# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1860_S298
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

298                                                    Old Testimonies against New Errors concerning the Working etc.

...the people, him will I also confess before my Father which is in heaven.""

A second objection can be made: if every act by which the Holy Spirit imparts spiritual life and faith through the Word to a person dead through sin is regeneration in the properly so-called sense, then one must grant that regeneration in the properly so-called sense can be repeated. For the act by which spiritual life and faith are produced in a person dead through sin can be repeated, and is not seldom repeated, since those who through sins against conscience have lost faith and the Holy Spirit and have thus fallen back into the death of sin can be, and not seldom are, placed again into spiritual life. But I answer that it is nothing absurd to maintain that regeneration in the strictest sense can be repeated; this is plain from what we shall show further below concerning the properties of regeneration, and especially concerning its capacity for repetition.

A third objection is made: that if adults are truly born again and endowed with true faith before receiving baptism, then afterward they have no need of baptism, and the sacrament of baptism could therefore be despised. But we answer here that this objection is grounded on no correct inference at all. For although adults who are born again through the Word and endowed with true faith before receiving baptism do not need baptism in order first to be truly born again and to become children of God and heirs of eternal life, they nevertheless still need that sacrament, partly because of Christ's command, who has prescribed this way of attaining salvation for all adults — that after they have been born again through the ministry of the Word they should also be baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit — and partly because of the necessary renewal of the regenerate person, of which baptism is also the bath, Titus 3:5.

The view we have thus far defended against various objections has already been set forth, not obscurely, by Augustine long ago, and among the Lutheran teachers by Dr. Aegidius Hunnius. The former indeed writes, in Against the Letters of Donatus (De bapt. contr. Donat.), Book 5, ch. 25: ""Baptism indeed can be present where conversion of heart is lacking; but conversion of heart (which consists chiefly in the kindling of faith) can indeed be present without baptism having been received, but not when it has been despised. For that is by no means to be called conversion to God, when the sacrament of God is despised."" The latter, however, plainly maintains, in his Locus on Baptism, p. 169, that the eunuch Cornelius, Lydia, and others in the history of the Christians were rather converted and born again through the Word before they were baptized. (System. th. P. III., p. 550—54.)

(To be continued.)