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.