Monday, April 25, 2022

John W. Riggs on the Early Christian Understanding of the Salvific Efficacy of Water Baptism

  

. . . the language typically employed by the earliest Christian witnesses, all of it diverse but having the same character, speaking of God’s personal agency: forgiveness, justification, reconciliation, redemption, healing, love, and so on. These words testify to an encounter with God in which God does not work by a force that guarantees its results. God works in a manner analogous to how personal agents work when they witness. (John W. Riggs, Baptism in the Reformed Tradition: An Historical and Practical Theology [Columbia Series in Reformed Theology: Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010], 103)