# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S263
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on a New Apology of the Reformed Church. 263

grown-up believers do not fall away, but remain in the faith and therefore let the regeneration worked in them be perceived in all manner of fruits of the Spirit. But how could it be otherwise, when the upbringing of baptized children, even on the part of parents who wish to be Christian, is for the most part so unchristian — the tender plant of faith, planted in the heart of the young baptized child, is not watered diligently by a daily reminder of the grace already bestowed on it in baptism, and the breaking-forth power of the remaining sinful corruption of original sin is not restrained with all one's might through earnest discipline? Not to speak at all of the great mass of unbelieving, godless parents of baptized children, who not only fail to preserve the grace of baptism in their children but rather themselves seek by every means to stifle it. — Truly it is sad when people neglect their sacred duty to keep, so far as lies in them, with their Savior the children brought to him through baptism; and — because these children, in the course of their "development," instead of growing in wisdom and grace before God and men, grow in blindness and sin, and on that account deny the power of the means of grace that was applied to them — saddest of all is it when this experience is even turned into a theological argument against it.

When Lic. K. writes, thirdly: "The passages John 3:5 and Titus 3:5, often adduced to corroborate the Lutheran doctrine, do not, as the present writer believes he has proven in the theol. Studien und Kritiken, refer to baptism at all, and would in any case, if they were mistakenly referred to it, refer not to the baptism of unconscious children but to the baptism of believing adults" — we can, to be sure, not refute the grounds which Hr. K. has adduced against referring John 3:5 and Titus 3:5 to baptism, since we do not know them; but this is also not at all necessary. Since Hr. K. does not wish to be an Anabaptist, and as a disciple of Calvin does not wish flatly to reject infant baptism, it does not help him in the least that he believes he has proven, through all manner of exegetical arts, that the two passages cited do not deal with baptism. Either he must concede that baptism really is a bath or effective means of regeneration, or he must prove that all the passages of Holy Scripture that deal with the power and fruit of baptism likewise "do not refer to baptism at all.")

*) Nor do we wish to take into account at all that Calvin himself, the "Reformer" of the Reformed Church, and its chief confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, expressly declare Titus 3:5 to be a passage that deals with baptism. In the latter confession it says under Question 71: "This promise (Matt. 28:19; Mark 16:16) is also repeated where Scripture calls baptism the washing of regeneration and the washing away of sins (Tit. 3:5; Acts 22:16)." Calvin writes on the words "through the washing of regeneration," among other things, the following: "I do not doubt that he alludes at least to baptism; indeed I readily allow the passage to be expounded of baptism. . The apostles are accustomed to derive their proof from the sacraments, in order to prove the thing signified in them, because among the pious the prin-