Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

And on Sunday, I had a debate with Ryan from needgod.net on whether or not water baptism saves.

Since I'm actually recording this on Friday, hello from the past, I can only pray that the debate went well.

Now, you can follow the link in the description to view the debate for yourself and you can let me know how you think I did.

But in any case, in the course of preparing for the debate, I found a video of Ryan responding to six of the Bible verses that seem to support the idea that water baptism does in fact save.

Now, Ryan claims that none of these verses mean what they plainly seem to mean, but I think that even without all the other Old Testament, New Testament, and early Christian evidence for the doctrine that water baptism does save, these six verses alone would be pretty strong evidence that this is indeed what the Bible teaches.

So I want to look at each verse, hear Ryan's objection to those verses, and then explain why I think these verses really are good evidence for water baptism saving.

And as always, I want to thank those of you who are supporting me over on Patreon at shamelessjoe.com.

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And for the handful of you who can donate at the very top tier, we actually have a Signal group chat that is, uh, very active.

So, let's unpack these passages beginning with

Passage number one, Mark 16:16.

Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

Notice how clear this passage is.

It's saying two things.

It says that if you don't believe, you will be condemned.

But it doesn't just say that.

It also says that if you want to be saved, you need two things.

You need to believe and to be baptized.

The phrase whoever believes and is baptized will be saved is completely clear in its meaning.

So how does Ryan respond to it?

Answer, he kind of doesn't.

He ignores that part of the verse to focus on the other half.

Now with this passage, it's important to realize it says whoever does not believe will be condemned.

It doesn't say whoever's not baptized will be condemned.

So we don't see baptism being essential in this verse.

But the only reason Ryan doesn't see baptism as being essential in this verse is because he's ignoring the first half of the verse, which says explicitly that whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.

Now the second half of the verse that he focuses on, that's not nullifying the first half.

Jesus is emphasizing the need for faith, but he's not contradicting the need for baptism he's just expressed.

A teacher might say, Whoever does their homework and passes the final will pass the class.

If you don't do your homework, you won't pass the class.

It would be absurd to hear that and think, Oh, okay, the final must not be important.

That means I only need to do my homework and I don't need to worry about passing the final.

But that's exactly the kind of interpretation that Ryan and Baptists who deny the need for baptism are doing when it comes to Mark 16:16.

But his next move is arguably worse.

But secondly, most scholars recognize that this verse is actually not found in the earliest manuscripts of Mark's Gospel.

Most scholars recognize that Mark 16 actually ends in verse eight, and so verses nine to 20 are not in the earliest manuscripts and so not authentic to Mark.

So this verse not being authentic to Mark shouldn't be used then to base any doctrines on if it's not actually really in the Bible.

This is a very dangerous move.

To avoid having to accept what the Bible teaches, Ryan declares the passage to not be in the Bible at all.

But on what basis?

Simply that most scholars say the passage isn't found in the earliest manuscripts?

But do you know how much of the Bible you would have to throw out if you uncritically applied that standard?

Particularly with the Old Testament?

Most scholars believe that the books of Isaiah and Daniel were compiled over time.

Does that mean that only the oldest parts of those books are inspired?

And if that is your standard, why?

Nothing in scripture says only the first draft of the book gets to be inspired by God.

Why can the Holy Spirit only work through the first author and not any subsequent ones?

After all, Christians have traditionally believed that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, but that the last chapter, Deuteronomy 34, which talks about Moses' death, was an epilogue obviously written by somebody else.

That doesn't mean it's not inspired.

Likewise, even though Romans is written by St. Paul, the person physically writing wasn't Paul but Tertius, as Romans 16:22 says explicitly.

But this never stopped us from believing that the entire books there are inspired.

So I think the stronger position is to say Mark 16:16 gets to stay in the Bible, and that it clearly says and means that if you want to be saved, you need to both believe and be baptized.

Passage number two, John 3:5.

Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.

Now this verse doesn't even use the word baptism or baptize, and so it's strange that people would use this to refer to baptism.

Where they're getting the idea of baptism is 'cause it says the word water.

The discussion with Jesus and Nicodemus is about birth and he's talking about two different kinds of birth, being born of water and being born of spirit.

Being born of water just refers to natural birth.

When you're in your mother's womb, you're in a water sac that bursts, you're born of water.

And so born of spirit is simply when God, the Holy Spirit draws you to faith in Jesus.

Ryan's interpretation separates John 3:5 into two different events, being born of water, natural birth, and being born of spirit, some kind of conversion experience.

But the first question worth asking is, who on earth refers to being born as being born of water?

I mean, there are water birth, like if you give birth in a bathtub, but born of water seems like a completely unnatural way to say what scripture sometimes describes as being born of a woman.

Born of water is just not a turn of phrase or imagery that I've seen anywhere, either in the Bible or anywhere else I can find to ever refer to childbirth.

That's a big red flag that this is what it means.But Jesus is clearly also not talking about natural birth.

Nicodemus actually thought he was, and Jesus clarified and seemed incredulous that someone as smart as Nicodemus could miss the point that profoundly.

After all, being born again or being born from above of water in the spirit is clearly one event, biblically, particularly in light of Old Testament passages like Isaiah 44:3, where God talks about pouring out water and the Spirit.

Or Ezekiel 36, where he says he's going to sprinkle clean water upon us and put his Spirit within us.

So there's a union between water and the Spirit that actually goes all the way back to the second verse of the Bible.

Passage number three, Acts 2:38.

Peter said to them, Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Let's put this passage in context.

Saint Peter has just preached to a crowd of thousands of Jewish pilgrims on the Feast of Pentecost, and he ends his preaching by saying, Let all the House of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

That is, Peter is speaking to people who probably literally were among those who had just called for Barabbas to be released and demanded that Jesus be crucified mere weeks earlier.

Now, the question the people had just asked Peter was, What shall we do?

Not, What must we do to be saved?

But just, What shall we do?

They had already come to faith.

They were cut to the heart.

They'd come to believe Peter's message of the gospel that he already preached.

And so they had salvation once they believed.

So according to Ryan, because they didn't literally ask, How do we become saved?

This signals that they already were saved, even though the first thing Peter tells them to do, he tells this group of a bunch of saved people that they need to repent.

Well, that seems pretty weird, doesn't it?

Is it really likely that Saint Peter hearing the question, What must we do?

From a crowd assumes that all of his listeners are already saved.

Remember, this isn't a crowd of disciples.

This is a crowd of thousands of people who he's just accused of conspiring in the death of Jesus.

And it's only after they're baptized, by the way, that the Bible numbers them amongst the flock.

So I'd say Ryan's interpretation only makes sense if we assume three things.

Number one, the crowd is already saved.

Number two, everyone in the crowd somehow knows that they're already saved.

They don't even need to ask, you know, for instance, how salvation works.

And number three, Peter also somehow knows that they're all already saved.

He knows he doesn't need to explain salvation to them.

Now, none of those things strike me as plausible.

When Peter tells these people that they need to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins, Ryan claims that what Peter really meant is that they've already been forgiven of their sins.

And so they're now asking, What shall we do now?

And so when it says, Repent, be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins, for there doesn't mean to get forgiveness.

It means because of the forgiveness you've already got.

Similar to if I say to you, Take two aspirin for your headache.

Am I saying that you should take the aspirin to get a headache or because you've already got one?

Because you've already got one and it will help.

So you take the aspirin for your headache or because of your headache.

And so you get baptized not to get forgiveness, but because of the forgiveness of your sins.

Ryan is absolutely right that in English, the word for can mean either causing, I went to school for a degree, or caused by, I took Tylenol for my headache.

But the Bible wasn't written in English, and this part was written in Greek, and the word being used there in Greek is ɛs.

It's a preposition that appears some 1,774 times in the Bible, and it appears thousands of other times in ancient Greek literature.

And you know how many times it means caused by?

Never.

There are no clear instances of ɛs being used this way in any Greek text.

In fact, this argument was decisively debunked decades ago.

From what I can tell, the first person to propose that ɛs might mean caused by was a Baptist scholar by the name of Dr. Julius Mante back in the early 1950s.

And his motivations were pretty obvious.

He didn't like the idea that Acts 2:38 seems to clearly say that baptism leads to forgiveness of sins, because that conflicts with his Baptist theology.

But even he began his argument by admitting that none of the Greek lexicons of his day agreed with him or with Ryan.

But he thought he'd found what he called infrequent and rare cases where ɛs meant caused by in passages from other Greek authors like Josephus and Polybius.

The problem is, none of the passages he found actually helped his case.

The famed Greek scholar Dr. Ralph Marcus quickly replied that, I must flatly state that he has been mistaken in his construing and rendering of all these passages.

And sure enough, one after another, he picked the grammar apart of each of the examples, showing that none of them meant caused by.

Even Mante was forced to admit that several of his examples just didn't work.

Today, even Protestant scholars who believe baptism doesn't save, people like Dallas Theological Seminary's Daniel Wallace, they have to concede that Mante is wrong.

He couldn't find a single clear example of ɛs ever meaning caused by.

And no one ever has, despite the word being used literally thousands of times.

But why might that be?

Well, because ɛs literally means into or in order to.

In this case, the Greek is literally saying something like, We are baptized into the forgiveness of our sins.

We are baptized in order to have our sins forgiven.

It doesn't mean we believe our sins are already forgiven and therefore we get baptized.

The Greek of Acts 2:38 is perfectly and unavoidably clear.

Peter isn't assuming they're saved.

He's telling them how to get saved.

They need to repent and they need to be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins.

Passage number four, Acts 22:16.

And now, why do you wait?

Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.

So Saint Paul is recounting his own conversion.

Ananias has come to him, miraculously healed him of his blindness, and yet Paul still has to do something.

And so he's told to, Be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.And that seems perfectly clear.

How could someone interpret this any other way besides needing baptism for the forgiveness of sins?

Well, here's how Ryan argues it.

Notice what it doesn't say.

It doesn't say, Rise and be baptized to wash away your sins.

It says, Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins.

Oh, okay.

So if the Greek had read, Be baptized to wash away your sins, would Ryan believe it then?

Well, remember, what is the Greek preposition for to in contexts like in order to?

Well, it's eis.

So if Ryan's demand is that he'll only believe that the Bible is teaching that baptism forgives sins if we, we can point out a passage to him that says, Baptism eis forgiveness of sins, well, Acts 2:38 literally says exactly that.

And you might have noticed a few moments ago, Ryan simply denied the meaning of the passage by insisting, implausibly, that eis might actually mean something that it's never been found to mean.

So even if you give him the exact evidence he demands, Ryan is still gonna deny the point.

It's actually rather striking.

Let's consider the second half of Ryan's argument.

It says, Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins.

It's got the word and there to connect that the washing away of the sins is not with baptism.

Okay, think about that argument for a moment.

Does connecting two ideas with and really mean that they're unrelated?

In Acts 16:31, for instance, when the jailer asks, Men, what must I do to be saved?

St. Paul says to him, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.

It's the exact same grammatical structure using the same Greek word for and as when St. Paul says, Be baptized and wash away your sins.

So if Ryan is right, the use of and there means that believing in Jesus is thus unrelated to being saved?

Number five, Romans 6:3-4.

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Here, it uses the word baptize or baptism, but it's important to remember what the Greek word for baptism means.

It's the Greek word baptizo, which simply means immersion.

Here again, I think the question is, what more could God say?

When Jesus says we need to be born again of water and the Spirit, Ryan complains that he doesn't use the word baptism.

St. Paul does use the word baptism.

But Ryan says this still isn't good enough, since that might just mean an immersion.

But St. Paul says that when we were baptized into Christ, we were baptized into Christ's death.

Now, he's connecting our baptism to salvation by means of the cross, but he's also highlighting this important biblical theme that we find throughout the Old and the New Testament, this union of water and the Holy Spirit I mentioned earlier.

It's repeatedly connected with two themes, with the death of evil and the creation of new life.

Literally, as I said before, the second sentence in the Bible is about the Spirit hovering over the waters in the first creation, and this idea appears over and over again in the Old Testament.

In Noah's Ark, which we'll get to next, we see water and the dove, which prefigures the Holy Spirit, connected with the death of the old world of sin and creation starting afresh.

In the Exodus, the Holy Spirit leads the Israelites in the pillar of cloud through the Red Sea into their new life, while their old life of slavery is destroyed, quite literally, with the death of the Egyptians.

Now, St. Paul even explicitly makes this connection to baptism.

He says that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

So here, Paul is clearly showing that the Red Sea crossing prefigures baptism, just as the manna prefigures the Eucharist, or spiritual food.

But according to Ryan, this actually has nothing to do with water baptism.

In Corinthians, it talks about people being baptized into Moses, in the cloud and the sea.

That simply refers to them being led by Moses through the Red Sea, not water baptism.

I've got to admit, I find Ryan's exegesis here hard to follow.

He claims it's not about water baptism, but St. Paul has just explicitly linked water, the sea, and the Spirit, the cloud.

What else would this be about?

There's no version of the word baptize where it just means led by, as Ryan says, and I can't fathom what it would mean to say that the Israelites were immersed in Moses in some non-baptismal sense.

So while Ryan is right that baptism can mean immersion, I think he's missing the context of Romans 6 about how water baptism is a way of death to our old way of life and the creation of a new one.

Now, that's a theme that St. Peter is also going to touch on as well in the final passage that we're gonna look at.

Passage number six, 1 Peter 3:21.

Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is perhaps the most explicit passage.

St. Peter has just finished talking about Noah's Ark, in which he says that eight persons were saved through water.

So it's yet another example from the Old Testament of salvation happening through water, and in case we don't get it, Peter explicitly tells us three things.

Number one, baptism corresponds to this.

That is, baptism is a modern example of being saved through water.

So he is explicitly talking about water baptism here, not some metaphorical immersion.

Number two, baptism now saves you.

Boom, it's right there.

Number three, how does baptism save you?

Well, he says it's not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Well, why does Peter need to clarify that?

Because he's clearly talking about a physical action, water baptism, and he wants to make sure that we don't get the idea that the important part is what we can see, the removal of dirt, but rather, the important part of what's going on is what's happening invisibly through this visible action.So how is Ryan going to respond to this?

Here, again, it's the word baptism just means immersion, and the context is not indicating water.

Peter literally just said that Noah's family were saved through water, and that this corresponds to baptism.

And his response?

Is that the context isn't indicating water?

The context is explicitly talking about water.

All right.

In fact, he links it up with Noah's flood in the verse before.

And with Noah's flood, the water was not the salvation.

The water was the judgment from God.

The salvation was being in the ark.

Here, Ryan is just directly disagreeing with St. Peter's description of Noah's ark as being a salvation through water, because Ryan is separating judgment from salvation.

But Peter's point is that the old sinful world is washed away in the flood, just as your old sinful life was washed away in water baptism.

That's the connection.

So what's going on?

By this point, I hope that you can see, the Bible speaks in some very straightforward ways about baptism actually saving you, by removing your sins, by washing away your sins.

And remember, I'm using the six passages that Ryan picked out.

There are plenty of other passages in the Bible that teach the same thing, and I hope you can see the intellectual gymnastics that Baptists like Ryan have to engage in, in order to avoid the plain meaning of scripture, whether it's claiming that baptism for forgiveness of sins really means baptism because your sins were already forgiven or saying that First Peter three isn't about being saved through water, even though Peter tells us it is, or trying to throw Mark 16:16 completely out of the Bible simply because it tells us that we're saved by believing and being baptized.

And so you might wonder, why do this to scripture?

Why do this to the Bible?

Why not just believe that when the Bible says that baptism saves you, that it actually means that?

Well, Ryan explains.

Now, the reality is, adding baptism as a requirement for heaven means we are no longer being saved purely by the work of Jesus dying for our sins.

It's now Jesus plus our works.

50% what Jesus did, 50% what we've done.

That's not grace anymore.

So according to Ryan, baptism is a work, because we have to do something.

And if you have to do anything, then it's not grace anymore.

Now, there are several problems with this.

First, we already heard Saint Paul talk about how he was told to be baptized and wash away your sin.

Now, whether you think that's a reference to baptism or not, he's clearly being told to do something to wash away his sins.

Second, if human actions can't be involved, then faith can't save us.

After all, the New Testament describes faith as working.

For instance, Saint Paul explicitly speaks of faith working through love, and he praises the Thessalonians for their work of faith, just as when Jesus addresses the churches in Revelation 2, he lists love and faith and service and patient endurance as works in Revelation 2 Verse 19.

Now, in contrast, Saint Paul makes clear that baptism isn't a work, or at least it's not the kind of work that he's speaking against.

In Titus 3, one of the passages that Ryan didn't cover, Paul says that Christ saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.

So we're not saved by our own deeds, but by this washing of rebirth and renewal in the Spirit.

Water and the Spirit, not our good deeds.

And that makes sense.

Faith is something that you do, you believe, you trust.

It's active, it's an active verb.

But baptism is something that's done to you.

You get baptized.

You receive baptism.

It's a passive verb.

But Ryan rejects this.

He insists that faith isn't a work and that baptism is, just 'cause he says so.

And if you really believe that baptism saves you when the Bible says baptism saves you, that means you're going to hell.

Same with baptism.

And what that means then is that if someone thinks that baptism is required for heaven, unfortunately they won't make it in.

Now, my focus so far has just been on what the Bible says.

But when Ryan suggests that anyone who reads the Bible differently than him on baptism is damned, let's consider what he's really claiming.

Everett Ferguson, a Protestant scholar, wrote Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries, in which he looks at both the Biblical evidence about baptism and also how Christians for the first 500 years understood baptism.

Now, what did those first Christians believe?

Now, if you're looking at the evidence for 854 pages, Ferguson s- concludes that there is a remarkable agreement amongst the early Christians that baptism saves us, and that John 3:5 is talking about us being born again through water baptism.

He then says, The New Testament and early Christian literature are virtually unanimous in ascribing a saving significance to baptism.

Baptism, however, was not seen as a human work, but as God's work, and the salvation in baptism was premised on the saving effect of Christ's death on the cross and his victorious resurrection.

So if believing that baptism is necessary for salvation is damnable itself, then few, if any, of the Christians of the first 500 years were saved.

Later Catholics are all damned for believing that baptism now saves you means just that, and so are most Protestants, including people like Martin Luther , who explicitly taught that baptism saves.

Now, do those conclusions strike you as a bit implausible?

I suggest they should.

So here's what I'd say.

Scripture teaches that baptism saves, because it does.

That doesn't mean God can't save you some other way, but this is the way He chose to save you.

And if your theology can't accept this, you need better theology.

Okay.

Now, maybe you're wondering, what would Ryan say in response to all of Joe's arguments here?

I don't know for sure.

Chances are good I found out, for better or for worse, in our debate on Sunday.

So click here to watch the full back-and-forth on what the Bible really teaches about baptism.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.