The evidence from both the Bible and the patristic literature for baptismal regeneration is overwhelming. This is admitted even by critics of the doctrine. As a “hostile witness,” notice the following from an enemy of Christianity and the historicity of the New Testament, Elaine Pagels who has to admit Paul taught the doctrine in the “proto-Pauline” corpus:
After his wrenching experience precipitated him into an unexpected new
life, Paul wrestled to understand what Christ demanded of him: how to spread
his “gospel” to everyone, especially to Gentiles. Convinced that his experience
had transformed him, Paul envisioned it as a paradigm for everyone: “anyone
in Christ is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Struggling to articulate
a deeply felt paradox, he declares that the person he used to be is dead: “I
died . . . so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ;
while living, it is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians
2:19-20). He does not suggest that this happened instantly, like a bolt of
lightning, as Martin Luther imagined it had, or as the Catholic poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins pictured it, “once at a crash.” After the initial shock, Paul realized that
his initial vision had catalyzed a process that would continue throughout his
whole lifetime, and beyond this life.
How, then, to bring others “into Christ”? Paul wants far more for his
listeners than that they believe what he preaches. Instead, he passionately
longs for them, too, to “be transformed.” Writing to people in Rome, he
promises that this may happen to anyone initiated “into Jesus Christ” through baptism:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Jesus Christ
were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him in baptism into death, so just
as Christ was raised from the dead . . . we too might walk in newness of life, being
joined in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:4-5)
So, Paul declares, whoever descends into the baptismal water, often by
being submerged in a river, is “baptized into Christ’s death,” and “buried with
him.” Emerging dripping what, and receiving new clothes, the baptized person is
being “clothed with Christ.” And when this happens, baptism erases the initiate’s
previous identity markers, including those on which Paul had most prided
himself—being Jewish, male, and freeborn. Anyone baptized into God’s family,
Paul declares, is now equal in status to everyone else:
You are all children of God through faith. Whoever among you were
baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer
Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female: you are all one, in Christ
Jesus. (Galatians 3:26-28)
Once we are baptized, infused with God’s spirit, Paul says, our faces
increasingly radiate divine light, since “we are being transformed . . . from
one degree of glory to another, through the Holy Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). (Elaine
Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus [San
Francisco: Doubleday, 2025], 167-68, italics in original)
