The confessional watershed: Westminster 10.3 and the 1689 Baptist Confession 10.3

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

Here is the most important exhibit in this section, because it is not a private theologian but the mature, deliberate language of the Reformed and Particular Baptist churches at their confessional best. The Westminster Confession (1646), followed nearly verbatim by the Second London Baptist Confession (1689), chapter 10, paragraph 3, states: "Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit; who worketh when, and where, and how he pleaseth; so also are all other elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the word."

Read the two clauses slowly. The first affirms exactly the doctrine of immediate regeneration argued in Part IV: elect infants are regenerated and saved through the Spirit, with the express note that He works when, where, and how He pleases. The second clause then extends the same rule to "all other elect persons who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the word." The confessional mainstream, in other words, does not hold that gospel hearing is an absolutely universal mechanism of regeneration; it holds that it is the ordinary means, with a stated class of exceptions governed by the Spirit's freedom. The dispute between this document and the confessional mainstream is therefore narrower than it first appears. It concerns the boundary of one word: who is "incapable" of outward calling? The mainstream has usually meant the mentally incapable. This study asks on what principled ground the person providentially incapable of hearing, the man born, living, and dying beyond the gospel's geographic reach, is excluded from a clause about persons the word cannot outwardly call. Incapacity of access is still incapacity.