Sword & Trowel 2018: Issue 1


 Since the Large Catechism strongly embraces infant baptism, we are


perhaps left mystified by Luther’s equally strong language on the abso- lute necessity of personal faith to the profitable reception of baptism. The Reformers were (it seems to me) placed in something of a di- lemma here, wishing to insist at the same time on the necessity of faith to sacramental efficacy, including the sacrament of baptism, and also on the baptism of infants, with all their apparent absence of meaningful faith. Different Reformers had different ways of trying to square the circle. In the Lutheran tradition, it came to be held that in the case of the infant, baptism itself supernaturally plants a seed of faith in his or her heart, which in the fulness of time will blos- som into a meaningful personal faith. This was the Lutheran version of baptismal regeneration. In the Reformed tradition, Zwingli held that in the case of the infant, the needed faith was exercised by the parents on their child’s behalf. In the English Reformed tradi- tion, the Westminster Confession taught that the efficacy of baptism was not tethered to the time of its reception. When the baptised infant matured and exercised his or her own faith, then the baptism received in infancy became retroactively effective. Baptists of course were to find none of these arguments convincing. They maintained, we may think with great- er clarity, consistency, and simplicity, that if one accepted the classical Prot- estant view of personal faith as the necessary precondition of sacramen- tal efficacy, then one should baptise


only those who professed such faith. Our Baptist ancestors, in other words, saw themselves as merely fol- lowing through the very doctrine of sacramental efficacy taught so plainly by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. If faith is needful to a right recep- tion of the sacraments, then we must baptise those alone in whom we see evidence of such faith. Anything else is a practical denial of the funda- mental principle of faith’s role in the sacraments. The Magisterial Reform- ers, therefore, by sowing so widely the theological seed of faith’s indis- pensability to the proper reception of the sacraments, prepared a future harvest among their Baptist sons and daughters.


CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH


Next we turn to the whole con- ception of the church. Because the Magisterial Reformers held church and state to be two sides of a single Christian citizen body, it followed that they regarded all members of their state-supported churches as Christians by profession. That is why we find definitions of the church that at first glance appear to be congrega- tionalist in nature. For example, in Luther’s Small Catechism, we find the following exposition of the statement in the Apostles’ Creed, ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit and in the holy Cath- olic Church’:


‘I believe that I cannot come to my Lord Jesus Christ by my own intelli- gence or power. But the Holy Spirit called me by the Gospel, enlight- ened me with His gifts, made me


page 20 Great Advances Sown by the Reformation


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