While the following sort of argument is part and parcel of Reformational teaching, I think it bears repeating, given that some seem to interpret any kind of robust sacramental theology as in tension with the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

One could argue, on the contrary and along with the Reformers, that a strong doctrine of sacramental efficacy is necessary in order to uphold and defend the Reformation solas. The argument would go like this:

Of course we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. The question is where Christ is to be found.

The Reformation answer is that Christ is to be found in the places in which he has promised to be: in his Word and in his Sacraments. It is in the Word of the Gospel--held out to us in proclamation, preaching, blessing, and absolution as much as in Baptism and the Supper--that Christ has promised to be present, offering himself to us, and there to be found by faith alone.

The medieval church had arguably eclipsed the Gospel by offering God in Christ to people in accordance with their own vain imaginings and inventions: through indulgences, through works of supererogation, through penance and satisfaction, through obligatory disciplines, through the saints and the blessed Virgin. And a god our own imagining is nothing but an idol.

The Reformation's recovery with clarity of the Gospel of grace opposed this idolatry by returning God's people to those places in which Christ had promised to be and there recieving him only by faith. The objective presence of Christ in his Word and Sacraments, received by faith, gives us a sure place to rest our faith, not dependent upon our own inventions and experience. The externum verbum of Word and Sacrament is a necessary corollary of the alien righteousness we receive in Christ extra nos.

Apart from the context of a strong doctrine of sacramental efficacy, we obscure the doctrines of grace, turning people back once again to the quicksand of subjectivity: experiences of conversion, feelings of spirituality, good works, holy living, an internal sense of forgiveness, signs and traces of some immediate work of the Spirit in our souls, and so on. Thus the Gospel once again becomes one of moral transformation, a righteousness before God that is inherent rather than imputed.

The Reformation solas, therefore, positively require that baptism saves because the Christ who is offered to us in the Gospel has graciously promised to be found and received in baptism only by faith unto the remission of sins. If you offer me a Christ who is not found in baptism, that is not the Christ of the Gospel, but one of our own invention.

Now, that is all probably more strongly worded than I would typically be inclined to put things. Yet, I hope it indicates how the issue of a high regard for sacramental efficacy, taken in itself, is decidedly not one of denying the Reformation solas, but one of affirming them.