On An Argument Against the Necessity of Baptism
There is an argument I hear quite a bit against the necessity of baptism. It says something like:
1. If it is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without baptism, then baptism is not necessary for salvation.
2. It is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without baptism.
3. So baptism is not necessary for salvation.
There's something funny going on with the word "necessary" here. To flesh this out, take a similar argument:
4. If it is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without knowing Jesus, then knowing Jesus is not necessary for salvation.
5. It is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without knowing Jesus (Romans 1 and Old Covenant Jews)
6. So knowing Jesus is not necessary for salvation.
This should make the proponent of the first argument uncomfortable because they often times say that we shouldn't really make big deal out of baptism, at least not to the degree that we Catholics (or any other Protestant group that believes in the necessity of baptism) do. But then we would also have to say that we shouldn't make a big deal out of knowing Jesus, and surely (most) anti-Baptism Protestants wouldn't advocate for that.
The motivation for wanting to push the first argument is that they want to distance themselves from the idea that we need to work for our salvation (leave aside that baptism wouldn't count as a work anyways). So, usually, when I, a Catholic, ask the Protestant if they would get baptized and why, they usually say, "While I do not believe baptism is necessary for salvation, I do it anyways out of obedience to Christ." There are reservations to be had about this answer. Do they mean that they get baptized out of obedience to Christ but they don't understand why Christ commanded them to be baptized? Is this because they have an intuition as to why Christ commanded baptism that it might start to sound a bit Catholic? Anyways, it doesn't escape the form of the argument. We could then say:
7. If it is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without obeying Jesus, then obeying Jesus is not necessary for salvation.
8. It is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without obeying Jesus (surely there will be sinners in Heaven)
9. So obeying Jesus is not necessary for salvation.
And then we mimic the Protestant rhetoric, "So why emphasize obeying Jesus?"
So what exactly is the issue here? Well, like I said, it seems to hinge on the understanding of necessity. I don't know that I have the vocabulary for it, but here is how I think of it. Take the disjunctive (P v Q). I order for this to be true, either P has to be true, or Q has to be true, or both can be true, but both P and Q cannot be false. Suppose I say something like, "It is not necessary for P to be true in order for the disjunct to be true. It is also not necessary for Q to be true for the disjunct to be true. So both P and Q can be false and still have the disjunct to be true." That would be a fallacy of composition, and I suspect some Protestants think like this, that since it is possible to be saved without X, X is not necessary and not a big deal, and I can think of just about everything being like this, so everything I do is not necessary to be saved, so I don't have to do anything.
But that doesn't really deal with the issue of necessity, and it might be that some Protestants don't think that way anyways. The problem might be that necessity is thought of as way of telling us how things are constituted. As some Neo-Scholastics have argued, conceiving of essences or the nature of things by way of "possible worlds" and deriving properties is a limited tool at best, question begging at worst. So for example, I may conceive of a man with one leg, but it wouldn't follow from that that men needn't have two legs. Men naturally have two legs, and we wouldn't say that a man who was hit by a car and lost a leg isn't a big deal and that we shouldn't focus on how many legs he has. We understand that it is possible for a man to have one leg, but that isn't how things are meant to be.
For that reason, in discussing the issue with Protestants, I have avoided the "necessary" language, and have used words like "essential" and "normative". It is essential that when you get baptized, you are saved. Salvation is a property of baptism. Essentially, saved people are baptized people. Sure, there may be some non normative way some people are saved without baptism as there is some non normative way a man only has one leg, but that's okay. God has a normative way of saving you, and that is through baptism. If God allows someone to be saved some non normative way, that is up to Him. But so far as it is up to us and our cooperation with His grace, we must get baptized.
I see that now in 2018 you are still out against protestants? I would like to challenge your misconception here and also your theology regarding the salvific nature of baptism. Baptism is definitely normative but it follows the act of God in saving the person. You cant be saved by doing something otherwise that would mean that your doing of it constituted a work before God. Even your believing is a gift from God himself and it is therefore by the work of Christ that a person is saved and baptism can not possibly confer something that God does inwardly prior. Even if we accept that baptism as an infant is a sign of God's prior work it does not follow that it is essential to salvation or necessary. It is however a command. Repent and be baptised but to make that second response a work which enables salvation is really not biblical and i would challenge you to rethink this. We are saved in participating in the life of God which he poured out on the cross for us. We receive this as a gift from God who gives us the faith of Jesus to respond rightly to God. Baptism is a sign of this for sure and is a command but to make it a work that is somehow efficacious or meritorious is a grave mistake. We trust in Christ alone to save. He alone unites us to God. Do we THEN need to be baptised? Yes we do. We do need to be baptised.
ReplyDeleteIt feels to me that you are using your Roman Catholicism as a kind of blanket to keep you warm rather than being clothed only in Christ. If this is the case, when God removes the blanket, don't be surprised to find it is cold. He will by graciously doing this allow you to have the true warmth of Jesus. They are not the same thing.
Hey Rich. Glad to see you exploring my blog.
DeleteI want to be careful in framing my motivations and the use of some words first. So first, I wouldn't say I am against Protestants, but I am against Protestantism, just in virtue of believing that Protestantism is false, and we should always be against what is false. I am not against persons. I am very much for persons, which is why I try to correct what I think are errors they believe. Second, as noted in this post, some Protestants actually do believe in the necessity of baptism, so this post isn't anti Protestant per se. I used to be a Protestant myself. I was an Anabaptist, and Anabaptists believe in the necessity of baptism for salvation as much as Catholics do. So, this post can be read and agreed upon even by some Protestants. This isn't a distinctively Catholic issue.
So you say baptism follows the act of God saving the person. There is a way in which this is consistent with what I have said. So, if one is saved, then it follows one gets baptised. If one is not baptized, then it also follows one is not saved (by rule of modus tollens). When we see that the second premise follows the first, there doesn't sound to be a difference in what we both believe.
Now I agree there is no work that could merit salvation before God. However, it doesn't follow that because I do something, that God didn't do it either. So for example, I have an act of faith. Faith is a verb and the verb is ascribed to me. In order to say that because God gives us faith (which I agree with) that therefore I did nothing, you would have to ignore the grammar of scripture, which is part of what gives it the meaning, and that seems like a mighty high price to pay. If that's the case, then there is never an act of faith I do, which is contrary to the plain reading of scripture.
I did say that I do believe that even faith is a gift from God. 100% and truly a gift from God. But it doesn't follow that it diminishes or destroys any human participation. It's not a problem for the hypostatic union, it's not a problem when Paul says he saves some people (1 Cor 9:22), and it wouldn't be a problem here, and there is a Thomistic explanation for this. So, under the general Thomistic metaphysics, we understand God being pure act sustains us at every single moment. Nothing I do sustains my being. That is 100% and truly God. However, there are other things I must do to sustain my existence which is itself dependent on God, like eat and drink. And while God is the ultimate cause of things, I also know that I am the material cause of my offspring. So, just because God is 100% involved and provides everything, it doesn't follow that I didn't cooperate or play a part in God's act of saving me.
Perhaps this example will help illustrate the point. Say a child wants to buy his mother a gift. But he has no money. His mother gives him a $10 allowance and with that allowance, he goes to the store and buys her flowers. So, did the child do anything do earn that gift or favor from his mother? No. It wouldn't be possible without the sustainment of the mother to begin with. But just because the mother made it possible for her child to do what he did doesn't mean the child had no real role in the act. So in the same way, yeah, everything is made possible truly from God, but that doesn't exclude human participation. So there is a way to understand what you're saying and be consistent with what has been said. It would just need the proper understanding of causes.
And remember, no proponent of the necessity of baptism believes that baptism is efficacious or meritorious apart from Christ. We believe that it is efficacious and meritorious precisely because it is participation in the life of Christ, specifically the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ (Rom 6:3-4).