Dan Corner, The Romans Road Unedited

Dan Corner, the author of The Believer's Conditional Security: Refuting Eternal Security, a huge text that soundly refutes various models of eternal security, has an online presentation critiquing the popular "Romans Road" approach to the Gospel:

Dan Corner, The Romans Road Unedited

There are many texts glossed over in the so-called Romans Road approach to the gospel, including Rom 6:1-5 which explicitly teaches baptismal regeneration (a doctrine Corner rejects). To quote two Reformed authors on this:

The explanatory γαρ in 6:5 links the verse with his previous comments about the believer’s death with Christ through water-baptism in 6:3-4. His argument appears to be that believers died to sin and should no longer live under its power (6:2). Their water-baptism proves that they participate in the death of Jesus and experience a spiritual death to the power of sin (6:3). Therefore, Paul concludes that believers have been buried with Jesus through their participation in water-baptism, a baptism that identifies them with the death of Jesus (their representative [5:12-21]) and thereby kills the power of sin in their lives, so that they would live with Jesus in the resurrection just as Jesus presently lives in the power of his physical resurrection (6:4). Believers who died to the power of sin by being baptized into Jesus’ death will certainly (αλλα και) participate in a physical resurrection just as Jesus died and resurrected, because those who died to the power of sin (just as Jesus died = τω ομοιωματι του θανατου αυτου) will participate in a future resurrection (just as Jesus has already been resurrected) (6:5). (Jarvis J. Williams, Christ Died for Our Sins: Representation and Substitution in Romans and their Jewish Martyrological Background [Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick Publications, 2015], 178).

The first thing we note is that Paul equates being baptized into Christ as being baptized into his death (Rom 6:3). Here Paul employs a metaphor. The believer does not necessarily die in baptism in a physical sense, but he or she is described as dying with Christ by way of spiritual analogy. They have died to their old self (cf. 2 Cor 5:17). Here we see baptism functioning as an identity marker in that the believer in baptism is identified with Christ in his death. Another metaphor that Paul includes with baptism is that of the believer in baptism being identified with Christ in his burial (Rom 6:4), but again this is not literal but metaphorical. Paul proceeds to use a third metaphor in relation to baptism to show that as Christ was raised from the dead to a new life by the glory of the Father, so believers have been identified with him to walk in a new life on a spiritual plane (Rom 6:4). This new life vis-á-vis baptism is often marked by calls and exhortations to ethical living . . . Paul reasons that since Christian believers are united by baptism with Jesus in his death, they will also consequently be united with Jesus in the resurrection. What happened to Christ on a physical plane is applied metaphorically to the believer on a spiritual plane. In tying baptism to the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, Paul is identifying and associating believers via baptism to Christ in his salvific work. The essence and heart of the gospel upon which believers are saved according to Paul is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor 15:14). These are the very three points with which believers are identified with Jesus in baptism. Thus Paul presents baptism first and foremost as an identification of the believer with Jesus in his death, burial, and resurrection. The idea of identity with Jesus in baptism is similarly stressed by Paul in Gal 3:27, ὅσοι γὰρ εἰς Χριστὸν ἐβαπτίσθητε, Χριστὸν ἐνεδύσασθε//”As many of you as were baptized into Christ, you have clothed yourselves with Christ.” The idea of identification in baptism in Gal 3:28 is seen in the metaphor of being clothed with Christ. (Tony Costa, Worship and the Risen Jesus in the Pauline Letters [Studies in Biblical Literature vol. 157; New York: Peter Lang, 2013], 219-220)

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