The Reformed doctrine of infant baptism is a stumbling block for many evangelical Christians who are otherwise attracted to joining a Reformed church. But the Reformed face not only the doctrinal challenge of defending the biblical rationale for our practice but also a communication challenge. Many people from other backgrounds don’t understand exactly what we mean by the language of infant baptism.

For the Reformed, “infant baptism” generally refers to the baptism of underage or minor children. Longtime members of Reformed churches are accustomed to seeing a husband and wife join the church and having several of their young children, of various ages, baptized. But in colloquial English the word “infant” refers to babies. Some Christians, understandably, assume that the Reformed baptize only babies and not other children. Several times in my ministry puzzled people have asked me about this: What do the Reformed think about children too old to be baptized but too young to make a profession of faith?

There’s nothing wrong with Reformed Christians referring to “infant” baptism, terminology deeply rooted in our tradition. But we should be aware of the potential for misunderstanding and be prepared to explain why we baptize our older underage children as well as our babies, as occasion demands.

Infants and Children

Most Reformed writings on baptism don’t address this issue directly. Such works often use the term “infant baptism” and intersperse references to the baptism of “children” or “little children” in their discussions. But they usually don’t explain this alteration in vocabulary. The Westminster Standards speak uniformly of “infants.” The Confession of Faith (28.4), Larger Catechism (Q. 166), and Shorter Catechism (Q. 95) teach that the “infants” of those who profess faith in Christ ought to be baptized, without explaining who is included in this category.

When addressing baptism, chapter 3 of the OPC’s Directory for the Public Worship of God identifies only two categories, the “Baptism of Infants” and the “Baptism of Adults.” If “infants” only means babies, it would leave out underage children unable to profess their faith, which is required for adult baptism (III.A.2; III.B.2.a). When the Directory explains infant baptism in III.B.1, however, it refers many times to the “child,” “children,” or “young children” being baptized. This suggests that children of various ages might be baptized based on their parents’ profession. This indeed is the practice of the OPC and other Reformed churches, but the Directory doesn’t explain this directly.

The Meaning of “Infant”

The terminology of infant baptism is ingrained in Reformed history. Since the Westminster Standards use only “infants” to describe those baptized because of their parents’ profession of faith, English-speaking Reformed people naturally gravitate to this language despite the contemporary risk of misunderstanding. But this language would likely have been far less susceptible to misunderstanding to English speakers in the seventeenth century, when the Westminster Standards were written. As the Oxford English Dictionary reports, one definition of “infant” in use at this time was a “person under (legal) age; a minor. In common law, one who has not completed his or her twenty-first year.” I don’t suggest that we should import every aspect of this definition into our doctrine of infant baptism, but it’s worth noting that the authors of the Westminster Standards would not have assumed that “infants” refers only to babies. And in fact “under (legal) age” and “a minor” captures actual Reformed practice quite well.

It’s interesting to compare English vocabulary to French. The French words enfant and bébé  have obvious etymological relation to the English words infant and baby. But while bébé does mean “baby,” enfant doesn’t mean “infant” but a child generally. The English “infant” formerly had a range of meaning closer to its French counterpart. Thus, when we read in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion about “infant baptism” (as some English translations have it), it may be helpful to note that Calvin, when composing the Institutes in his native French, wrote of the baptism of enfants, which didn’t carry identical connotations as “infants” does in contemporary English.

The Baptism of Children in Scripture

More important than clarifying terminology is asking whether Scripture teaches that believers’ underage children generally, and not only their babies, should be baptized when their parents join the church. This isn’t the occasion to offer a defense of Reformed paedobaptism itself. In this section, I simply wish to show that many of the texts and arguments Reformed Christians use to defend “infant baptism” imply that all their underage children should be baptized.

One of the central planks of the Reformed defense of paedobaptism is that God welcomes households and not simply individuals into the covenant community. That is, when parents are professing members of the church, their children are also members of the covenant community and thus rightly receive the sign of entry into the covenant. This was true in the Old Testament. When God established his covenant with Abraham, he instituted circumcision as the covenant sign (Gen. 17:9–14). Abraham had believed God’s promises (15:6) and thus received circumcision as a man of faith (see Rom. 4:10–11). But God also made his covenant with his offspring after him (Gen. 17:10), and thus Abraham was to circumcise all the males of his “house” (17:12–13, 23, 27). The coming of the new covenant didn’t alter the importance of households. When Zacchaeus believed in Jesus, Jesus proclaimed him a son of Abraham and said salvation had come to his “house” (Luke 19:9). And when people believed the apostles’ preaching, the apostles baptized not only them but their houses too (see Acts 16:14–15, 30–34; 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:16; cf. Acts 10:22; 11:12, 14).

A simple conclusion follows: Since underage children generally, and not babies alone, are members of their parents’ households, they properly receive the sign of the covenant. This is why Abraham not only circumcised Isaac when he was eight days old, according to God’s command (Gen. 17:12; 21:4), but also his son Ishmael, who was thirteen when God gave the sign of circumcision (17:25).

Reformed Christians appeal to other texts as well to support infant baptism. Among them are the accounts of Jesus welcoming little children as those to whom “the kingdom” belongs (Matt. 19:13–14; Mark 10:13–14; Luke 18:15–16) and Paul’s statement that the children of believers are “holy” (1 Cor. 7:14). These texts do not identify only babies as members of Christ’s kingdom and as holy before the Lord. These four texts, in fact, use three different words in the original Greek to describe the children. Luke uses the term brephe, which refers to very young children in the New Testament. Matthew and Mark use paidia, which can refer to a newborn (e.g., Matt. 2:8; John 16:21) but also to older children (e.g., Mark 9:24; 1 John 2:13). First Corinthians 7 uses tekna. The New Testament often uses this term in a metaphorical way—for example, “children of the promise” (Rom. 9:8) or “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3)—but when used of actual children it can refer to those old enough for the apostles to address them in their letters (e.g., Eph. 6:1; Col. 3:20; 1 John 2:12). These observations suggest a simple point: The New Testament doesn’t use any technical term communicating that babies alone are members of the covenant community. Its use of a variety of terms with somewhat different connotations indicates that underage children generally enjoy this privilege.

Adult Children?

Readers might wonder, however, whether these considerations prove too much. Reformed churches don’t baptize adult children based on their parents’ profession (with exceptions for the mentally handicapped), yet sometimes adult children live in their parents’ home. If we baptize younger children based on the household principle, why not adult children?

On occasion, Scripture uses “house” in an extended sense to refer to a multi-generational family (such as the “house of Jacob” in Gen. 46:27) or to a class of people (such as the “house of Aaron” in Ps. 118:3). But with respect to the household principle discussed above, Scripture’s expectation is that when children become adults they establish their own houses. Reformed churches, therefore, don’t baptize believers’ children who have reached an age of accountability and are able to form houses of their own.

The New Testament doesn’t provide a precise age at which children reach this point, and thus it’s unwarranted for Reformed churches to be dogmatic about this. In most American states and in many other countries, eighteen is the age of majority. This is close to the age of twenty that God reckoned as the age of accountability when dealing with the Israelites in the wilderness (see Num. 14:29). These facts provide guidance for the church’s elders, but they will have to make wise judgments for particular cases.

The author, an OP minister, is professor of systematic theology and Christian ethics at Westminster Seminary California. New Horizons, January 2026.