Adult baptism

Believer's baptism (occasionally called credobaptism, from the Latin word credo meaning "I believe") is the Christian practice of baptism as this is understood by many evangelical denominations, particularly those that descend from the Anabaptist and English Baptist tradition. According to their understanding, a person is baptized on the basis of his or her profession of faith in Jesus Christ and as admission into a local community of faith.

The contrasting belief, held in nearly every other Christian church back to antiquity, is infant baptism (pedobaptism or paedobaptism, from the Greek paido meaning "child"), in which infants or young children are baptized if one or both parents are already members of the denomination. Such is the practice in the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Churches, Coptic and Oriental Orthodox Churches, Lutheran Churches, Anglican and Episcopal Churches, and others.

Baptisms are performed in various ways: believer's baptism is typically only by immersion or pouring (also called affusion) and infant baptism by either affusion, aspersion (sprinkling) or immersion. Believer's baptism is often referred to as adult baptism, due to the credobaptist denial that faith can exist prior to the age of accountability. Believer's baptism may be extended to children so long as they are old enough to earnestly profess their faith.

Defenders of infant baptism have attempted to trace the practice to the New Testament era, but generally acknowledge that no unambiguous evidence exists that the practice existed prior to the 2nd century. The oldest surviving manual of church discipline, the Didache, envisions the baptism of adults. Advocates of believer's baptism contend that non-Biblical records are not authoritative, and that no evidence exists from the Bible or early Christian literature that infant baptism was practiced by the apostles.

Another argument posed by some advocates of believer's baptism focuses on the fact that most churches that practice infant baptism were heavily intertwined with the state in medieval and Reformation-era Europe. In many instances, citizens of a nation were required under penalty of law to belong to the state church. Infant baptism marked the infant as a citizen of the nation and a loyal subject of the reigning political order as much as it marked the infant as a Christian. To denominations like the Baptists, which have historically stressed religious liberty, toleration, and separation of church and state, this practice is an unacceptable violation of the basic human right to self-determination in matters of spirituality and religion; but this argument does little to dissuade the many pedobaptistic churches today which are, as in the United States and most other Western nations, unburdened by any compulsion to baptize anyone because of a governmental demand.

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