Benjamin B. Warfield — The Development of the Doctrine of Infant Salvation (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1891), from the Monergism text.
Warfield traces how the doctrine of the salvation of infants dying in infancy has been held in every age of the Church and yet corrected: the Fathers’ necessity of baptism and Augustine’s mildest damnation, the medieval mitigation, the teaching of Rome, the Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed doctrines from Zwingli to Dort and Westminster, the “ethical” tendencies of later Protestantism, and the doctrinal development which makes the salvation of the infant rest on God’s electing grace.
The task which we set before us in this brief paper is not to unravel the history of opinion as to the salvation of infants dying in infancy, but the much more circumscribed one of tracing the development of doctrine on this subject. We hope to show that there has been a doctrine as to the salvation of infants common to all ages of the Church; but that there has also been in this, as in other doctrines, a progressive correction of crudities in its conception, by which the true meaning and relations of the common teaching have been freed from deforming accretions and its permanent core brought to purer expression.
I. THE PATRISTIC DOCTRINE
It is fundamental to the very conception of Christianity that it is a remedial scheme. Christ Jesus came to save sinners. The first Christians had no difficulty in understanding and confessing that Christ had come into a world lost in sin to establish a kingdom of righteousness, citizenship in which is the condition of salvation. That infants were admitted into this citizenship they did not question; Irenaeus, for example, finds it appropriate that Christ was born an infant and grew by natural stages into manhood, since “He came to save all by Himself - all, I say, who by Him are born again unto God, infants and children, and boys and young men, and old men,” and accordingly passed through every age that He might sanctify all. Nor did they question that not the natural birth of the flesh, but the new birth of the Spirit was the sole gateway for infants too, into the kingdom; communion with God was lost for all alike, and to infants too it was restored only in Christ.1 Less pure elements, however, entered almost inevitably into their thought. The ingrained externalism of both Jewish and heathen modes of conception, when brought into the Church wrought naturally toward the identification of the kingdom of Christ with the external Church, and of regeneration with baptism. Already in Justin and Irenaeus, the word “regeneration” means “baptism”; the Fathers uniformly understand John iii. 5 of baptism. The maxim of the Patristic age thus became extra ecclesiam nulla salus; baptism was held to be necessary to salvation with the necessity of means; and as a corollary, no unbaptized infant could be saved. How early this doctrine of the necessity of baptism became settled in the Church is difficult to trace in the paucity of very early witnesses. Tertullian already defends it from objection.2 The reply of Cyprian and his fellow bishops to Fidus on the duty of early baptism, presupposes it.3 After that, it was plainly the Church-doctrine; and although it was mitigated in the case of adults by the admission not only of the baptism of blood, but also that of intention,4 the latter mitigation was not allowed in the case of infants. The whole Patristic Church agreed that, martyrs excepted, no infant dying unbaptized could enter the kingdom of heaven.
The fairest exponent of the thought of the age on this subject is Augustine, who was called upon to defend it against the Pelagian error that infants dying unbaptized, while failing of entrance into the kingdom, yet obtain eternal life. His constancy in this controversy has won for him the unenviable title of durus infantum pater - a designation doubly unjust, in that not only did he neither originate the obnoxious dogma nor teach it in its harshest form, but he was even preparing its destruction by the doctrines of grace, of which he was more truly the father.5 Augustine expressed the Church-doctrine moderately, teaching, of course, that infants dying unbaptized would be found on Christ’s left hand and be condemned to eternal punishment, but also not forgetting to add that their punishment would be the mildest of all, and indeed that they were to be beaten with so few stripes that he could not say it would have been better for them not to be born.6 No doubt, others of the Fathers softened the doctrine even below this; some of the Greeks, for instance, like Gregory Nazianzen, thought that unbaptized infants are “neither glorified nor punished” - that is, of course, go into a middle state similar to that taught by Pelagius.7 But it is not to Augustine, but to Fulgentius (d. 533),8 or to Alcimus Avitus (d. 525),9 or to Gregory the Great (d. 604)10 to whom we must go for the strongest expression of the woe of unbaptized infants. Probably only such anonymous objectors as those whom Tertullian confutes,11 or such obscure and erratic individuals as Vincentius Victor whom Augustine convicts, in the whole Patristic age, doubted that the kingdom of heaven was closed to all infants departing this life without the sacrament of baptism.