Infant baptism (paedobaptism)

Many Christians affirm infant baptism, that the children of believers are rightly baptized in infancy rather than waiting for a personal profession of faith. The practice's early history is itself debated by historians rather than straightforwardly settled: the early Christian writer Tertullian, writing around the turn of the third century, actually argued for delaying baptism, including of young children, unless urgent danger required it, a position some historians read as evidence infant baptism was not yet the unquestioned universal norm at that date, while others point to roughly contemporary or slightly later witnesses, including the church order traditionally associated with Hippolytus of Rome, which explicitly directs that little ones unable to speak for themselves be baptized with their families, as evidence the practice was already established in some communities by the early third century. The evidence from the earliest centuries is fragmentary enough that scholars continue to debate exactly when and how widely the practice took hold.

Where infants are baptized but later die without having made a personal profession of faith, the theological question of their standing before God has itself generated development within paedobaptist traditions; Catholic theology, having historically taught the possibility of a state called limbo for unbaptized infants, issued a 2007 document expressing hope, though not a formal doctrinal declaration, that God provides a way of salvation for infants who die without baptism.

Infant baptism is practiced by the Roman Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Methodist traditions, the great majority of historic Christendom by both number of adherents and length of continuous practice. It stands opposed to the believers-church view that baptism belongs only to those who can profess faith for themselves, a division dating from the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Even among paedobaptist churches, the ritual's surrounding practice differs considerably. Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches baptize infants by full immersion, generally three times, and commune them immediately afterward at the same service, treating the infant as a full communicant member from that day forward rather than deferring full sacramental participation to a later age. Western paedobaptist churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, typically baptize by pouring rather than immersion and postpone both first communion and a rite of confirmation or profession to later childhood or adolescence, treating baptism as the start of a longer process of formation that concludes only when the child is old enough to ratify, in some personal way, what was done on their behalf as an infant. The disagreement with credobaptist churches turns on whether that later ratification is a return to something already truly given, or the moment true baptism ought to have occurred in the first place.