Michael Wohlfahrt, an Anabaptist immigrant from Krefeld, Germany, and a member of the Brethren/Dunker community in Philadelphia, was a good friend of Ben Franklin.
Franklin, like many of the nation's founders, was a deist who acknowledged God as a Creator who established the laws of nature, but believed that humanity alone was responsible for governing human affairs and determining how to live a moral life. He was also a dedicated Freemason who, while he had a Methodist upbringing and occasionally attended Christ Church in Philadelphia (where he was buried), was never known to be a member of any church.
Nevertheless Franklin must have engaged in numerous conversations about religion with his friend Michael Wohlfahrt, and once suggested that Brethren and other Anabaptists should devise a creed to better clarify and define their beliefs. Mennonites did have their 1527 Schleitheim Confession and the Dordrecht Confession of Faith of 1632, but the Brethren had no such written document.
In Franklin's autobiography, he cites Wohlfahrt's response to his suggestion as follows:
When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.
Franklin responded with, "This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong."
According to seminary professor Scott Holland, the member of our son's church in Pittsburgh from whom I got this information, Wohlfahrt eventually joined the Ephrata Cloister, a utopian community influenced by both Radical Pietism and Anabaptism.
