Friday, October 14, 2022

Johannes Warns on Baptismal Regeneration being "Dangerous": More Evidence Protestants are Divided on Central Issues

  

The rejection in the “Church” Fellowship literature of the “Lutheran” doctrine of baptismal regeneration often indeed lacks nothing in sharpness. Thus Pastor Lüdecke of Stassfurt gives information as to the Fellowship Movement in the province of Saxony and in Anhalt:

 

Something as to Baptismal Regeneration. The “Lutheran Treasury” writes: “Nowadays one hears so many speak slightingly of baptismal regeneration. But as soon as we cease to see in baptism the bath of regeneration, thus soon, as regards the new birth, are we dependent only on our inner experiences and ourselves smother the sure comfort which Christ would offer us with baptism.” Upon this we remark that from the first the Fellowship Movement has protested against the unbiblical doctrine of regeneration by baptism, which we have to thank for a great part of our Church misery. It is not baptism which makes us sure of our standing in grace, but “the Spirit of God gives witness to our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16). According to the Augsburg Confession salvation is offered in baptism, but personal appropriation of the salvation comes only through faith, in the conversion and surrender to God. Luther himself, as regards the doctrine of baptism, in the second half of his development, could not free himself from the leaven of Catholicism. Through this the Reformation lost its full fruit, and not long after Luther’s death fell into an external formalism, which was only broken by the pietism of Spener and his adherents.

 

Sören Kierkegaard, one of mankind’s spiritual heroes, whom we must thank for the clearing away of much rubbish in the theology of the Church of the nineteenth century, finds sharp words concerning baptismal regeneration: “We take the children, give each one a few drops of water on its head, and thereby it is a Christian. If a few have not properly received their drops of water, that does not matter; they have merely to imagine that in their case all has been performed according to the ordinance, and that thereby they are Christians. Thus in a short time we have more Christians than herrings in the fishing season millions of Christians, and thus we are the greatest power the world has ever seen. For this minting of false Christians is too horrible.”

 

Thus far the sarcastic and very keen Kierkegaard. Justified are his reproaches that through the Church doctrinal practice Christians are placed in the world en masse who are no Christians at all. We ask the “Treasury,” where are the thousands upon thousands who by baptism have been born again unto a living hope? The fact of the present general falling away of our people form even the outward Church forms has long since pronounced judgment upon the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. In Lutheran circles one should not delude himself with shibboleths as to the manifest bankruptcy which this doctrine has involved.

 

This protest against the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is certainly gladdening, and there is probably no pastor within the Fellowship Movement in Germany who would not declare as did pastor B. Cörper: “If anyone would say as did that pastor, as he was about to baptize a child, ‘Let us proceed to the act of generation,’ then we would have to protest decidedly.” (Johannes Warns, Baptism: Studies in the Original Christian Baptism: Its History and Conflicts Its elation to a State or National Church and its Significance for the Present Time [2d ed.; trans. H. G. Lang; 1922], 161-62)

 

Notwithstanding the above, Warns notes that those who hold to baptismal regeneration within the Lutheran traditions are in the majority:

 

But it is still incontestable that outspoken Lutherans, who adhere to children’s faith and baptismal regeneration, have the Confessions on their side, and thus represent the official teaching of the Church, and the Fellowship pastors do not . . . Moreover, even today the number of pastors in the State Churches is not small who adhere consistently to the Lutheran doctrine of baptism. (ibid., 162, emphasis in original)