The Reformers built the systems this book engages—Zwingli’s symbolic baptism, Calvin’s sign-and-seal. But the arguments did not stop there. These same positions have been restated in the last fifty years by serious scholars whose work shapes how today’s Protestant readers think about faith, baptism, and the gospel response. A reader trained on those scholars deserves to see where this book’s framework engages them.
Thomas Schreiner, Robert Stein, and the Credobaptist Case
The most thorough contemporary defense of believer’s baptism from the Reformed Baptist tradition is the multi-author volume Believer’s Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ.1 Robert Stein’s contribution concludes that becoming a Christian in Acts involved five integrally related components—repentance, faith, confession, receiving the gift of the Spirit, and baptism—occurring together and normally on the same day.
Stein calls water baptism in the name of Jesus an essential part of becoming a Christian. He reads the parts of the response as inseparable, so that naming one names them all. He calls this synecdoche: for Luke, “repentance” stands for “repentance-faith-baptism.” He treats “believe” the same way, calling it shorthand for the whole sequence—believed, repented, confessed, received the Spirit, were baptized. On Acts 22:16 he finds not just a temporal but a causal relationship between baptism and the forgiveness of sins, and he concludes that a repentance-faith-confession-baptism is what brings the gift of the Spirit.
Chapter 7, “The Unified Gospel Response,” introduces the concept of synecdoche; Chapter 9 traces the same recognition back through the Reformers. Chapter 14 takes up the volume’s primary baptismal texts: Romans 6, Colossians 2, 1 Peter 3:21, Galatians 3:27, Titus 3:5.
Schreiner gives baptism more than a symbolic role. He treats it as central to Christian initiation, denies that it saves mechanically, and holds that it saves only because it is anchored to Christ’s death and resurrection and joined to the baptized person’s appeal to God for cleansing. He writes that water baptism and Spirit baptism were part and parcel of the complex of saving events at conversion, and that those who exclude water baptism put asunder what God meant to be joined together. He leans toward reading Peter’s eperōtema as that appeal rather than as a pledge made to God, though he holds that his argument stands either way. This book agrees with all of it.
The disagreement is narrow. Schreiner’s faith is what this book calls trusting belief. For him, baptism always follows that faith, and baptism is where the person asks God for cleansing. He holds that Cornelius shows water baptism is not absolutely necessary for salvation, and that a person may be a Christian without ever being baptized. Yet he writes that those who treat baptism casually veer away from Paul, and endorses Schnackenburg’s judgment that Paul would not understand anyone refusing baptism—that such an attitude would no longer be genuine faith. This book reads baptism as where trusting belief completes itself, not a step taken after it is finished. Baptism is how a believing person asks God for cleansing. Someone who believes but withholds baptism has not yet made that request the way God said to make it. Schreiner and this book share the anchoring to the cross, the denial that the water has any power, and the requirement that the person consciously appeal to God. Schreiner has baptism as the occasion of that request. This book has it as the occasion and as part of the request itself. Chapter 7 works out why baptism and trusting belief are distinct but inseparable.
John MacArthur and Lordship Salvation
MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus anchored the Lordship Salvation claim that faith which does not submit to Christ’s lordship is not saving faith.2 He wrote against a gospel that asks for a decision and requires nothing after it, and he was right to. Where belief costs nothing it surrenders nothing, and a Lord who may be received without being obeyed is not the Lord Scripture presents. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 argue the same.
The difference is how far the response has to go. MacArthur’s converted person has repented, surrendered to Christ’s lordship, and trusted Him wholly—and MacArthur holds that such a person is already saved, with baptism to be obeyed afterward. This book reads that same person as having done everything but the one thing that completes it. Chapter 3 calls it Level 3 trusting belief; Level 4 is saving belief—that same faith completing itself in baptism.
Matthew Bates and the Allegiance Turn
Bates’ Salvation by Allegiance Alone is the contemporary standard-bearer for reading pistis in the New Testament as allegiance to Jesus as King rather than as bare intellectual assent.3 This book agrees with the move, develops it as trusting belief in Chapter 3, and engages Bates in Chapter 11.
Bates gives baptism real weight—union with the King begins decisively there, at the event taken as a whole. But for Bates a person enters salvation by confessing loyalty to the King, and that confession comes before the water. So on his account the allegiance is complete before the person is baptized. This book reads allegiance that withholds baptism as allegiance withheld. Chapter 7 shows why allegiance and baptism are not separable.
N. T. Wright on Faithfulness
Wright’s work on the gospel as the royal announcement of Jesus’ kingship has reshaped how many evangelical readers approach Romans and Galatians.4 This book’s treatment of the obedience of faith in Chapter 10 stands on common ground with Wright’s emphasis on the gospel as a summons issuing in the loyalty that a King’s announcement demands.
For Wright, justification is God’s declaration that a person is in the right and belongs to the covenant family, and He issues that verdict on faith. It is the last day’s verdict announced in advance. Wright treats baptism as the event in the present that matches the resurrection on the last day, and he can describe becoming a Christian as believing the gospel and being baptized. Baptism makes it visible and celebrates it. This book reads that verdict as still ahead of the person until he is baptized.
Where This Leaves the Conversation
The contemporary versions of the Protestant positions are sharper and better defended than their sixteenth-century forms. These scholars differ among themselves, and the differences are real—Schreiner argues from a Reformed Baptist confession, Wright from a covenantal and Anglican one. They also differ in how much they grant baptism, from MacArthur’s command to be obeyed afterward to Stein’s causal tie to the forgiveness of sins. But with the exception of Stein, who treats the exact order and timing as largely irrelevant to Luke, each of them has salvation complete before baptism.
That is the break, and it is not small. These positions read the saving response as backward-looking: belief lays hold of a salvation already secured, and baptism testifies to a rescue already accomplished. This book reads it as forward-looking. The crowd at Pentecost was cut to the heart and cried out, “What shall we do?”—not because they had been saved, but because they had not. They were pleading for a rescue they did not yet possess.
The gospel response is that plea. Trusting belief, repentance, confession, and baptism are how a guilty person calls upon the name of the Lord to be saved, not how a saved person announces that he already is. A salvation already received asks only to be confessed; a salvation still being sought has to be asked for the way God said to ask.
Each of these scholars’ tools—linguistic, historical, and exegetical—is engaged in this book on its own ground. The reader who wants to press any of these questions further can continue the conversation through the AI study companion at eternalstakes.com.
Notes
- Thomas R. Schreiner and Shawn D. Wright, eds., Believer’s Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2006); Thomas R. Schreiner, “Baptism in the Epistles: An Initiation Rite for Believers,” in Believer’s Baptism, 70, 75, 80, 92; Robert H. Stein, “Baptism in Luke-Acts,” in Believer’s Baptism, 51–52, 63–65. The Schnackenburg judgment is quoted approvingly by Schreiner at 80, citing Rudolf Schnackenburg, Baptism in the Thought of St. Paul, 127.
- John F. MacArthur, The Gospel According to Jesus, rev. and updated anniversary ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009).
- Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), esp. 174, 190–91, 197.
- N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2 vols., Christian Origins and the Question of God 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), esp. 915–17, 962–63.