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

object to laying their bodies in consecrated ground, as if they were outside
of the Church. "We bury them," say they, "as Christians, confessing
thereby that we believe the strong assurances of Christ. The bodies of these
unbaptized children have part in the joyous resurrection of life." 271
HOFFMAN (Tuebingen, 1727), to whom we owe one of the most
admirable of the older expositions of the Confession, says: "It does not
follow from these words that all children of unbelievers, born out of the
Church, are lost. Still less is such an inference true of the unbaptized
children of Christians; for although regeneration is generally wrought in
infants by Baptism, yet it may be wrought extraordinarily by an operation
of the Holy Spirit without means, which the Augsburg Confession does
not deny in these words. It merely desires to teach the absolute necessity
of the new birth, or regeneration, and the ordinary necessity of Baptism.
On the question whether the infants of the heathen nations are lost, most of
our theologians prefer to suspend their judgment. To affirm as a certain
thing that they are lost, could not be done without rashness." 272
FEUERLIN (Obs. to A. C. p. 10,) says: "In regard to the infants of
unbelievers, we are either to suspend our judgment or adopt the milder
opinion, in view of the universality of the salvation of Christ, which can be
applied to them by some extraordinary mode of regeneration."
CARPZOV, whose Introduction to our Symbolical Books is a
classic in its kind, says: "The Augsburg Confession does not say that
unbaptized infants may not be regenerated in an extraordinary mode. The
harsh opinion of Augustine, and of other fathers, in regard to this, was
based upon a misunderstanding of John iii. 5, for they regarded those
words as teaching an absolute necessity of Baptism, when, in fact, that
necessity is only ordinary--a necessity which binds us, and will not allow
us to despise or neglect Baptism, but does not at all bind God to this mean,
as if He could not, or would not, in a case of necessity arising in His own
providence, perform that in an extraordinary way, which, in other cases,
He performs
271 P. 418.
272 Pp. 36, 37.