Posted on 10/06/2015 10:35:57 AM PDT by envisio
You still haven't answered my challenge for you to tell me how, where, by whom, and for what purpose Peter was baptized.
2. Your interpretation of 1 Peter 3:20-21 is so warped that it neither admits that Noah's spirit was in communion with God's Spirit, saved by faith long before the flood came; and that when the flood did come, Noah's soul and body were saved from physical death not in the water, but kept out of the water. "In the like figure" means this is a figurative expression with water baptism being symbolic of the flood waters, and if you are not a dunce, Peter's language there is not literal, it is figurative-literal.
3. Unless you were different from anybody else, your body and spirit did not leave your body during the rite of baptism. The one baptized dos not literally die, but is subjected to a rite that figuratively exhibits the pre-baptism spiritual rebirth of the believer by comparing it to the literal truth of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it cannot be plainer that baptism is symbolic. And if your baptism was not immersion, it wasn't even a New Testament baptism. Come on, wake up! The literal fact, of which the reborn child of God is intimately familiar, is the new life imparted by the Baptism of the Holy Spirit upon the believer at the moment when conviction, repentance, and total commitment to the Risen Christ, Lord, and Eternal High Priest join to produce a new-born Spiritual man-creature, all things being new, forever belonging to the Lord, and neither the believer's soul and spirit and faith ever to be seized from nor escape out of His grasp.
This is symbolized by the figure of death, burial, and resurrection of the believer in the conduct of the ordinance of the Disciples' Baptism into service to the King. "Baptism into Christ" is an expression where "Christ" is a metonomy representing the sense of "the service of Christ." It means "baptism into the service of Christ." That also is figurative-literal language.
4. Your church relying onthe writings of "Apostolic Fathers" (who are not the real, literal students of Jesus who saw, heard, and touched Jesus before death and after His resurrection), products of the false teaching of apostolic succession, is a denomination, and I would say a false one, an apostate from The Faith of the Bible, claiming authority over and above the Written Word, but not faithful to it. In fact, the whole failed hermeneuutic of that errant denomination is based on allegorical methodology deriving from worldly Platonic philosophy and introduced subsequent to the accession to influence of Gentiles who introduced catholicism, and not the Scripture-based literal, grammatical, historical, contextual, cultural hermeneutic displayed by Jesus and His Apostles. Paul himself, trained both by Gamaliel and later by Gentile scholars, stayed far away from the your kind of interpretation. THis hermeneutic was literal, pragmatic, and needed no translators to deliver the faith to the Greek-speaking population of his day. The reliance of your dogmas on fallible, errant men, many of whose actual heresies are recognized, are not the footing that I want to choose upon which to base my journey into eternal life with The God of the Bible and His Only Begotten Son.
Summary: Your enumerated points here are not only illiterate and unproven, but actually nonsensical. You look at a rite that is not only ripe with symbolism, and claim it is not, just like other rites and rituals invented to explain away secrets of God to which the denomination has never had access, but which are open to the regenerated believer-disciple through the Word of God and spiritual discernment (1 Cor. 2:13-16).
So your answer is yes AND no???
Will you at least agree that no one is saved without faith?
Brother, a little caution is in order here. There is good reason to believe that the Disciples' Baptism, a baptism of immersion of water, was not John's baptism unto repentance, but was employed the same way as John's. My opinion is that Jesus did baptize at least the Twelve into His especially chosen closest group of students (Jn. 3:22), and maybe a few more before His ministry expanded and the number of secondary applying to be disciples became unmanageable by only one person.
He did teach at least the Twelve Disciples to baptize other followers, using immersion as the vehicle of induction into commitment to a life of instruction (Jn. 4:1-2). Moreover, He baptizes not only in The Spirit (Pentecost, Cornelius). The symbol of fire is by some denominations connected with Spirit baptism, thinking that it hints of zealousness, but that is wrong. He also will baptize with fire, as the creator of the Lake of Fire; and the Devil, his angels, and unsaved humans will be its subjects.
You might want to study a dissertation on the seven baptisms that one earlier post of mine links to, where you can get a little better grasp of the subject before committing your opinions on it to writing.
Just a FRiendly suggestion.
My answer was yes.
We can agree we are saved by grace and grace alone.
Even faith is a gift of grace, grace precedes faith.
We are spiritually dead in Adam and without grace no one would believe in Jesus.
God may decide to save some American Indians living in the year 500ad and obviously could not believe that Jesus is the Christ since no one was there to preach to them. In that case, the Holy Spirit would have baptized them into Christ and faith would have been totally absent.
Just as I thought......so much for hundreds of places.
Greek syntax? Lol, I am sure the Greek Catholics understood Greek better than you.
1 Peter 3 needs no interpretation, it flatly states baptism does now save us.
The comment about physically dying shows a total lack of understanding of the historical Faith. In baptism, we are placed in Christ. Christ died for our sins, and He will never die again. All those in Christ therefore will never die spiritually.
You can attack the Church Fathers all you want, but isn’t strange that after the Apostles died, the universal faith believed by those all thru the world bears absolutely no resemblance to the strange doctrines and beliefs you hold.
Re Noah: Are you trying to tell me that Noah was not saved before he passed through the Flood (essentially without getting wet)? What Peter's Torah said, as translated into English is:
"But Noah found favour in the eyes of Jehovah.
This is the history of Noah. Noah was a just man, perfect
amongst his generations: Noah walked with God" (Gen. 6:8-9 AV).
Noah walked with God, and the only way for two to walk together is if they agree. Noah daily agreed with=homologehoh=confessed his errors whenever they occurred, and his shortcomings were instantly forgiven and forgotten by JHVH and cleansed of unrighteousness. Noah was just; that is, saved by faith in the ever-present JHVH, justified, and sanctified more than a hundred years before he passed through the Flood event without getting wet, during which time JHVH kept on saving him, as He not only brings security of salvation to the regenerated believer, but from then on keeps on saving that believer into eternity.
(2) The word "figure" properly translated with greater detail of meaning is αντιτυπον = antitype, in which figure the medium of baptism is not water, the mode is not "preserved from contact with" but rather "totally immersed in," and the sense is not literal in the earthly world, but literal in the sphere of the Spirit.
It is baptism in the Spirit that marks and effects our salvation from the consequences of sin. The verb "save" is here in the present tense, active voice, indicative mode, third person singular. The sense is not something happening only once (punctiliar uses the aorist tense) but persistent (which is the feature of the present tense here). This baptism is one that keeps on saving, not one that happens once without further effect. So this phrase cannot describe a one-time external application of moisture, whatever the form. Nor does it project the sense of the perfect tense, of an event happening once but with ongoing effects.
So, in this, what is straightforward to the Hellenistic mind totally escapes your comprehension as you misinterpret what the ambiguity of the English translation presents you, and your interpretation is wrong,
(But note that participation in the Disciples Vaptism by water immersion, as uniformly practiced by the Apostles, can be a contributive act in the ongoing salvation in the sanctification of the believer, for which "(water) baptism saves" in the aorist is not a term amiss.)
One of the things this doctrine means is that a priest's wetted fingers placed on a baby's head and pronouncing the titles of the members of The Godhead does not save that baby from Hellfire, no matter what you insist. And there is no place in Scripture that backs up your conception or your contention that salvation is by water baptism.
(3) Regarding the Patristics, they had no other or greater authority than today's believers have, and that is the Written Word alone verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit, plenary in compass of its sphere of authority, preserved throughout the ages by JHVH, and translated by faithful servants of God into languages such that God's plan of salvation can be preached and souls convicted and surrendering to it can be saved by the promise of God:
"And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?
Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia,
and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,
Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene,
and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes,
Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works
of God" (Acts 2:8-11 AV) AV).
I am glad I can go out, knowing from the Holy Scriptures that salvation is by faith, and not by baptism.
So now you concede that water baptism isn't required for someone to be saved? Dude...make up your mind!
You are right there but DEAD wrong about faith being absent in a person's salvation. God says it is IMPOSSIBLE to please Him without it and whoever comes to Him must believe. There is NO OTHER NAME by which we are saved but Jesus Christ. Some native in deepest darkest Africa must still have faith to be saved. His good works don't save him anymore than ours do. I don't limit the work of the Holy Spirit in rewarding those who diligently seek the truth. Do you?
I wasn't giving my opinions on the 7 baptisms...I was showing that there is biblically more than one baptism and they all do not include water or require water as the Catholic teaches...
Eph 4:5 One Lord, one faith, one baptism,
According to Catholics 'that' baptism (and all baptisms) is/are water because every time the word baptism is used in the scripture it means getting wet...There is only one baptism and that requires a Catholic priest who then gets someone wet...
You've got some scripture to prove that, right???
Revelation 7:9
No, I don’t limit the Holy Spirit. How do you read Revelation 7:9? It says every tribe and tongue. So if a tribe in deepest Africa spoke a language in 500ad and no Christian missionary ever was sent to preach the gospel to them, can one or more of them be saved? They could not have faith and their good works are like filthy rags. Suppose that language died in 600ad, again before ever seeing a missionary.
Please take off the 16th century blinders and stop saying “ water baptism”. There is only baptism. Jesus commanded the Church to baptize, so if one hears the Gospel, comes to faith in Jesus as the Messiah who died for their sins, that person must be baptized by the Church to have their sins remitted, receive the Holy Spirit and be placed in Christ. This is normative for the believer since 33ad. But it does not limit the Holy Spirit baptizing the African who lived in 500ad never hearing of Jesus nor the Gospel.
No one is recorded as being saved in the NT without the Holy Spirit sending the Church to them to make a disciple and baptize them.
We all deserve hell for our sins and it is only out of God’s love and mercy that He has decided to extend saving grace made possible from the sacrificial death of His perfect Son. As Jesus said in John 8, unless you believe He is the one, you will die in your sins. Obviously this can’t apply to someone who never heard of Jesus.
You guys are a trip...I'll bet your religion sent you to that verse, to prove that everyone who ever lived was saved by grace (without faith)...But who cares about the context, eh???
Let's see what God says about it...
Rev 7:14 And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Great Tribulation??? The Indians in 500 AD went thru the Great Tribulation??? IT HASN'T EVEN HAPPENED YET!!! And you don't even get embarrassed...
Why don’t you take off your elitist exclusionary glasses first!? You and I have gone round and round on this argument many times before on numerous threads, I don’t perceive you changing your mind about this no matter who says what. You really don’t have the decisive ancient witness on this subject that you may think you have.
If you cannot recognize the inherent contradictions between your all over the place opinions and what God has told us in His sacred word then only the Holy Spirit can open your eyes. God saves us - ALL of us - by His grace THROUGH faith. It hasn’t ever changed. Water baptism is an act of obedience by the one who has already come to saving faith in the Savior. It is NOT the act that saves but the answer of faith to the grace of God. It doesn’t save our souls anymore than a shower cleans our heart.
I’m done trying to get you to comprehend this truth. Maybe one day it will hit you and you’ll understand. Adios.
Maybe I wasn't clear on what you were saying. I was not trying to offend you, so I hope you take my comment ubder advisement.
With respect --
No problem...I don't always make myself as clear as I'd like to...
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