Let me give an example of liturgical practice which is incompatible with normative infant baptism:
How does one account for the way in which the Armenian Church, one of the most ancient, developed specific liturgies for babies? Prefacing the Order for Baptism which states explicitly that it is for use with adults and grown children, the Armenian books provide two Canons to be used for infants.
The first is the “Canon of an eight days old child”; the infant is brought to the door of the church by his grandmother, he is named, signed with the cross, and one prayer said. The second is a Canon for use when the child is forty days old; he is brought by his mother and his nurse, at the church door a prayer is said for the purification of the mother, they enter church where hands are laid on the child, and he is caused to prostrate himself before the altar.
How could that provision for infants have been made if the apostolic norm was to baptise infants? How also indeed could infants have been treated as ineligible for baptism?
These rites for infants are well echoed by modern rites of infant blessing and dedication such as the Church of England’s Service of Thanksgiving for the Gift of a Child.
