Saturday, June 15, 2019

Luther's Confidence in His Salvation Being Tied to His Water Baptism


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)