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The Meaning of Baptism—and How It Makes the Gospel Visible

Do Baptists Talk to Their Babies?

Baptism For the Dead

Does Baptism Justify?

Infant Baptism in the History of the Church 

The Case for Covenantal Continuity in the Sacramental Life of the Church

Christians Should Baptize Their Children, but Not Because of Circumcision

Crystalline Baptism

When the topic of faith is discussed among protestants and their modern evangelical cousins there is a tendency to define the word differently. This is a big reason why the modern evangelical rejects the baptism of infants as practiced by the majority of the church for the last two thousand years.

What evangelicals understand faith to be and what we understand it to be are not the same things. Evangelicals define faith in terms of knowledge. The accepting of a certain set of facts as true. But that's not what faith is. Faith, to believe, is a question of trust and loyalty. No one needs to know all of the facts to do that.

In fact... all an infant does is trust. Loyalty comes naturally to them. They need no facts. They trust their mother to love them, their father to protect them, and why not their God to save them?

But where is this taught in the Bible? In the very definition of the word itself. The word for what evangelicals define as faith is epignosis. It literally means precise and correct knowledge. But the word rendered faith and or belief is pistis. It means trust and loyalty. Two completely different concepts.