Objection 54

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

Reformed dogmatics itself objects: regeneration without any faith is a contradiction, since the new life necessarily exercises itself. A regenerate adult with no knowledge of Christ would be a believer who believes nothing, an incoherent category.

Answer. The objection is answered from within the same dogmatics that raises it. In accounting for regenerate infants, the Reformed distinguished the habit or seed of faith from its conscious acts, and Bavinck's treatment allows that the implanted life may exist before, and apart from, its full reflective exercise. The regenerate person beyond gospel light is not "a believer who believes nothing"; he is a quickened soul whose new nature exercises itself at the level of its light: Godward fear, conviction of sin, hunger for mercy, the publican's prayer without the publican's vocabulary. That is not an ad hoc invention for this argument; it is the same account the tradition gives of the believing infant and of every saint's life below the level of articulate consciousness. The demand that regeneration always and instantly issue in doctrinally informed faith is precisely the demand that damns infants, and no party to this dispute accepts that conclusion.