You did not post the entire verse. I'm not a fan of cutting out part of the verse.
He tells Titus, "He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit" (Titus 3:5).
The verse needs to be understood in the context of the passage.
The passage, in context, points towards faith in Him is what saves as noted in 3:7. It is not on the basis of deeds as noted in 3:5.
I agree with you (and the Catholic Church agrees) that baptism without repentance and faith is only getting wet. The point I am also making, though, is that repentance and faith are only salvific because of the more central role the Holy Spirit--that is, God Himself in the Third Person of the Trinity--plays in baptism. My human efforts at faith and repentance cannot save me without God's grace, which is poured out by and in the Holy Spirit.
On this I agree.
And you are right that genuine faith must bear fruit. However, Luther did introduce a doctrine called Sola fide which some people have taken in that direction, which is why I was refuting that.
My understanding has always been that no matter how "good" we are or how many "good deeds" we do those are of no avail without faith in Christ first. I think the point Luther was trying to make is that even those deeds do not save us. They are evidence of our salvation. Ephesians 2:8-9 makes this clear: For by grace you have been saved through faith; and not that of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works so that none may boast.
It sounds like you didn't hear the point I was making on baptism being fundamentally an action of the Holy Spirit. I was not suggesting, and the NT does not teach, that water alone is the salvific agent in baptism. I think we might actually agree on some of that but we are not using the same terminology.
I agree the Holy Spirit moves one to salvation.
The normal order of how one comes to Christ:
Hear or read the Gospel message.
Believe the message...not just intellectualize it.
The Holy Spirit falls/enters/comes upon the person.
Baptism.
Fruit is produced.
You may be right....we may be closer on this that we realize.
That tangential issue aside, the part of Titus you added to the part I quoted does not change the fact that Paul says, "He saved us through the washing of regeneration of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit," identifying water and Spirit baptism as salvific agents. You say that in context, this phrase "points towards faith in Him is what saves as noted in 3:7," but in fact, here is what 3:7 says: "so that having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life." Paul says, "justified by his grace" here, not "justified by faith"--the word "faith" does not appear anywhere here. (I am not saying faith is not important, by the way, I am simply pointing out that this is not the language Paul uses in this particular passage.) What then is the "grace" he is talking about? If you start back around 3:4 or so and read through to 3:7 in the original Greek--the part you quoted in an earlier post--what emerges is that Paul is using the phrase "saved us with the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit" to describe the means by which God extended the "mercy" mentioned in verse 5--the mercy which Paul contrasts with the "righteous things we had done" immediately preceding in verse 5. It is this "mercy" extended through the "washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit" that Paul goes on to sum up as "this grace" in verse 7. This is a little clearer in the Greek, which reads literally starting back in verse 5:
"not by works in righteousness that practiced we, but according to (κατὰ) his mercy he saved us through (διὰ) the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Spirit Holy, whom he poured richly on us through Jesus Christ the Savior of us, that having been justified by that (ἐκείνου) grace, heirs we should become according to the hope of life eternal."
My point is that in this verse, Paul is identifying "the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit"--that is, water and Spirit baptism (we can infer from the parallel passages where John the Baptist and Jesus use similar terminology)--as the means by which God's grace saved us, and not as a human "work of righteousness". In other words, baptism is not a human "work" for Paul. It is an instrument of God's grace. If you read some of my previous posts in light of this, I hope my meaning will be more clear. I am not denying that Paul also places an emphasis on faith's role in salvation in certain passages. I am simply pointing out that in other passages he places an emphasis on baptism, and that when he does so, he is not identifying it as a human work, but as an instrument of God. God's grace--in the form of the gift of the Holy Spirit--is the ultimate agent of salvation. Baptism is fundamentally an immersion in the Holy Spirit, not in water. The water is used to symbolize the spiritual "washing"--the cleansing of conscience(cf. 1 Peter 3:21)--that the Holy Spirit gives us in baptism. The water used in baptism is merely the "material element" of baptism, as St. Augustine put it. The Catholic Catechism summarizes:
"According to the Apostle Paul, the believer enters through Baptism into communion with Christ's death, is buried with him, and rises with him: '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 by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.'(29) The baptized have 'put on Christ.'(30) Through the Holy Spirit, Baptism is a bath that purifies, justifies, and sanctifies. Hence Baptism is a bath of water in which the "imperishable seed" of the Word of God produces its life-giving effect.(31) St. Augustine says of Baptism: "The word is brought to the material element, and it becomes a sacrament.(32)
29 Rom 6:3-4; cf. Col 2:12.
30 Gal 3:27.
31 CE 1 Cor 6:11; 12:13.
32 1 Pet 1:23; cf. Eph 5:26.
33 St. Augustine, In Jo. ev. 80,3:PL 35,1840.
Note the emphasis on "through the Holy Spirit" and the role of "the Word of God" here. The water of baptism is only salvific by virtue of divine action, not as a human work, and not as any property of the water in itself. I think perhaps we have been at odds over this because you were taking my references to the saving role of baptism to be a "justification by works" rather than "by faith". That is not what I was saying; that is not what the Catholic Church teaches. I hope I have cleared that up a bit.
On the sequence of faith in the process of salvation. When I talk about this, I am distinguishing two different aspects of "faith": faith as a gift of the Holy Spirit (from the passage in Ephesians 2:8-9) and faith as a human assent to and cooperation with the Holy Spirit's action. The point I have been trying to make is that the Holy Spirit's action is more fundamental in the process of salvation and that the human assent/cooperation can only come in response to what the Holy Spirit has initiated. This is true by definition if faith is a "gift of God", as the Ephesians passage you quote indicates. Paul similarly mentions faith as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12:9. I am distinguishing this from human cooperation with the Spirit's action. The belief that you mention normally comes before the physical act of immersion in water, I am interpreting passages which refer to that as talking about the human contribution to the baptism process. I hope that makes clearer where we are disagreeing vs. where we are merely using different terminology.
On Greek, etc.: I imagine that in any branch of Christianity, there is a minority who work in the original languages. Fortunately it is not necessary for everyone in the Church to have that gift. However, it is necessary for Scripture scholars to work in the original languages, and Catholic Scripture scholars certainly do. Fr. Mitch Pacwa can quote verses from the NT in Greek off the top of his head without looking it up (and is fluent in 11 other languages). J.R.R. Tolkien, who translated the Book of Jonah for the Jerusalem Bible, knew 35 languages. There are many very knowledgeable Catholics working in the original Biblical languages if you look into it.
On the ECF/Greek Fathers' allegories: Origen gets the most carried away with that (that is one reason he was not canonized by the Catholic Church), but St. John Chrysostom, for example, sticks much closer to the intent of Scripture (and was probably one of the best post-Apostolic exegetes in the first 500 years of the Church, along with St. Augustine and St. Jerome).
On Greek as the universal language of the Roman Empire: Greek became the lingua franca of the Roman upper classes and writers during the Hellenistic period, but Latin was the native language of the Romans (along with a few other related languages spoken on the Italian peninsula), so the lower-class people in Rome spoke Latin, as did the military and government officials when using official documents; and many other people in the Empire were bilingual and used both Greek and Latin, sometimes interchangeably. Some "Greek" manuscripts we have are actually Greek translations of Latin translations of Greek documents! So it was a bit complex. Latin gradually edged out Greek as the common language, and by about the 3rd to 4th century AD, Latin had become the common language, to remain the official language of the military into the 6th century and in widespread military use into the 7th century. Historians are not sure precisely when the Christian liturgy was first translated from Greek into Latin, but it seems to have occurred sometime between the 1st and 3rd century. The earliest description we have outside the NT of the Christian liturgy is from St. Justin Martyr, who was in Rome in the 130s-160s. What he describes there is consistent with what became known as the Latin Rite (the one practiced by the Roman Catholic Church), which has a large number of phrases that are identical with those from Greek-speaking areas (for instance the Antiochene Rite from Syria) when these are translated into Latin.
On Latin manuscripts of the NT: it depends on whether we're talking about fragments and individual books or complete manuscripts, and also whether we're talking about the date that Latin manuscripts were first translated vs. the early copies of the translations we have (two different things). We have Latin fragments from as early as the second century ("Over 10,000 Latin New Testament manuscripts dating from the 2nd to 16th century have been located.": The Earliest New Testament Manuscripts). Also in the second century, Justin Martyr's student Tatian did a Gospel harmony called the Diatessaron which became standard in the Syriac-speaking churches and was also translated into Latin and began circulating in Latin. Various Latin manuscripts from the 2nd to 4th century became known as the Vetus Latina (Old Latin) Bible, which is one of the earliest Bibles: "The "Old Latin" translation of the New Testament, in connection with which one of the Old Testament was executed from the Septuagint, is perhaps the earliest that exists in any language. The Old Syriac alone can rival it in antiquity, and if either may claim the precedence, it is probably the Latin. This version, and afterwards the revision of it by Jerome, was the grand medium through which the Holy Scriptures were known to the Western or Latin churches for more than twelve centuries. It has exercised no small influence on the popular modern versions of Christendom, and it is the great storehouse of theological terms for both Catholic and Protestant Christianity." (Ancient Versions of the New Testament.--there's more at this link on other versions of the Latin Bible that were circulating from the 2nd century on.) St. Jerome began revising the Vetus Latina around 388 A.D., producing what became the standard Latin translation for the next millennium, the Vulgate. The Vulgate remains important for both OT and NT textual criticism: "In translating the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible, Jerome was relatively free in rendering their text into Latin, but it is possible to determine that the oldest surviving complete manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, which date from nearly 600 years after Jerome, nevertheless transmit a consonantal Hebrew text very close to that used by Jerome. . .Damasus had instructed Jerome to be conservative in his revision of the Old Latin Gospels, and it is possible to see Jerome's obedience to this injunction in the preservation in the Vulgate of variant Latin vocabulary for the same Greek terms. . .Given Jerome's conservative methods, and that manuscript evidence from outside Egypt at this early date is very rare; these Vulgate readings have considerable critical interest. More interesting still—because effectively untouched by Jerome —are the Vulgate books of the rest of the New Testament; which demonstrate rather more of supposed "Western" expansions, and otherwise transmit a very early Old Latin text. Most valuable of all from a text-critical perspective is the Vulgate text of the Apocalypse, a book where there is no clear majority text in the surviving Greek witnesses." Vulgate
I am sure I missed something in there I meant to include, but that is quite enough typing for one night/morning!