There is a passage of Scripture that people routinely pull out when you start talking about baptism being essential to salvation.
You share Mark 16:16, where Jesus says, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved.” Or Acts 2:38, where Peter says baptism is for the forgiveness of sins. Or 1 Peter 3:21, where he says that baptism saves. You quote Acts 22:16 and almost immediately someone fires back with 1 Corinthians 1:17 (as if Scripture can fight against Scripture). They remind you that Paul said God didn’t send him to baptize, but to preach the gospel. They conclude, therefore, that baptism is not part of the gospel. And if it’s not part of the gospel, it can’t be essential to salvation.
It’s a clever argument. But I want to show you today that it completely misreads what Paul is actually saying. And after we study what Paul is saying, we will see three passages of Scripture that clearly show that baptism is part of the gospel.
The passage we’re looking at is 1 Corinthians 1:17, where Paul says:
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect.
Did you notice how that verse begins? That little word for indicates something: Paul is not commencing a point here. He’s either continuing or concluding one. Let’s not neglect context, which always is happening when someone thinks this verse by itself disproves that baptism is essential to salvation. Let’s be good Bible students and start where Paul starts.
Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.
1 Corinthians 1:10
Why is Paul writing this? Verse 11 tells us. He has heard from the household of Chloe that there are arguments and divisions among the church at Corinth. And what are they fighting about?
Now I say this, that each of you says, “I am of Paul,” or “I am of Apollos,” or “I am of Cephas,” or “I am of Christ.”
v. 12
Essentially, they were saying this person taught me, this person baptized me, and therefore I belong to this person’s camp. Paul responds in verse 13 with a series of rhetorical questions:
Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
Of course the answer to all three is no. And to drive the point home, Paul says in vv. 14–16:
I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name. Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas. Besides, I do not know whether I baptized any other.
Now please notice what Paul is talking about here. He is not teaching on baptism. He is not addressing whether baptism saves. Yet that is what so many people try to do with the next verse. They try to use it to teach what baptism is and what it’s for. But Paul is not making a case for either the definition or purpose of baptism here. He is talking to a group of people who have all been baptized (see 12:13) specifically about who did the baptizing. The issue in Corinth was that Christians were dividing over which leader had baptized them. Paul is essentially saying, “I am glad I did not baptize many of you, because you have already proven you would have used that as a reason to elevate me above other teachers, which would have become a disaster.”
That is the context. And then, in verse 17, Paul says:
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect.
Here is where people make the jump. They go from Paul talking about baptizing and who does the baptizing, to suddenly concluding that Paul is making a statement about whether baptism itself is part of the gospel. But Paul never made that jump. That is an assumption that readers bring to the text, not something the text actually says.
Think about it this way. I preach the gospel regularly. I mention baptism nearly every time I preach. After I have preached, people have believed, and they went and were baptized. And I was not the one who baptized them. I can honestly say that I was not asked to do the baptizing. I was asked to preach. Does that mean I think baptism is unnecessary? Not at all. And you would be wrong to assume that I think that baptism is not essential when I say that I was not asked to baptize, but to preach. The two things are simply not the same. The fact that Paul was not sent to baptize does not mean baptism is not part of what one must do to obey the gospel.
Consider a meal. Every meal requires food. If I were to say to my family, “Let’s not divide over who cooked tonight,” I am not making a statement about whether the food is necessary. I am making a statement about who prepared it being irrelevant. That is exactly what Paul is doing. He is saying that who does the baptizing is not part of the gospel message. But that is a far cry from saying baptism itself is not part of obeying the gospel (by the way, if you want to study what happens if the “wrong” person baptizes you, check out this study).
Now, I want to show you something. There are three passages in the New Testament that make it clear that baptism is, in fact, part of preaching the gospel. And once you see them, the argument some people try to make from 1 Corinthians 1 falls apart completely.
The first is Mark 16:15–16. Jesus Himself, after His resurrection, gives the apostles their marching orders:
Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.
Notice what Jesus includes in the gospel proclamation: Believe and be baptized. Some people argue that the second half of verse 16 proves baptism is not essential, because Jesus says “he who does not believe will be condemned,” not “he who is not baptized.” But let me ask you something: are you trying to figure out how to be condemned, or how to be saved? Jesus is telling us what it looks like to be saved. And He says: believe and be baptized.
The second passage is Acts 8:12. In this context, Philip had gone down to Samaria and preached the gospel. We don’t have a word-for-word transcript of his sermon, but we know what it was about. The text says he was “preaching the good news [the gospel] about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ” (NASB). That’s the gospel. And how did the people respond? Here’s the entire verse:
But when they believed Philip preaching the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were being baptized, men and women alike.
Philip preached the gospel, and they responded by being baptized. You and I don’t know every word that Philip said, but we do know that somewhere within his gospel message, he included the command to be baptized into Jesus.
The third passage is later in the same chapter. An angel tells Philip to go to a certain road in the desert, where he meets a man from Ethiopia who is reading from Isaiah 53. The man asks who the prophet is talking about, and Philip begins right there in Isaiah 53 and preaches Jesus to him. We don’t have a transcript of that conversation either. Here’s what we do have:
Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him. Now as they went down the road, they came to some water. And the eunuch said, “See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?”
Acts 8:35–36
The man heard the gospel of Jesus, and his response was to ask to be baptized. There is no doubt that baptism was part of what he understood the gospel to require.
So we have Jesus saying believe and be baptized to be saved. We have Philip preaching the gospel and people being baptized in response. We have another man hearing about Jesus and immediately asking to be baptized. That’s the model we see throughout the entire book of Acts. Then we have Paul saying he was not sent to do the baptizing.
None of these statements contradict each other, unless you force 1 Corinthians 1:17 to say something Paul never intended. The passage is not about the essentiality of baptism. It is about the foolishness of dividing over who performs the baptism. To use this passage to argue that baptism is not part of the gospel, you would have to ignore the context entirely. You would have to look past the divisions in Corinth, past Paul’s frustration with people claiming him as a personal brand, past his gratitude that he had not baptized many of them for fear of feeding that carnality. You would have to pull verse 17 out of all of that, read it in isolation, and arrive at a conclusion that contradicts what Jesus Himself taught and sent His apostles and prophets to teach.
And I want to say this with as much grace as I can muster: that approach to Scripture is eisegesis. It is reading a conclusion into the text, rather than drawing a conclusion out of it. It is asking, “How can I prove what I already believe?”, rather than asking, “What does God want me to know?”