Regeneration: Various Views
infusion of real power in baptism, does not exist. Faith naturally carries with it rebirth, a new mind-set, and new courage.
Regeneration, in fact, is nothing other than faith.53
For this reason Kaftan removes regeneration as well as Justification from the discussion of the order of salvation and restores it to the work of Christ. He thus considers regeneration as a benefit objectively prepared for the church in Christ's resurrection. It is only by faith in the resurrection that the individual person gains regeneration.
Regeneration: Various Views The relation to Justification, though very important, is definitely not the only issue that presents itself in connection with regeneration. Those who expect the problems that occur in this locus and the solutions offered for them to be significantly less numerous than those occurring in connection with the dogmas of the Trinity, the incarnation, atonement, and so forth are in for severe disappointment. The diversity of opinions is so immense that it is hard to gain a clear overview of it. In the first period, when Christianity made its debut in the world, people held to a simple sequence: faith and repentance opened the way to the benefits of the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. In this connection, they simply aligned themselves with the preaching of John the Baptist, Jesus, and the apostles. And even now that is still the way the public proclamation of the gospel of Christ proceeds both in the church and on the mission field. It cannot come with the demand of regeneration, but can only call adults to faith and repentance. Every new religious movement, such as the Reformation and later Methodism, therefore begins with the same invitation: as soon and as long as the gospel has to do with adults, faith and repentance are in the foreground. Calvin even made that his starting point and in the order of redemption placed regeneration after faith. Numerous theologians, in all
modalities and every period, refrained from following that pattern in the order of redemption. After treating the calling, they proceed to deal with the loci of faith and repentance.
But as soon as the church has gained an enduring place in the world and awakens to the need for reflection, two objections to this order present themselves. The first derives from the position of the children of believers, who cannot be counted as Gentiles, yet in their infancy cannot in fact believe and repent either. If they all remained alive, the difficulty could be somewhat relieved by the consideration that they would later have the opportunity to repent and believe. But this is not the case: thousands upon thousands of infants die before, during, or shortly after birth.54 And not only Christian sentiment, but also the scriptural doctrine of the covenant of grace in which not only believers themselves but also their children are included, resists the idea that these children are all lost. Now if no one can enter the kingdom of heaven except by faith and repentance, one is compelled to make a distinction between faith as capacity and faith as act, between conversion in a passive and an active sense
—in other words, between regeneration and repentance (faith), and in the order of redemption to have the former precede the latter.
Added to this, there was still another consideration that drove people in the same direction. As long as the church lives by the simple preaching of the gospel and remains a missionary church, it can acquiesce in the calling to faith and repentance. In that situation it confines itself to perceptible phenomena and feels no need to penetrate the underlying reasons for these phenomena. But that cannot last long. Reflection, specifically religious reflection and not just curiosity, inevitably awakens.
The Christian church, after all, was convinced from the outset that the salvation it had received was a gift of God. The moment it began to try to account for this fact and to examine Scripture more deeply on this point, it could no longer simply consider
faith and repentance as human acts but had to answer the question of what lay behind these acts, whether they originated in the human will or in the grace of God. It was all the harder pressed to answer it because, both inside and outside the church, it saw so many people grow up who never came to faith and repentance. At that point there was a parting of the ways.
Some people—all the followers of Pelagius of earlier and later date—maintained that after the call from God the way of salvation started with human beings, with their acts of faith and repentance, and that these acts therefore ultimately originated in their free will. But Augustine and his followers felt compelled by the witness of Scripture and their own experience to trace the acts of faith and repentance to a prior, internal, and efficacious grace of God, in other words, to regeneration. Thus, not only in the case of infants but equally in the case of adults, regeneration came to be placed prior to faith and repentance.
In reality, however, this separation was far more complex than the contrasting principles would lead one to expect. Many theologians were intent on mediation and moved in this direction by an ethical interest. For if regeneration were totally detached from faith and repentance, it apparently could only consist in a magical infusion of spiritual energy completely independent of the human consciousness and will. For this reason, numerous theologians still today, as many did in the past, place regeneration after faith and repentance and make it more or less dependent on them. In that case one naturally faces the question of how salvation can be said to be a work of God from start to finish if faith and repentance at the same time have to be free acts of human beings. One may try to resolve the difficulty by pointing out that the unconverted can still attend church, listen to the Word of God, and examine the Scriptures.
They then can do their best ("do what is in them to do"), for they still possess the ability to apply themselves to grace or the possibility of refraining from active resistance. Finally, in the call or in baptism, they then receive the power to believe if they
want to. Alternatively, one could say that there is no opposition or even distinction between the divine and the human activity, since the two are one and the same thing viewed from two perspectives. It hardly needs saying, however, that all these proposed attempts at reconciliation are futile. If God and human beings are distinct though not separate, one always has to face the question: at the end of all the interactions, who makes the final decision? Who ultimately settles the issue? If it is the human person, then Pelagius is fundamentally correct and the decision concerning what is most important in human history— namely, eternal salvation—rests in human hands. If, however, the last word rests with God and his omnipotent grace, one sides with Augustine and accepts a preceding rebirth (internal grace) in which the human person is passive. In other words, by placing regeneration after faith and repentance, one does not escape the problem but wraps oneself in an insoluble contradiction.
The same thing is true if in the case of the children of believers one wants to hold on to regeneration's dependence on faith and repentance. Of course, in that case it will not do to assume a rebirth in the heart of those children accomplished by the Holy
Spirit apart from all means. Neither can one say that the Holy Spirit employs the Word in moving young covenant children to faith and repentance, those who have not yet reached the age of discretion, for "this cannot be accomplished verbally with infants but only with adults who have reached the age of discretion."55 On this point, accordingly, all Catholics,
Lutherans, Anabaptists, and others are agreed. The last group remains consistent even to the point of rejecting infant baptism, though as a rule it assumes the salvation of children who die in infancy and in so doing weakens the doctrine of original sin. But Catholics and Lutherans looked for a solution precisely in infant baptism. While this baptism presupposes nothing, at least nothing more than external privileges (such as being born of Christian parents), it produces much: incorporation into Christ and his body. However, by taking this position they have in a
questionable way changed the character of the sacrament. For while the sacrament was instituted as a sign and seal of the covenant of grace and of participation in its benefits, baptism serves here to introduce children into that covenant and to gain for them the benefits of that covenant. In this process, baptism acquired a power that it cannot possess of itself but that is conferred on it by the Word and Spirit that mysteriously united themselves with the water of baptism. This scenario bears a much more magical character than that which the creators of it sought to escape on ethical grounds. Given this view, it is hard to see why baptism, if it really bestows grace, could not be administered to the children of unbelievers. But this is further than people were prepared to go. Of the original rule that faith and repentance need to precede baptism, Rome has even kept a memory in the doctrine that at least no obstacle is to be posed to the reception of supernatural grace.
Lutherans meanwhile maintained that while the young children of believers do not bring faith to their baptism and were not baptized on the basis of their parents' faith, the Holy Spirit nevertheless worked that faith in their heart by baptism in union with the Word so that they accepted Christ and obtained the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Inasmuch as they accorded logical priority to faith and made regeneration second, they insisted that faith, produced in the heart of children by the Holy
Spirit, was an active faith and not an inactive, bare disposition.
Naturally they did not deny that in the life of children faith operates differently than in adults. The children's faith was active not with respect to its external activities but to internal activities and the qualities of faith. As such, it was still a faith that put on Christ (Gal. 3:27), received the kingdom of heaven
(Mark 10:15), and participated in regeneration and salvation (John 3:5), and so forth.56 We may not be able to picture this activity of faith in children, any more than that of adults when the latter are in an unconscious state. Still, this is not a sufficient reason to deny an active faith to children. This attempt on the
part of Lutherans thus to remain faithful to the old order of redemption also in connection with infant baptism was, however, gradually abandoned. It proved psychologically difficult to maintain [belief in] an active faith in the case of young children. And since the regeneration granted in baptism still always remained amissible and was frequently lost as a result of unbelief when the children grew older,57 regeneration actually came down to a combination of the powers of believing.58
For all these reasons Reformed theologians gradually came to make a distinction between regeneration and faith (conversion).
In the early period [of the Reformation] they also occasionally based the baptism of infants on the faith of the parents or the church, or on their future faith (Calvin, Beza). But soon they pulled back from this position and arrived at the unanimous confession that the children of believers were as much included in the covenant of grace as their believing parents—not only by means of or after, but already before baptism. Thus the Holy
Spirit could grant them the grace of regeneration equally well as adults, for regeneration also occurs among adults apart from their will and before faith. There was disagreement over the time at which this regeneration took place in the children of believers.
But they agreed that the Holy Spirit could also work in the hearts of children aside from the calling through the Word, and that he did this consistently in the children of believers who died in childhood. They also agreed that the Holy Spirit also frequently did this in the case of children who were born in the church, grew up in it, and later joined it by a personal confession. Therefore, in general the children of believers should, in accordance with the judgment of charity, be regarded as elect and regenerate until from their "talk" or their "walk" the contrary was evident. Hence both in the case of adults and children, regeneration in the restricted sense preceded—if not temporally than certainly always logically—faith and repentance.