Why baptize babies who cannot yet believe?

01Your verses first

“He that believeth and is baptized”

“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned.”

“But Peter said to them: Do penance: and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins. And you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”

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 that are far off, whomsoever the Lord our God shall call.”

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 is the case. Here is what it does not 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.

“And they brought unto him also infants, that he might touch them. Which when the disciples saw, they rebuked them. But Jesus, calling them together, said: Suffer children to come to me and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.”

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.