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.
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Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 