Very Good Question. Glad You Asked.
We don’t baptize babies, and the reason is simple: every baptism in the New Testament comes after something an infant isn’t yet able to do — hearing the gospel, believing it, turning away from sin. Baptism is a believer’s response, and that’s the whole of the answer. It isn’t a verdict on babies. Read the Bible’s own account and you’ll find little children pictured as safe with God.
If you were christened as an infant, or if you carried your own child forward to be christened, this isn’t an abstract question. It touches people you love. It deserves a real answer instead of a slogan.
Who Was Baptized in the New Testament?
Read through Acts and watch the people who go down into the water. Every time, they’re people who first listened and then believed. “But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women” (Acts 8:12). Men and women — people old enough to sit under preaching and weigh what they heard.
Jesus Himself put believing ahead of baptism when He sent the apostles out: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:16). Peter, on the day the church began, put repentance ahead of it: “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). And faith has a starting place of its own: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). None of that is within a baby’s reach. An infant can’t hear with understanding, can’t believe, and has nothing to repent of. To baptize one is to keep the act while letting go of everything Scripture attaches to it.
But What About the “Households” Baptized in Acts 16?
This is usually where the conversation goes next, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge. Twice in Acts 16, a whole household is baptized — Lydia’s (v. 15) and the Philippian jailer’s (v. 33) — and those two verses do a lot of work for the case that infants were included.
Look closer at what the text actually says rather than what it doesn’t rule out. Lydia is introduced by her own trade, “a seller of purple goods” (Acts 16:14), with no husband or children mentioned anywhere in the account. Her “household” reads far more naturally as her staff and dependents than as a nursery.
The jailer’s household is even clearer, because Luke tells us what happened to them before the baptism: Paul and Silas “spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house” (Acts 16:32). A household that can be preached to is a household that can understand what’s being preached. Afterward, Luke adds that the jailer “rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God” (Acts 16:34) — in the Greek text, that verb is singular, tied grammatically to the jailer himself, with the household sharing his joy rather than the verse claiming each of them separately came to faith. Either way you read it, nothing in the passage describes an infant.
The same pattern holds outside Acts. Paul baptized “the household of Stephanas” (1 Corinthians 1:16), and later identifies that same household as people who “devoted themselves to the service of the saints” (1 Corinthians 16:15) — grown work, done by people old enough to choose it.
“Household” language in the first century regularly included servants, employees, and extended family, and Scripture never tells us these particular households held an infant. Building a case for infant baptism out of that silence asks these two verses to carry a weight none of the New Testament’s plain baptism accounts will support.
But Aren’t Babies Born Sinners?
The case for infant baptism usually rests on the idea that a child arrives in the world already guilty of Adam’s sin, with something that has to be washed off. Scripture describes guilt very differently: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). Guilt stays with the one who did the sinning. Sin is something a person commits (1 John 3:4). It’s not luggage handed to a newborn.
That’s why Jesus pointed at small children as a picture of what the kingdom is like, rather than as people needing to be cleansed: “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). It’s also why David spoke the way he did after his infant son died: “But now he is dead. Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). David expected to see that child again. The child was safe.
Scripture even gestures toward the reason why. Moses told the generation that had refused to enter Canaan that their “little ones,” who “today have no knowledge of good or evil” (Deuteronomy 1:39), would be the ones to inherit the land in their place, and Isaiah describes a child too young to “refuse the evil and choose the good” (Isaiah 7:15–16). Neither passage hands us a formula, but both describe something Scripture and common sense both recognize: a stage of life before moral responsibility has kicked in — what’s sometimes called an age of accountability. Whatever age that turns out to be for any individual child, an infant is nowhere near it.
Take that as the good news it is. A baby doesn’t need to be baptized for the same reason a baby doesn’t need to be forgiven. The account is clean.
What About My Child Who Was Christened?
Let’s say the obvious thing first: a christening was an act of love. Parents stood before God and promised to raise a child toward Him, and we won’t say a hard word about that. But loving a child doesn’t turn one act into a different act. The baptism the New Testament describes is a person’s own decision, a burial of someone who has chosen to die to sin. “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Nobody can make that choice for another person, no matter how deeply they love them.
So the honest answer to the question is also the kindest one. Your child isn’t lost, and never was. If the day comes when they believe for themselves, baptism will be theirs to choose, and choosing it will mean everything, because it will be their own faith at work.
Wasn’t This How the Church Always Did It?
It’s a fair question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a wave of the hand. The earliest clear description historians have of infants being baptized comes from Tertullian, a North African church leader writing around AD 200 — roughly 170 years after Pentecost. What’s easy to miss is that Tertullian was arguing against the practice in that very passage, urging parents to wait until a child was old enough to ask for baptism personally. Historians still debate how much further back, quietly and undocumented, the custom might reach; what isn’t in dispute is that nothing resembling it appears in the New Testament itself. That’s the only record this study has ever claimed to follow.
What Should I Do With This?
Sit down with the conversions in Acts, chapters 2, 8, 9, 10, and 16, and put one question to each account: what happened in the moments right before the baptism? Hearing, believing, repenting. Every time. Never an infant. If you were christened as a baby and you’ve since come to believe on your own, that same reading will help you see what your obedience should look like now.
One word about who is telling you this. Here at Christians in Honesdale we’re simply Christians, an independent congregation with no denomination or headquarters standing behind us, so we can only speak for ourselves and never for everyone else who wears Christ’s name. Honest study is the only authority we can point you to. Take your time, open your own Bible, and hold everything you’ve read here up against it.
Keep Studying, With Us If You Like
If this question has been sitting with you, we’d be glad to open Acts together and let you weigh it at your own pace, with nothing to sign and no pressure of any kind. You can schedule a free Bible study, read more about who we are, or get in touch about visiting.
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Look for us at 416 Main Street, Suite D, Honesdale, PA 18431. The lot and the door we use are both around the back.