In my thirteenth year of life [description of his baptism]. I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. I stood before the congregation and the elder said to me publicly: "Today you present yourself to join a company of people with no other doctrine or law save the New Testament. The New Testament is our creed. If anyone asks you for a copy of your creed you can do nothing better than to hand him a copy of the New Testament. I counsel you that if you ever find a people who are keeping closer to the precepts of the New Testament than the Brethren, go and join them." The step I am now taking is in obedience to the counsel of the elder from whom I first received instruction in Christ.
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The step I now take is in obedience to my conscience and under the impulsion of a sense of duty. What I do now is no more a repudiation of that which is good, holy, true, and beautiful in my former association than the Apostle Paul’s following his vision of Jesus, the Messiah, was a repudiation of Israel and his brethren, the Israelites.
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I witness this to my friends and the many whom I have tried to instruct. I would that my witness and my protest against the present course of the Church of the Brethren could be understood as an action of love after prolonged self-examination. My years in the Church of the Brethren almost exactly correspond to the period in which the church was drawn into the wake of nineteenth century religious and social liberalism. I have been associated with, or have known, most of the church’s leaders of this period. .... I wish to record my judgment that the only path of return for the Church of the Brethren from the verge of absorption into humanism is to return to the ideal of a New Testament church, with the apostolic writings as authoritative law, norm, and guide.
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For myself, I believe the Spirit spoke at Schwartzenau, and I believe that the biblical party of the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation represents in our century the clearest line of God’s speaking. I wish to record my conclusion that much of the nominal "church work" of the past century has not been an extension of God’s Kingdom as such, but primarily the attempt to bring religious-minded people into some predetermined attitude toward the economic-political-social order of our Western capitalistic world.
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I wish a church fellowship founded in a loyal biblicism. As a safeguard against biblicism becoming a shelter for a too-extreme individualism, the historical Dunker remedy was the collective counsel of the Brethren. Such counsel, willingly accepted in love, becomes a most useful witness and a most useful method of developing the inner spiritual life. One of the errors of our times is that the inner may be separated from the outer and still exist.
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As I look back across the years I am humiliated and penitent at my failures, and it is no idle mouthing of Scripture to say that I have been an unprofitable servant. I am astonished at how many moods, whims, fads, fancies, and tangents I have participated in. I have here read a judgment of the Church of the Brethren - and it is my clearest judgment - but I am under the judgment too, for why were not my words effective in averting the perils I so deplore? I have earned the praise of men as a teacher, but seldom have I been able to communicate the deep conviction by which I lived.
Source: "Apologia" by Floyd Mallott, Brethren Life and Thought, Spring 1965
