Participating Witness. Anthony G. Siegrist

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Participating Witness - Anthony G. Siegrist Princeton Theological Monograph Series

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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.

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