A Defining Reformation-Era Divide

Believer's baptism sets these traditions, Baptist, Anabaptist, Pentecostal, and others, against the paedobaptist churches that baptize infants, a division reaching back to the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, when the first Anabaptists rebaptized adults and were persecuted for it by Catholic and mainstream Protestant authorities alike, in some cases executed by drowning, a punishment chroniclers note was chosen by their persecutors as a grim mockery of the rebaptism the condemned had practiced.

The English Baptist movement that later carried the credobaptist conviction into the wider Protestant world arose somewhat independently in the early seventeenth century, out of English Separatism rather than as a direct continuation of continental Anabaptism, though the two movements share the core theological argument and are often grouped together as believers-church traditions for that reason. The disagreement between credobaptist and paedobaptist churches turns on whether baptism chiefly signifies God's prior grace and covenant, embracing the children of believers as the Reformed and Lutheran traditions hold, or the individual's own personal faith and decision, and it remains one of the most durable and practically consequential divisions in the Protestant world.