What this is about
Here is roughly how it sounds. This is written by this page as an example — it is not a quotation from anybody, and no church, ministry or person is named anywhere on this page.
Start by agreeing with what is right in it, because something is:
- A baptism with no faith behind it, ever, does nobody any good. The Bible has a man like that — Simon in Samaria, baptized in good order and still, Peter says, “in the gall of bitterness” (Acts 8).
- Water does not work on its own. No historic church has ever said it does.
- A person baptized as a baby and then never taught, never brought to church, never told what was done for him, has been given something and left to starve on it.
- And a person who comes to faith as an adult wants, and should want, to say the words himself.
So the question is not does faith matter? It does. The question is narrower: does faith make a baptism, or receive one? If it makes it, a baby’s baptism was nothing and should be done again. If it receives it, the baptism was God’s act, it stands, and the adult who now believes is receiving what he was given. Notice one thing before going further: nobody on either side believes in two baptisms. The people who say “do it again” do not think they are repeating anything; they think the first one never happened. So the whole argument comes down to one question: who gets to say that a baptism done with water, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, was nothing?
What this page is not doing
It is not about how much water — dipping or pouring — which is a different argument. It does not settle what baptism does inside a person, on which Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed churches differ; it uses only what all of them agree on, which is that baptism is God’s act and is not repeated. It tells nobody whether to accept or refuse a baptism, or to stay in a church or leave one. It names no living person or church. And the sixteenth-century killing of people who re-baptized is mentioned here as a fact and defended by nobody.
The short answer
- In the Bible, nobody baptizes himself. Every time the New Testament talks about someone being baptized, it is something done to him: “be baptized”, “were baptized”, “are we all baptized”. When it names what the person does, it is repent, believe, or call on the Lord — never baptize. Three verses say who is really doing it, and it is God: “by one Spirit are we all baptized”; “he saved us, by the washing of regeneration”; Christ cleanses the church “with the washing of water”.
- The first Christian writer to object to baptizing babies thought the baptism counted. Around the year 200 a writer in Carthage called Tertullian argued that children should wait — “let them come while they are growing up”. His reason was that the godparents might be let down by how the child turned out. That is only a worry if the baptism stands. He never once suggests doing it again later.
- By 244 it was being called apostolic, and by 253 the only question was how soon. Origen, the most learned Christian of his century: “The Church received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants.” In 253 sixty-six bishops met at Carthage to decide whether babies should be baptized at once or on the eighth day like circumcision. They said at once. Whether to baptize them at all was not on the agenda.
- Scholars do argue about whether it goes back to the apostles — and it does not matter to this question. In the fourth century many Christian parents waited, and famous bishops were baptized as adults. But nobody in the whole record, in any century, was baptized a second time because the first time he had been a baby. Even the people who preferred waiting said a baby baptized in danger was truly baptized.
- If your faith has to make the baptism real, you can never be sure of any baptism. If the first one was nothing because you did not really believe, the second one is nothing unless you really believe now — and the only thing that can tell you is the same heart that got it wrong before. The Bible does not trust that instrument: “The heart is deceitful above all things”; “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool.” Luther saw where this ends: whoever bases baptism on faith “will have to be baptized over again so often that he never again falls or is without faith.”
- “One baptism” is in the creed. Every historic church says every Sunday: “I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.” It was put there in 381, and the Church that put it there had already ruled that a baptism is not done twice.
- When baptized people fell away and came back, they were never re-baptized. Peter denied Christ three times and was restored with three questions. Simon in Samaria was told to repent and pray, not to go back in the water. The Corinthian who was thrown out of the church was to be “forgiven and comforted” when he repented. The thousands who caved under persecution in the year 250 were brought back through repentance and the bishop’s hands. Nobody proposed a second baptism — the only argument was about how long the repentance should take.
- The early Church worked out what makes a baptism real, and the baby’s age was never on the list. Water; the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; the intention to do what Christ commanded. A heretic’s baptism counted (314). A baptism by a bishop who had betrayed the faith counted. A liar’s baptism counted, though it did him no good until he repented. The one time the early Church did baptize people again, it was because their first “baptism” had not used the name of the Trinity — so it was not a baptism at all.
- The Reformers were asked exactly this question and said no. Luther, 1528: “True, one should add faith to baptism. But we are not to base baptism on faith.” And for the person who did not believe as a baby: “The baptism indeed was right, but I, alas, did not receive it aright.” Calvin: the promise made in baptism “always remained fixed, and firm, and true” even to those who did not believe at the time. Cranmer’s Articles: infant baptism “is in any wise to be retained in the Church”. The Presbyterians’ Westminster Confession: baptism “is but once to be administered to any person.”
- On this one point Rome and the Reformers are indistinguishable. The Council of Trent, in the same decade, condemned anyone who says children are “to be rebaptized when they have reached the years of discretion”. Put Trent, Luther and Calvin side by side on this question and you cannot tell them apart. The person who re-baptizes is not restoring the Reformation; he is holding the one position the Reformation and Rome agreed in rejecting.
- In sixteen centuries there is no case of a real baptism being knowingly repeated — because there cannot be. Every group that ever re-baptized first declared the earlier baptism to be no baptism: the Donatists said Catholic baptisms were void; a twelfth-century preacher said infant baptisms were void; even the strict bishops of the 250s only re-baptized people they said had never been baptized. “Valid re-baptism” is not rare. It is a contradiction in terms.
- The argument against infant baptism is a method, and the method does not stop there. “Not commanded in Scripture; no clear example; done by a Church that had gone wrong; not real unless I personally verified it.” Apply those four sentences honestly and they also remove the list of books in the New Testament, the word Trinity, Sunday worship and women at communion — all settled by the same fourth-century Church that baptized babies. Someone who keeps those and drops the baptism is not using the method. He is using a preference.
- A second baptism, whatever it means to mean, says that the first one was nothing — and the first one was God’s. Every historic church gives a person baptized as a baby a way to say the words himself: confirmation, or renewing the baptismal promises out loud. None of them will pour the water again, because the thing a person most needs when his faith wobbles is a promise that does not depend on it.
The first exercise: who is doing the baptizing?
Six verses about baptism, from the King James Bible. For each, say whether the baptism is something done to the person, something the person does, or whether the verse names both — something the person does (repent, believe, call) and a baptism done to him. Answer first; then read the note.
0 of 6 answered.
The second exercise: who said it?
Six statements about baptizing babies and baptizing twice. Each is from Rome, from a Reformer or a Reformation confession, or from the first re-baptizers. Guess which. Most people get at least two wrong, and the two they get wrong are the point.
0 of 6 answered.
The bit nobody expects: the strict people never re-baptized either
You might expect that the strictest Christians in history — the ones who thought a serious sin after baptism was nearly unforgivable — would have been the ones to demand a second baptism. It went the other way. The early Church argued for two hundred years about whether a person who denied Christ under persecution could be forgiven even once. Some said never. Most said once, after a long public repentance. Nobody said “baptize him again.” The image they used was a shipwreck: baptism was the ship, and repentance was the plank you clung to afterwards. Nobody thought you could build a second ship.
Luther, a thousand years later, did not answer that by proposing a second baptism. He answered it by saying the ship never sank: “The ship never breaks, because it is the ordinance of God, and not our work. But it happens that we slip and fall out of the ship. Yet if anybody falls out, let him see to it that he swims to the ship and clings to it.” Repentance, he said, “is nothing else than a return and approach to Baptism.”
Why this matters more than the history
If baptism is your testimony, then when your faith fails your baptism fails with it, and you have nothing to go back to except a better feeling next time. If baptism is God’s act, then when your faith fails the baptism is still there, done, dated, with your name on it, and the way back is to return to it. The second view is the only one that gives a frightened person something outside himself to hold. That is why every historic church, when it wants to comfort somebody, points him at his baptism — and why none of them will let him be baptized again.
The third exercise: what happened to the people who fell?
Six baptized people or groups who denied Christ, sinned badly or broke away — from the Bible and the early Church. For each, say what happened when they came back: restored through repentance, baptized again, or refused.
0 of 6 answered.
The fair objections, and what can be said to them
“There is no baby baptized anywhere in the New Testament.”
True, and this page says so. There is also no verse saying “wait until the children can believe”. What there is: a promise “unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:39); whole households baptized when the head of the house believed (Acts 16); Jesus rebuking those who kept infants from him (Luke 18); and baptism called the new circumcision (Colossians 2) — the sign God ordered given on the eighth day of life. People read all that two ways. But nothing in it makes a baby’s baptism nothing, and that is the only point this page needs.
“Paul says to examine yourself. So I can judge whether my faith was real.”
He does (2 Corinthians 13:5) — but look at what he says to examine: “whether ye be in the faith”, now, today. Not whether you were in the faith at your baptism thirty years ago, which no amount of looking inward can settle. And look at what he says to look for: not a feeling, but Christ — “how that Jesus Christ is in you”. Faith checks itself by looking at what it trusts, not by looking at itself.
“Ephesians says one baptism — meaning one kind, not one time.”
That reading is possible on the bare words, and the page admits it. But the verse lists “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God” in a row, and the Church that received the letter read it as once within a hundred years and wrote it into the creed within three hundred. And even the first re-baptizers’ own confession of 1527 never says “again” — it says infant baptism is not baptism. Everybody agrees baptism is once. The argument is only about whether the first one happened.
“A lot of people were baptized as babies and never became Christians. Wasn’t it wasted?”
On some of them, yes, so far as anyone can see — and the historic churches say so; they call it a gift left unused, not a gift that was never given. But notice that this is an argument about what happened afterwards, and a second baptism cannot fix what happened afterwards. Only faith can. The question is whether that faith, when it comes, should be told it now has a baptism to receive, or that it must produce one.
Check it yourself
Five things, all free, and the first three together take about an hour. If the sources do not say what this page says they say, the page is wrong and you will find out quickly.
- 1. Martin Luther, Concerning Rebaptism (1528). Forty minutes; in Luther’s Works volume 40 and widely excerpted online. The exact question this page asks — I was baptized as a baby without faith, must I be baptized now that I believe? — put to Luther by people who had been told yes, and answered.
- 2. The Council of Trent, Session VII (1547), the canons on baptism. Ten minutes, free. Read canons 11 and 13, then read Luther, and try to tell them apart on this point.
- 3. Acts 2:38, Acts 8:9–24, Romans 6:1–11, 1 Corinthians 12:13, Galatians 3:26–29, Titus 3:4–7. Twenty minutes. Read them one after another and mark, in each, who is doing the baptizing and what the person himself is told to do.
- 4. Tertullian, On Baptism, chapter 18. Five minutes, free online. The earliest argument against baptizing babies. Notice what his remedy is, and notice that the word again never appears.
- 5. John Calvin, Institutes, Book IV, chapter 15, sections 16–18. Twenty minutes, free online. Calvin on people baptized before they believed, and what he tells them.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier has ten interactive sections, every quotation dated and sourced, the objections answered where they arise, the published prompt so you can re-run the whole enquiry yourself, a walk down the regress that opens when a baptism is made to depend on the recipient’s faith, and a diagnostic you can run on a request to be re-baptized.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →