Position · 200

Infant Baptism

The practice of baptising the infant children of believers, as well as adult converts.

History

Roots

The New Testament never describes a baby being baptised, and it never forbids it. What it does describe is whole households baptised together: Lydia “and her household” (Acts 16:15), the Philippian jailer “and all his family” (Acts 16:33), the household of Stephanas (1 Corinthians 1:16). Peter’s Pentecost sermon told its hearers that “the promise is for you and for your children” (Acts 2:39). Whether those households included infants, and what Peter meant by “children”, is where the argument has stood ever since.

The first clear evidence comes around 200. Tertullian, in On Baptism (c. 200–206), argued that “the delay of baptism is preferable; principally, however, in the case of little children” (ch. 18). He was objecting to a practice that already existed, which makes him a witness for it as well as a critic. The Apostolic Tradition, traditionally attributed to Hippolytus of Rome (early third century, though both author and date are disputed), tells the minister to baptise the little ones first and lets parents answer for those who cannot speak (ch. 21). Origen, writing in the 230s and 240s, said the church had received from the apostles the tradition of baptising infants (Commentary on Romans 5.9; Homilies on Leviticus 8.3).

By the mid-third century the question was no longer whether but when. Bishop Fidus asked whether newborns should wait until the eighth day, as with circumcision. Cyprian of Carthage replied for a council of sixty-six bishops that no one agreed with him: grace should not be withheld from anyone, least of all a newborn (Letter 58, c. 253). Practice still varied. Many Christian parents in the fourth century delayed baptism, sometimes until adulthood, so that serious sins committed after it could be avoided. Gregory of Nazianzus, preaching in 381, advised baptism at once for a child in danger of death and otherwise waiting “till the end of the third year, or a little more or less” (Oration 40.28).

Causes

Augustine turned a common practice into a doctrinal necessity. Against Pelagius and his followers, who denied that Adam’s sin passed to his descendants, Augustine argued that the church’s custom of baptising infants “for the remission of sins” proved they carried original sin, since they had committed none of their own. He set this out in On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants (412, New Advent). The Council of Carthage in 418 made it law: anyone who denies that “infants newly from their mother’s wombs should be baptized,” or who says they inherit no original sin from Adam, “let him be anathema” (canon 110 of the African Code). The defeat of Pelagianism tied infant baptism to the doctrine of original sin in the West for the next thousand years.

Once Christianity became the religion of the empire and then of medieval Europe, infant baptism became nearly universal. Baptism marked birth into the church and, in practice, into civil society.

Influence

The Reformation kept the practice but broke its consensus. Martin Luther defended infant baptism against both Rome and the radicals. Huldrych Zwingli had himself voiced doubts about it in the early 1520s, but when some of his Zurich followers, led by Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, refused to have their children baptised, he turned against them. After a public disputation in January 1525 the Zurich council ordered infants baptised, and the dissenters began baptising one another as adults that same month. This was the birth of the Anabaptist movement and of Believer’s Baptism as a church practice. Zurich executed Manz by drowning in 1527.

Every magisterial Reformation confession that followed affirmed infant baptism and condemned its opponents. The Augsburg Confession (1530) “condemn[s] the Anabaptists, who reject the baptism of children” (art. 9). The Anglican Thirty-nine Articles say that “the Baptism of young Children is in any wise to be retained in the Church” (art. 27). The Westminster Confession (1646) holds that “the infants of one, or both, believing parents are to be baptized” (ch. 28.4). The Council of Trent (1547) reaffirmed the Catholic teaching in its canons on baptism.

The English Separatist John Smyth drew the opposite conclusion in Amsterdam in 1609, baptised himself and his congregation as believers, and started the line that became the Baptist churches. From then on the Protestant world held two practices, and it still does.

Key ideas and contributors

Churches that baptise infants agree on the practice far more than on the reasons for it.

Washing away original sin. For the Roman Catholic Church, following Augustine, infants are “born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin” and so “have need of the new birth in Baptism.” Baptism really cleanses and regenerates them, and the Church would “deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God” if it delayed (Catechism 1250–1252). The Catechism adds that the free gift of grace “is particularly manifest in infant Baptism”: the child has done nothing to earn it.

Initiation into the life of the church. The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches baptise infants by triple immersion and, in the same service, chrismate them and give them communion. They speak less of inherited guilt than Augustine did and more of the child being joined to Christ and to the church, and beginning the road toward union with God.

A means of grace that works faith. Martin Luther’s Large Catechism (1529) answered the objection that infants cannot believe. Luther held that God can give faith to an infant and that the church brings the child in that hope, but that it baptises because God commanded it, not because of the faith of the one baptised. Even a baptised adult cannot be certain of their own faith; what is certain is God’s word. The church’s long practice was, for him, proof that God approves it (Large Catechism, Part IV). Lutheran churches still hold that baptism regenerates.

The sign of the covenant. John Calvin built the Reformed case on the continuity of God’s covenant. Circumcision marked the children of Israel as members of the covenant before they could understand it (Genesis 17:7–12). Paul connects circumcision and baptism (Colossians 2:11–12), and the children of a believer are called “holy” (1 Corinthians 7:14). If the children of believers belonged to the covenant under Moses, Calvin argued, it would be strange for the new covenant to shut them out. Jesus’ welcome of the little children (Mark 10:13–16) points the same way (Institutes 4.16, 1559). In this view baptism signs and seals God’s promise; it does not by itself guarantee that the child is regenerate.

Prevenient grace. John Wesley kept infant baptism for the Methodist movement. His Treatise on Baptism (1756) set out “the grounds of infant baptism, taken from Scripture, reason, and primitive, universal practice,” arguing from original sin, the covenant and the household baptisms (text). Scholars have shown that Wesley drew most of it from his father Samuel’s 1700 tract. Later Methodism came to stress baptism as a sign of the grace that goes before any human response.

Other contributors: Thomas Cranmer, whose Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552) gave English-speaking churches their baptismal service for infants, with godparents answering for the child; and Huldrych Zwingli, who in his later writings against the Anabaptists treated baptism mainly as a pledge and a sign of belonging, the root of the covenant view.

Key controversies

No command, no clear example. The basic objection from the Anabaptist and Baptist side is that the New Testament pattern is preaching, repentance, faith and then baptism (Acts 2:38, Acts 8:12). The Schleitheim Confession (1527) gave baptism to “all those who have been taught repentance and who believe truly that their sins are taken away through Christ,” and excluded “all infant baptism, the greatest and first abomination of the pope” (art. 1). Defenders answer that the household baptisms likely included children and that the New Testament records a missionary situation, where converts were necessarily adults.

What the early church did. In 1958 the German scholar Joachim Jeremias argued in Infant Baptism in the First Four Centuries (Archive.org; English 1960) that the church baptised infants from the apostolic age. Kurt Aland replied in Did the Early Church Baptize Infants? (1961; English 1963) that the clear evidence starts only around 200, and Jeremias answered in The Origins of Infant Baptism (1962). Everett Ferguson’s Baptism in the Early Church (Eerdmans, 2009) concluded that infant baptism probably began as emergency baptism for dying children and spread from there. Neither side has produced a text that settles the first century.

Circumcision and the covenant. Baptists accept that baptism replaces circumcision in some sense but deny that the new covenant works the same way. They argue that its members all “know the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:34), so membership comes by new birth, not natural birth. The Reformed reply that the new covenant, like the old, includes children, and that the church on earth has always been a mixed body.

Faith and regeneration. Paedobaptists disagree sharply with each other here. Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans and many Anglicans hold that baptism regenerates the infant. The Reformed deny that baptism regenerates by itself and treat it as a covenant sign. Critics on the Baptist side ask how a sign of faith can be given to someone who cannot yet believe; critics on the Lutheran side ask what a covenant sign means if it gives nothing.

Christendom and nominal Christianity. The sharpest modern critic came from inside the paedobaptist churches. Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian, told students in 1943 that infant baptism was a serious disorder in the church’s practice, kept alive largely by the church’s wish to remain a national church; baptism should be the free response of a believer (The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism, 1943; English 1948). Barth’s critics replied that he made baptism a human act when the Reformers had treated it as God’s. The worry he named is still common: whole populations baptised as infants who never practise the faith.

Infants who die unbaptised. If baptism is necessary for salvation, what happens to babies who die without it? Augustine taught that they suffer the mildest of punishments. Medieval theologians softened this into limbo, a state of natural happiness without the vision of God. The Roman Catholic Church never defined limbo, and in 2007 the International Theological Commission concluded that there are “reasons for prayerful hope” that such infants are saved (The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised). Reformed confessions place the question in God’s election rather than the sacrament.

Rebaptism. Since infant-baptising churches recognise each other’s baptisms but most Baptist churches do not, a person baptised as an infant who joins a Baptist church is usually baptised again. Paedobaptists regard this as a denial that their first baptism was real. The World Council of Churches’ Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982) asked infant-baptising churches to guard against indiscriminate baptism and believer-baptising churches to avoid anything that suggests rebaptism. Some denominations now allow both practices side by side.

What remains unresolved

The debate rests on two questions the texts do not answer directly. One is historical: did the apostles baptise infants, or did the church start later? The other is theological: is the church the community of those who have believed, or the community of God’s covenant with believers and their children? A church’s answer to the second usually decides how it reads the evidence for the first. Each side also names the other’s practical risk. Infant baptism can produce baptised people with no faith. Believer’s baptism can leave the children of Christians outside the church they are raised in.