Believer's baptism (credobaptism)

Baptists and other believers-church traditions affirm credobaptism, that baptism is properly administered only to those old enough to make a personal profession of faith, and not to infants. On this view baptism is the response of a conscious believer to the gospel and a sign of a faith already professed, so it belongs to those who can repent and believe for themselves; many of these traditions practice it by full immersion, seeing it as a symbol of dying and rising with Christ. The New Testament pattern of preaching followed by the baptism of believers is cited as the warrant, alongside the absence, proponents argue, of any clear New Testament instance of an infant being baptized.

The conviction has an identifiable origin point in the Swiss Reformation: in Zurich in the mid-1520s, a group later called the Swiss Brethren, including Conrad Grebel, broke with the city's official reformer Huldrych Zwingli specifically over infant baptism, and performed what the authorities considered the first adult rebaptisms of the movement, taking the name Anabaptist, re-baptizer, from opponents who viewed the practice as a repeat and therefore invalid or blasphemous act rather than a first true baptism at all.

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.