If you believe in God the Father and in his Son the Lord Jesus, if you have repented and are determined to walk in his law, and if you have been baptized for the remission of sins and the gift of the Spirit, then God has told you personally by the word and the water that you are his, and thus elect. You have no reason to doubt God’s word, but every reason to be confident.

Now all that remains is to make your calling and election more sure by continuing in faith and works.

One might think this good – facing the future with confidence, or dangerous – encouraging presumption, and emptying the warnings about apostacy of real meaning.

Although FV chaps and their friends (I count myself in the latter camp) acknowledge both a qualitative and quantatative difference to the faith of the (decretally) elect and (decretally)non-elect, no one, as far as I know, has been able to elaborate on the difference in quality. This means, does it not, that we as individuals do not know which we have, and how we will eventually end up in eternity.

Am I getting the wrong end of the stick?

Or would you readily agree, arguing that we should look to Christ and be diligent in the means of grace? Would you say that this makes us less likely to make unwarrented presumptions on our destiny from logical deductions?

Many seem to want to deny infants that die in infancy are saved through faith, positing some king of “immediate regeneration” to take its place. But the Reformed traditions seems to also have said that, rather, infants who die are saved though the root or seed of faith that is within them, faith that hasn’t produced any ‘acts’ of faith, but still faith.

For some, this seems too speculative I suppose, or perhaps just too doubtful in light of what we know of brain development and consciousness.

But then, I asked, if we deny that infants actually have any kind of faith, what of those true believers who experience dementia or alzheimers or other brain debilitating conditions later in life. We’d confess that their faith was true saving faith, but now the person has regressed mentally to the state of an infant, if we already deny that infants can in any sense posses faith, then I guess we’d be compelled to claim that the demented elect person possessed only *temporary* faith, though it was in fact saving.

This isn’t just a nice logic problem. Sometimes dementia produces great changes in personality or hostility that would call into question the “evidences” of holy living or fruitfulness of the persons faith. One pastor I know who’d father suffered dementia and became very “evil” in outlook suffered great distress at the challenge to his theology of sanctification. I’ll always keep in mind what he looked to: the scripture that stated “our lives are *hidden* in Christ Jesus”.

The faith of the infant or demented person is an article, in some sense, of faith as well.