You count now’, the preacher said. ‘You didn’t even count before’.”6

The next morning the boy woke up back in his apartment. His parents were still asleep, paying for a late night of inebriated socializing. The child scrounged a breakfast, using whatever his short body could reach in the kitchen. As he waited alone for his parents, the child realized what he wanted to do. He stole a streetcar token and a half packet of lifesavers from his mother’s purse and made the journey back to the exact spot beside the river where the previous day’s events had unfolded. As O’Connor says, “He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn’t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward.”7 He gasped for air and sputtered. Pushing his head back under the water he tried again:

He stopped and thought suddenly: it’s another joke, it’s just another joke! He thought how far he had come for nothing and he began to hit and splash and kick the filthy river. His feet were already treading on nothing. He gave a low cry of pain and indignation . . . . He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all the fury and fear left him.8

Despite the well-intended efforts of a passerby the boy never surfaced—the river swept him away.

Baptism among Anabaptists

In O’Connor’s story the child’s belief in the efficacy of baptism stands sharply contrasted to contemporary nonchalance. For the early Anabaptists, as is still the case for some around the globe today, baptism was an act of obedience to Jesus that could cost one’s life, yet in North America this same rite is easily carried out. If baptism was once a matter of life and death, here and now it seems to be no longer the case. The story of the drowned child is striking because we find it unbelievable that baptism would be taken so seriously.

An Evolving Practice

One of the most vivid moments in the origin of the modern practice of believers’ baptism occurred in Zurich in 1525. In the growing momentum of the Protestant Reformation a number of young radicals gathered there under the teaching of Ulrich Zwingli. Following the spirit and perhaps even the logic of Zwingli’s reforms, they began to question the validity of the sacrament of baptism. Some took the drastic step of refusing to submit their children to the rite. Highly controversial, this was viewed by authorities as a threat to civil order. In January of that year the city of Zurich held a public disputation on the matter. Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz represented the position of those who would eventually be called the Swiss Brethren against Zwingli, who argued for the more widely accepted and traditional approach of baptizing infants. Zwingli was pronounced the winner of the debate and believers’ baptism was forbidden. Manz, Grebel, and their community were, however, not persuaded. Within a week they had met together, performed new baptisms, and taken communion. Both Manz and Grebel were later imprisoned on several occasions. After finally fleeing the city, it appears that Grebel contracted the plague and died in 1526. Manz was eventually re-arrested and drowned in Lake Zurich in 1527. This series of events represents some of the founding moments of the Anabaptist movement. It is with good reason that the story is often recounted.

Just as most children in North American Anabaptist communities are not baptized by traveling preachers with healing gifts, most are not baptized in opposition to civil laws as were their spiritual forebearers. There are many variances in the way believers’ baptism is practiced. The one essential commonality among communities that practice believers’ baptism is that the process of initiation begins with a confession of faith and a request to receive baptism. The oldest prominent Anabaptist confession, the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, describes this assumption:

Baptism shall be given to all those who have been taught repentance and the amendment of life and [who] believe truly that their sins are taken away through Christ, and to all those who desire to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and be buried with Him in death, so that they might rise with Him; to all those who with such an understanding themselves desire and request it from us; hereby is excluded all infant baptism.9

Likewise, the 1632 Dordrecht Confession of Faith, widely used in North America until the twentieth century, states: “All penitent believers, who, through faith, regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost, are made one with God, and are written in heaven, must, upon such Scriptural confession of faith, and renewing of life, be baptized with water.”10

The story of Manz and Grebel and the confessions of Schleitheim and Dordrecht leave an important issue untouched. They do not provide precedent for the crucial question of how children of Anabaptists are to be incorporated into the church. If baptism based on an adult conversion is to be the norm for a missionary church, this policy leaves the children of those converts in uncharted waters. No one is made a Christian biologically; nevertheless, the experience of joining a church in which one has been nurtured since childhood is different than that of being an adult convert. The change in Anabaptist communities over the last four centuries is testament to this ambiguity. The social historian Leland Harder describes the age of baptismal candidates in the sixteenth century like this: “The estimated average age of baptism for ten representative Anabaptist men and women, 1525–1536, was 36.4, with none under the age of 20, two between the ages of 20 and 29, four between 30 and 39, and four between 40 and 49.”11 These were first-generation Anabaptists. Yet, since they assumed the propriety of marriage and having children, the scenario of adult conversion could not remain static. Thus, over time, Anabaptist groups have developed various ways of incorporating children. Some have been more successful than others. One method has been a simple adaptation: baptize children—instead of just adults—still assuming of course that these children make a confession of faith. In contrast to the representative sample from the sixteenth century, a 1973 study by Leland Harder and J. Howard Kauffman of four Mennonite denominations and the Brethren in Christ Church showed a downward trend in the age of baptism running through the twentieth century. At the time of that study the median age was just under fifteen.12 Similar observations have been made at the beginning of the twenty-first century.13 And this trend seems to have resonance beyond immediate members of the Anabaptist family. The Baptist theologian James Leo Garrett, for instance, has observed that in some Baptist churches children as young as six are baptized.14 Another Baptist leader, Brian Haymes, attests to something similar. Haymes is from the United Kingdom, and he recounts a visit to the United States, relating that upon meeting other Baptists there he initially was appreciative of their passion for believers’ baptism, but then was “stunned as they [told] me they baptize children of six or seven years of age.”15 Haymes goes on to tell of one of his students who was baffled by similar observations.

Heirs of the Radical Reformation are now regularly baptizing children, pre- and early-adolescent persons. Certainly there is always a variety of trends at work across the spectrum of Anabaptist groups in North America. My point is not that every group and every individual fits this trend. This sociological snippet demonstrates that the practice is fluid. However, even if only one pre-adolescent child is baptized as a believer, that event would beg for an explanation. The fact that these aberrations seem to have become more common suggests a broad shift pointing to a widespread theological change. The assumption behind incorporating children through believers’ baptism is that the practice still upholds the central Anabaptist affirmation that individuals should be baptized only after making a confession of faith and a genuine decision to begin a disciple’s form of life. It might appear as though this attempt to secure the outcome of our children’s faith development were the only real option for Anabaptist communities today. However, the example of one Anabaptist group stands in contradistinction to this trend—the Old Order Amish (Amish). Their practice shows that, even in the twenty-first century, Anabaptist communities do not need to baptize children.

Anabaptist Practice of a Different Order

The contemporary Amish draw their name from the seventeenth-century rigorist Jacob Amman who led his followers to separate from the larger Anabaptist movement over a number of issues, notably a more demanding application of the Dordrecht Confession. The followers of Amman later immigrated to North America and today the Amish have settlements in over twenty-five states and one Canadian province. They are known for their close-knit communities and their particularly leery approach to technology. For instance, many Amish communities loath the interruption to family life caused by telephones, and as a result some relegate them to small sheds located at the far end of their laneways. Where Christians in the revivalist tradition focus on an individualized and experiential appropriation of faith, the Amish take an approach that, though not entirely unemotional, is highly rational and irreducibly communal. The Amish understand themselves to be mutually accountable for matters of faith and practice. For them baptism is not only an event testifying to the relationship of the individual to God, but just as prominently it marks a change in the relationship of the baptismal candidate to the church community.16 In fact it is difficult to say that Amish theology could speak at all of a relationship with God without the community of the church.

An important aspect of the coherence of the Amish approach can be observed by attending to the dynamics of the period of young adulthood that some communities call rumspringe, or a time of “running around.” This important exception to the generally highly disciplined and communal character of Amish life constantly catches the attention of outsiders. Non-Amish find this apparent anomaly particularly intriguing since its occasional manifestation as “worldly living” contrasts so clearly to the subdued reputation of Amish adults. One example is the fact that most Amish communities forbid the owning and operating of cars by their members on the grounds that these vehicles scatter families and easily become opportunities to display pride and competitiveness. Yet non-Amish neighbors know that some young Amish, usually males, do own and operate cars. Occasionally these Amish-owned vehicles are even equipped with after-market sound systems. On the surface this double standard seems hypocritical. However, what outsiders often fail to realize is that, even though the Amish do encourage their children to consider the possibility of being baptized in the future and seek to raise them in light of the community’s understanding of the gospel, those who are not baptized—even the children of Amish parents—are not required to live according to the discipline or rule of the church. The adolescent freedom of rumspringe endows the act of joining the church with greater meaning. John Hostetler, a prominent scholar of Amish life, tells us that in Amish communities, young people are reminded that it is better not to make a vow, such as baptism, than to go back on one once made. Because of the seriousness of this event it is often delayed until early adulthood, near the time when Amish young people commonly get married.17

Amish children are taught how to live according to the gospel and are nurtured in a spirituality that stresses the virtues of forgiveness and humility. The direct preparation for baptism, though, is a discrete sequence that usually takes six to eight weeks. Particularly important for young men to consider at this point is the assumption that in choosing to become a baptized member of the community they publicly state their willingness to serve as the community’s minister, should they be asked.18 A contemporary Amish-oriented publication illustrates the larger point well. It has the rather flat title, 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life, and is an Amish reworking of an older question-and-answer-ordered Mennonite text. The following two questions are most relevant:

Q: Should there be an age limit in the baptism of children?

The New Testament gives none, but it does teach us the seriousness of baptism and of becoming a member of the Bride of Christ, His Church (Eph 5:27; Matt 18:15–18; 1 Cor 12:12–27). This decision to serve God is the most important event in one’s life. It is not for children but only for those who have reached the age of understanding and maturity. The new birth comes to a thinking, surrendered believer, not to an immature child who is easily influenced and hardly able to comprehend the gravity of the matter.

Q: How then can we know if a person is old enough for baptism?

We believe a person is old enough when he is mature enough (1) to recognize he is lost without a Savior, (2) to understand the conditions of salvation, (3) to renounce the world and its sins and his own flesh and blood, (4) to accept the blood of Jesus as the atonement for his sins, and (5) to solemnly promise before God to help labor and counsel in the church, and to not depart from the faith, whether it means life or death. According to article twenty-one of the Thirty-Three Articles of Faith, Christian baptism can “be given to none but those who are regenerated by faith, dead to sin, desire the same, rise from the death of sin, and walk in newness of life, observing whatsoever Christ has commanded them.”19

Baptism, in the Amish view, implies saying “Yes” to Christ and “No” to the world. It commits one to the community of faith and grants access to the resources of grace that lie within it. It makes individual pride and desires secondary to the discernment of the community.

Amish baptismal services communicate even more of the community’s understanding of the centrality of baptism to the life of the Christian. These services can be long affairs, sometimes stretching to four hours. 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 of faith as a commitment to Christian discipleship in all areas of life, both personal and social.”28 The revivalist obsession with crises conversion as the basis for the Christian life, what we might call ‘conversionism’, is now woven through the fabric of North American Christianity. This has found resonance with the larger social trends of individualism and religious consumerism, thereby amplifying its impact. In a society where it is assumed that faith is a matter of individual voluntary choice and where spiritual experience has been commodified, it is not surprising that Anabaptist communities have been affected by revivalism’s emotional appeal and individualized focus. The crucial questions are whether or not the revivalist influence on Anabaptist baptismal practice has transformed it into something else altogether and whether or not this new phenomena can be coherently integrated into the larger form of Anabaptist life.

The child in O’Connor’s story is baptized under his own volition. However, we must ask if this sort of minimalized qualifier is capable of making sense of the seriousness of the Apostle Paul’s words when he asks, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Or if it can be congruent with his continuation, “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”29 The gravity of being joined to Jesus is not a marginal theme in the NT. The words of Paul evoke those of Jesus in Mark’s gospel: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”30 It is by no means self-evident that being voluntary is sufficient to render a ritual washing as the practice that initiates persons into this sort of a life. The fact that Anabaptist communities have adopted revivalist approaches to baptism, chiefly the assumption that children are eligible candidates, is one indication that the theology of baptism needs to be revisited.

To avoid being too dismissive, let us consider this issue further. We must first ask what it could possibly mean for a child to confess faith, in a revivalist context or any other. In Matthew 19 Jesus forbids his disciples to banish children from his company, saying, “it is to such as these [children] that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”31 Clearly the community of Jesus’ followers should have a ready place for children; however, Jesus’ words maintain the categorical distinction between children and disciples. Though Jesus blesses children he instructs disciples. Does discipleship then demand an end of childhood? For Anabaptists to undergo baptism is in the words of Mark’s Jesus to take up one’s cross. In the gospel of Matthew the risen Jesus tells his disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”32 Here discipleship, baptism, and teaching are tied together. Anabaptists have long denied that this can be applied to babies. Yet the prevalence of child-baptism in the twentieth-century runs headlong against this.

The case that the baptism of children represents a theological problem can be further supported by observing the incongruity of several of the assumptions that support it. First, this practice assumes that what is being done is actually a coherent form of baptism. To receive any benefit of doubt it must make sense within one of the traditional approaches to baptism. Though some elements of folk-revivalism might, like the fictional story “The River,” hold to a sacramental understanding, this is not generally the case in Anabaptist circles. And though Anabaptists likely have absorbed many spiritualist assumptions through the pietism implicit in revivalism, the fact that baptism is still practiced mitigates against this being the operative approach. More likely these communities ostensibly hold to some form of the testimonial approach.

If the baptism of children is understood as a testimonial form of the practice it must be assumed that these children are capable of making the sort of statement that this theology of baptism requires. However, might it not be the case that the same sort of plausibility structure and related social pressure that convinced parents in Christendom to baptize their infants now pressures children to request baptism? Might it not be the case that a child’s request for baptism, as well intentioned as it likely is, is not the sort of statement demanded by believers’ baptism? This is not to question whether children want to identify with Jesus in some way or whether they might want at some level to have their sins “forgiven.” The crux of the matter is just that it is difficult to understand how a child is capable of making a non-coerced confession of faith. This means that the semiotic character of baptism is blurred; intentional discipleship cannot be differentiated from socialization or the desire of a religious community to secure its future. Modern society realizes this: we do not allow children to fight in our wars or to marry even if they volunteer to do so. For children to join the church through baptism is to reduce the practice to a gate-keeping ceremony that initiates children into the next developmental stage of their lives. It reduces baptism to the weak formality of connecting to a community without risk or distinctive ethical commitments.

A second operative assumption in child baptism is the conversionist belief that children are in danger of divine judgment—that a nine-year-old needs to repent of his life of sin. The assumption that children are objects of God’s wrath did not begin with modern revivalism. It has a long history going back at least to Augustine, who avers in his Confessions, “The harmlessness of babes is in their body’s effect, not their mind’s intent.”33 For many groups that practice believers’ baptism the doctrine of the age of accountability is used to make some sense of this pre-pubescent predicament. In the Assemblies of God context a document endorsed by the Commission on Doctrinal Purity and the Executive Presbytery exemplifies this approach clearly: “The Assemblies of God believes that children are loved by God, and until they come to an age of understanding (some call it ‘the age of accountability’), they have a place in the kingdom of God.”34 The underlying assumption is that after reaching this age the child is left vulnerable before God. The doctrine is traditionally grounded in biblical references such as 2 Sam 12:23, in which David states that his son will not return to him, but rather that David will “go to” his son (thereby affirming the son’s innocence), or Deut 1:37–40 in which the children of the rebellious Israelites are not subjected to judgment because they “do not yet know right from wrong.”35

The age of accountability is an attempt to reign in runaway repercussions of the doctrine of original sin. However, it is precisely in its tentative formalization that it creates irresolvable pastoral dilemmas. One cannot help but wonder at precisely what age one is actually accountable before God. Would it not be fairer if accountability was linked to developmental progress instead of age? Might there then be a quantitative test to determine when a child qualifies as one accountable before God for her sin? The doctrine of the age of accountability is at best built on marginal biblical references. Furthermore, it fails to provide the clarification it suggests. In Anabaptist circles it is further undermined by the implications of the term “accountability,” which implies a specifically forensic understanding of the atonement. According to Thomas Finger’s analysis of the roots of Anabaptism this was not the dominant view. Finger claims that the primary soteriological model for early Anabaptists was more akin to divinization, involving a gradual ontological transformation intrinsically patterned by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.36 This does not dismiss the need for the process of conversion, but it does downplay any sort of legal necessity for quickly baptizing children out of fear for their eternal destiny. It undercuts the assumption that children must be baptized as soon as possible to avoid divine judgment.

In his book Believers Baptism for Children of the Church Marlin Jeschke argues convincingly that significant confusion around the status of children has arisen from the assumption of a false dichotomy, that all of humanity falls into one of two neat categories: they are either saved or reprobate. As a result child evangelism has taken the place of Christian nurture. Jeschke’s recommendation is that Anabaptists recover an understanding of the innocence of childhood.37 This does not avoid the difficulty of giving definition to the process of nurture but it does, in the face of revivalist assumptions, begin to put the discussion of the initiation of the children of Christians on the right field. It also gestures toward a way of understanding the life of the church that can take into account those with developmental or cognitive impediments. Space does not permit the development of an alternative to the notion of the age of accountability and the false dichotomy Jeschke names; nevertheless, it is definitely the case that we can question the assumption that children are objects of divine judgment in need of conversion. The baptism of children has been challenged before in Anabaptist circles, and my argument is that because of its theological incoherence it should continue to be critiqued. It should not be allowed to become normative, for in doing so I fear it would reshape Anabaptist theology in destructive ways.

Locating the Problem in Denominational Theologies

In O’Connor’s presentation of baptism the passion of the central characters—the young boy, the sitter, and the preacher—is juxtaposed to a detached, empty cosmopolitanism represented by the boy’s parents and their friends. This aspect of the story calls into question the sentimentality and triumphalism inherent in many religious practices. A well-known anecdote about O’Connor makes her view clear. The story is told that once at a dinner party in which a writer-sophisticate proclaimed that the sacraments were still useful—as literary symbols—O’Connor is said to have bluntly responded: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”38 For O’Connor a sacrament implies much more than symbolism. Likewise, the central characters in her story are more than merely open to the possibility of God acting in their world. They expect it. If the Christian faith is to have any of the serious sort of impact to which baptism portends we should wonder how the life of the church could be characterized in any other way. Indeed, this question arises from the very history of Anabaptism itself. Arnold Snyder has stated that the closest analogue early Anabaptists had to the medieval eucharistic sacrament and its concept of the real presence of Jesus was the life of the church itself.39 Nevertheless, for many contemporary Anabaptists the rite of initiation does not participate in the divine nearness of sacramentality. To both support this claim and to explain more clearly how believers’ baptism is understood today it will be helpful to look to the way some Anabaptist denominations present their beliefs and practices.

The category is hard to define, but conservative estimates are that more than 1.6 million people participate in Anabaptist-affiliated congregations in the world. Only slightly more than 0.5 million of those reside in the United States and Canada.40 These congregations, though, make up more than fifty denominations or independently affiliated Anabaptist groups.41 They range from very acculturated denominations with high levels of education and professional training to culturally distinct groups who see little use for formal education. They include highly mobile individuals as well as those who have decided not to ride in airplanes or even drive cars.42 Giving a theologically significant and succinct description of the beliefs that these groups hold to be true about baptism is challenging. It is a job that threatens to slowly and laboriously swamp this project with detail. Rowing through extended quotations varying only slightly one from the other would tire even the most committed reader. Nevertheless, a sketch of how some prominent self-identifying Anabaptist groups describe the practice will provide helpful context for the discussion that follows. It will also advance the thesis of this project by displaying the theology of baptism and opening it for critique. I will describe key features of the current statements of five Anabaptist denominations: (1) The Conservative Mennonite Conference (Conservative Conference), which includes about 110 congregations in North America. The Conservative Conference is rooted in the Amish Mennonite expression of Anabaptism. With its denominational origins traceable to 1910, this group formed from congregations that sought a middle ground between more assimilated Amish Mennonites and the traditional and distinct Old Order Amish. (2) The Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren (Mennonite Brethren), which includes some 250 congregations in Canada. The Mennonite Brethren trace their origin to revival movements among Russian Mennonite settlements in the 1860s. Today the Mennonite Brethren describe themselves as both Anabaptist and Evangelical. (3) The Brethren in Christ of North America (Brethren in Christ), which includes about 295 congregations in both the United States and Canada. The Brethren in Christ count both Pietism and Wesleyanism as formative theological traditions alongside their older Anabaptist roots. The final two denominations under examination currently use the same confession of faith, the “Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective” (“Confession of Faith”), affirmed in 1995. These two denominations are (4) Mennonite Church USA, which includes roughly 940 congregations in the US, and (5) Mennonite Church Canada, which includes close to 230 congregations in Canada. These two denominations are the result of the recent merger of the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church and include some of the oldest Anabaptist conferences, groups of mutually accountable congregations, in North America.

The statements described below are the way in which these groups publicly articulate their beliefs in the form of a confession of faith or a doctrinal statement. These denominations have each taken a variety of steps in formulating these documents, which themselves hold differing levels of confessional and teaching authority within each denomination and its affiliated organizations. Formal statements of belief and practice are not new in the Anabaptist tradition even though the proper status of central Christian statements like the Apostles Creed and the Nicean Creed is debated.43 Classic statements such as the sixteenth-century Schleitheim Articles and the seventeenth-century Dordrecht Confession have served as gathering points for Anabaptists throughout history. In what follows I will first consider the doctrine of baptism and then provide a further description of the ways in which it is dogmatically related to the doctrines of God and the church.

Every denominational document surveyed here describes baptism in testimonial terms. Some denominations like the Conservative Conference list water baptism alongside communion, washing of feet, anointing the sick, laying on of hands, and marriage as “ceremonies and symbols of the Christian faith.”44 The specific language that the Conservative Conference uses to describe baptism depicts it as an “external symbol of internal spiritual baptism.” It symbolizes being buried with Christ and joined in his resurrection, being cleansed by God from sin and guilt. In addition, the Conservative Conference describes baptism as a “public confession of faith,” and it is linked to membership in a local congregation.

The testimonial understanding of baptism is also clearly evident in the Mennonite Brethren statement. It says, “We believe that when people receive God’s gift of salvation, they are to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Baptism is a sign of having been cleansed from sin. It is a covenant with the church to walk in the way of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.”45 The Mennonite Brethren statement also reads: “Baptism is a sign of the believer’s incorporation into the body of Christ as expressed in the local church. Baptism is also a pledge to serve Christ according to the gifts given to each person.” This shares the perspective of many early Anabaptists, which inverts Calvin’s view of how baptism functions as a pledge. For the Mennonite Brethren the one who makes a promise in baptism is not God but the individual. Of the denominations surveyed here, the Mennonite Brethren state most directly their belief that infant baptism is invalid, saying, “Persons who claim baptism as infants and wish to become members of a Mennonite Brethren congregation are to receive baptism on their confession of faith.”

In their “Articles of Faith and Doctrine” the Brethren in Christ describe baptism and communion as “ordinances.”46 They also recognize “practices” such as footwashing, marriage, and the dedication of children as important to the life of the church. The Brethren in Christ say that baptism is a “public witness” that “symbolizes the believer’s submission to Jesus Christ and identification with His death and resurrection.” The Brethren in Christ expect baptized believers to “commit themselves to the membership covenant,” which is a way of affirming their loyalty to the church as a local body of disciples and a global unified body of Christ. Of the denominations surveyed here the Brethren in Christ most clearly affirm a particular mode of baptism, which in their case is immersion.

In the confession of faith upheld by both Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA baptism is described most prominently as a “sign,” “testimony,” and “pledge.”47 It is a sign of cleansing, repentance, forgiveness, renunciation of evil, as well as death to sin. It is a testimony of God’s gift of the Spirit, which enables new life. It is a pledge to “serve Christ and to minister as a member of his body.” Baptism, the confession says, is “done in obedience to Jesus’ command.” Baptism’s relationship to Jesus means that “Those who accept water baptism commit themselves to follow Jesus in giving their lives for others, in loving their enemies, and in renouncing violence, even when it means their own suffering or death.” With these goals in view it is not surprising that this document claims directly that baptism is only for those who “are of the age of accountability and who freely request baptism on the basis of their response to Jesus Christ in faith.”

To strengthen the analysis of the theology of baptism presented in these documents it is important to consider the practice within a broader dogmatic context. For this we must pay special attention to the doctrines of God and the church. I am particularly interested in how these texts describe the church’s relationship to God and how they describe the present work of Jesus. We begin with the Conservative Conference’s doctrinal description of the church, which outlines several common Anabaptist themes:

The church of Jesus Christ is the universal body of redeemed believers committed to Jesus Christ as Lord, and finds expression in the local church in worship, fellowship, holiness, discipline, teaching and preaching the Word, prayer, spiritual gifts, and the New Testament ordinances. The church is called out from and is separate from the world, but reaches out to the world with the Gospel and the “cup of cold water”. The church, as the body of Christ, is the visible representation of God on earth and is ready to suffer and serve as required by Christ and His Word.

A key feature of this statement, which it shares with most other contemporary Anabaptist doctrinal statements, is the theological distance it maintains between the church and God. The language used here of “representation” is the closest most Anabaptist statements come to equating the presence or work of the church with that of God. The way in which the body of Christ motif is understood in representational terms is evidence of this. The Conservative Conference’s “Statement of Theology” explains that Jesus’ present work is that of intercession. Representation and intercession imply absence and distance.

The Mennonite Brethren describe the church as “the people called by God through Jesus Christ.” The church “makes Christ visible in the world.” Like the Conservative Conference, the Mennonite Brethren describe the ongoing work of Christ as “intercession” and “advocacy.” In addition, they say that Jesus also “calls [believers] to be his witnesses.” At this point we can begin to observe a formal parallel in the way that the church represents God just as baptism represents God’s work. Though the Spirit is said to unite the church and is described as the presence of God, the Mennonite Brethren statement does not elucidate how the Spirit’s presence or work actually involve the church.

In describing new life in Christ the Brethren in Christ believe “Persons thus justified by grace through faith enjoy peace with God, are adopted into God’s family, become part of the church, and receive the assurance of eternal life. We become new creatures in Christ, regenerated by the Holy Spirit.” Notice that in this statement becoming part of the church happens alongside enjoying peace with God, being adopted into God’s family, and receiving the assurance of eternal life. These are all listed as effects of justification by grace through faith, yet there is no clear role for the church in bringing about these realities. The “Articles of Faith and Doctrine” of the Brethren in Christ describe Jesus as the head of the church and the one who established it. The Lordship of Jesus is deemed a current reality; though, like other Anabaptist statements, Jesus’ primary ongoing role is said to be intercession. Nevertheless, the body of Christ motif has a prominent role in the Brethren in Christ description of the church. Its invocation, though, is highly metaphorical.

The “Confession of Faith” used by the two relatively large denominations in the United States and Canada describes the church as “the assembly of those who have accepted God’s offer of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.” It is “the assembly of those who voluntarily commit themselves to follow Christ.” Recognizing the popularity of the body of Christ motif among Anabaptists, this confession stresses it as well: “We believe that the church as the body of Christ is the visible manifestation of Jesus Christ. The church is called to live and minister as Christ lived and ministered in the world.” In the present tense this document describes Jesus as “the model human being” and “the image of the invisible God.” Jesus is further affirmed as “our Lord and the not-yet-recognized Lord of the world.”

The “Confession of Faith” of these Mennonite denominations is theologically ambiguous at two key points. In various ways the other documents share these features as well. The first point of ambiguity can be seen in this statement: “Baptism by water is a sign that a person has repented, received forgiveness, renounced evil, and died to sin, through the grace of God in Christ Jesus. Thus cleansed, believers are incorporated into Christ’s body on earth, the church.” While reference to the church being Christ’s body is noticeably less abstract than in some of the other statements, the relationship of the sign of water baptism to either cleansing or incorporation is not clear. It is unclear what “thus cleansed” refers to. Does baptism participate in this? Does baptism have anything to do with the subsequent incorporation in Christ’s body? The “Confession of Faith” is imprecise. The second point of ambiguity has even wider ramifications. In the portions of the confession that deal most directly with Jesus and the Spirit, the ongoing relationship of these two members of the Trinity to the church is indistinct. The “Confession of Faith” tells us the Spirit calls people to repentance, convicts of sin, and leads in the way of righteousness. The Spirit teaches, guides in truth, and empowers individuals. It says the Spirit empowers the church to preach, teach, testify, heal, suffer, and so on. A similar point is made regarding Jesus: “We recognize Jesus Christ as the head of the church, his body. As members of his body, we are in Christ, and Christ dwells in us. Empowered by this intimate relationship with Christ, the church continues his ministry of mercy, justice, and peace in a broken world.” The belief that Jesus’ ministry is continued in the church is clear. It is important to notice though that the theological structure of this ongoing ministry is vicarious. The continuity of the work of Jesus with that of the church comes through its attribution not through agential constancy. The Spirit works directly in the lives of individuals, but does not work in the world through the corporate church; rather, the church’s work is “empowered” by the Spirit.

Each of these denominational statements has two broad features in common. First, baptism, a practice central to the Anabaptist tradition, is presented as theologically non-essential to the Christian life. It is carried out as an act of obedience. Baptism is described as a statement, a testimony, or a sign about that life, but not necessary for it. The doctrinal statements do not present a construal of baptism that would provide rationale for why a ritual washing is more effective than a verbal testimony. If we were to compare the Christian life to a journey, say hiking the Appalachian Trail, baptism would not be a form of preparation or a natural and necessary way of beginning. It would be more like a moment in which the hiker, following the instructions of some ancient backpacking authority, held up a sign telling others that he or she had decided to tackle the challenging trail. Obedience is an admirable reason for continuing to baptize. However, its nonessential characterization contradicts Anabaptism’s history and the ancient Christian practice. It fails to account for passages such as 1 Pet 3:21, which places some constitutive element of baptism in a causal relationship with salvation. This nonessential description leaves Anabaptist communities open to short-sighted redefinitions of the practice, manifested in the last century by the declining age of baptismal candidates.

The second common feature is that the visible church, another central aspect of the Anabaptist tradition, exists in a sort of second class relationship to the individual believer’s relationship with God. At a conceptual level, and in colloquial terms, the church is a bit like a third wheel in an individual’s personal relationship with God. Though the Spirit is said to do many things in the lives of believers and is also described as the Spirit of the church, the Anabaptist documents are careful to avoid stating that the Spirit works in the world through the church. Though the church is affirmed as the body of Christ, the most straightforward way of receiving this proposition—that Jesus remains present to humanity through the church—is mostly dismissed. Instead, the church is said to be the visible representation of Jesus, as though a body were a representation of a mind or a soul. In these documents the presence of the church does not constitute the presence of God in the world. Not only is this logically strained—for how can the Spirit of God be in the church and the church not constitute God’s presence in the world—but this ecclesial marginalization allows for the continuation of a revivalist practice of baptism that loses discipleship in its search for conversion.

Throughout the rest of this volume my evaluation of these contemporary documents will be both affirming and critical. I will affirm the importance of Anabaptist communities continuing to describe baptism as an individual’s pledge to live according to the pattern of the life of the first-century Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. This view correlates with the discipleship emphasis of Matt 28:19–20 and the widely held assumption that baptism is done in part as an act of imitation of Jesus’ own baptism. I will be critical of the fact that the practices and the body ordained by God are not affirmed as ways of mediating divine presence. The work of God in the world is seen to circumvent Christ’s body and to proceed directly to the hearts of individuals. These assumptions are debilitating because they enable a form of discipleship that can ignore God, for if the work and presence of God are both invisible and exclusively personal then they are rightly held in suspicion or even dismissed. If God’s presence is unnameable and his work beyond apprehension, then individuals are ultimately alone in their quests to follow the example of Jesus. If God’s presence and work cannot be understood—even using theological categories—then this God is unpredictable and unreliable, maybe even unidentifiable.

The critical elements of this analysis will make some nervous. I can imagine a critic pointing to 1 Tim 2:5, which reads: “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all . . .” The critic might argue that my thesis could lead to the denial of the universal accessibility of God through Jesus. I believe such fears are misguided since the sort of divine mediation lacking in the Anabaptist statements is not that which would create a barrier between individuals and God, what seems to be Paul’s worry. It is not of the sort that would nullify the life and work of Jesus. The mediation of God’s presence and action that would fill the lacuna in these Anabaptist construals of baptism is that which the writer of this letter to Timothy participated in and the type that the church which produced the Bible remains. These were real, flawed people enabled to undertake the work of God in the world. In them God made his presence and will accessible to others. The form of ecclesial mediation I will argue for is one that upholds the necessity of the church as the body through which God chooses to be present in the world. It is a form that upholds God’s choice to act through the church in baptism both to cleanse and to welcome new members of Christ’s body. It is a form of ecclesial mediation in which God chooses to be present to humanity in much the same way as ancient Israel. At its best Israel was not a barrier between God and the rest of the nations. Israel was the people in which God’s presence was manifest and where God’s will for human sociality could be recognized. Of course Israel was not always at its best, and it was at these times that God’s grace was most evident. God’s non-rejection of Israel despite its unfaithfulness is pre-figured by God’s non-rejection of humanity despite the fall. Jesus himself is the mediator that the writer of 1Timothy speaks about, and Jesus is God’s gracious faithfulness in making Israel a blessing. In this volume I am arguing that baptism must be understood to participate in Jesus’ continued bodily mediation through the church.48

I refer to the lack of appropriate ecclesial mediation in these Anabaptist documents as a lacuna. Just as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, so does a community’s theology. What these contemporary Anabaptist documents assert in place of an appropriate form of ecclesial mediation is the voluntary power of the individual. Instead of God acting through the church in baptism, the individual makes a proclamation of her own. For children to be baptized as “believers” is to have the very concept of belief, which in this case is meant to denote a response to the call to follow Jesus in the community of other disciples, reduced to a very basic mode of self-assertion—the ability to speak. The story that this chapter opened with invites us to challenge the logic that equates voluntariety and speech with belief and discipleship. It also points to the poverty of a cosmopolitan reduction of spiritual life and maybe even the dryness or one-dimensionality of non-sacramental construals of ecclesial practices. As an alternative to this rationalist flattening out of life, revivalism presents the experience(s) of conversion. Contemporary Anabaptism, to speak very generally, vacillates between these two modern postures. And yet as revealing as O’Connor’s story of a child’s baptism might be, it is ultimately a parable of deconstruction. It tugs at the loose threads of our assumptions but knits no new garments. In a parallel way I am suggesting that the baptism of children is a crucial distortion in the implementation of believers’ baptism. It is one that Amish Anabaptists demonstrate is not inevitable. Even though the trend of child baptism can be correlated with the influence of revivalism, Anabaptist theologies of baptism bear responsibility for its perpetuation. Or at the very least they show how much Anabaptists have internalized this theological ambiguity. Lacking a clear affirmation of concrete media through which God is present to the world or acts in it, these communities have made themselves vulnerable to continually marginalizing practices such as baptism—even the church.

1. The following summary is taken from O’Connor’s short story, “The River,” 157–74. O’Connor engages similar themes in a more extended format in her book, The Violent Bear It Away. Fredrick C. Bauerschmidt reflects briefly on O’Connor’s “The River” in the context of baptism in “Baptism in the Diaspora,” 16–61. In “The River” the child’s name and subsequent re-naming is given theological significance. Since I cannot explore this here, I simply avoid mentioning the child’s name at all.

2. O’Connor, “The River,” 163.

3. Ibid., 165.

4. Ibid., 166.

5. Ibid., 168.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 173.

8. Ibid., 173–74.

9. This statement is also known as the “Schleitheim Brotherly Union.” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, s.v. “Schleitheim Confession (Anabaptist, 1527).” http://www.gameo.org. Hereafter all references to this online encyclopedia will be abbreviated GAMEO.

10. GAMEO, s.v. “Dordrecht Confession of Faith (Mennonite, 1632).”

11. Leland D. Harder, GAMEO, s.v. “Age at Baptism.”

12. The reference is to the article cited above, but the data Harder is referring to here is from the 1973 study of the Brethren in Christ Church published as Kauffman and Harder, Four Centuries Later.

13. This is demonstrated by a study done by Donald Kraybill, Conrad Kanagy, and Ronald Burwell. These sociologists have published various aspects of their study in diverse venues; however, data related to baptism was shared with me in private correspondence, June–July, 2008. Some of the data from this survey was published by Kanagy in Road Signs for the Journey.

14. Garrett, “Baptists Concerning Baptism,” 65. Also see George, “Southern Baptists,” 47.

15. Haymes, “Baptism,” 125.

16. Nolt, History of the Amish, 87–88.

17. Hostetler, Amish Society, 77–78, 365–66.

18. Ibid.

19. 1001 Questions and Answers, 43–44. This text appears to be an anonymously redacted version of one written by Daniel Kauffman in 1907 entitled, 1000 Questions and Answers on Points of Christian Doctrine, which seems to have been later published by Mennonite Publishing House of Scottdale, PA in 1933. The “Thirty-Three Articles of Faith” is a reference to “The Confession of Faith” published in Winchester, Virginia in 1837. This was an English translation of the much older Belydenisse near Godts heylig woort, which appeared in the Hoorn Martyr Book (Historie der warachtighe getuygen) in 1617. It was published most influentially in the Martyr’s Mirror in 1660. The confession itself is believed to be an edited compilation of sentences from Menno Simons. For more information and an English translation, see GAMEO, s.v. “Confession of Faith (1617).”

20. Miller, Our Heritage, 148–69.

21. Hostetler, Amish Society, 79–81.

22. Kraybill reports that the Amish have a retention rate above 90 percent (Amish Culture, 186). Other sources describe a range between 65 and 95 percent, depending on the community.

23. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 263.

24. T. Schlabach, “Mennonites, Revivalism, Modernity,” 398–415.

25. Juhnke, “Review of Mennonite Tent Revivals, 484–85.

26. GAMEO, s.v. “Revivalism.”

27. Mennonite General Conference, “Nurture and Evangelism of Children.”

28. Miller, “Mennonites,” 23.

29. Rom 6:3–4.

30. Mark 8:34–35.

31. Matt 19:14.

32. Matt 28:19–20.

33. Augustine, Confessions, 10. Though the Wills translation is not an academic one, I appreciate the candor with which he renders Augustine’s reflections.

34. This document can be found under the “Beliefs” heading on the Assemblies of God website, http://www.ag.org/top/Beliefs/gendoct_11_accountability.cfm.

35. Similar passages include 1 Sam 3:7; Jer 1:4–7; and Luke 2:52.

36. Finger, Contemporary Anabaptist Theology, 131.

37. Jeschke, Believers Baptism for Children, 103–24.

38. As quoted in Wood, Flannery, 23.

39. Snyder, Following in the Footsteps, 109–10.

40. See the MWC map on the Mennonite World Conference website: http://www.mwc-cmm.org/en15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14&Itemid=17&lang=en.

41. See the NA Anabaptist map available on the Mennonite World Review website: http://media.mennoweekly.org/ static/images/anabaptist_map.pdf.

42. A variety of reference works can provide details. For example, see Kraybill, Concise Encyclopaedia. The variety of Anabaptist groups is not merely geographical. Kraybill reports that in 2001 there were more than thirty Anabaptist groups and 370 congregations in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania alone (Amish Culture, 15).

43. Koop provides a helpful introduction to the status of confessions of faith in Anabaptist studies as well as an analysis of key seventeenth-century confessions in his Anabaptist-Mennonite Confessions.

44. This and following references to the Conservative Conference view of baptism are drawn from the CMC “Statement of Theology” and the “Statement of Practice.” These can be found at http://cmcrosedale.org/index.shtml. For each denominational description discussed I choose to reference official documents posted on the web since this is the most public and accessible venue in which these views are expressed. However, this means that quotations will not be cited with page numbers. Instead, in the text I will try to make clear to which section of the document I refer.

45. This and following references to the Mennonite Brethren view of baptism are drawn from the “detailed version” of the CCMB “Confession of Faith”: http://www.mbconf.ca/home/products_and_services/resources/theology/confession_of_faith/detailed_version/.

46. This and following references to the Brethren in Christ view of baptism are drawn from the “Articles of Faith and Doctrine” of the BCNA: http://www.bic-church.org/about/ articlesoffaith.asp.

47. This and following references to the “Confession of Faith in Mennonite Perspective” can be located at http://www.mcusa-archives.org/library/resolutions/1995/index.html.

48. Miroslav Volf has developed an argument from a Free Church perspective toward similar ends (After Our Likeness, 160–68).