In his works
(36.69), Luther, notwithstanding holding to forensic justification and sola
fide, still explicated one could be assured of their salvation, not by a
conversion experience, but their water baptism:
We must therefore beware of those who have
reduced the power of baptism to such small and slender dimensions that, while
they say grace is indeed inpoured by it, they maintain afterwards it is poured
out again through sin, and that then one must reach heaven by another way, as
if baptism had now become entirely useless. Do not hold such a view, but
understand that this is the significance of baptism, that through it you die
and live again. Therefore, whether by penance or by any other way, you can only
return to the power of your baptism, and do again that which you were baptized
to do and which your baptism signified. Baptism never becomes useless, unless
you despair and refuse to return to its salvation. You may indeed wander away
from the sign for a time, but the sign is not therefore useless. Thus, you have
been once baptized in the sacrament, but you need continually to be baptized by
faith, continually to die and continually to live. Baptism swallowed up your
whole body and gave it forth again; in the same way that which baptism
signifies should swallow up your whole life, body and soul, and give it forth
again at the last day, clad in the robe of glory and immortality. We are
therefore never without the sign of baptism nor without the thing it signifies.
Indeed, we need continually to be baptized more and more, until we fulfill the
sign perfectly at the last day.
As one
Reformed author wrote:
Jonathan Trigg explains Luther’s comment: “The
present tense of baptism arises from the fundamental principle of Luther’s
theology—the word of the Lord on which baptism is predicated, ‘He who believes
and is baptized shall be saved. This word is always to be heard in baptism; it
is never silenced.” (Jonathan D. Trigg, Baptism
in the Theology of Martin Luther [Brill, 2001], 202-3, as cited by F.J.
Vesko, Word, Water, and Spirit: A
Reformed Perspective on Baptism [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Reformation Heritage
Press, 2010], 47)
