This paper on baptism as calling on the name of the Lord to be saved was originally delivered to the Reformation Society of Western New York on March 12, 2026. For readability, it has been converted into a series of articles. A PDF version is available.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Baptism in the Gospels
Part 3: Baptism in the Book of Acts
Part 4: Baptism in the Epistles
Part 5: Conclusion
That baptism is a calling on the name of the Lord to be saved, “a means of prayer for acceptance with God and for full salvation from God,” is an aspect of the ordinance that has gone much overlooked since the early days of the church.1Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, 102. Yet this is how it is consistently portrayed across the pages of the New Testament. The rite of baptism is presented as an act of faith in the promises of God. It is the response demanded by the gospel, the place appointed for the penitent sinner to come to Christ and receive his grace. The biblical evidence suggests that “entrance into the life of the kingdom of God includes repentance, faith and baptism from the human side, and forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit from the divine side, and that baptism is the normal point at which the action of each side is focused.”2Fowler, More Than a Symbol, 221. “This concept of faith, baptism and grace implies that baptism is the normal venue for the introduction of the individual into the sphere of redemption, although this is neither invariably nor automatically true” (210). In other words, it is a better sinner’s prayer.
It is astonishing to consider that Scripture associates precisely the same gifts of grace with both faith and baptism.3Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, 272–273. As it has been shown, this includes not only forgiveness (Acts 10:43; 22:16) and the Holy Spirit (Gal. 3:2; 1 Cor. 12:13) but also justification (Rom. 3:28; 1 Cor. 6:11), union with Christ (Eph. 3:17; Rom. 6:3-4), sonship (John 1:12; Gal. 3:26-27), church membership (Acts 5:14; 2:41), the life of the age to come (John 3:16; Titus 3:5), and even salvation itself (Eph. 2:8; 1 Pet. 3:21). All of these gifts “are ours in and through baptism, precisely because it is faith-baptism, but only when it is faith-baptism.”4Cross, Recovering the Evangelical Sacrament, 80, Kindle edition (emphasis added). However, as Beasley-Murray rightly reminds us: “Faith has no merit to claim such gifts and baptism has no power to produce them; all is of God, who brings man to faith and to baptism, and in his sovereignty has been pleased so to order his giving. . . . Our duty is to make sure that we neither deny the reality of man’s part in faith and baptism nor underestimate the wonder of grace in both.”5Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, 273-274.
Returning to our original question, I would suggest that baptism is an appropriate answer to give for the moment when a person was saved. “Believers can and should point to their baptism as the moment in which the Spirit claimed them in full and in which they claimed Christ in full.”6Brandon C. Jones, Waters of Promise: Finding Meaning in Believer Baptism (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2012). Although perhaps the question itself is a bit misleading, since becoming a Christian is something of a process, involving “a number of components that are intimately interrelated and belong together.”7Robert H. Stein, “Baptism in Luke-Acts,” 57. Quoting Cross, he adds: “One does not become a Christian in Acts at the minute of faith, or the instant of repentance, or the time of confession, or the moment of baptism, or the point in time when God gave his Spirit. These were not separated in time as in the present day but occurred together, that is, on the same day, and thus ‘the need to pinpoint exactly when conversion took place and also to identify the normative sequence for the constituent elements of conversion-initiation are obviated.’” At the same time, we should have no problem responding with our baptism, for not only is it a vital part in the complex of conversion, it is also the most suitable element for marking the occasion of our turn to God in Christ and acceptance by him. It is dramatically memorable and publicly observable; it is a fitting representation of the whole saving event.
Marriage provides a helpful analogy. Some say that baptism is like a wedding ring, a mere symbol of the vows made before God. But baptism is more like a wedding ceremony. There, the couple pledges their commitment to one another before God and a congregation of witnesses. The minister officially pronounces the couple as husband and wife, who then share a kiss indicative of the consummation to follow. The marriage license is finally signed and submitted. All of these elements are involved in and constitute a marriage. Yet, in another sense, it is actually God who is ultimately responsible for joining the two together as one flesh (Matt. 19:6). So, to answer the question, “When were you united to your spouse?” you would rightly reply, “The day when I was married.” Likewise, to answer the question, “When were you united to Christ and his church?” you would rightly reply, “The day when I was baptized.”
Implications
There are a few implications that follow from these observations. First, the inseparable relationship between faith and baptism challenges proponents of covenant theology who insist on the baptism of infants. This is not to suggest that the human response of faith is the most important or essential component of baptism, or that all of the arguments for the inclusion of believers’ children into the church at birth are unconvincing. And it must certainly be recognized that baptism is not only something we do but something done to us, both by God (who raises the dead) and his church (that wields the keys). Still, the way baptism is presented across the entire New Testament reveals that faith is nevertheless essential to what baptism is. Emphasizing the role of God and the church in baptism should not displace the role of the baptized; the priority of grace does not diminish the necessity of faith. The covenant baptism of infants may very well be a good and necessary consequence deduced from Scripture, but baptism as an act of faith, a calling on the name of the Lord for salvation, is a truth expressly set down in Scripture.
Second, the saving significance accorded to baptism challenges those who insist that baptism is merely a sign, an act of obedience consequent to conversion.8“What is really important, we often hear in baptist churches, is what happens in the heart, in the conversion experience as it is transacted between God and the soul. Baptism is ‘just’ a symbol—like a wedding ring, nice but dispensable, a mere external ceremony. So what is usually left as the compulsion for baptism among baptists? Obedience. Why do it? Because Jesus did it and the NT commands it. So baptism, instead of being a cataclysmic gateway from death to life, becomes merely the first of many acts of discipleship. The sense of drama is gone, the sense of baptism having some real contact with salvation is gone, and baptism has been reduced to an act of sheer obedience. The real drama is elsewhere, in the private enclave of the heart.” Jonathan H. Rainbow, “‘Confessor Baptism’: The Baptismal Doctrine of the Early Anabaptists,” Believer’s Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ, NAC Studies in Bible & Theology, Thomas R. Schreiner and Shawn D. Wright, eds. (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 205. The exegesis of baptismal texts by Baptist authors often appears to be influenced more so by an aversion to paedobaptism or baptismal regeneration than by the words of the biblical authors. They are quick to assert what baptism is not and all that it does not do, while the New Testament regularly affirms the exact opposite (e.g., 1 Pet. 3:21)! Similarly, Michael Haykin remarks that “the Baptist tradition has been focused more on the proper subjects and correct mode of baptism than its meaning.”9Michael A. G. Haykin, Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition (Bellingham, WA; Lexham Press, 2022), 13. The result, broadly speaking, is a deficient baptismal theology. To be worthy of the name, credobaptists should strive to recover a better, fuller, and richer definition of baptism, along with a more robust understanding of conversion.10“Baptism is the committing of oneself to Christ in faith. Baptism is the response of repentance. Baptism is the prayer for baptism in the Holy Spirit. I am not baptised in the hope (by others) that I might subsequently be converted. I am not baptised in order to demonstrate to others that I have been converted (whether in the near or distant past). I am baptised as the means of that conversion. This is the sinner’s prayer. This is the promise of the Spirit. This is the washing of new birth (Titus 3.5).” John E. Colwell in Cross, Recovering the Evangelical Sacrament, 13, Kindle edition. This does not mean adopting specific labels or using loaded terms such as “sacramentalism” or “baptismal regeneration;” it simply means that we should seek to make as much of baptism as the Bible makes of it.
Third, the close connection in time between a sinner’s conversion to Christ and their baptism into his body, evidenced in the immediate baptisms found in Acts, challenges both paedobaptists and credobaptists alike in our practice of church membership. It is imperative that we use the keys of the kingdom well, guarding the borders of the kingdom and doing our best to ensure that we are baptizing credible professors (Matt. 16:13-19; 18:15-20). There are good reasons for why the church came to introduce a period of instruction for new converts before their baptism and admission to the Lord’s Table. However, we must also take care that we do not lose the significance of baptism as the God-ordained response of faith to the gospel. It should not be treated as some kind of “reward” for those who have jumped through enough theological hoops, or held out as a distant privilege for those who have produced enough spiritual fruit, for baptism is how a penitent sinner comes to God in Christ to receive his grace, enter his kingdom, and be raised to walk in newness of life. The time between baptism and the other elements of conversion may vary, but “baptism should be regarded as the ultimate and unreserved ratification of the individual’s turning to God and of God’s gracious turning to the individual.”11Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, 394.
Applications
To begin to address some of these issues, we would do well to follow the pattern of the New Testament and regularly include baptism in the preaching of the gospel as the right and necessary response to God’s salvation in Christ. We must not reduce the Christian faith “to mere believism, a form of Evangelical gnosticism in which spirit and matter are artificially separated,” where the most real and genuine response of faith occurs privately within one’s heart.12Cross, Recovering the Evangelical Sacrament, 104-105, Kindle edition. The gospel demands a response for Christ from the heart and the body (Acts 2:37-38).We should call our hearers to not only repent and believe but also to be baptized into the name of Jesus Christ, for it is in baptism that Jesus reclaims our entire life in the body for himself. Such an outward, public, and physical expression should not be treated as an optional extra. Yes, the thief on the cross entered Paradise without being baptized, for “faith and baptism do not enjoy the same logical status of necessity.”13Wellum, “Baptism and the Relationship Between the Covenants,” 152. As H. J. Wotherspoon has beautifully articulated it: “He who has faith, but cannot obtain a sacrament, has Christ: he who has a sacrament but has not faith has nothing.”14Quoted in Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, 304 (emphasis original). But that does not change the fact that the thief on the cross would have likely been among the first to get in the water if he had been able to hear Peter’s sermon on Pentecost!
We would also do well, in our teaching on baptism, to keep it tied together with both conversion and church membership. This is because baptism is “the divinely ordained normative confirming sign and seal of initiation into God’s new covenant and his covenant community, without which the normative process of Christian initiation is incomplete.”15Jones, Waters of Promise, 142. We should speak of baptism as our transfer from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of the beloved Son, as our burial with Christ and resurrection by his Spirit, as our ordination into the royal priesthood. We should behold baptism as the emergence of a new creation in the midst of the old, as a proof of Christ’s continued victory over sin and death, and as a glimpse of the bodily resurrection yet to come. Baptism is the rite of initiation into the church precisely because this is what baptism is and what it does. Peterson writes: “In practice, baptism may be separated in time from the moment of conversion, but it provides a ‘focus and occasion for the divine-human encounter,’ serving as ‘a metaphor for the divine initiative in the encounter.’”16David G. Peterson, Romans, Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary (Bellingham, WA; Lexham Press, 2020), 263. This also means that when we experience times of suffering and trial, and our faith wavers, we can look to our baptism. We can remember the good confession we made the day when we emerged from the waters united to Christ. We can look to our baptism because it tells us who we are—better yet, whose we are.
Finally, let us not be guilty of despising baptism. As Naaman’s servant once remarked: “It is a great word the prophet has spoken to you; will you not do it? Has he actually said to you, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” (5:13). Since baptism is how our God intends for us to call on the name of his Son to be saved, to be cleansed of our sin and enter his kingdom like little children, then why devalue it? Since baptism is the place where God has promised to meet the sinner who has turned to him in obedient faith, the place where we can expect him to be gracious to us, then why insist on another? Why replace baptism with sinner’s prayers, raised hands, altar calls, and decision cards? Instead, we should aim to restore baptism to its rightful, biblical place as a baptism of conversion, “the act of faith of a believer as they respond to the grace of God who draws near in Christ by his Spirit.”17Cross, Recovering the Evangelical Sacrament, 343, Kindle edition. In the words of Beasley-Murray once more: “It behoves us accordingly to make much of baptism. It is given as the trysting place of the sinner with his Saviour; he who has met Him there will not despise it. But in the last resort it is only a place: the Lord Himself is its glory, as He is its grace. Let the glory then be given to whom it belongs!”18Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, 305 (emphasis original).
