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Karl Barth perceptively challenged Calvin’s doctrine of padeobaptism as inconsistent.

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To baptize infants, Reformed paedobaptists are inconsistent with their own definition of baptism. With little variation Calvin, Murray, and Marcel define baptism as cleansing, mortification, and union with Christ. Significantly, they each appeal to the necessary response of faith on the part of the one baptized. Therefore, baptism, according to their careful NT exegesis, represents an individual’s commitment to Christ. 

Each of them goes on to argue, however, for the baptism of infants who have not exercised faith and therefore have not been cleansed of sin, have not mortified (or are not in the process of mortifying) the flesh, and are not united to Christ.

For example, how does Calvin stress baptism’s role in uniting a believer with Christ and still advocate the baptism of infants, who lack faith and therefore are not united to Christ?

François Wendel rightly notes that “Calvin seems to be making union with Christ dependent upon reception of baptism, whereas almost everywhere else he says that this union is given at the same time as faith, and independently of the sacrament, which, on the contrary, presupposes the existence of faith and therefore of union with Christ.”

Calvin movingly, and rightly, stresses that the individual must exercise faith in God’s promises to receive a benefit at baptism. The exception to this is Calvin’s defense of paedobaptism.

Karl Barth perceptively challenged Calvin’s doctrine at this point, noting that the practice of infant baptism is irreconcilable with Calvin’s own definition of baptism:

  According to Calvin’s own and in itself excellent baptismal teaching, baptism consists not only in our receiving the symbol of grace, but it is at the same time, in our consentire cum omnibus christianis, in our public affirmare of our faith, in our iurare in God’s name, also the expression of a human velle. This without doubt it must be, in virtue of the cognitive character of the sacramental power. But then, in that case, baptism can be no kind of infant-baptism. How strange that Calvin seems to have forgotten this in his next chapter where he sets out his defence of infant-baptism, there commending a baptism which is without decision and confession!

In sum, Reformed paedobaptists define baptism as a rite for believers. They here echo the NT, which teaches that believers should express faith at their baptism, not when they look back on it years later. Reformed paedobaptists’ definition of baptism is better than their practice of baptizing infants.


Schreiner, T. R., & Wright, S. D. (2006). Believer’s baptism: sign of the new covenant in Christ (pp. 217–218). Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group.

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