Romans 4:5, Romans 6:11
Paul’s certainty with regard to us belonging to this new world in God’s presence is based on us sharing in Christ’s death. By sharing in his death through baptism, we also share in his resurrection. The underwater grave is the portal to heaven!
In Romans 6:11 Paul conveys this idea with the following words: So you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Just like in Romans 5:11 and Romans 5:21, Paul here again refers to Jesus Christ as our Lord.
(These words are missing from Romans 6:11 in the minority of the manuscripts and therefore they have also often been omitted from modern Bible translations). By doing so the apostle reaches a provisional conclusion: The identity of Gentile Christians lies not in the law of Moses and its circumcision as a means of being incorporated into Israel. Neither does it, however, lie in the world of sin outside the law. Does this then mean that the Christians in Rome live in a vacuum? Paul here clarifies that they now proceed from a new point of departure in terms of their expectation of life. They are not to become Jews, but nor are they to remain Romans, but they are transformed into a new kind of people by means of being incorporated into Christ’s death: they are the people who share in the glory of the One who is now in heaven. The Lord Jesus Christ now forms the new point of orientation for their entire existence.
According to the religious-historical school of exegesis which had become popular at the end of the nineteenth and during the first half of the twentieth centuries, the idea of the death and resurrection of the initiated
was regarded as a Hellenistic (mystical and magical) interpretation of what happens during baptism. Lietzmann1 believes that Paul adopted this idea for the Gentile Christian congregation from mystic religions, since baptism effectuates death but not resurrection, and that the resurrection is here understood as signifying ethical renewal. However, these parallels based on Hellenistic mysteries are unconvincing (Nilsson2 p 679—701, Wagner3 , Agersnap4 p 52—98), even if Käsemann5 remains unconvinced by the overwhelming criticism against this position. He maintains that, because of the inclusion of the phrase, with Christ,
we must here think of a Mysterien-geschehen, i.e. a mystical occurrence. However, the idea of death
is already part of the act of baptism, in which the person being baptized is symbolically drowned,
and also because baptism is done “in the name of" Jesus, the One who was crucified and died. Furthermore, Paul maintains that there is no baptism apart from a confession of faith and as such one cannot interpret with Christ
in a mystical-magical sense, for it is a union through faith and through the Spirit.6
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.