cyprian:
What if a person is menally retarded and can’t understand what faith is can he be baptised. In all respect how can you not be able to lose something and then be able to lose something? And if grace is conferred by water and the spirit, how is faith(knowledgable ascent) necessary? You say we recieve Grace* by* way of… In the Bible whole households were being baptised and as a covenental practice to Jews, the rite of Baptism would eventually (and immediately) replace the holy rite of circumcision. It seems that this would have upset the Jews(converts) to think that
only those who were old enought to have faith(understand) would be baptised, when their faith as parents was sufficient to have younger people circumsized.
Peace and Love
I am not sure who you are confusing me with but I believe in the baptism of infants and so does Lutheranism. We are born spiritually dead as expressed in Eph 2:1. We do not have the ability to spiritually come to God. If one were to claim that they chose to be baptized and become Christian then they, in my humble opinion, are boasting about their works of law.
In 2 Cor 2:14 Paul states "But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.’
Likewise in Romans 8 states: “because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so”
2 Cor 3:5 5Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God,
So when it comes to infants and the mentally challenged they need not understand to be received by the holy spirit, because not one of us understands or is capable of coming to God by our own volition.
The baptized infants and mentally challenged do indeed have ‘faith.’
This is why ‘faith’ and ‘works’ are gifts of God’s Grace… outside of God’s Grace they do not exist. Which brings me to a past post of someone… Do daemons believe in God? Sure they do just as I believe in the fact Elton John exists, but Daemons are outside of God’s Grace and therefore do not have ‘faith’ they only have belief.
We do not loose God’s Grace, he constantly holds it before us but we can cut ourselves off from his Grace by rejecting it – God isn’t going to force someone to go to Heaven that does not wish to do so…
I compare it to breathing. We do not consciously choose to participate in our breathing nor is it our choice when we choose to start breathing, but we can reject our ability to breath and hold our breath. However, the minute we cease rejecting our breathing we start inhaling and exhaling without any conscious participation on our part.
