But many people believed in justification apart from baptism prior to the Reformation, as I've documented elsewhere. And among those who assigned some type of soteriological efficacy to baptism, there was widespread disagreement about the sort of efficacy involved, and soteriological efficacy was also attributed to other rituals (or sacraments, ceremonies, or whatever you want to call them): the laying on of hands, foot washing, etc. See here for a discussion of many examples from the patristic era. So, justification apart from baptism was more widely held before the Reformation than is typically suggested, and there wasn't the sort of unified alternative to it that we're told there was. Rather, there was a wide diversity of alternatives.
One problem is that people will often quote sources referring to some manner of efficacy, or specifically soteriological efficacy, of baptism without mentioning that the same source or others also assign such efficacy to prebaptismal faith, anointing with oil, the laying on of hands, and other things besides baptism. And baptism is sometimes defined differently by different sources, so that it sometimes includes more than the water ritual people typically have in mind today.
I've written many posts over the years discussing these issues. I've mostly discussed the Biblical, patristic, and late medieval evidence. I've said less about the evidence from the early and middle centuries of the medieval era. I've occasionally addressed those earlier medieval sources, like the discussion of Severus of Antioch and Andreas here and the post on Bede here. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is cite some portions of a book I recently read about baptismal views under Charlemagne, Susan Keefe's Water And The Word, Vol. 1 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Though her book focuses on sources at the time of Charlemagne, she sometimes discusses other medieval sources as well. I could cite far more than what I'll be quoting below. These are just some examples among others that could be included. Since she discusses more than issues of soteriology, and those other issues have some significance, I'll include some of her comments on those other issues:
What the author [of a medieval document on baptism] describes - a single chrismation immediately after the font, directly followed by an imposition of hands and invocation of the Holy Spirit, all performed by one minister who is a priest (sacerdos) - stands in stark contrast to the post-baptismal procedure in the Roman rite. That has two post-baptismal chrismations, the first administered by a priest, the second by the bishop to impart the Holy Spirit. It had long been established that only bishops might impart the Holy Spirit when they signed the neophytes with chrism, and only bishops might sign the forehead with chrism....
Following the four stages of becoming a Christian, salt, however, is the only pre-baptismal ceremony our author specifically identifies and explains. Also, at another point he says the church has four sacraments: "salt, baptism, chrism, and the Body and Blood," adding salt to Isidore's oft-quoted definition of the sacraments of the church....
The pedilavium, or foot-washing ceremony, is a feature known only in the baptismal rites of northern Italy, southern Gaul, and perhaps Ireland, as witnessed in a number of Milanese rites of baptism, the Missale Gothicum, the Missale Gallicanum Vetus (circa 700), the Bobbio Missal (eighth century), and the Stowe Missal (circa 800). Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) and Ps.-Maximus of Turin also refer to it. No other of our Texts contains explicit mention of the foot-washing. Despite the non-Romanity of the pedilavium, there are eight known manuscripts of Text 49 [which includes foot washing]. It circulated with very popular canon law material....
Text 7, from Spain, where giving salt to the catechumens was not the custom, was written where the liturgy was being influenced by Romanizations. In Text 58 Isidore's simple "tinction" is changed to "three-fold tinction." Perhaps the composer was aware of Alcuin's wrath regarding the Spanish practice of single immersion [in baptism]. Three Texts (4, 8, 21) contain Isidore's teaching on three kinds of baptism: water, blood, and tears, but the composer of Text 57 altered Isidore, specifically stating that there are two kinds of baptism, omitting tears. Two Texts say that only priests are allowed to baptize, except in danger of death when any cleric or lay person can validly baptize. In Text 21, however, it says that if necessity demands, deacons may baptize, and it says nothing about lay people....
If one looks for the ninth-century theology of baptism, it would seem that no consensus was achieved on the purpose, necessity, and effect of the individual ceremonies....Their teaching on the reception of the Holy Spirit is one example of how unrigid they were about the purpose and effect of the individual ceremonies. The reception of the Holy Spirit was not confined to a single ceremony or moment in all of the Texts, but can be found in different Texts occurring in the pre-baptismal exsufflation, the anointing of the breast and back, and even the touching of the nose and ears (Text 50), as well is in the font itself and in the post-baptismal anointing and the episcopal hand-laying....All that can be stressed here is that there were many different explanations or emphases regarding the theological import of any ceremony, and no sense of one "correct" explanation.
(103, 105, 112, 124-27)
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