After the rise of Pelagianism, some theologians hesitated between traducianism and creationism, believing the former to offer a better, if not the only, explanation of the transmission of original sin.
"[citation needed] Jerome condemned it and said that creationism was the opinion of the Church, but he admitted that most of the Western Christians held traducianism.
[2] All the other scholastics held creationism as certain and differed only in regard to the censure that should be attached to the opposite error.
Accordingly, Peter Lombard asserted, "The Catholic Church teaches that souls are created at their infusion into the body."
Saint Thomas Aquinas was more emphatic: "It is heretical to say that the intellectual soul is transmitted by process of generation."
Others maintained that all souls are created apart and are then united with their respective bodies, either by their own volition or by the command and action of God.
[citation needed] That the soul sinned in its pre-existent state and on that account was incarcerated in the body is regarded by the Catholic Church as a fiction that has been repeatedly condemned.
However, whether the rational soul is infused into the organism at conception, as the modern opinion holds, or some weeks subsequently, as medieval scholastics supposed, is an open question to some theologians.
[citation needed] Martin Luther, like Augustine, was unwilling to make a dogmatic statement but at least later in his life moved away from the medieval consensus and favored the Traducian position.
Pope Pius XII stated: "That the souls are created by God, it is the Catholic Faith that obliges us to accept.
"[citation needed] Traducianism was developed initially by Tertullian, who took a semi-materialistic view of the nature of the soul.
Protestant advocates include various Lutheran Churches as well as some modern theologians such as Augustus H. Strong (Baptist), and Gordon Clark (Presbyterian), Lewis Sperry Chafer, Millard Erickson,[11] Norman L. Geisler, and Robert L.
[12] In Evil, Sin and Christian Theism (2022), Andrew Loke argues for a modified hylomorphic theory that combines the merits of both Traducianism and Creationism.
The weakness of traducianism, to many theologians, is that it makes the generation of the soul dependent as it is parallel to of the transmission of matter.