Just as people are often undecided about religious issues in our day, the same was true in past generations. That category of agnosticism is often, I'd say typically, ignored in discussions of historical theology, especially pre-Reformation church history.
We'll be told that everybody before the Reformation held such-and-such a view, but the fact that some individuals were agnostic on the subject won't be mentioned. (Probably often because the person making the claim about what everybody believed isn't aware of that agnosticism.)
For example, as I've mentioned before, some individuals were agnostic about whether Mary was assumed to heaven. That agnosticism persisted even into the second millennium of church history. See, for example, the entries on Aelred of Rievaulx, Isaac of Stella, and Peter of Celle in Michael O'Carroll's Theotokos (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1988).
Another example of this kind of thing is discussed in Craig Atwood's book on the Hussites, The Theology Of The Czech Brethren From Hus To Comenius (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). On page 180, he refers to some pre-Reformation Hussites who "wanted to leave up to God the question of whether the [eucharistic] bread changed or remained bread".
We see this sort of thing frequently in our day, with predestination, eschatology, church government, and whatever else. We need to keep in mind that people were sometimes agnostic on religious issues prior to the Reformation as well. People tend to focus on opposition to a belief when thinking about an alternative to the claim that everybody held that belief before the Reformation. But we need to remember that agnosticism is another category that's relevant. The people who were agnostic about the subject shouldn't be grouped with the people who affirmed the belief in question.
I'm curious, because pre-Reformation theology isn't an area I work on a lot: In modern scholarship do you also run into the bad argument that because we first run into explicit opposition to a view in such-and-such century it must have been almost universally believed prior to that? I ask because I ran into just this when reading Michael Heiser. He seems to be arguing that because we only find rabbis opposing a view of "two powers in heaven" late in the 1st century or early in the 2nd this means that most Jews of Jesus' time were binitarian! It's a crazy argument. I've pointed out that it would be like saying that because we only find church websites with statements of faith explicitly defining marriage as between one man and one woman in the early 00s this means that most Christians accepted gay "marriage" prior to that.
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