I was born into a church that rejected infant baptisim and only baptised people of the “age of accountability” via full immersion, and many years later was recieved into the Catholic Church so I might have a unique perspective on this.
A couple of issues with the concept that baptisim is only valid if done through full knowledge of what one is doing:
First of all, how can anyone really say that right then, right there, they are sufficiently aware of what they are doing? I know of several people in the church I grew up in that were baptized twice or even three times. What they said was “I really didn’t know what I was doing at 12 years old” and then at age 22, or 39, or whatever they would go back to the baptistry again because that had had a radical realignment of their understanding of grace, faith, and so on. Some people in that denomination would say that after the first baptisim “you just got wet” and others saw efficacy in it. The point is, what all does a person need to know before making an informed decision about the most important thing that can happen to a person? A few times in life one looks back and discovers that all that they used to know is only so much straw compared to what they now know, or what they now know they don’t know.
Second, I recall the conversations my father had with me back when I was of the age that it was expected that I would go forward for Baptisim. I would point out a verse and ask what it meant, meaning that I did not understand everything. He said that I did not have to know everything, that he would help me with all that after I was baptized. Interesting concept, that.
I was happy to have my three children baptized as infants. Two in the Anglican and the third in the Catholic Church. The parents and the Godparents carry responsibility to properly bring up the children. If you have a way to watch recent episodes of *The Journey Home *on EWTN (if you have Roku, or it may be on YouTube or on EWTN’s site) try finding the episode with Jennifer Fulwiler. She was an athesist who turned to Christianity and ultiamtely to the Catholic Church. She made a case that although raised an atheist, she had been baptized as an infant and she thought that that had imparted grace which helped her in her journey to Christianity even in the years when she denied that there was a God.
Did my children choose to be baptized? No. Nor did they choose that Adam would sin either and we have all suffered for that. Humanity was cast out of the garden, not just Adam and Eve, my children did not choose that either. And, be serious, how many 9, 10, 11 or 12 year old kids can not be talked into baptisim if the parents tried hard enough, how free of a choice is that, really, in churches that have baptsim later in life?
Regarding how people are to be baptized, try doing a web search for the Didache, an extremely early Church document that could date to the year 100 or so. It describes the different options of how people are to be baptized. There is also archeological evidence for infant baptisim in the early days of Christianity, namely cemetary inscriptions where children were burried, giving their birth day and the day (not that long thereafter) of when they were baptized.
Some fundamentalists make a big deal about the Greek word for baptize being defined as immersion. The reality though is that the words recorded in the gospels were spoken in Aramaic, not Greek. Picking apart the Greek is being nit picky. I think there is a good case to be made that some of the gospels were first written in Aramaic as well, but that is just my opinion. The New Testament is the history of Jesus and of the early days of the Church He founded. It is not a Popular Mechanics how-to-guide on how to make a church in one’s garage over a long weekend. The Church that He made has existed ever since and that Church exists, in part, to carry on sacred tradition (baptisim started and went on for a long time before one word of sacred scripture was put to paper) and to interpret sacred scripture.
I was baptized as a teenager at a youth camp at a city named Sacramento. It was only a couple of years ago, when hunting down the letter of baptisim to provide to the priest to be recieved into the Catholic Church that the irony struck me. That protestant church denied that there were such things as sacraments, and was baptizing kids in a camp at Sacramento. Well, as a sacrament (something that imparts grace, as opposed to simply being an act of obedience) baptisim makes sense.
