A number of reviews and reactions to Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation have come out in the past few months from scholars who have recognized the book’s importance not only for the field of sacramental theology, but for other areas such as missiology and moral theology as well.
I was especially delighted to read Dom Hugh Somerville Knapman’s appreciative words in The Downside Review. Some very important — but today largely overlooked — debates over limbo, the eternal destiny of unbaptized infants, and baptism were hashed out in the pages of The Downside Review in the mid-twentieth century, and I cite some of them in Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation. It is gratifying — and humbling — to see my own contribution become a part of this much longer and larger conversation.
Dom Knapman writes
It is to Anthony Lusvardi’s credit that he has revisited such an unfashionable doctrine, and so well… More importantly, even most importantly for this reader, Lusvardi confronts us with the centrality of baptism to the gift of salvation in Christ. Anyone who teaches baptism, especially at secondary and tertiary levels, will benefit enormously from Lusvardi’s work…
Lusvardi explains masterfully and accessibly how authentic doctrinal development plays out, as the Church addressed and overcame these apparent challenges to the fundamental doctrine of the necessity of sacramental baptism. What he reveals is that baptism always remains necessary, but also that in cases of strictly-defined inability, it can be attained by modes other than water, that is by blood or desire. Baptism by water, blood, or desire all achieve the same end: conformity to and participation in the death and resurrection of Christ.
While Dom Knapman appreciated the sacramental dimensions of the work, Dr. Gavin D’Costa, one of the world’s top scholars in the theology of world religions and missiology, notes its importance for those fields. In his review in Angelicum, D’Costa picked up on the parallels between my book’s historical analysis and Servais Pinckaers’s seminal The Sources of Christian Ethics, “where Pinckaers argued a similar thesis about Christian ethics — from Christologically centered praxis and the pursuit of virtue, to emphasizing duty, obligation and juridical categories.” Thinking about baptism or salvation primarily in terms of such categories, I argue, led to a distorted picture which began to come apart in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I also appreciated Dr. D’Costa’s comparison to a book that has become a point of reference in the field but, in my opinion, suffers from the common biases of its time:
Lusvardi’s book is a powerful counter argument to Francis A. Sullivan SJ’s widely known and much used work, Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response (1992). Lusvardi shows how Sullivan downplays the context of some of his sources so that for example, Justin Martyr is read as a precursor to Karl Rahner… Lusvardi also convincingly shows that Sullivan’s argument that the discovery of the new world led to a real reconsideration of the issue of the salvation of the non-Christian is false.
Finally, also deserving mention is the review of moral theologian Maria Morrow in the Journal of Moral Theology. Dr. Morrow notes the book’s relevance for theologians working in her field. She zooms in on the importance of the conclusion:
Finally, while not downplaying Lusvardi’s masterful historical account in the body of the book, the conclusion, “Water, Blood, and Desire,” deserves special mention. Lusvardi’s modesty in making claims about the likelihood of baptism of desire for salvation joins with his overarching insights, liturgical account, and delightful wit to make thirty pages that cannot be missed. Lusvardi makes a compelling case that baptism of desire likely does apply in some situations, such as the unbaptized infants who die in utero but whose parents intended baptism for them (happily, this is also quite pastoral). On the other hand, Lusvardi also circumscribes the concept so that it does not dissolve into something irrelevant, removed entirely from the sacrament. While many of us would like the satisfying thought that all people are saved, such an assertion—in addition to not being biblical or traditional—removes much, if not all, of the meaning from both sacramental and moral theology, as well as the significance of Christian life more generally.
Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation is available from Catholic University of America Press (try the discount code CT10), Amazon, and other online booksellers.
And more exciting news: an Italian translation is currently in the works!
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 