How Old the Argument Is

Infant baptism was widespread enough by the early centuries of Christianity that when the theologian Augustine of Hippo argued in the late fourth and early fifth centuries that infants needed baptism because they inherited a real, culpable original sin from Adam, he was defending an already established practice against critics rather than proposing something new, and his position became the dominant Western account of why the rite could not simply wait for a person old enough to ask for it.

The argument stayed largely settled within the Catholic and later Orthodox churches for over a thousand years. It reopened sharply during the Protestant Reformation, when Anabaptist groups in the sixteenth century rejected infant baptism outright, arguing that faith had to precede a valid baptism and that baptizing someone incapable of belief was not merely premature but invalid, a position for which they were persecuted by both Catholic and mainstream Protestant authorities of the time. That sixteenth century split runs in an unbroken line to the present divide between traditions that baptize infants, Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, and most Reformed churches among them, and Baptist and other believer's baptism traditions descended from the Anabaptist position, which baptize only those old enough to profess faith themselves, making this one of the oldest continuously unresolved disagreements in Christian practice.