Baptism is the instrument through which God regenerates a person, forgives sin, and brings him into salvation, so that the baptized are born again in the water.
A heresy denies the Gospel or the God it reveals (Galatians 1:8).
Where It Began
In the New Testament, people heard the Gospel, believed, and were then baptized as a public confession of what had already happened inside them (Acts 8:12; Acts 18:8). Within a few generations after the apostles, some Christian writers began to speak of the water itself as the place where sins are washed away and new life begins.
By about 200, Tertullian of Carthage wrote a whole treatise on baptism that treated it as the moment of cleansing. Because he believed baptism removed sin, he urged people to delay it rather than waste it. Fifty years later Cyprian and the North African bishops reasoned the other way: if baptism washes away sin, even newborns should receive it at once. That reasoning is how infant baptism spread.
Augustine joined baptismal regeneration to his doctrine of original sin, teaching that unbaptized infants could not be saved. From there it became the settled teaching of the Catholic Church, later defined at the Council of Trent, and it remains the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox churches.
The People Involved
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Why This Is Dangerous
It adds a work to the Gospel and moves a person's hope from Christ's finished work to a rite. Anyone trusting his baptism to save him is not trusting Christ alone, and salvation is not of works (Ephesians 2:9).