“baptism now saves you.” —St. Paul
“baptism now saves you.” —St. Paul, oops St Peter, referenced by St_Thomas_Aquinas
Actually, the passage reads:
“...when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. 21 Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ...”
Baptism saves you in the corresponding sense in which the Flood saved Noah. Did the Flood save Noah’s life? Hardly! It would have killed him, had God not warned him to build the Ark. So in what sense did the Flood ‘save’ Noah?
It saved him from the surrounding world of sin. It separated him & his family from the sinful society in which they lived.
Salvation covers both justification (our being forgiven and given new life) and sanctification (become separated to God, to be made holy). Water baptism is an important part of sanctification. Like the Flood separating Noah - as St Peter said - so does water baptism separate us from the society around us.
John the Baptist said he baptized with water, but that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit. Paul affirms this, writing, “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.”
We become a part of Christ - a part of the tribe of Christ, so to speak - when Jesus baptizes us with the Holy Spirit, giving us new life. Water baptism, done by man, is the appeal to God for a new life, separate from the life of the world around us. It is “an appeal to God for a good conscience” - and as Peter wrote a couple of sentences before: “having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame”.
Water baptism is us asking God to let us live a new life of good behavior, one dedicated to Him and not to us. And Robertson notes that the word used is a rare one, used to describe an appeal - a request - that has already been granted.
I’m not discussing Catholicism here. I gave the same response recently on a thread from a “Church of Christ” person saying water baptism was required. It is the same answer I was given when I talked to a Baptist preacher in Logan Utah years ago, when a person from the “Church of Christ” told me I needed water baptism to become a Christian (and I had been baptized with water some years earlier, actually).