The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

or Christian world, which we call Christendom. The real question settled
then by the Apostle is no more than this, that the child of one Christian
parent has the same spiritual relation as the child whose parents are both
Christians, leaving it in the main an open question what those relations are.
Hence the inference from this passage goes to the ground, that children are
members of the visible church by their birth, and much more the inference
that they are born again by virtue of their relation to Christian parents.
Death no regenerating power.
4. Nor is there any power in death to regenerate. There are those
who seem to think that the body is the seat of original sin, and that all that
is necessary to redeem the soul from the power of sin, is to separate it from
the body. But the true primary seat of sin is the soul. The body can be
spoken of as the seat of sin only in a secondary sense, and because of the
soul's connection with it. The mere separation of the soul from the body,
cannot in itself change the soul's moral condition. He that is unregenerate
before death, remains unregenerate after death, unless after death the Holy
Spirit make the great change. Death in itself can have no such power, and
no such tendency. But if the Holy Spirit can work this change in an infant
after death, He can just as readily do it before its death, and the whole idea
of purgation after death, of a change of relation to God after the departure
of the soul, of a renewal of probation in an eternal world, is utterly foreign
to the entire tendency of the New Testament doctrine. To admit it, is to
admit the existence of a purgatory; it would grant the Romish doctrine in
its main point, and the controversy would narrow itself to the comparative
trifles of the duration and modes of that purgatory. No such refuge is
necessary. The great change is wrought by the Holy Spirit alone, and the
possibilities and probabilities of human regeneration are limited by nothing
but His purpose and His power. Any regeneration for which infinite power
is adequate, and which divine goodness purposes and promises, may and
will be wrought.
Twelfth Thesis. Relations of baptism to original sin.
XII. This new birth by the Holy Spirit has Baptism as one of its
ordinary means. Conf., "Durch die Taufe," "per Baptismum.”