foreign to Anabaptism, as the affirmations about the ban and church discipline demonstrate, it is employed inconsistently. Though the church can excommunicate members in the name of God, it does not welcome them or nurture them in that same name. Instead, when Anabaptist churches address these more obviously positive aspects of the Christian life they do not speak of God acting through his people but of either the power of an individual’s will or the mysterious, invisible workings of the Spirit. The question is whether or not this footing provides enough traction to support the rigors of the sort of life intended.
Miroslav Volf notes the ramifications of this challenge in After Our Likeness. He observes, “Because human beings appropriate salvific grace in faith, the understanding of salvation (and thus also of the church) is shaped in an essential fashion by the way the faith is mediated. Hence, an individualistic understanding of the mediation of faith is at once also an individualistic view of salvation, and a communal understanding of the mediation of faith is also a communal view of salvation.”57 Though Volf’s categories of faith and salvation are not the operative ones in our present discussion, his insight about the link between the mediation of faith and the subsequent view of salvation is critical. If Anabaptists understand the process of initiation into the community to be one of personal and entirely spiritual encounter with God, the view of the subsequent life of that community must either uphold this initial encounter or exist awkwardly in dissonance with it. If the church is not a necessary medium through which God initiates new believers, the subsequent life of the believer will remain at odds with the claims the community makes about its role in something like redemptive discipline. The conceptual link with baptism is the belief that it functions in part as a pledge indicating of the candidate’s voluntary submission to the church’s power of the keys. The early Anabaptist leader Balthasar Hubmaier explains: “[W]hen he receives the baptism of water the one who is baptized testifies publicly that he has pledged himself henceforth to live according to the Rule of Christ. By virtue of this pledge he has submitted himself to sisters, brothers, and to the church so that when he transgresses they now have the authority to admonish, punish, ban, and reaccept him.”58 It is crucial to remember that this act of submission is granted to a body in which the candidate has voice. In the Anabaptist tradition it is not an alien clerical structure that claims divine power.
Yet the double standard remains: Anabaptist churches are willing to claim the role of divine mediator in discipline but not in welcome. They are willing to serve as the film critic but not its producer. Before turning more directly to a description of ecclesial mediation it will be useful to consider in a more formal way the two most prominent alternatives to affirming the church’s mediatorial role. I have alluded to these in various ways, yet considering representatives of these two alternatives will strengthen my case that a more directly affirmed concept of ecclesial mediation is necessary to rightly practice believers’ baptism.
Alternative One: Human Agency in Place of Divine
Stated rather crudely, one alternative to ecclesial mediation is to deny that individuals need the assistance of God to live righteously. “Righteous character” is how Thomas Finger describes the goal of salvation in the view of most early Anabaptists. He suggests they, like many Catholics, were more concerned with the goal of salvation than with the process through which it was achieved.59 This first alternative to ecclesial mediation extends, even caricatures this by denying that divine assistance is needed to achieve this goal. Here the powers of reason and the will form the gravitational field within which the human creature subdues unrighteousness. Nothing more than a clear-eyed, rational view of ethics is needed to produce the cruciform life. This alternative is ready at hand for Anabaptists because of the tradition’s humanist roots.
Balthasar Hubmaier’s emphasis on commitment is one example of a theology of baptism shaded this way. In his 1525 treatise, On the Christian Baptism of Believers, he describes the rite as “an outward confession or testimony through which visible brothers and sisters can know each other . . .”60 Summarizing Hubmaier’s view, Wayne Pipkin writes, “In the act of baptism one commits oneself to be a follower of Christ—if necessary, to the point of martyrdom.”61 The relevant idea here is that as a product of the will, commitment represents a cognitivist understanding of discipleship that privileges the role of reason. This strips baptism of any objective, effective, or performative power. It is only semiotic. For people like Hubmaier, who retained much of his Catholic training, this was tempered by a high ecclesiology so that baptism was not distanced from Christian formation. However, the same assumption cannot be made of contemporary Anabaptism where this medieval ecclesiology has been replaced by a revivalist ecclesial minimalism. The denominational statements surveyed earlier demonstrate the results of this quite clearly. This rationalist emphasis loses sight of the goodness of creation and the ability—even the preference—of God to make use of common elements and practices such as those by which the church is constituted.
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