of the church. I will refer to these as the “testimonial” and “sacramental” approaches. In the former, the ordinances are understood to point to the work of Christ and involve Christians subjectively. In the latter, God is understood to make direct use of these rites to affect Christians more objectively. Both reject an approach that might be called “spiritualist.” In the spiritualist perspective, all rituals and practices are viewed with suspicion. Rites such as baptism are considered unnecessary or virtually so because the core of the Christian faith is believed to be interior, to be occupied with analyzing the invisible soul’s posture before the invisible God. The conceptual fulcrum that activates spiritualist approaches to traditional church practices is the assumption that the eternal/temporal and holy/profane dichotomies are equivalent to a spiritual/physical dichotomy. The spiritualist approach was embraced by some early Anabaptists and forms of it are still upheld among branches of the Religious Society of Friends, the Salvation Army, and some Evangelical and Anabaptist groups. Spiritualism in its various forms holds that physical acts like rituals are at best a distant outworking of the more meaningful and determinative inner life, which is thought to have access to God that is direct and unmediated.
Most streams of Christianity have rejected the spiritualist approach. One reason for this is that it does not seem to take seriously enough the Eucharistic command of Jesus to “Do this in remembrance of me.”9 More generally, spiritualism appears insensitive to God’s approval of the material world and the embodied character of human creatures. Despite the fundamental nature of these critiques, the place of formal practices in many Anabaptist congregations remains tenuous. Irma Fast Dueck, writing from her vantage point as a faculty member at a Mennonite university, has noticed among her students what she calls an ongoing “lack of ritual sensibility.” She suggests, “There may be an implicit assumption that somehow the rites and rituals of the church belong to less mature stages of human development, destined for obsolescence by the triumph of reason. Or perhaps there is a suspicion of rituals and the rites of the church as somewhat pagan, magical, or idolatrous. Or, quite possibly, the way we engage in the ritual fails to capture the theological imagination of those observing the practice.” She concludes, “No matter what the reason, many of those in the Believers Church tradition are left to sustain meaningful baptismal practices against this lack of ritual sensibility.”10 This project will endeavor to overturn such minimizations of baptism, seeking to cultivate what Fast Dueck calls a “baptismal ecology.” This means that I will attend most closely to the dynamics of the two central Christian construals of baptism, the testimonial and sacramental approaches.
The disparity between these two ways of construing Christianity’s central rites marks the divide of vast ecclesial watersheds. Each encompasses both great rivers of tradition and numerous lesser streams of practical and ideological variance. There are also commonalities. In the first place, both affirm that baptism is a sign. Its function is not limited to the physical dirt or germs that water might remove. In other words, both affirm in some way the twin Augustinian descriptions of a sacrament as a “visible sign of an invisible grace” and as a “visible word.”11 Second, each affirms, though in significantly different ways, that baptism involves the coming together of the actions of God and those of human creatures. Neither position denies the importance of human dependence on God or God’s empowering recognition of human activity. Third, both affirm the public nature of baptism. Baptism is understood to be public in that it is never practiced by a lone individual and always invokes the historical and concrete nature of the church. Fourth, both acknowledge the importance of a relative similarity in form. For most Christian communities, regardless of whether they involve infants or not, baptism involves a ritual washing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The fifth and final basic commonality is the assumption that baptism is carried out in obedience to the command of Jesus. The divisive question is what this means. Thus in a parallel debate about communion, Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Luke are much debated: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”12 The tension lies between the words “is” and “remembrance.” Despite the significant commonalities, the testimonial and sacramental approaches diverge.
Sacramental theology, to even the initiated, can appear to be more than a neatly defined watershed; including the Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Catholic traditions, it seems to be a whole world unto itself.13 One access point into the jumbled folds of this landscape can be found in Robert Jenson’s claim: “The word in which God communicates himself must be an embodied word, a word ‘with’ some visible reality, a grant of divine objectivity. We must be able to see and touch what we are to apprehend from god; religion cannot do without sacrament.”14 The Anglican Book of Common Prayer provides another point of entry through its commonly affirmed definition that sacraments are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”15 In a sacramental understanding of baptism the individual is acted upon; she receives a gift.
The etymological background of the term “sacrament” is slippery. Though it seems to originally have been used to refer to the oath of allegiance given by a soldier to his commander, its common usage in the Christian tradition, with the exception of Tertullian’s early employment of the term, bears little resemblance. The language is conflicted significantly because of the Vulgate’s use of “sacrament” in instances when a more apt translation might be something like “mystery.” Most scholars agree that although the notion of a sacrament is older than Augustine’s use of it, his rather fluid theology of the sacraments is the baseline for subsequent development in the West. The Augustinian view is that a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace, and each one pertains to the magnum sacramentum mysterium, Christ and the church. In the twelfth century Hugh of St. Victor added nuance to the traditional Augustinian description by providing, according to Leonard Vander Zee, “a distinction between what might be called a general sign, one thing merely pointing to another, and a sacramental sign, which also confers the reality to which the sign points.”16 Seven sacraments were then thought to fall under the standard medieval definition of a “sign which brings about what it signifies.” This was made more pointed through the traditional phrase efficient significando, which presses sacraments “bring about what they signify precisely by signifying it.”17
The nature of the sacraments was furiously debated during the Protestant Reformation, both in the parting of ways between the reformers and medieval sacramental theology and between the Protestant leaders themselves. Most famous is the contentious debate, only distantly related to this project, about the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Though Luther rejected descriptions dependent on Aristotelian metaphysics, he opposed Zwingli’s more radical approach. For Luther the concept of promise was central to his understanding of the sacraments. In The Babylonian Captivity he argues that even though all of Scripture can be described as either a command or a promise, “[I]t has seemed proper to restrict the name of sacrament to those promises which have signs attached to them.”18 Ultimately, this means that there are only two sacraments. In this same text Luther rejects the traditional sacramental assumption that the sacraments are effective in themselves, ex opera operato, or “by the work performed,” because he believes that a sacrament is only effective if it is received in faith.19 Despite these and other ways in which Luther revised sacramental theology, for contemporary Lutherans it remains of paramount importance that God acts “in, with, and under” these rites. David Yeago further explains this axiom: “On the one hand, the reality of the sacraments cannot be accounted