Both Heb. 10.22-23 and 1 Pet. 3.21 do in fact refer to
water baptism. The Hebrews passage refers to both water baptism and internal
spiritual cleaning. The author is concerned with the cleansing of the guilty
conscience, but he does not say that the water ritual could effect such a
change, rather he distinguishes the two things by the conjunction “and.” We
need to bear in mind, however, that for adult converts coming into the New
Covenant community from outside, the water ritual may indeed come close on the
heels of the cleansing of the heart, and in any case, the latter is aptly
symbolized by the former. Conversion is one thing, however, ritual initiation
is another, as is shown in Acts, where we find both the pattern water then
Spirit reception (Acts 8), and Spirit reception then water (Acts 10), then
distinction between John’s and Christian baptism in Acts 18-19. Baptism most
obviously symbolizes spiritual cleansing (Heb. 10.23; Acts 22.16; and see the
language in Eph. 5.26-27). But it is a striking fact that the most dominant
image that comes to the minds of the NT writers when they thin about baptism is
death, and not just any sort of death, but death as a judgment of God, and that
brings us to 1 Pet. 3.21.
In some ways, 1 Pet. 3 is the appropriate place to
conclude our discussion of the praxis of water baptism. Here baptism is the
antitype of the Noachic flood—through which some few were saved, but most were
judged and lost. Thus, water symbolizes a redemptive judgment in that passage,
as it does in Rom. 6 where the old person is judged but the new person is
saved. What is unique about this passage is that we are told something about
how baptism saves: “not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but the appeal unto
God for a good conscience (or possibly a Christian life).” The grammar is
complex here but the word “baptism” comes right before these two clauses
explain what baptism is, not how it saves, which only comes at the end
of the verse in the “through” clause. (Ben Witherington III, Biblical
Theology: The Convergence of the Canon [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2019], 430-31)
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