Did Paul agree with Luke that saving faith involves baptism?
Did Paul’s and Luke’s missionary companionship influence how they used the word believe? Did they share the same understanding of how to respond to Christ crucified? These are very interesting questions for two reasons.
First, early Christian tradition asserts Luke wrote the gospel Paul proclaimed. If this is true, then Luke’s usage of believe might very well reflect Paul’s viewpoint. What can we discover regarding whether their perspectives aligned?
Second, Luke was comfortable using “believe” and “turned to the Lord” as conversion summary statements indicating baptism had occurred. Thus, when Luke recounted that someone believed, that conversion story encompassed more than just believing; it signified a faith response involving baptism.
Like Luke, Paul used believe and faith to depict the proper response to the gospel (Rom. 1:16-17). People need to rely upon Christ in order to receive God’s gift of salvation. However, with statements like Romans 1:16-17, was Paul asserting that people only need to believe or was he summarizing various aspects of trusting in Christ under the umbrella of believing?
The first clue might come from a phrase also found in Romans. Paul described his missionary objective among the Gentiles and the gospel’s purpose as producing “the obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5; 16:25-26). Thus when Paul speaks of faith, he understood the faith response to involve some form of obedience.
Romans provides further light on this subject. He wrote that in order for the message to erupt as faith within someone the message must be heard, believed in one’s heart and confessed with one’s lips (Rom. 10:6-10; 10:17). Romans 1:16-17 says nothing about confession, yet since “with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” it is clearly a necessary active component of believing. Sometimes Paul does seem to summarize various elements of the faith response with believe.
Furthermore, Paul did not limit the obedient faith of conversion to merely confessing and believing. According to him, there is also another aspect of the heart’s obedience to the message that sets a person free from sin (Rom. 6:17-18). The obedience setting one free from sin in Romans 6:17-18 points to the earlier part of this context on baptism (Rom. 6:3-4). Not only did Paul describe baptism as a faith response, he also tied baptism to salvation. According to him, in baptism people are released from sin, transformed by God and are claimed by God as his people (Colossians 2:12-13; Galatians 3:26-27).
Like Luke, Paul on some occasions did summarize responding to the gospel with the terms believe or faith. For Paul such believing and faith involved a trust composed of believing, confessing and be baptized. We must allow Paul and Luke to communicate what they believed, rather than force what we might have preferred for them to have written into their use of language.
As missionary collaborators Paul and Luke worked side by side to spread the gospel. Did they present the same message and use terms like believe and faith in the same way? It would seem so. After all, Paul himself emphasized a unity driving the one church; there is one faith as well as only one baptism (Eph. 4:5). I think Luke would agree.
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