Can Baptism Save When There Is No Water?

In various conversations, I have dealt with Oneness Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Church of Christ members who claimed that I Peter 3:21 teaches Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you

." That is all they quote, and trumpet, "See! Baptism saves you!" And those words look pretty definite. However there is more to the passage than that one sentence.

Notice what Peter says: "which corresponds to this." Ah, now the obvious question should be, corresponds to what? Yet no one ever asks that question.

In the immediately preceding verse, Peter says, "when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water." 

Ah, so the comparison that Peter is making is to Noah, his wife, three sons, and three daughters-in-law, who were preserved during the Flood. Where were Noah and his family during the Flood? "Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood" (Genesis 7:7). Noah and his family weren't in the water. In fact, everyone in the water died. Noah and his family remained dry.

So, Peter is comparing a situation in which people remained dry to water baptism! If his point were that baptism is salvific, then Noah and his family would have been the only people not saved during the Flood! And such an absurdity proves that baptismal regeneration is not what is taught in I Peter 3:21.

Rather, continuing in that verse, "not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience." So, not the baptism per se, but rather what it represents, "a good conscience," a synonym for "faith." Peter is actually teaching the opposite of what the sacerdotalists claim for him, justification by faith alone, not by the addition of any ritual.