Dr. David Scaer makes a point that should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t, in his piece “Flights from the Atonement” in the latest Concordia Theological Quarterly (July 2008): by denying the ability of infants to have faith, they thus deny justification by faith. Children who have not yet reached the maturity to make a rational decision for Christ are saved on account of their human birth, not the birth from above (John 3). The following is from pp197f, with my emphasis added: Like Roman Catholics, the Reformed do not see justification as the one chief doctrine. Evangelicals who stand in the Reformed tradition may share with Lutherans a verbally identical definition, but in understanding faith as a conscious rational decision of which…