Infant baptism according to Church fathers and modern theologians

Abstract

Baptism is the sign and the means of God's redeeming love, which frees us from original sin and communicates to us a share in the divine life. Through baptism, all Christians are called to reveal to others the living presence of Jesus in our midst. Baptism is the sacrament through which we are joined to Jesus, welcomed into the Catholic Church and freed of original sin. In baptism Jesus gives us new life in the Holy Spirit through which we begin to share in God's loving presence- grace. This sacrament is the door of the Church of Christ and the entrance into a new life. We are reborn from the state of slaves of sin into the freedom of the sons of God. It incorporates us with Christ's mystical body and makes us partakers of all the privileges flowing from the redemptive act of the Church's Divine Founder. Christ bid the apostles to teach all nations and baptise them. This has always been taken for granted as regards adults, however, infant baptism has been the subject of much dispute. The Waldenses and Cathari and later on the Anabaptists rejected the doctrine that infants are capable of receiving valid baptism and some sectarians at the present day hold the same opinion.