In this episode, Trent sits down with Marco Arroyo, a Church of Christ minister, to discuss their agreements and differences on salvation, especially on infant baptism.
Transcription:
Trent:
There’s a funny story behind today’s dialogue. My friend Spencer told me there was a Protestant minister who does jujitsu at his gym, and he made videos about me on his YouTube channel, and I watched some of them and I thought they were pretty good. So I asked Spencer to get the minister’s contact information. I emailed him and I said, Hey, why don’t I come down to your gym? We could do a few roles together and then we could do a dialogue on your channel. So I went down, we got a few roles in, had a good time, and then I went to his church, which is the Church of Christ, to have a dialogue about the Catholic view of salvation and the Church of Christ view of salvation. And it ended up having a particular emphasis on the issue of baptism where we have actually a lot of agreement, but still important disagreements.
So I hope you find today’s episode really edifying. I also want to say I’m really grateful to everyone, our patrons and our supporters who helped us reach our goal of redesigning the studio to do these kinds of interviews here. We’re going to start work on that very soon to redesign our studio. But if you want to help fund our mobile studio, because there’s still some guests I would love to have who can’t come here, but I would like to be able to go to them and have professional interviews, and there’s some guests where there are certain states or cities or even countries where it would be easier for me to go interview three or four people than try to fly three or four people to come out here if they all live in the same place. So I’d love for you to support our mobile studio to do these kinds of interviews. Click the link, the description below. But thank you guys so much for all your support. We’re going to be redesigning the studio soon to have in-person dialogues. And with that said, here is my discussion with Church of Christ Minister Marco Arroyo on the issue of salvation with a particular emphasis on baptism.
Marcco:
A lot of this stuff, when I hear you talk about Catholicism and the one true church that Jesus established, we kind of speak the same way sometimes about the principle behind the idea of Jesus’s church and how it wasn’t meant to be branched off into all these different theological viewpoints, but the unity and theology and in doctrine is supposed to be in Christ. And so maybe we can talk about that too. Sure. But anyway, so long story short, I had a year’s worth of Bible studies with this girl and some members of churches of Christ, and then I was eventually baptized, but I’ve been baptized three times in my life. I was baptized in the Catholic church as a baby,
My dad’s side of the family, very Catholic, and then I was baptized in the Pentecostal church, just believing it was like I was already a Christian, just a good thing that Christians should do. And then I really believed that I needed to be baptized when I was studying with a member of the Church of Christ. I really believed that at that time I was becoming a Christian that before then with my ideas about baptism, especially in my second baptism, that it just wasn’t what the Bible teaches about baptism. And so I felt the need to be baptized. One more time.
Trent:
What’s interesting, a little bit about Church of Christ, because when we think about baptism, there’s really four possible views divided on two questions.
Does
Baptism save it spiritually regenerate us, and should we baptize infants? So for example, you could say, yeah, baptism, you say baptism doesn’t save. Let’s say you don’t believe in baptism regeneration, then many call a credo. Bt though the credo bap, you’ll say, okay, baptism doesn’t save and we don’t baptize infants.
Then
You’ll have other protestants who will say, yeah, baptism doesn’t save, but it’s a covenant sign, so we’re going to baptize infants. So some Protestants will do that as a sign of entering the covenant, even though baptism doesn’t save then. So that’s one side of it. Then the other side would be baptism does save, and so we baptize infants, which would be Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and then the last quadrant would be baptism does save, but we don’t baptize infants, which is Church of Christ.
Marcco:
Hey guys, there
Trent:
You go.
Marcco:
It’s funny, I was watching your conversation with Gavin Orland, and at the time you were like, I don’t know, and he was churches of Christ, and then you’re like, oh yeah, that’s true.
Trent:
Yeah, that’s always the thing of the quadrants. I’m like, that would be, oh yeah, that would be the last
Marcco:
Part I thought about when I saw that video making a silly little edit, taking that, and then he’s like, yeah, churches of Christ too. And then just me being like
Trent:
Totally
Marcco:
For preparation for a conversation. Yes. I thought that’d be funny promo material. But I was going to say, have you ever spoken to someone had a dialogue like this with someone who believes that baptism is necessary, that it saves, but they don’t baptize infants?
Trent:
I have not. This would be a first dialogue with someone on that point, because usually it’s either it saves, so we believe in infant baptism or it’s one of the other ones, and most of the time it’s for those who don’t believe it doesn’t save. Nine times out of 10, it’s with somebody who doesn’t baptize infants.
Marcco:
Wow, that cool.
Trent:
Nine times out of 10. Yeah,
Marcco:
That’s cool to be again, the guy in that final quadrant.
Trent:
Yeah, yeah, right.
Marcco:
Okay, so I’ll let you say, what is the Catholic plan of salvation you have, let’s say this is the scenario, alien sinner is the term that gets used sometimes, doesn’t know Jesus or anything like that. And he goes, I want to know Jesus. Trent, what do you tell him? I want to become a Christian.
Trent:
Well, I would share the gospel with him, and the gospel is the good news of salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so to be saved, you just have to do three things. You have to repent. You have to receive Christ and remain united to Christ. So repent, receive, remain.
Marcco:
The literation is good.
Trent:
Yeah, rep, repent, receive, remain. That’s basically the three steps, not necessarily in that order, but repent, receive remains. So if it’s an adult, for example, I was baptized when I was 17 years old. I was raised in a fairly non-religious household. Dad’s Jewish mom, used to be Catholic, then became Christian. My dad didn’t go to temple or anything like that either. He was just your typical Jew doesn’t go to temple or anything like that. So we were raised in a very non-religious household. Then I met Catholic teens when I was in high school, it convicted me of Christianity. And then I did more research to look at which different denominations should I join. So in doing, I came to see, oh, the Catholic church is the church that Jesus Christ established. I’m going to be part of this. The word Catholic just means universal
Kaho according to the whole to be a part of. So if I said to just someone right off the street, you want to be saved, repent. If you’re an adult like I was, repent of your sins, receive Christ, and we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive that in baptism, you would repent, receive Christ in faith. Yeah, I believe in Jesus. I believe in the church that he’s established. I would receive the Holy Spirit in baptism, at the moment of being baptized, all of your sins are washed away. Original sin is removed. You go from being a child of Adam to being an adopted child of God, and at that very moment you’re baptized. There is absolutely nothing to hinder you entering into heaven. Then from that time on, however, there is a spiritual battle. There are powers and principalities, there’s temptations, there is the devil. There are things always trying to pull us away from Christ, and it is possible for us to forsake our salvation. I don’t like using the word lose salvation. You don’t lose your salvation like you lose your car keys. It just doesn’t happen like that. But you can make a conscious action. You can forsake it. The clearest example would be apostasy if you just leave the faith entirely because I don’t believe anymore. But you can also forsake salvation. Even if you say you believe, if you engage in grave sin, then that’s saying with your actions something different. It’s like a man who says, I love my wife, but if he cheats on his wife, he’s saying with his actions, he doesn’t really love her.
And so if he does that, he has to reconcile with his wife. He has to seek forgiveness. If we commit a grave sin, and the Bible’s clear that not all sins are of equal weight, and I think Christians generally believe this. There are some. We all sin every day. James says, we all make small mistakes. We all stumble in many small ways. James read two. But there are certainly some sins that are incompatible with the Christian life.
Graves sins like abortion, pornography, fornication, there are grave sins. And that to engage in these things separates us from God. And if we do these grave things, just take even just adulteries example I gave earlier. We would seek reconciliation with God. So as a Catholic, if you commit mortal sin, you would seek reconciliation with God through a minister of the church. So to be saved in the first instant, you go to a minister of the church, you receive baptism. If you fall away, if you reject God through your actions, you approach a minister of the church, a priest through the sacrament to confession and confess your sins, and he stands in the person of Christ. And through him, God forgives our sins. And so then moving forward, it’s just from baptism, there is no work. The only work you must do to be saved. There’s no work. Just don’t die in a state of mortal sin. Don’t die in a state of rebellion against God. So that means don’t do evil, we ought not do, but also fulfill the obligations you have as a Christian. So for example, God commands us to worship him on Sundays. You can’t just sleep in on Sundays and say, well, God doesn’t really care.
No, that’s an obligation given to us. The early church received this from the apostles that we are to worship God on Sundays and holy days of obligation. So for example, I’ve known some Christians who don’t celebrate Christmas because they say, well, it’s not in the Bible to celebrate Christmas. If Christmas happens to be on a Tuesday, I don’t have to go to church. So it is always funny when it happens to fall on a Sunday, but somebody you are like, why do I have to go? I just went on Sunday. It’s Christmas.
Marcco:
What happens when it falls on a Sunday?
Trent:
Oh yeah. Well, I think that
Marcco:
Must be rough.
Trent:
Well, I think, well, it falls if it falls on a Sunday, it’s a two for one. You celebrate your Sunday obligation and the obligation to celebrate Christ’s nativity. It’s more if it happens to fall, I think it was a year or two ago, maybe it was last year. It was on a Monday. So you go on Sunday and then you go on Monday. So not
Marcco:
Two days in a row.
Trent:
Yeah, not two days in a row. You look at Christians 2000 years ago, they think we’re such cream puffs today. How long ago, Lord? Yeah. So what I would say is that it’s repent, receive, and remain. So you can make it simple. Or if you say, well, what exactly do I have to do? You could enumerate, here’s all, if I were to enumerate, some people will say the Catholic planet of salvation, oh, it’s so complex. But really if you had to explain to someone and they said, I want to be saved, you say, well believe in Jesus, Romans 10, nine, confess your lips. And they say, oh, okay. And then they continue to let’s say, be an OnlyFans model and do pornography. You’d say, well, wait, wait, you can’t keep doing that. Well, okay, well can I do this? For example, this other grave center? Well, okay, not that are things. These are actions that are incompatible with Christian life. Or if they say, okay, great, I’m saved. I never have to go to church again. Well, hold on. If you’re really saved, you would be part of a local community. So that’s what I would call the enumeration problem, that the Catholic planet salvation can be summarized, repent, receive, remain, and still may say, well, what do you mean by all of that? Okay, let me enumerate
Marcco:
It.
Trent:
But I do believe Protestants have to do the same thing. They’re just going to describe it a little differently.
Marcco:
Yeah, definitely. So yeah, if you were to ask me what the planet salvation is, I was just talking with Caleb about this, that a lot of people in churches of Christ will say it’s like five things you got to do. And the origin of this was very interesting that Caleb was just telling me about that Walter Scott would say to children, this was like a memory device for children that it was here. Believe, repent, confess, be baptized. So there’s five things you got to do. And then he would have children tell that to their parents. Again, shout out to Caleb, smart
Trent:
Guy.
Marcco:
But that’s what he would do. And so a lot of people in churches of Christ, that’s how they put it. But you could also condense that down a little bit, very similarly, which you could just say someone you really, you could boil it down to believe repenting and baptism essentially. So when you said receive Christ, that was belief and baptism.
Trent:
Yeah, so well, for an adult, so we do have to have faith in Christ. We have to make an act of faith where we’re commanded to believe God is one, God is a trinity. And that’s interesting here. I think many Protestants might say, oh, you just have to believe in Jesus. But then once again, you drill down deeper. Well, can you deny the Trinity? Oh yeah. Well, you have to believe the Father, son and Holy Spirit are equal and that they’re distinct persons. And then you were telling me during the classes upstairs, you’re doing a class on the Godhead and how that can get complicated. Yeah, it’s funny. People will say, oh, Catholic is so complicated. But once again, it isn’t just believing in Jesus because we’d say, you can’t believe in heresy.
You
Have to be a true Christian. You can’t reject the Trinity, for example. So I would say repent, receive. So for an adult to believe in Jesus Christ, believe in his church, believe in God, the Father, son and Holy Spirit, but then to receive the Holy Spirit and receive God’s sanctifying grace. So what Catholics believe is that being saved is not merely a legal declaration. It’s not merely a judge saying not guilty. Now, God does make a declaration. There are forensic aspects to it, similar to how when God created the world, he said, let there be light. He made this declaration. Then there actually was light. So we would say that when God, we become saved through baptism, our souls really are changed. We become new creations in Christ, baptism leaves an indelible mark on the soul, and that’s why it is never repeated,
Marcco:
Indelible,
Trent:
Indelible in the sense it can’t be erased.
Marcco:
Okay?
Trent:
So the sacraments that we believe that they, so for example, if you receive the grace of confession, you go to God, you confess your sins, you can go to confession again if you commit another grave sin in your life, but three sacraments, baptism, confirmation. So receiving the oils of confirmation to strengthen you as a Christian and holy orders like becoming a priest, those leave an unchanging mark on the soul. So once you are baptized, so for you, you will always be a Catholic, that baptism was valid. You might have different theology and views about that. So for example, if you were to become Catholic, you would not be rebaptized,
Marcco:
Okay?
Trent:
You would receive the sacrament of confirmation, for example, to be in full communion. But if it was determined there’s a record, you received a valid baptism. So we would say for an infant, like I said, repent, receive, remain. It would just be more receive, repent, remain. So when an infant receives baptism, they receive the Holy Spirit. They are a Christian. There is absolutely a hundred percent, no doubt about their salvation.
Marcco:
Yeah.
Trent:
So interesting that when infants in the early church, if an infant were to die after baptism, the church bells would continuously ring for their funerals because it was treated as almost a mini canonization. That there is absolutely a hundred percent no doubt, this child who has been baptized is in heaven. And so it’s very interesting that you see, even in the ancient Christian catacombs, you’ll see inscriptions asking for children who had died. And of course 2000 years ago in the catacombs, this was a time when half of all children died before the age of five, there was a 50% mortality rate. Only half of all people made it past the age of five because of disease and harsh conditions. So in the catacombs, there are many examples of Christians asking my palos, please pray for me. He is one year in three months. And the idea is that these children were baptized. There was absolute assurance that they were in heaven praying for their parents who were on earth. And so that’s how they viewed it and sought for their intercession. There was no doubt these young children assuredly were in heaven.
Marcco:
Can you trace in your circumstance being baptized when you were 17 in that situation, can you find or track or point out the moment where you were justified? The moment of justification?
Trent:
Yes, I would say it was. So we would say justification and sanctification are really two ways of describing the same thing. We believe
Marcco:
Hatred. So Calvinists are different there, right?
Trent:
Very much so, very much. And in fact, the distinction of justification and sanctification really was born more out of the Protestant reformation. When you look to the early church fathers, they were really considered the same way of describing
Marcco:
Basically synonymous.
Trent:
Yeah. So if justification makes you right with God and sanctification makes you holy, well, what makes us right with God is that we become holy. We become holy as God is holy. So I would say that there was a moment where I received the gift of faith when I came to believe Jesus’, God before I was baptized. That’s something I didn’t merit. It just came into my heart through study and reflection and I recognized Jesus’ Lord. And then I wanted to seek baptism that it was at the moment that I was baptized, that I was justified, that I went from being Now if I were to have died before receiving baptism, the church has a very long tradition of something called the baptism of desire
That
If someone says, I want to be a Christian and I believe in Jesus and I want baptism and you get hit by a bus, or 2000 years ago, hit by a chariot. This is a very long tradition in the church that those people were still buried in Christian cemeteries because it was recognized that they were the term we use as a catechumen, one who is seeking to be baptized. And we would recognize that because they desired baptism, God is able to provide the graces of baptism to them knowing that they’re going to die before they receive it.
Marcco:
So we’ve got something similar like that by the way, that sometimes the example of Abraham has pointed out that God sees the action with Abraham and Isaac and the sacrifice as, okay, he’s going to do it. I know he’s going to do it. And so he sees that differently. Like old thing is the hypotheticals will get thrown out is like someone’s about to go get baptized, but they slip and fall, they hit their head, they die or something like
Trent:
That. And we would call that baptism of desire, and there’s a very long recognition of that in the church’s history. So I would say that I had the gift of faith and I sought baptism and when I was baptized, and what’s great about this is that we do believe salvation is a process, not a moment, but there is an initial moment when you go from being a child of Adam, someone who is an original sin, someone who by their natural powers can never merit heaven. There’s nothing special about you to merit it. That from there the waters of baptism wash away sin. You are born again as John three five says, and you receive the Holy Spirit is Acts
Marcco:
2 38. That’s so similar. Exactly. So similar.
Trent:
Yeah. So we would say that that that was the moment of initial justification. So as Catholics for example, we might quote James chapter two when it says a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. The church, the church, the Council of Trent, not my show, but the 16th century
Marcco:
Catholic.
Trent:
Yeah, the ecumenical council held in the wake of the Protestant reformation. That verse in James, A man is justified by works and not by faith alone. It is only cited in the council to describe works we do in cooperation with the grace of God after baptism
That
When we do good work. So Ephesians two 10 for Ephesians two, eight through 10, people will take that and say, oh, we’re saved by grace is not of any works, the works that were prepared for
Marcco:
Us, they try to use that against you as much as they try to use it against me. Right, exactly.
Trent:
Because what we would say is, well, no, we agree when
Marcco:
I don’t have a problem with that passage.
Trent:
And neither did Martin Luther because Luther believed that baptism saves. And Luther said, yes, baptism saves us. Ephesians two, eight through nine. We are not saved by works. All that shows is that baptism is not a work.
Marcco:
Yeah, exactly.
Trent:
It just shows then we are not saved by works. We are saved by baptism. S... Read more on Catholic.com