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In the missionary situation of Protestantism in Latin America, it has been most natural to conceive of evangelical Christianity as a unity. Under the pressure of an ancient and anti-religious secularism, what all non-Roman Catholic Christians held in common was invariably more significant than what divided them.

But from the beginning it was not so. Students of the sixteenth-century Reformation have in recent years made it abundantly clear that there were actually two quite different Reformation movements, expressing two divergent conceptions of the nature and mission of the church. On one side, there was the Reformation supported by governments in northern Europe and Britain. Whether in the Lutheran, Reformed, or Anglican forms, these official magisterial reformations had in common a fundamental conception of the limits and the pattern of reform. They maintained, from the Middle Ages, the alliance of church and state as this was expressed in the church’s support for the political goals of the local government and in the government’s responsibility for seeing through the Reformation. They also maintained the identity of church and society as expressed in the universal obligation of infant baptism.

On the other side of the great division, even though springing from the same historical soil of the early Swiss Reformation, there was the position of the free churches: the Swiss Brethren, the Bruderhof movement in Moravia, and Mennonites in the Low Countries. These were the weak but courageous representatives of this other vision of the church’s liberty, which has not ceased to grow in numbers and in spiritual vitality over the centuries.

The time is rapidly drawing near when Protestant Christians in Latin America will need to face with growing seriousness this division within the Protestant heritage. During the first generation of missionary aggressiveness, and continuing as long as evangelicals lived under the pressure of persecution, every member of an evangelical congregation obviously had come to that position by deep personal conviction. But now, with the decrease of clericalism, the change in the attitude of the Roman church, and a growth in numbers of Protestants, it may soon come about that second- and third-generation Protestants will raise for all evangelicalism many of the traditional questions implanted in the ancient debate about the baptism of infants. Likewise, the growing numbers and social prestige of Protestants will place before them questions of social responsibility and the possibility of a kind of establishment attitude toward society which was not previously possible in these nations.

Still another aspect of the need for a clarification of the issue of the free church is the great strength in Latin America of the “nonhistorical denominations.” These movements have neither a strong sense of historical perspective nor an outspoken concern for the sociological faithfulness of the church, although they are exclusively free church in their character and theological structure. As the strength of North American leadership is replaced by the intellectual and sociological maturation of indigenous leadership in these young movements, their attitudes toward culture and society can be expected to shift quite rapidly, as has already been demonstrated by the evolution of Pentecostalism in the United States. Therefore, it is not a sectarian revival of divisive character but, rather, an ecumenical responsibility for the spiritual freedom of the entire Protestant movement that leads us to suggest that the great theological challenge of the coming generation will center on the choices that need to be made at this point.

As we approach such a study it should not be assumed that our concern is to determine which denomination is and always has been right. With regard to a particular issue, such as the baptism of infants, it is true that theological responsibility demands that we not be satisfied with affirming two equally valid but contradictory answers. Yet, neither of the traditions currently represented in Latin America has come there straight from the New Testament. On one hand, the pedobaptist Protestant traditions (Waldensian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist) brought with them a form developed in Europe in the age of Protestant establishment at its height. Its maintenance in a free church missionary situation, although perhaps logically a contradiction, has not fundamentally changed the stance of the churches in society thus far. On the other hand, the North American believers-baptist groups have come to faith in a society for which, by a similarly paradoxical contradiction, the baptism of adults has become the established form of Protestantism in spite of formal separation of church and state. Thus, neither group has created a form of church life directly out of the Latin American situation. They have taken account of neither the Catholic conservatism of the past nor the revolutionary secularism that is now breaking in upon us. Therefore, although we deal with matters which historically have been expressed in the form of debate between denominations, let us not undertake them under any such immediately polemical assumptions.

Historic contestation over infant baptism has usually been made unfruitful by two mistakes:

a. On the one hand, in the Reformation era and ever since, it has been possible (and has in fact seemed most normal) to carry on a discussion of whether infants should be baptized as an isolated issue within the theology of the sacraments, a discussion seeking to decide the question solely on the basis of texts in the New Testament dealing specifically with baptism as authorized by Christ and as it is practiced by the apostles. While this kind of study is not completely inappropriate, it has also been largely fruitless because it placed the conversation in too narrow a frame. Far more is at stake than the proper handling of a ritual; the entire nature of the church and her place in the world is the issue.

b. The second misunderstanding has been just as harmful. Reformation debates about this issue began at the same time that Europeans were coming to conceive of themselves more and more as individuals. The Reformers themselves mightily fostered this humanistic individualism in their interpretations of the nature of faith and of revelation, but they retained the outward character of the institutions of Christendom in the sociology of their Reformations. It was normal that on both sides of the debate the question of infant baptism was understood consciously as concentrated upon the inward and individual experience. This concentration on the character of the experience of the individual was furthered immensely by the continuing argument around the topic of baptism in the following centuries. What it means to believe truly, what personal understanding and experiences are involved, how one can be sure that one has been forgiven—all such discussion tended in the direction of individualism which seemed to fit in well with the modern Western view of the person as a sovereign, and perhaps lonely, individual.

Again, this kind of study is not inappropriate. It continues to be theologically necessary. But, it is not at the center of the definition of the free church.

The Children of Abraham

The father of the community of the covenant, according to the New Testament as well as the Old, is Abraham, who forsook the earthly city in order to undertake a pilgrimage to the city of God. In quite separate portions of the New Testament, it is striking how uniformly we find the meaning of Abraham shifted away from the Judaistic understanding in order to state the nature of the community of the new covenant.

The first of these statements is in the beginning of the gospel story where John the Baptist was preaching the baptism of repentance. His audience at that moment was formed by Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism. He questioned their readiness to receive this sign of repentance: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”1 In other words, to be a child of Abraham is no longer guaranteed automatically by one’s simple hereditary connection to the people of Israel according to the flesh, nor even by a position of prominence in that people. To be a child of Abraham is a miracle, worked by God with no more human collaboration than is provided by a stone, a miracle reflecting itself in a new kind of life, namely in works “worthy of repentance.”2 John is not preaching individualism; he is picturing a new kind of community whose common basis is a novel renewing work of God and not a common family heritage.

In a quite different context as reported in John’s Gospel, Jesus himself discusses the same topic with the Jews:

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin . . . So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed . . . If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did.”3

Again the contrast is the same. The true child of Abraham will, like Abraham, believe and obey God. He who does not believe and obey in this manner, whatever his genealogy, is not a son of Abraham but of the devil.4 Thus, sonship is identical with liberty; to be a Jew who is not a child of Abraham by faith and obedience is to be a slave to sin.

The third recurrence of the same pattern of thought is found again in a quite different connection, as Paul instructs the Christians of Galatia concerning the meaning of justification by faith. The promise given to Abraham was a promise based upon his faith. God was bound not to the law, not to the mechanical succession of children from father, but to the spiritual succession of believing obedience. Those who rest in faith are the true sons of Abraham.5 The promise of the covenant, promulgated in the day of Abraham, is ratified and made fully valid only in Christ whose response was perfect obedience and through him in those who believe.

For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.6

Although the immediate issues with which Jesus and the writers were concerned in these three New Testament texts are varied, the presence of this striking parallelism of thought is evidence that it was not only a device of rhetoric or argument to which a preacher like Jesus or John or a teacher like Paul would refer just once in order to illustrate an argument. This was probably a standard line of thought in all of the New Testament church which, of course, needed to encounter the challenge of Judaism in every city.

What is here described is not individualism but a new kind of community, not a concentration upon the inner experience of guilt and forgiveness which an individual may feel but the incorporation of that individual into a fellowship of the forgiving and the forgiven. Certainly, in an age when modern individuals become more fully conscious of their personalities as individuals and of their feelings and consciousness as modern individuals, it will be appropriate that the increased consciousness of individual personality will find expression and meaning that coming to faith and baptism will have for the individual. But, to center our attention upon the fact that the baptism of individuals is especially fitting in the age of modern individualism and personalism is to shift the focus of the New Testament concern.

Also, at those points in the New Testament witness where baptism is not the issue, it is just as clear that we are to understand the meaning of the gospel as summed up in the creation of a new kind of community. When, in 1 Peter 2, the Christian fellowship is called a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, and told by an application of a quotation from the prophet Hosea that to “be now my people” is the equivalent of “having received grace,” the message is the same.7 The church of the New Testament does not simply pick up the heritage of Judaism according to the flesh and apply the same principle of ethnic continuity to a group founded upon a new doctrine. Rather, it creates a new principle of community and continuity.

Once again the same point is clear in Ephesians 3. Here, the apostle Paul describes the truth that both the abolition of the distinction between Jew and Greek and the rejection of the flesh and the law are ways of maintaining the identity of the people as a mystery. This mystery stands at the center of the divine purpose uniquely revealed to him in his ministry as apostle to the Gentiles.8

Thus, our understanding of what it means that the church in the New Testament is the church of committed believers must begin with the miraculous character of the community of faith in which people of all kinds belong without distinction, if they only believe. We shall not center our attention on the emotions or on the information upon which belief often centers (although naturally humans are the kind of beings who cannot believe without emotions or information). The fundamental definition of the free church is not found in the feelings individuals have had upon entering it but in its character as a community founded upon the redemptive activity of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit with its order based only upon that divine work.

The Missionary Community

Only the believers church can maintain its missionary character over the generations. For such a church continues in every generation to be dependent upon evangelization, unable to survive unless even the children of believers are won by gospel preaching to an adhesion that is not taken for granted. Otherwise, if the children of believers are thought of as already within the community of faith, the unavoidable result is that within two or three generations the focus of attention changes from winning those outside the people of God to educating and holding those who were born into Christian families. With the passage of time, this always resulted in the geographic identification of one area as Christian and of other areas as pagan, or of one racial group as Christian and others as pagan. Other deformations also tend to reinstate the spiritual equivalent of Judaism, namely, believing that the people of God is preserved by its external order and by the control that the older generation and the inherited law have over the youth. Not infrequently, this deformation goes to the point of Puritanism or of inquisition, not shrinking from the use of social or even physical coercion in order to make sure that everyone remains faithful.

It is certainly not to be taken for granted that the mere formality of baptizing only adults will avoid these deformations. But it is sure that if we insist that membership in the people of God is a matter of new birth and that mere conformity to the standards and behavior patterns and ideas of the people of God without personal conviction is no help, this is the needed safeguard. The refusal to baptize infants or the immature remains a most appropriate symbol of the refusal to forsake that missionary character that the church is called to retain.

The Fall of the Church

Ever since the age of the Reformation, Protestant historians have spoken of certain earlier events as constituting “the fall of the church.” This was their way of explaining how it could have come to pass that Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages was so far from the life of the New Testament church that the only way it could find renewal was apparently through conflict and division.

In this evaluation of the fallenness of the medieval church, all Protestants and numerous Catholics agreed. But, opinions were different as to what it was that constituted the fall. Certainly, it was not the simple fact that the church began to be tolerated in the age of Constantine. For some, the essential errors were specifically doctrinal or ritual: the development of the idea of the mass as a sacrifice or of salvation through works. For others, the issue was institutional.

Others have felt that what was basically wrong was the development of a church order centering in the papacy with the disciplinary authority in the bishops. For still others, it was the support given the church by the state and the development of the Christian doctrine of the just war, according to which alliance of church and state was felt to be not only possible but appropriate, making not only defensive war but even the crusade a Christian possibility.

All of these changes were of far-reaching importance; any one of them suffices to support the sixteenth-century claim that the Roman hierarchy had sacrificed its authority to speak for the true faith. But all of these were simply the superficial and very logical outworkings of a more fundamental change. The basic shift in orientation that we most identify as “the fall of the church” was that the Christian community was no longer a community of faith, constituted by the divine miracle of repentance, brought together out of the world and living in the midst of the world with a mission to the world, but that Christendom had been created by the identification of the Christian faith with the total human community in a given geographical area. That geographical area at the time was the Roman empire; later still smaller units could be spoken of as the church.

It is this identification of the church with total society, rendering possible the use of the term “Christendom” to designate a geographical area and a civilization, which constitutes the most characteristic description (and the infidelity) of the so-called Christian Middle Ages. The organizational relationships between the government and the hierarchy, the development of the papacy, and the development of the sacramental system are all the logical outworkings of this fatal alliance.

Thus, from the perspective of the church of believers, there is a certain sense in which we can with gratitude accept the secularization that characterizes the modern age. To the extent that this means Christian faith is being disentangled from a particular civilization, a particular part of the world, a particular social structure, and especially to the extent to which it is being disentangled from identification with the total membership of any one special group or nation, this development “clears the decks” for a restatement of what it means for the church to be in but not of the world.

By this we certainly do not mean that the mounting tide of non-religious or irreligious or anti-religious thought is itself wholesome or saving. We cannot say that the entire process of secularization is wholesome or that we can derive guidance from it for how God wants the world to develop. But at least the dismantling of the misunderstanding of Christendom is to be welcomed. We shall have made progress if we learn to understand the faith no longer as the cultural possession of a given population but, again, as the call to a voluntary community.

One of the obvious implications of the dissociation of church and society is the demand for religious liberty. It has been adequately demonstrated that the believers church movement of the Reformation marks the real origin of the concept of religious liberty. Religious liberty is not only a necessary limitation upon the power of the state; it also marks a voluntary renunciation by the church of any capacity to coerce. Many religious bodies have objected to the authority of the state in matters of religion when it was exercised against them. Yet, it is only from the perspective of the free church that we find Christian thinkers also insisting upon the renunciation of the use of such authority in favor of what they consider to be the truth. But this concern for religious liberty, as important as it has become in our age, is likewise not the rootage but simply the outworking of the disentanglement of the covenant of faith from the natural community.

What is true of religious liberty must be said for the concept of religious establishment as well. The church is not the church of the nation or of the state or of the social order. It is present in the midst of the population and the social order and concerned for their welfare. But, often enough, its contribution is a proclamation of judgment. Its capacity to be the true church is often dependent upon her independence from the powers currently exercising sovereignty. So, in a socially homogeneous community, if there should be no protest against extending to a church the privilege of official recognition, even then it would be wrong.

Conclusion

The testing of the freedom of the church often, if not always, comes at some external point where the circumference of the life of the church comes in contact with the claims of the world. Thus, we may need to speak of the governmental recognition of church, of the issue of religious liberty, of the freedom for the individual to make one’s own choice and commitment. In the same way, we can speak of specific polemical issues as we defend one kind of church practice against another. We shall continue to need to argue the wrongness of the baptism of infants. Yet behind or above or beyond all of this, the fundamental concern in our understanding of what it means to be the free church is the freedom of the Holy Spirit of God to constitute—in every day, in every generation, and in every place—that people of the new covenant whose daily existence reflects the reality that God has come in the midst of humanity to be their God and to make them his people.

1 Matt 3:9. See also Luke 3:8.

2 Matt 3:8.

3 John 8:31–34, 39.

4 See John 8:44.

5 See Gal 3:7-9.

6 Gal 3:26–29.

7 See 1 Pet 2:9–10 and Hosea 1:9.

8 See Eph 3:2–6.