The core fact is that inspired scripture unambiguously connects justification to baptism, and the passages could not be more explicit. Baptism is for the remission of sins. The End. The primary issue is therefore the authority of the God’s word, and it seems to us that Evangelicals cannot, or will not, see their noses on their faces. They are simply denying the plain text of scripture. There are no deep issues hidden in dark passages here, just plain teaching in plain words.

Second, their views are a slander upon the character of God. Instrumental efficacy is a matter of God’s own truthfulness and faithfulness, since he has promised to save us by means of it. If God were to keep his Word, he must act savingly in the sacraments; otherwise, his covenant promises are empty lies.

Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins. (Acts 2.38)

Thus, far from efficacious sacraments stealing glory and credit away from Almighty God, they are necessary to preserve his glory and integrity.
In answer to the Lutheran controversialist Westphal, Calvin wrote:
But as baptism is a solemn recognition by which God introduces his children into the possession of life, a true and effectual sealing of the promise, a pledge of sacred union with Christ, it is justly said to be the entrance and reception into the Church. And as the instruments of the Holy Spirit are not dead, God truly performs and effects by baptism what He figures. (Italics mine)

The Reformation churches were unanimous in their opposition to the Anabaptists because their distinctives make a liar of God.

ABRAHAM

Roger Salter holds up Abraham as the model of justification apart from sacraments at all.

Abraham is the prime example of justification by faith in Holy Scripture without works and prior to sacramental administration (the rite of circumcision). The great patriarch is evidence of justification by faith alone, pure and simple without any extraneous surmising of what the sequence “faith then circumcision” meant in terms of Gentile message or ingathering. He is the model of the “justified individual” for all time.

When we read the apostle Paul’s explanation in the key text, Romans 4, however, we discover an entirely different reason for Abraham’s justification before circumcision. It is because he would in time be the father of the circumcised and the uncircumcised, the Jew and the Gentile, and not to be a model for all who follow him.

Indeed, all who followed him in the covenants of grace were sternly commanded not to copy his experience of justification by faith apart from sacrament, because God ordered that they be circumcised on the eighth day. Abraham’s children had to receive the sacrament of justification while they were newborn infants, and not wait to be justified by faith first before receiving the sacrament. Indeed, so strict was this ordinance that refusal resulted in exclusion from the covenant. Moses’ wife had to protect her infant boy from the angel of death by circumcising him with a sharp stone, which is a grim warning to us not to condemn or neglect the baptism of our covenant children by waiting for them first to come to a conscious faith.

One could go to Naaman the Assyrian General and to the men of Nineveh for an example of justification apart from sacraments. However, I am sure that most would baulk at making these exceptional OT cases a model for us today.

We do not handcuff God to baptism, as Roger still suggests, despite our plain words to the contrary. Nevertheless, God has commanded it at the present time, in the new era inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, for the usual and general means of the remission of sins. Therefore no man has any right to assume otherwise without incurring the great sin of presumption. We do not assert its absolutenecessity, but strongly defend its general necessity.

The Nicene Creed unambiguously states, “I accept one baptism for the remission of sins”. This creed of the early church is a foundation document of the Anglican Faith, and this clause remains in force to this day.

And yet, and yet, Roger still cannot see the plain grammatical sense of the Bible and the standards by claiming that a man is normally justified immediately upon the act of faith, apart from baptism.

ADULTS

The glaring weakness of the Anabaptist and Evangelical model is the fact that it only has in view the salvation of heathen adults, to whom salvation is mediated solely by the spoken gospel of Christ, to be received by faith, which is immediately accompanied by all the saving graces.

They have no model for the infant children of believers, and so they are forced to deny to them any ordinary, usual, or general means of salvation, including the word of God. If, then, these little ones are to be saved, it must be without gospel or sacrament. On the other hand, the Anglican model generally, with very few exceptions, mediates salvation to both adults and children by means of the word and the sacraments.

In the Baptistic and Evangelical systems the salvation of covenant children, the mentally infirm, and others with severe disabilities like Autism, is always in doubt because it is unmediated and remains invisible, whereas in the English Church the objective fact of their baptism makes their salvation sure and certain.

The unspoken Anabaptist assumption is that the Lord Jesus died mainly for mentally competent adults. Why is there no model for the whole spectrum of non-adults? This silent axiom fights against the very spirit of God’s grace and mercy.

Christ died for all men without distinction, so we minister to those disabled by youth or injury by means of the sacraments, which are visible words, according to God’s command.
It is a great sin to neglect to baptize the infant children of believers, and the reason is plain – it is denying salvation to the child should it die before being baptized. (Anglican Evangelicals do indeed baptize infants, but one has to wonder why they do). Baptism is for the remission of sins, and so the parents of an unbaptized child dying in infancy can have no assurance of its salvation. At best, all they can cling on to is the possibility that it may, possibly, be saved.

The doctrine of the Church of England has always been that “it is certain by God’s Word that children, being baptized, (if they depart out of this life in their infancy) are certainly saved.”

Articles of the Convocation, 1536. Homily on Salvation, 1547. Preface to Confirmation, Book 1549, and to books of 1552, and the Book of Elizabeth.
In the Rubric of 1662, to the form of Public Baptism, were added the words: “It is certain by God’s Word that children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved”. This naturally includes every disabled child as well. The Rubric stands to this day.

Her silence on the subject of the salvation of unbaptized children speaks volumes. Baptized children are certainly saved, but the same cannot be said of the unbaptized infant.
All of the affirmations of the English Church as to the certainty of the salvation of all those worthily baptized, whether adults or infants, have been the objects of steady opposition on the part of decided High Calvinists, Baptists, and Evangelicals.

ASSURANCE

Baptism places salvation on the securest ground because God has promised to forgive us by means of it, and the Almighty makes no promise that he does not keep. We have there sure and certain assurances of the remission of our sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit, in words that cannot be misunderstood. The sincere Christian, asking how he can be sure that God loves him and that he is saved, need only remind himself of the promise:

“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved”. (Mark 16.16)

Anabaptists, High Calvinists, and Evangelicals, however, turn what is intended to be an objective source of trust and faith into doubt. They insist upon changing it into a hypothetical possibility of a hypothetical salvation. They put a question mark over God’s promise, and inject doubt where there should be certainty.

Witsius: “Baptism does not signify nor seal, still less does it confer on all infants of those who are in the covenant, any common justification, regeneration and sanctification. … or remission of original sin, either a revocable or irrevocable remission.” De Effic. Baptism, 622.

Zanchius favoured the idea that infants should always be baptized on the understanding that their salvation was conditional upon being one of the secretly elect. But why stop at infants? Such a conditional baptism applies equally to adults.

This pernicious doctrine leaves Christian parents in doubt that their dead infants had been adopted as sons of God through the baptism they received. Further, it takes away from the sincere older convert the assurances given to him by God in the rite.

It is evident, then, that on the Anabaptist and Evangelical hypothesis of baptism, the name of the Trinity is invoked upon what is always uncertain and often false.
The Church of England, in her Articles and form of Baptism, distinctly affirms the certainty of the salvation it administers to sincere believers and their children, as does any part of Christendom. The originals of her form of Baptism were drawn from the Lutheran Church and the older Western tradition. She took those forms precisely because they have this meaning.
She says in Article XXV, transferring verbatim part of the Augsburg Confession, Article XIII, “that sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, through which God operates on us,” and “quickens,” that is, excites (Lat. excitat) “ faith, as well as confirms it.”

That is not the Anabaptist, Evangelical, and later Calvinistic doctrine that separates the efficacy from the signs, and denies that sacraments mediate salvation.
She declares (Article XXVII) “… that by Baptism as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly, are grafted (inserted : Lat. inseruntur) into the Church.” That plainly concedes the objective force of the sacrament.

These and many other passages are, in their natural and obvious sense, irreconcilable with the empty sign school, and have taxed the ingenuity of their expositors to the utmost.

Not only is there some distance between the teaching of Evangelicals and orthodox Anglicanism, but also the two positions are mutually exclusive and contradictory.

The Anabaptist/Evangelical empty sign party refuses to see that God has promised forgiveness to sincere believers and their children when they are baptised, and thus it turns the ordained instruments of the Holy Spirit into dead and lifeless ceremonies. God effects what he promises, and he has in so many words linked our pardon to baptism. “Repent and be baptised for the remission of your sins”.

Abraham is not a model of justification apart from sacraments, because his descendants were sternly commanded to receive the sign and seal of so great a thing on the eighth day upon pain of exclusion from the covenants of grace.

Adult conversion is only half of the story, not the dominant model, because forgiveness is offered in baptism to “you and your children”, not just to “you and you alone”. A full-orbed doctrine of baptism includes infants, without excluding them from the blessings that God has connected to it.

Assurance is integral to baptism since it is intended to provide the church with an objective guarantee of our certain salvation, but in Evangelical hands it has become little more than a hypothetical sign of a hypothetical possibility.

If sacramental signs are empty, then so are words.

END