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

the outward part of Baptism is essential absolutely, nor that regeneration
necessarily attends it. The necessity of the outward part of Baptism is not
the absolute, one of the Holy Spirit, who Himself works regeneration, but
is the ordinary necessity of the precept, and of the means. It is necessary
because God has enjoined it, and voluntary neglect to do what God has
enjoined destroys man. It is necessary because God has connected a
promise with it, and he who voluntarily neglects to seek God's promises in
God's connections will look for them in vain elsewhere. It is necessary
because God makes it one of the ordinary channels of His grace, and he
who voluntarily turns from the ordinary channel to seek grace elsewhere,
will seek it in vain. It is so necessary on our part that we may not, we dare
not, neglect it. But on God's part it is not so necessary that He may not, in
an extraordinary case, reach, in an extraordinary way, what Baptism is His
ordinary mode of accomplishing. Food is ordinarily necessary to human
life; so that the father who voluntarily withholds food from his child is at
heart its murderer. Yet food is not so absolutely essential to human life that
God may not sustain life without it. God's own appointments limit us, but
do not limit Him. Man does live by food alone on the side of God's
ordinary appointment; yet he no less lives, when God so wills, not by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Is Baptism absolutely necessary?
5. Hence, of necessity, goes to the ground the assumption that the
Augsburg Confession teaches that unbaptized infants are lost, or that any
man deprived, without any fault of his own, of Baptism is lost. When we
say absolute, we mean that which allows of no exceptions. The absolute
necessity of Baptism, in this sense, has been continually denied in our
Church.
Luther.
The language of LUTHER is very explicit on this point. 270 In his
"Christliches Bedenken" (1542), in reply to anxious Christian mothers, he
(1) refutes and forbids the practice of the Romish Church, of baptizing a
child not fully born, a practice based upon the idea of the absolute
necessity of Baptism
270 Leipzig ed. of Luther's Works, Vol. xxii. pp. 400-422.