- Romans 6:4
This verse is one of those trump cards that some people plunk down in any debate, thinking that they outweigh any evidence to the contrary. In this case, it is plunked down by Baptists when discussing the mode of baptism. They claim that it means that the mode must look like the burial of Jesus. So they baptize by lowering a person backward, like a corpse lowering into a grave,and then raising him up, like a corpse rising in resurrection. But do you notice that the verse says nothing about "looking like"? Not one syllable. Rather, this is a case of begging the question, presupposing a conclusion, and then reading it into the premise.
However, Romans 6:4 is not about the mode of baptism. Rather, it uses "baptism" to indicate the covenantal connection between the elect and the death of Christ, ending the previous relationship to sin "by baptism into death" (no comma). When it was finished for Him, it was finished for us, too, because of the covenantal connection. In other words, Paul here is making the same point that he did in the following chapter: "You also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to Him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code" (Romans 7:4-6).
Since the believer is now in Christ, he is "dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). To turn verse 4 into a reference to the mode of baptism is to ignore Paul's point about our new relationship to sin and righteousness. As always, context, context, context.
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