Why baptize babies who cannot yet believe?

01Your verses first

“He that believeth and is baptized”

“He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who disbelieves will be condemned.”

“Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Read fairly: in the New Testament people hear, believe, repent, and then are baptized. An infant cannot believe or repent. So baptism should wait until a person can make that profession for themselves.

Catholics agree that baptism is the sacrament of faith. The question is whose faith, and how much.

02The Catholic reading

To you and to your children

“For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are far off, even as many as the Lord our God will call to himself.’”

Several times the New Testament records whole households being baptized: Lydia “and her household,” the jailer “and all his house,” and the household of Stephanas.^11,8,12

Paul links baptism with circumcision, which in Israel was given to infants on the eighth day.^13,14

Baptism, the Catechism says, “is the sacrament of faith,” but the faith it requires is “not a perfect and mature faith, but a beginning that is called to develop.”² Children are baptized “in the faith of the Church.”⁴

And it is a gift: “The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism.”³

That’s the case. Here’s what it doesn’t claim.

03Honest limits

What the New Testament does not say

The Catechism is careful: there is explicit testimony to infant baptism from the second century on, and it is “quite possible” that infants were baptized from the beginning, when whole households received baptism.⁵

So no verse names an infant being baptized, and Catholics do not claim one. The case rests on the household texts, on the link with circumcision, and on the practice of the Church from very early on.

“They were also bringing their babies to him, that he might touch them. But when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. Jesus summoned them, saying, ‘Allow the little children to come to me, and don’t hinder them, for God’s Kingdom belongs to such as these.”

So the disagreement is about what baptism is.

04The real disagreement

Where we think it lies

Not whether faith matters. The question is whether baptism is first our act of commitment, or first God’s gift, received in the faith of the Church and then grown into.

Since the earliest times, the Church says, baptism has been given to children, because it is a grace and a gift of God that does not presuppose any human merit.⁴

“The promise is to you and to your children.” Catholics take Peter at his word.