Generally speaking, the debate about baptism is treated as a secondary issue. This means that believers disagree on the issue and continue to have a good level of fellowship and partnership in the Gospel. It’s a secondary issue in that it is still important both because those on both sides consider there to be serious implications from it and because really, a local church has to sort out what it believes on this.
However, there is a strand of paedobaptism that pushes things up the order so that it becomes primary and that’s to do with when people become dogmatic about a particularly interpretation of what it signifies.
Mark Jones, in this recent article argues for a strand of Presbyterian thinking which claims that paedobaptists are credo-baptists because they are baptising on the basis of faith, not the faith of parents or sponsors but on the faith of the child themselves. The child is presumed to be elect, within the covenant and not merely having the possibility of regeneration but being regenerate.
One thing you can say for this position is that it is more consistent than other versions. I have long argued that you cannot claim that someone is within the covenant without recognising that they must therefore receive both the benefits and responsibilities of the covenant. Nor, indeed is the covenant for “dead” people. So a covenant member must be spiritually alive.
However, it is also worth remembering that our inconsistencies are often what protects us from serious error. So, the big question is whether Mark’s consistency takes him somewhere helpful or somewhere dangerous.
Now, the important thing to consider here is “if the child is regenerate, then on what basis?” You see, if we are just taking a kind of charitable and hopeful view that they might be, then whilst this is at best sentimental and leaves open questions including “why children of believers only?”, “what about children who are fostered or adopted by believers?” and “what about children where their parents believed after they were born?” but it can be argued to still expect that an infant, at the capacity they have, either as a very young baby or in utero has believed. It leaves open the possibility that they may not.
When we insist that the child is a believer, does have faith, not just that they may, then we remove the possibility that the child might not have faith. So on what basis are we saying this? Before Acts 2 is wheeled out, remember that the promise given there is not just to your children but also to those who are far off. It was not the promise of genetic inheritance of faith. It was not the offer of a kind of “semi-universalism. So, this leaves us asking the question “where does the guarantee come from”?
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be Biblical warrant for this. Moreover, the answers given will begin to touch on our understanding of what the Gospel is and how we are saved, so that it becomes a primary issue with all the implications that entails.
Faithroots 
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