Believers’ Baptism as an Ongoing Practice of Constellating Identities: Historical and Theological Insights after the Radical Reformation’s 500th Year

As Anabaptism celebrates its 500th year, authoritarianism and partisan violence loom menacingly on the horizon of possible futures. This article revisits early Anabaptists and English Baptists, who insisted upon believers’ baptism amidst a broader struggle to distinguish between the loyalties generated by the orders of church and state. Before this insistence, however, these reformers worked within their local, mainstream reform movements. They became increasingly radical, advocating for soul liberty and the separation of church from state, only as their reforms were rejected and they were alienated from state-church spaces. Well-adjusted to the prevailing social order, their neighbours could not begin to fathom the radicals’ worldview, and believers’ baptism came to symbolise the radicals’ break with reality itself. Ultimately, this article offers a constructive theology of baptism to prepare ‘small b’ baptists to discern intentionally the tensions among modernity’s many loyalties and to navigate faithfully the twenty-first century’s environmental pressures.