Saving Faith Prior To Baptism

From the discussion at Justin Taylor's blog, linked earlier:

Bryan Cross wrote:

"If what you were saying were true, then every catechumen who died prior to his baptism would be damned. But the Church has never believed that. A person who claims to have faith, and knows that Jesus Christ has established baptism as the sacrament of faith through which we are born again, and yet refuses to be baptized, does not have faith. But faith comes *through* the sacrament of baptism, even when the reception of faith precedes the reception of the sacrament of baptism."

I said, earlier in this discussion, that I was addressing the normative means of justification in Catholicism. Catechumens who die prior to baptism, a category I mentioned as an exception before you mentioned them, are an exception, not representatives of what's normative.

Your assertion that faith comes through baptism is a claim you don't support, and it's one that's contradicted by the evidence. Nobody in the Biblical era is described as having faith, yet needing to wait until baptism to have that faith enhanced in some manner and thereby attain justification. Rather, people are justified as soon as they come to faith, and every instance in which it's narrated for us occurs prior to baptism (Mark 2:5, Luke 7:50, 18:10-14, Acts 10:44-48, Galatians 3:2, Ephesians 1:13-14, etc.). Even in the unusual context of Acts 19:1-6, the people in question receive the Spirit at the time of the laying on of hands, not at the time of baptism, and Paul's question in verse 2 suggests that he considered it normative to receive the Spirit at the time of faith, not at the time of baptism. To dismiss one of these passages as an exception to the rule would be unreasonable. To dismiss all of them as exceptions would be even more unreasonable. Some of the passages occur in contexts that are treated as normative (Acts 11 and Acts 15 treat the method of receiving justification in Acts 10 as normal; it's doubtful that all of the Galatians and Ephesians to whom Paul was writing were exceptions to a rule; etc.). And even the passages that aren't described as normative can't be dismissed as exceptions unless we have evidence to that effect. And we don't.

Furthermore, asserting that these passages are including baptism when they mention faith, or are assuming baptism without mentioning it, would also be an insufficient argument. We don't normally assume that the term faith includes baptism, and some of the relevant contexts can't reasonably include such a ceremony. There wouldn't have been a baptism in the Jewish temple in Luke 18. The people in Acts 10 are described as being baptized after receiving the Spirit through faith. Etc. Even in a passage like Galatians 3 or Ephesians 1, where reading baptism into the passage would be less unreasonable, it's still unreasonable to do so. Not only is baptism not mentioned (despite being mentioned explicitly in so many other contexts), but Paul even tells us that these people were justified at the time when they heard the message and believed. He's referring to the preaching of the gospel, and to interpret that as a reference to people being baptized as they hear the preaching would make little sense. Rather, the image Paul presents us with is reminiscent of what we see in Acts 10 and elsewhere in Acts, where people believe a preached message prior to baptism. Those who hear the preached word in Acts and accept it are said to believe, even though they haven't yet been baptized (15:7-9). Baptism is sometimes mentioned, but it's distinguished from faith (Acts 8:12-13, 18:8). It's not just assumed that any mention of faith includes baptism.

Baptism does unite us to Christ. But so do other activities that occur after the attaining of justification (Romans 13:14, 2 Corinthians 4:10-11, Philippians 3:10-12).