Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of the Church Part 3.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

We're talking about the doctrine of the church.

And last time we looked at some of the biblical data

concerning baptism. Today we want to raise some serious theological questions about the nature

of baptism. The first and foremost question that needs to be addressed is this. Is baptism a sacrament or is it an ordinance?

You'll remember how a sacrament differs from an ordinance. A sacrament is literally a means of grace.

It is like a channel through which God's grace comes to you, much in the same way that water

might flow through a pipe.

On the sacramental view, we receive God's saving grace via baptism.

Baptism serves to mediate God's grace to us.

By contrast, on the view of baptism as an ordinance,

baptism serves merely as a symbolic function. It is a sign of some act of

God's grace that can be quite independent of that sign. It is not baptism then that accomplishes

the reception of God's grace. It is merely a sign or a symbol of it.

Today we want to look at the case for thinking of baptism as a sacrament. This would be the case

that would be presented, for example, by Roman Catholics,

or by Lutherans or others who take a sacramental view of baptism. We'll look at two main points.

The first point that the sacramentalist will make is that baptism is very closely linked with justification.

There's a tight connection in the New Testament between being baptized and being justified, which is, of course, the very essence of Christian salvation.

Let's look again at Romans chapter 6, verses 1 in following, which is one of the key New Testament

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