Paul's letter to the Romans also
introduces the rigorous view that baptism is a spiritual line of demarcation.
When the believer is baptized, he is set free from sin and should never again
submit to its power.
Are we to continue in sin that
grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do
you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were
baptised into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism, so that
as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might
walk in newness of life ...
We know that our old self was
crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no
longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin ...
So you also must consider
yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore
reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your
members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men
who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as
instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you
are not under law but under grace. What then? Are we to sin because we are not
under law but under grace? By no means! (6.1-15)
Paul himself is largely
responsible for the widespread belief that through baptism the believer is
liberated from the power and effects of sin. Early Christianity (and certainly
the church at Rome) embraced the promise that baptism served as the ‘method of
entry’ to eternal life, to becoming a ‘new creature’, gaining release from evil
spirits and being washed of one’s sins. (Roman Garrison, Redemptive Almsgiving
in Early Christianity [Library of New Testament Studies 77; Sheffield: JSTO
Press, 1993], 137-38, emphasis in bold added)
