et renovatione (quse fidei justificationem sequitur) usurpatur. In qua significatione D. Lutherus hac voce, turn in libro de ecclesia et conciliis, turn alibi etiam, multum usus est."1
As this lax use of terms was unavoidably attended with great confusion, the " Form of Concord " itself, and the later Lutheran theologians were more precise. They made especially a sharp distinction between justification and anything signifying a sub- jective change in the sinner.
In the early Church regeneration often expressed, not any in- ward moral change, but an external change of state or relation. Among the Jews when a heathen became a proselyte to their religion, he was said to be born again. The change of his status from without to within the theocracy, was called regeneration. This usage in a measure passed over to the Christian Church. When a man became a member of the Church he was said to be born anew ; and baptism, which was the rite of initiation, was called regeneration. This use of fhe word has not yet entirely passed away. A distinction is still sometimes made between regeneration and spiritual renovation. The one is external, the other internal. Some of the advocates of baptismal regeneration make this distinction, and interpret the language of the formulas of the Church of England in accordance with it. The regenera- tion effected in baptism, in their view, is not any spiritual change in the state of the soul, but simply a birth into the visible Church.
§ 2. Nature of Regeneration.
By a consent almost universal the word regeneration is now used to designate, not the whole work of sanctification, nor the first stages of that work comprehended in conversion, much less justification or any mere external change of state, but the in- stantaneous change from spiritual death to spiritual life. Regen- eration, therefore, is a spiritual resurrection ; the beginning of a new life. Sometimes the word expresses the act of God. God regenerates. Sometimes it designates the subjective effect of his act. The sinner is regenerated. He becomes a new creature. He is born again. And this is his regeneration. These two ap- plications of the word are so allied as not to produce confusion. The nature of regeneration is not explained in the Bible further than the account therein given of its author, God, in the exercise of the exceeding greatness of his power ; its subject, the whole soul ; and its effects, spiritual life, and all consequent holy acts
1 in. 19, 20, 21 ; Hase, Libri Symbolici, 3d edit. p. 686.
0 PART HI. Ch. XV. — regeneration.
and states. Its metaphysical nature is left a mystery. It is not the province of either philosophy or theology to solve that mys- tery. It is, however, the duty of the theologian to examine the various theories concerning the nature of this saving change, and to reject all such as are inconsistent with the Word of God.
Not a change in the Substance of the Soul.
Regeneration does not consist in any change in the substance of the soul. The only advocate of the opposite doctrine among Protestant theologians was Flacius Illyricus, so called from the place of his birth. He was one of the most prominent Lutheran theologians in what is called the second Reformation in Germany. He did great service in the cause of truth in resisting the syner- gism of Melancthon, and the concessions which that eminent but yielding reformer was disposed to make to the papists. He con- tributed some of the most important works of the age in which he lived to the vindication of the Protestant faith. His " Cata- logus Testium Veritatis," designed to prove that the doctrines of the Reformation had had their witnesses in all ages ; his " Clavis Scripturae Sacrae ; " and especially the great historical work, "The Magdeburg Centuries" (in thirteen volumes, folio), of which he was the originator and principal author, attest his learning, talents, and untiring industry. His fervent and un- compromising spirit involved him in many difficulties and sorrows. He died worn out by suffering and labour, says his biographer ; one of those men of faith of whom the world was not worthy. Always extreme in his opinions, he held that original sin was a corruption of the substance of the soul, and regeneration such a change of that substance as to restore its normal purity. All his friends who had sided with him in his controversy with the Syn- ergists and the supporters of the Leipzig Interim, forsook him now, and he stood alone. In the " Form of Concord," adopted to settle all the controversies of the period, these peculiar view of Flacius were condemned as a virtual revival of the Manichaea heresy. It was urged that if the substance of the soul be sinful, God, by whom each individual soul is created, must be the author of sin; and that Christ who, in assuming our nature, became consubstantial with us, must be a partaker of sin. No Christian Church has assumed the responsibility of the doctrine of Flacius, or held that regeneration involves a change of the essence of the soul
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