A Command, Not a Custom

The thirteenth chapter of John's gospel records Jesus washing his disciples' feet at the last supper and telling them to do likewise for one another. Most Christian traditions read the episode as a lesson in humility, illustrated once rather than commanded as an ongoing rite. A smaller number of churches, chiefly within the Anabaptist and Mennonite family, read the same words as instituting a third ordinance alongside baptism and the Lord's Supper, binding rather than merely exemplary. Dirk Philips, a founding Dutch Anabaptist elder, gave the practice sustained theological treatment in his Enchiridion of 1564, and the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, the most widely adopted Mennonite confession, gives footwashing an article entirely of its own alongside baptism and communion. Of nineteen Anabaptist and Mennonite confessions written between 1527 and 1874, twelve include the ordinance and seven omit it, so even within the tradition that treats it as commanded rather than optional, the practice has never been universal. Where it is kept, the churches that keep it argue for it as an instruction Christ gave, not as an inherited custom that happens to have persisted. The seven confessions that omit the ordinance generally treat footwashing as a matter of Christian love better left to conscience than fixed as a third binding rite alongside baptism and communion.