An Atheist Reflects on Anabaptism

Alan Soffin

In thinking about the problems for respondents and other avowed theists who are Mennonites, I returned to the description of Anabaptism one finds repeated in different sources. With respect to the immediately schismatic decision against infant baptism in favor of "adult: commitment (and baptism) I could conceive no reason for the decision save that adults are assumed to be able to make mature, informed judgments.

It seemed and seems to me that an insistence upon adult commitment could not have been based only on age or size or strength or citizen status or responsibility according to law, common or formal. There had to be a reason that was more than formal, more than merely a group-sanctioned rule, for risking obloquy or worse by rejecting infant baptism and, frankly, running the risk of waiting until adulthood to ask for commitment.

The only plausible candidate for insisting on adult commitment was surely the notion that with adulthood comes what is called "maturity"—maturity not of body but of judgment. And surely there can be no way to distinguish immaturity from maturity of mind save by the ability to distinguish what is true from what is false and what is right from what is wrong.

Since truth and right are not mere matters of opinion (else how sanely to insist on right or wrong religions or religious practices?), they must have essentially to do with we we know. What we know and what we only think are for human beings the two opposite banks of life’s river. Only the bank of knowledge can keep us from death in the river. Thus the question of commitment presupposes a judgment upon evidence and inference. It presupposes, in short, the quest for wisdom.

And so, as John Dewey wisely said, "Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy." To think honestly is not to know the answer beforehand, and not to know the answer beforehand is to risk a conflict between what you hope for, what you live by, and what is true or possible.

Our origin, our meaning, and our direction are profound and difficult subjects. Is it a surprise that these, one way or another, should be subject to difficult changes? Religion asks for the meaning of life—how to live and how to die. To my mind this is what Anabaptism, as I read it its origin, realized was not a subject for early, uninformed, immature commitment. 

Nor, to my mind, can it rest on faith, for faith can be entered upon without information or mature judgment. A child can have faith just as an adult can. And if we say only an adult can have "genuine" or "real" or "authentic" faith, then we are implicitly insisting that reason and truth and profundity of feeling must be the foundation of any hopeful or trusting commitment. We are back to inquiry and the absence of guaranteed outcomes to honest investigations.

Finally, having faith is a decision, not an isolated act. This aspect of it too entails responsibility and groundedness rather than pure, abstract, choice.

For these reasons, the spirit—indeed, the distinguishing principle—of Anabaptism is its implicit presupposition of wisdom as the ground of commitment. In this way, to my surprise, I find myself in the same tradition, striving to know the truth with respect to humanity’s origin, place, and role. 

With Anabaptism, I understand that the answers cannot themselves be a matter simply of choice. Rather, they must be founded on the hardest reflection—on experience, on testimony, on literature, on history, and on the truths revealed in the context of vocation, family, and love (the context of consequence and responsibility).

——Alan Soffin, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, numbers among his interests philosophy, religion, filmmaking, writing, and music ranging from classical through jazz and international sounds. Soffin is author of the new book Rethinking Religion: Beyond Scientism, Theism, and Philosophic Doubt (Cascadia, 2011).