I think I have written more in favor of baptismal regeneration than any other Latter-day Saint apologist (e.g., Refuting Jeff McCullough ("Hello Saints") on Baptismal Regeneration and Baptism Does Cleanse Us from Our Sins). For those who are curious as to how some argue against biblical texts for the doctrine, such as 1 Pet 3:20-21 and Eph 5:26 (cf. Titus 3:5), consider, for educational purposes, the following from Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531):
. . . baptism is sometimes used for the blood or passion of Christ.
This, again, by metonymy, the name of the sign being transferred to the thing
signified, for metonymy is a transposition of names. For instance, when 1 Peter
3:20 and 21 teaches that we are saved through baptism in the same way that men
were saved of old in the ark, we are not to understand, by heaven, the washing
of baptism, but Christ Himself or His blood and death, for by these we have
been redeemed, as the apostle himself immediately explains. We see here again
incidentally the sign used for that of which it is the sign. How foolish,
therefore, would any one seem, who because of these words should maintain that
we were washed clean of our sins by the baptismal waters! Thus, consequently,
what is said in Eph. 5:26 of the washings of water by the word, and in Romans
6:3 and 4, is not to be taken literally, but the force of these figurative
expressions is to be judged by faith and our knowledge of heavenly things.
(“Declaration of Huldreich Zwingli Regarding Original Sin, Addressed
to Urbanus Rhegius,” August 15, 1526, in The
Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, ed. William John Hinke, 3 vols. [Philadelphia:
Heidelberg Press, 1922], 2:28)
