WATTS Baptism and the Hiddenness of God 271
reception of the promise. Here is Luther's essential theology of the sacra-
ments: an effective sign in which God is present and active but only
through the content of the word of the gospel. This word is symbolized in
the sign of washing and the promise is received through faith. In baptism
there is 'a blessed dying unto sin and a resurrection in the grace of God, so
that the old man, conceived and born in sin, is there drowned, and a new
man, born in grace comes forth and rises'.^7
This raises the issue of the relation of faith to baptism and Luther mustbe heard aright before the work of criticism can begin. For Luther, baptism
and faith go together, yet true faith is not dependent upon human effort
and must not be confused with any feelings of adequacy on the part of theperson coming for baptism. For Luther, it is therefore wrong to withhold
baptism from children and babies on the grounds that they have not come
to maturity of faith. What better sign of God's gracious dealing with hu-
manity than the baptismal washing of a baby? Yet Luther is insistent that
baptism is ineffectual apart from faith: this is of course quite consistent
with his whole theology of sacraments and also with his understanding ofjustification by grace through faith. The question thus becomes, how can
the baptism of young children be understood with regard to faith? Luther's
main reply is to assert that God can grant requisite faith to the infant.
Indeed he was emphatic that baptism should not be given on the basis of
some future faith of the child, but only on the basis of a true, God-given
infant faith. The biblical basis of this position Luther took from the invita-
tion of Jesus to suffer the little children to come to him and also John the
Baptist's prenatal leap of joy at the arrival of Jesus in Mary's womb.
We might forgive Luther these curious exegetical gymnastics given his
total opposition to the Roman sacramentalism of his day: a theology of
baptism which so emphasizes the active grace of God through the Word
was no mean achievement in its day. We would concur with Beasley-
Murray's observation as to the difficulty of understanding how such
exegesis can be taken seriously today.^8 Of course, others avoided such
eccentric use of Scripture and replaced the notion of infant faith with- L W, XXXV, p. 30. In a recent study Bernhard Lohse makes the point that from
1523-25, with the rise of Anabaptism, Luther placed greater emphasis on the divine
promise in baptism, though even then he retained the importance of faith receiving the
promise. B. Lohse, Martin Luther's Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999), pp.
302-305. - See G.R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (Exeter: Paternoster
Press, 1972 [1962]), p. 347, especially the extended n. 1.