Tertullian’s own anthropology later mandated the infant baptism he opposed

Evidence

And here is the irony. The doctrinal architecture of traducianism that Tertullian constructed in De Anima would, in the hands of Augustine and the subsequent Western tradition, produce the requirement that infants be baptized as soon as possible after birth — because, on the Augustinian original-sin account, the infant who dies unbaptized is at spiritual risk. Tertullian himself opposed exactly the practice that his own theological foundations would, two centuries later, mandate. He could not see, in 210 CE, what would be done with what he had written. Subsequent generations of Latin Christian theologians — Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine — built on Tertullian’s traducianist anthropology but reached the opposite conclusion about infant baptism. — , The Rod and the Child, 1633

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general principle that authors do not control what later generations make of their work — a running theme in this book series.