Philip Melanchthon on Baptism
Infants included, and effective for regeneration
Of Baptism they teach that it is necessary to salvation, and that by Baptism the grace of God is offered, and that children are to be baptized, who by Baptism, being offered to God, are received into God's favor.
THE POSITION
Infants are baptized and baptism does something. Augsburg IX calls it necessary to salvation, says grace is offered through it, and says the children offered to God in it are received into his favour; Augsburg II describes original sin as bringing eternal death on all who are not born again by baptism and the Holy Spirit. The Anabaptists are condemned both for refusing infant baptism and for holding that infants are saved without it.
5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.
8 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Luther's colleague at Wittenberg and the Reformation's systematizer. He wrote the first Protestant systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521), drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology (1531), and then revised his own work far enough that the Formula of Concord condemned the later version seventeen years after his death. This entry rests on the Augsburg Confession read in Latin and English — Part I less Articles VI-VIII and XIV-XVI, plus Part II Articles XXII-XXIV and XXVIII — on the opening articles of the Apology in English, and on the successive editions of the Loci through Latin sentences preserved by Schaff and Bente; no edition of the Loci itself was read.
Cite this page
"Philip Melanchthon on Baptism", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/melanchthon/baptism (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/melanchthon/baptism).