Let me summarize OBJECTIVELY the state of the question.
One or (arguably) Two Church Fathers opined in favor of a BoD: St. Augustine and St. Ambrose. Of these, St. Augustine was admittedly just speculating and forcefully retracted the opinion in his later, more mature, anti-Pelagian days (but BoDers never present those quotes). St. Ambrose's quote is ambiguous, and elsewhere in his work he too rejects BoD.
About a dozen or so Church Fathers promoted the notion of BoB. One of the earliest of these was St. Cyprian. Several other Church Fathers adopted the opinion from him. But St. Cyprian called BoB a Sacrament ... which modern scholars consider an error. St. Cyprian also erred in advocating an opinion about re-baptism that was later condemned as heretical by the Church. Nevertheless, there's evidence that St. Cyprian considered BoB nothing more than an alternate mode of administering the SACRAMENT of Baptism. He stated that martyrs were washed in their blood while angels pronounced the words (of Baptism) -- thus having blood stand in for water as matter for the Sacrament. So he did not consider BoB an exception to needing the Sacrament, but simply an alternate way of RECEIVING the Sacrament. Some of these Church Fathers, moreover, used the term BoB to refer to a SECOND Baptism for those who had already been Sacramentally baptized (one was speaking of a priest). But even then a dozen Church Fathers sharing an opinion, out of hundreds and hundreds of Church Fathers, does not rise to the level of establishing dogmatic consensus, a witness to Revealed Truth.
What the Church Fathers WERE absolutely unanimous about was the necessity of the Sacrament of Baptism for salvation and about the necessity of explicit faith in Jesus Christ for salvation (something which pernicious BoDers like LoT conveniently ignore).
In any case, for about 600 years you hear not another peep about BoD among Catholic authors.
Near the beginning of the pre-scholastic era, this question was picked up by two rival scholars, Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor. Abelard was against the notion and Hugh for it. Incidentally, Abelard was the first to reject another of St. Augustine's opinions, and the Church sided with him that St. Augustine had it wrong. Neither was aware of St. Augustine's later retraction of BoD ... since not all of St. Augustine's copious works were readily available or in publication. Peter Lombard, who studied under both men, wrote to St. Bernard about it. St. Bernard responded that he would rather "err with Augustine" on this point than to be right on his own. Again, St. Bernard was unaware that St. Augustine had retracted the opinion. In any case, Peter Lombard went with it, due to St. Bernard's response, and it made it into his early scholastic theology manual The Sentences. St. Thomas studied these and adopted the opinion. And, of course, after St. Thomas, due to his authority, the opinion went viral.
Pope Innocent II and/or III (some dispute as to the authorship) opined in favor of this position "on the authority of Augustine and Ambrose" (note, not by their papal authority). But their explanations were muddled and contradictory (one of them completely contradicts St. Alphonsus' later position that those saved by BoD still have Purgatory time left).
Not much after that until the alleged BoD passage in Trent. Misinterpretation of the passage in Trent gave further life to this opinion. Strangely, theology manuals used in seminaries after the Council of Trent still treated BoD as a "disputed question" among theologians. Then the 1917 Code of Canon Law promoted this possibility of salvation in the context of pastoral theology.
On the Theological Note of BoD
In order for something to be dogmatic, it has to be part of the Deposit of Revelation. But there's no direct witness from the Church Fathers (by unanimous consensus) that it was. Nor has anyone ever demonstrated that it derives implicitly and necessarily from other revealed truths. So this opinion of speculative theology can never be defined as dogma ... despite the false allegations of the modern heretical Cushingites.
On the Progression of BoD/BoB
Those early Church Fathers who believed in BoB/BoD ONLY EVER APPLIED the notion to formal CATECHUMENS. They never entertained the possibility that it could apply to non-Christians (Catechumens were considered Christians but not part of "the faithful"). For the first SIXTEEN HUNDRED YEARS of Church History no Catholic EVER disputed the doctrine that explicit faith in Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity are necessary for salvation. Even the Athanasian Creed teaches this.
But sometime about the year 1600 a handful of Jesuits started dabbling with the notion that people could have supernatural faith by explicitly believing only in the existence of God as a rewarder/punisher ... a novelty.
With this new heretical tool in hand, heretical because it violates a dogmatic teaching of the Ordinary Universal Magisterium undisputed for 1600 years, the Jesuits combined this with the notion of an "implicit" Baptism of desire contained in the generic feeling of wanting to do whatever God wants of them. So in this way, the Jesuits and their followers were able to extend salvation to all manner of non-Catholic and even infidel ... so long as they had some belief in God. See how far we had come from the one or two Church Fathers who believed that formal Catechumens who had officially joined the Church as "Christians" through a formal public ceremony and who publicly professed belief in the true faith and who basically not only desired Baptism but even had it scheduled "on their calendar" ... to now any well-meaning infidel who doesn't even believe in Christ, never heard of Baptism, but just sincerely wants to do the will of some generic deity.
This upended and destroyed Tridentine Catholic ecclesiology which emphasized that the Church is a visible society to which only those belong who publicly profess the Catholic faith.
Now the Church could include all these people only invisibly united to it ... heretics, infidels, etc.
But since there's no salvation outside the Church (as defined several times by the Church), you have to say that heretics, infidels, etc. who are saved must have been inside the Church during their lives.
THIS IS PRECISELY THE "SUBSISTENCE" ECCLESIOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVIST SOTERIOLOGY TAUGHT BY VATICAN II and is the fundamental error on which ALL the Vatican II errors rest. Yet these blithering idiot sedevacantists who accuse V2 and the V2 Popes of "heresy" for adopting this ecclesiology are among the most vocal proponents of the EXACT SAME ECCLESIOLOGY. In so doing, they condemn themselves and they undermine any valid reason for resisting Vatican II. Consequently, if I believed in this ecclesiology/soteriology as promoted by the Cushingite BoDers, I would have to accept Vatican II and recant my schism from the Catholic Church.
Shortly before Vatican II, Father Leonard Feeney discovered that the decay of faith he was seeing in the years prior to Vatican II were caused by a rejection of the EENS dogma and the subjectivism associated with it. It was only later that he rejected BoD because he saw how those who were undermining EENS used BoD as THE weapon of choice to uproot the dogma. Vatican II didn't happen in a vacuum. Father Feeney was opposed and persecuted by the arch-heretic Cardinal Cushing (whose heretical statements are a matter of public record). Cushing allegedly obtained a condemnation from the Holy Office against Father Feeney, but strangely he waited until several years after it was allegedly issued to release it ... until RIGHT after the Cardinal who had allegedly signed it passed away. And then it never appeared in any official publication of the Holy See but only in Cushing's own rag publication. So this clearly suggests that it was altered and/or completely fabricated by Cushing to put the hammer down on Father Feeney, a courageous defender of the faith against the rising modernism. Lots of BoDer Trads think that the Church was perfect before Vatican II, that every bishop in the world, theretofore completely orthodox, suddenly apostasized at 2:35 PM on September 14th 1963 (or some other such arbitrary date). No, Vatican II didn't happen in a vacuum. It came directly out of the same errors that Father Feeney so courageously combatted in his day. In fact, Vatican II DIRECTLY QUOTED this Cushing-fabricated docuмent (so-called Suprema Haec, deceptively named using the first two Latin words to make it seem like it had more authority, like an encyclical or something) ... Vatican II directly quoted Suprema Haec IN SUPPORT OF ITS ECCLESIOLOGY, which the rabid pro-BoD sedevacantists call heretical. Well, they call it heretical in Vatican II but completely orthodox in Suprema Haec.
And that's where we stand today.
Topic: LoT's Quote Spamming (Read 615 times)