# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1855 04 10_S131
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

131

their sponsors in their stead with Yes. You confess that, despite much reflection, you have never been able to come to full clearness, and that even in the old writings of our fathers, which you have read over, you have nowhere found a satisfying explanation. You complain that this unclearness has become the more oppressive to you at every baptism at which you had to be present as sponsor, and has embittered to you the loving service of a Christian sponsor for a good part. Gladly do I comply with your wish, and since I presume that many Lutheran Christians suffer from the same unclearness, I will let my answer come to all such, for their service, through the "Lutheraner."

You ask, 1st, whether the questions mentioned are an essential part of the baptismal act. To this I answer without hesitation: No. However venerable, however fitting they may be, they yet do not belong to the indispensably necessary constituents of a right baptism, but are only a human ceremony with which baptism has been adorned. Neither Christ nor the Apostles prescribed these questions; just as we also hold an emergency baptism, in which for brevity's sake these questions must sometimes be omitted, to be a right baptism. Between the essential and the non-essential, between what is divine institution and what is human addition, we must carefully distinguish, if we would preserve for ourselves an evangelical, free conscience.

You ask further whether these questions, strictly speaking, ought not to be put only at the baptism of adults, and whether it is not something inconvenient and unnatural to lay before little children questions about their faith which they cannot answer with their own mouth. I gladly grant you that the above questions were originally designed for the baptism of adults. When in the earliest time of Christendom, as was natural, adults first, who had previously been instructed in the Christian faith, were baptized, then the holiness of the Sacrament required that they be asked about their faith, so that one might not impart it to one manifestly unbelieving and cast the pearl before swine. We have an example of this in Philip, who asked the eunuch, who begged baptism of him, beforehand: "If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest." To which the latter answered: "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Then, however, these questions were also transferred to the baptism of children, as a testimony that the baptism of adults and of children is one and the same baptism. Whether this transference be one suited to the nature of the child or not, I will explain myself on that when I have first answered your two following questions.

You ask, namely, 3d, whether you are to conceive the questions as a demand for a vicarious faith of the Church, which is represented through the sponsors and into whose bosom the person baptized is to be received. I answer: of a vicarious faith of the Church the Holy Scripture knows nothing, and accordingly the Lutheran Church also nothing. This is an opinion which we leave to the Roman Church, and if it has crept in among some Lutherans, this fact proves only that there are also Romanizing Lutherans. No man, not even the whole Church, can believe for another man. Every one must live by his own faith. A child also, if it is to be saved, must have its own faith; the faith of the Church can never replace the lack of one's own faith. Well may the Church by her faith help the child to its own faith, in that she asks God for faith for the child; well may she in faith bring the child to Christ and pray Him to receive and bless it; but never can she believe vicariously for the child. This interpretation is therefore wholly inadmissible and stands in direct contradiction to our doctrine of faith.

Or else, you ask, am I to conceive the questions as a demand for a promise of the child that it will believe in riper years, or as an obligation of the child to a future faith?

Your question gives ground for the suspicion that you stand in a considerable error. You seem to deny faith to the child to be baptized, in that you refer it to future times, to riper age. If that is your opinion, then I am by no means surprised that the questions in view are to you so dark a riddle. Could I convince you that a child at its baptism really has faith, then your unclearness would presently vanish of itself. Were I to remark to you that the assertion that a child cannot believe is precisely the foundation-pillar of the Anabaptists, on which their whole heresy rests, you would be terrified at it. It does not occur to me in the remotest degree to accuse you of an Anabaptist heresy; but so it goes, often a little leaven clings unawares to the most upright Christians, which they have yet to purge out. To deny faith to a child can only he who ventures to deny either the omnipotence or the grace of God, or the destination of the child to eternal life, or original sin. If, indeed, faith were a work of one's own reason and strength of man, then a child could believe as little as an adult; but since faith is a divine work, far exalted above all human reason, who will forbid the Spirit of God to have His work of grace also in children? If John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Ghost already in his mother's womb, why should not the same Holy Ghost have His work also in other Christian children, who do not yet, as is often the case with adults, wilfully resist Him? Or may we doubt the gracious will of God to give faith to the little ones, who wills that all men should be saved? Or are children by nature already fit to enter into the kingdom of God? Are they not also sinners, flesh born of flesh? Or is there for children another way to salvation than faith in Jesus Christ? It is true, God has ordained the preaching of His Word as the ordinary means of faith. Yet however earnestly God has bound us to this means, He is nevertheless not bound to it, and may also without this means work faith in the little children to be baptized, especially since they enjoy the intercession of the whole of Christendom, which without ceasing in the Lord's Prayer, as for the great, so for the little, prays: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. Or who may presume to deny to little children the general capacity of being brought to faith? It would be dreadful to put the little children on a level with the unreasoning creatures, the stones and plants and beasts, which indeed were not created by God to be vessels of the Holy Ghost. We must needs grant that little children also possess the essential parts of a true man created and destined for eternal life, though, as the members and powers of their body, so also the powers of their rational soul are in a yet undeveloped state. If you, beloved friend, are convinced by these brief hints that a child by God's power can believe, and that it also must believe, if holy baptism is to avail it unto salvation, according to the word of the Lord: he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; then the promise henceforth to believe in riper age, or the obligation to faith, will appear to you of itself as wholly insufficient. Such an interpretation would also stand in manifest contradiction with the sense of our question; for the child is not asked: wilt thou believe! but, dost thou believe?

Having now shown you, in what has gone before, the untenableness of your attempts to reconcile yourself by a convenient interpretation with those questions, do not be anxious on that account, as though a right interpretation, in keeping with the analogy of faith, were wholly impossible. Hear, finally, how I regard these questions with their answers. I regard them as a symbolic act, like the exorcism, by which we express our firm conviction that the child's own faith is indeed required, if it is to be saved by baptism; I regard them as a solemn protestation against the papistic error of an opus operatum, that is, against the error that the Sacrament saves even without the faith of the recipient. Not only that, however, but we also express by this symbolic act our good confidence that the gracious God hears our intercession and that of the whole of Christendom, and has given the little child saving faith, even though we cannot comprehend the nature of this child's faith, any more than that of adults. If, however, we may answer to the question: dost thou believe? into the soul of the child with a confident Yes, then we are also certain that the devil has no more power over the child, and that it by its faith has passed out of the kingdom of the devil into the gracious kingdom of Christ our Lord, and so the question also: dost thou renounce