There Were Many Views Of Baptism Before The Reformation

I've been seeing a lot of comments lately to the effect that every Christian believed in baptismal regeneration before the Reformation, that the church fathers all held a particular view of baptism that contradicts what most Evangelicals believe, etc. Typically, almost always, issues like these are approached as if there was one view of baptism that was held universally or almost universally prior to the Reformation.

There are many views of baptism in the pre-Reformation sources, including on matters like regeneration and the forgiveness of sins. There are even differences in defining baptism (e.g., some sources combined multiple rituals and referred to them collectively as "baptism" rather than singling out the water ritual as we typically do today). One of the views that existed - the one that's the Biblical view and was advocated by some sources in the patristic and medieval eras - was that we're justified through faith alone prior to baptism. Some extrabiblical sources, not just Biblical ones, discuss justification without ever even mentioning baptism, sometimes also implying its exclusion in other ways, describe changes in people's lives prior to baptism that bear a strong resemblance to regeneration, etc.

Facts like those are frequently ignored. And we regularly get a series of dubious assumptions in favor of baptismal regeneration, typically with little or no effort to offer any reason to think they're true (that the many examples of justification apart from baptism during and after Jesus' public ministry should be dismissed as exceptions to the rule or irrelevant in some other way; that baptism isn't a work; and so on). The few advocates of justification apart from baptism who speak up in these discussions almost always offer a far weaker case for their position than they could and should. That ought to change.

Here's a collection of resources on the evidence for justification apart from baptism. That page includes links to discussions of why this issue is important (evidence that baptism should be considered a work, meaning that this is a matter of adding works to the gospel; how baptismal regeneration is inconsistent with the Biblical theme of the nearness of redemption; etc.). Here's a post about the variety of views of baptism that existed prior to the Reformation.

My last post illustrates some of the issues involved. Given how much Peter and Josephus' comments on baptism overlap, it's likely that they're drawing from a common source. And the fact that two sources who are so independent are making such similar comments makes more sense if they were correcting an actual misconception about baptism rather than just addressing a hypothetical position. Notice, then, that it seems that there were multiple views of baptism in multiple contexts as early as the first century. Josephus explains that baptism isn't regenerative, that it doesn't remove sin, and I've argued that Peter also held such a view. So, we have multiple views of baptism and multiple affirmations of justification apart from baptism as early as the first century. As my material linked above demonstrates, there were many other views of baptism found in sources from the second century onward, and we find more sources advocating justification apart from baptism (among other views) beyond the first century.

The later popularity of positions involving some kind of highly efficacious view of baptism (with the sources disagreeing over the nature of that efficaciousness) is the best argument for baptismal regeneration. But it's a later development, the inconsistencies among the sources who held such a view are usually ignored, and the evidence for baptismal regeneration considered as a whole weighs less than the earlier and better evidence to the contrary.

However, a rejection of baptismal regeneration raises the issue of what we should think of the salvation of people who have believed that baptism is regenerative. I've addressed that issue in some other posts, like here and here.