nonaeroterraqueous
Nonexistent Member
This emphasizes not God's monergistic action in regenerating a person, but man's response to God and his participation in his salvation.
Man's response is the product of God's monergistic action. His baptism is a direct result of his response. If the person's response is taken out of the picture, then you're baptizing a baby of unknown destiny. It would be similar to forcibly spraying down a crowd of strangers with a fire hose and calling it a baptism. In both cases a response from the affected individual is unnecessary. The end result is assumed to be a monergistic act of God.
However, if you think that the believer's baptism is an attempt to make salvation a synergistic work, an act of man, then you've trapped yourself in your own argument. The parents of the baby have chosen the baptism instead of the baby. It's still an act of man. You've only changed the man. Instead of being the decision of the baptized, it becomes the decision of someone else.
Seeing an infant who has no ability to repent and believe be baptized testifies to us that regeneration is an act of God alone which does not require man's participation.
I have never seen a baptism that requires no participation from man, unless it be baptism by the Holy Spirit, which almost never involves water. Until I see an unwilling individual lifted into thin air and thrown into a body of water, to the sound of a voice from Heaven proclaiming his baptism, I must say I've never seen a baptism devoid of man's participation.
Monergism is God's work on our very nature. It is that nature which drives everything else about our Christianity.
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