[Costeon]

For those who hold to the now traditional view that no one is saved until they have been baptized in Jesus' name and baptized with the Spirit with the sign of tongues, it would be better for them to say that no saving work at all occurs until someone has experienced both elements than to assert that different aspects of salvation occur at different points in a process.

If people would teach, for example, that baptism does not bring the remission of sins until someone has also been baptized in the Spirit, or someone has not been born of the Spirit until he has also been born of the water, this would avoid the implications that I have mentioned several times in this thread, that someone could have all their sins remitted and therefore be justified, but at that moment still be lost because he has not received the Spirit with the sign of tongues, or that someone could receive the fullness of the life-giving and transforming Spirit, but still be lost if he has not been baptized in water and therefore still has his record of sins against him.

It’s not surprising that no other groups have ever argued for a process of salvation the way apparently almost all Oneness Pentecostals do now since the teaching of a process of salvation leads to absurd implications--wildly unreasonable or illogical. Everyone else in the history of the church, as far as I know, has asserted that salvation occurs at a particular point. For Catholics, Orthodox, and Church of Christ, for example, this point is baptism. Everything experienced in salvation occurs at that point. For other Protestants this point is faith.