This Pelagianizing drift may no doubt be regarded as in part a reaction from the harshness of the Romanist syllogism, “No man can attain salvation who is not a member of Christ; but no one becomes a member of Christ except by baptism, received either in re or in voto.”1 So considered, its fault is that it impinges by way of mitigation and modification on the major premise; which, however, is the fundamental proposition of Christianity. Its roots are planted, in the last analysis, in a conception of men, not as fallen creatures, children of wrath and deserving of a doom which can only be escaped by becoming members of Christ, but as creatures of God with claims on Him for natural happiness, but, of course, with no claims on Him for such additional supernatural benefits as He may yet lovingly confer on His creatures in Christ. On the other hand, that great religious movement which we call the Reformation, the constitutive principle of which was its revised doctrine of the Church, ranged itself properly against the fallacious minor premise, and easily broke its bonds with the sword of the Word. Men are not constituted members of Christ through the Church, but members of the Church through Christ: they are not made the members of Christ by baptism which the Church gives, but by faith, the gift of God; and baptism is the Church’s recognition of this inner fact.
The full benefit of this better apprehension of the nature of that Church of God membership in which is the condition of salvation, was not reaped, however, by all Protestants in equal measure. It was the strength of the Lutheran movement that it worked out its positions not theoretically or all at once, but step by step, as it was forced on by the logic of events and experience. But it was an incidental evil that, being compelled to express its faith early, its first confession was framed before the full development of Protestant thought, and subsequently contracted the faith of Lutheranism into too narrow channels. The Augsburg Confession contains the true doctrine of the Church as the congregatio sanctorum; but it committed Lutheranism to the doctrine that baptism is necessary to salvation. This it did by teaching that children are not saved without baptism (Art. IX.),2 inasmuch as the condemnation and eternal death brought by original sin upon all are not removed except from those who are born again by baptism and the Holy Ghost (Art. II.).3 Surely by this declaration the necessity of baptism is made the necessity of means. And the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession is repeated in the Formula Concordiæ. In this symbol the Anabaptists are condemned because they teach “that infants not baptized are not sinners before God, but just and innocent, and in this their innocence, when they have not as yet the use of reason, may, without baptism (of which, to wit, in the opinion of the Anabaptists they have no need) attain unto salvation. And in this way they reject the whole doctrine of original sin, and all the consequences that follow therefrom.” From this it seems clear that to the framers of the Formula it is one of the consequences which follow from original sin that even infants, dying before the use of reason, cannot attain unto salvation without baptism; and this inference is strengthened by the subsequent article which condemns the Anabaptists for teaching “that the children of Christians, on the ground that they are sprung from Christian and believing parents, are in very deed holy, and are to be accounted as belonging to the children of God, even apart from and before the receiving of baptism.” Whence it would seem to follow that they are made holy first and only by baptism.4 These deliverances have naturally been felt to require some mollifying interpretation, and in this direction the theologians have urged: 1. That the necessity affirmed is not absolute but ordinary, and binds man and not God. 2. That as the assertion is directed against the Anabaptists, it is not the privation but the contempt of baptism that is affirmed to be damning. 3. That the necessity of baptism is not intended to be equalized with that of the Holy Ghost. 4. That the affirmation is not that for original sin alone any one is actually damned, but only that all are therefor damnable. There is force undoubtedly in these considerations. But they obviously do not avail wholly to relieve the Lutheran formularies of limiting salvation to those who enjoy the means of grace, and, as concerns infants, to those who receive the sacrament of baptism.