Baptism, Believer Or Infant?

“You’re getting re-baptized? You were already baptized as a baby, I know because I have the picture!” My grandma said to me in confusion when I shared with her that I was going to get baptized in a few weeks at my church.

“Grandma, this is different. This is my choice, this is my faith, my relationship with Jesus.” I told her trying to stay calm.

“Well, whatever I don’t get it. Just let me know when it is and I’ll be there.”

The topic of which type of baptism, believer or infant, gives the better understand of baptism itself has been discussed for quiet some time now. Believer’s baptism is when the person makes a choice to be baptized, while Infant baptism is when an infant is baptized by the choice of their parents. Believer’s baptism is seen as making a choice to follow and obey Jesus and infant baptism is seen as a child becoming apart of the community of the church and washing away the original sin.

In this paper, I will be defending the view of believer’s baptism as I feel it gives a better understand of what baptism is suppose to be.

Arguments for Believer’s Baptism

My first argument for why I think believer’s baptism is gives the best understandings of what baptism is suppose to be is that it is our response to God’s grace. Ted Dorman quotes Menno Simon in A Faith for all Seasons “Baptism is an expression our response to God’s grace, not a sign of that grace, and must therefore be administered only after one believes in Christ. (2001)” My faith didn’t grow until I decided to follow Jesus with my heart, I went through the motions but I wasn’t choosing Jesus. Once I made my faith my own, and experienced God’s grace in so many ways, I knew the next step was to be baptized. I experience God’s grace when I chose winter of...

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... is it goes against church tradition. In Boyd and Eddy, the authors state you can’t rely of church tradition because scripture is the sole authority, sola scriptura. If we relied of church tradition over scripture many things would be different now. Scripture is what we follow, not what the traditions say we follow. If we were still following some of the church traditions, we could possibly still be living in a world were the church is corrupt. Also, infant baptism in the church didn’t become tradition right away; it wasn’t until at least after the 2nd Century that it became tradition. Nothing starts off as a tradition, you have to do it multiple times before it becomes a tradition, and so this “tradition” didn’t start when the church was born. A tradition that did start with Jesus was believer’s baptism, as he himself was baptized in the form of believer’s baptism.