# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S11
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1898. 11

It is true, of course, that the office of sponsor in its whole extent is not necessary and is not a circumstance required by God for a right, valid baptism. Where a baptism is performed in the presence of the Christian congregation, baptismal witnesses are not necessarily needed; there are people enough who were present. Where it can be shown that a baptism was performed in the sight of a whole Christian congregation, it is at the same time shown that a right baptism was performed. For an upright congregation simply does not tolerate that a mutilated baptism, a baptism that would be no baptism, be performed before its eyes and within its hearing. But where no other witnesses are present to whom one can appeal, and can appeal with right even in later years, there witnesses are to be present at a baptism. For baptism is to be a seal of God's grace, a support of our faith, so that we know: as surely as we are baptized, we are children of God, God has received us into his covenant of grace, which he can never break; so that we can take comfort in our baptism when everything else may give way. When we know, and take comfort in it, that we are baptized, we are saved, here and in eternity, as surely as God is God. But if baptism is to be such a seal, it must itself be certain; the fact that we are baptized must not itself stand in doubt. We can safely follow the principle: A doubtful baptism counts as no baptism, that is: where doubt prevails whether a person was baptized at all, or whether he was baptized according to Christ's institution, we are to regard him as not baptized and are to baptize him. Cases used to occur more often in the past in which children were baptized by itinerant clerical journeymen, who traveled on the strength of there being children to baptize in the new settlements, and who also baptized as one ordered, Lutheran, Reformed, or in the sense of the unbelievers of Forty-Eight, of whom there were then still more, into God, virtue and immortality, or into the stars and stripes, or whatever else one wanted to have people baptized into. Where it cannot be established whether the baptism performed on a child was a right baptism, one baptizes and so establishes that the person is baptized. Or where one even knows: the one who baptized this child was himself a denier of the Holy Trinity, and the community to which he belonged was of his unbelief, one baptizes, for one knows: this child is not baptized. These cases, too, used to occur more often than happens today. In Germany, service books [*Agenden*] were widely used according to which no child was baptized, or at most very seldom one. In the service book of Provost Sintenis, which was much used, there are fifteen baptismal forms; among these there is a single one according to which baptism is done in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that is the form for the baptism of a child born out of wedlock. Where, then, it is demonstrable that baptism was performed according to this service book, we do not baptize again