New American Commentary Studies in Bible & Theology by Thomas R. Schreiner, Shawn Wright, Believer’s Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ (2007) pp 478-79.
Would Paul have been saved if he had died before he received baptism three days later?
Such a theoretical question distracts us from biblical teaching that resists conforming to contemporary categories devised by the impatient enquirer. To yield to it is unwise, unnecessary, and injurious to Christian teaching on conversion because it aims at isolating baptism from conversion on the basis of a theoretical exception. The question unnecessarily raises a theoretical exception when the NT provides an actual exception with the thief on the cross. To yield to the theoretical question does injury to the clarity of the NT pattern concerning conversion.
While the NT accounts for the salvation of the thief on the cross, whose conversion was compressed in its aspects and who did not receive baptism, it shows a discernible pattern of conversion. This pattern should regulate our doctrinal formulation of the relationship of conversion and baptism for those converted before they approach impending death, and yet the Bible also accounts for those rare exceptions.
Stein rightly argues that “to establish an understanding of the normal conversion pattern based on extremely rare or unusual experiences is to emphasize the abnormal. In general a person could not be converted to Christianity in the New Testament apart from baptism.” [“Baptism and Becoming a Christian in the New Testament,” 15.]
