Donatism

This is Lecture 11, the Wheat and the Tears, Donatism. With the conversion of the Emperor Constantine that we looked at a little while ago, things changed radically, and people reacted differently to the new situation that they found themselves in. The persecuted church was no longer the persecuted church, but the tolerated church and before too long the official religion of the Roman Empire. And there were different responses to that situation because as the church became the official religion of the Roman Empire, of course many wealthy prominent people joined for all sorts of reasons. Some people in viewing what was happening, people like Eusebius of Cessaria, were so grateful for the freedom and the prestige that had come to the church that they found it difficult to take a critical stance before the government or the society. The Tears were dismayed by what was happening, the growth of nominalism and a kind of lukewarm Christianity as they saw it, and many of those people fled to the desert and to other remote places to take up the monastic life. No others, people call Donatists that we're going to look at in this lecture, who simply broke away from the larger church and called themselves the true church. And there were others that we will look at later, who really long for the good old days before Christianity took over, and a pagan reaction set in that is going to cause a lot of concern. So much so that, say, Augustine writes the largest of his important books, The City of God, as a kind of answer to the pagan reaction of people trying to establish the older Roman religion after the days of the toleration of Christianity. The heart of the Donatist controversy had to do with forgiveness and restoration. So the prayer that I'm going to use today doesn't come from the Donatist. It comes from the larger church, from the middle of the 5th century, and it's a prayer for mercy and forgiveness. It's joined together as I pray these words, Almighty and everlasting God, who are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and are it want to give more than either we desire or deserve. Poured out upon us the abundance of thy mercy, forgiving us those things where of our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we're not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy son, our Lord, amen. Marcienne and Montenus, back in the 2nd century, had founded separate churches, broke away from the main church, started their own movements. In the 3rd century and in the 4th century, two very similar movements arose and broke away from the established church, the novacianist in the 3rd century and the Donatist in the 4th century, and the issue that motivated both of these sysms was this, what really is the nature of the 2 church? Those movements are very similar and we will study them together to try to understand exactly what was the problem that these Christians were wrestling with and what answers did they bring to the problem. The struggle to answer the question, what is really the true church is going to help establish the doctrine of the church. We have noted already and we'll note again that when an issue comes up, a question comes up, a heresy arises, then the church tends to become very active in trying to deal with that problem. Here we have another example of a heresy or a sysm motivating the church to think seriously about the issue that is at stake. This whole struggle will also further the development of the Catholic Church into what we can pretty soon call the Roman Catholic Church. I have resisted efforts on your part to make me say when the Roman Catholic Church starts, I don't know, but if I had to give one answer to that, which I just do without much enthusiasm, it is with Pope Leo I in the latter part of the 5th century, but the history that we're going to look at today certainly leads further toward developments that we can see as the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church from the early Christian Church that we have been studying up to this point. Well what was the problem that caused all of this controversy in the 3rd century and the 4th century? The problem began with a long debate on how to view post-baptismal sin. We have already seen that the early church tended to view baptism as the sacrament which washes away sin and cleanses the person from all sin, but what about sins after baptism? And different people had come up with different ideas on this, the shepherd of Hermas, 2nd century book that we have referred to from time to time, had the rather odd view to us that God forgives one sin only, one major sin only after baptism. After that there's no more forgiveness for major sins. Our region, the 3rd century Church Father believed that idolatry and adultery and fornication were three sins that could not be forgiven. Tatolian, also in the 3rd century, who had taken a more lenient view, changed his mind, remember he became avantidus then they were very very strict as far as these things were concerned. Tatolian changed his mind and saw the shepherd of Hermas who had said one sin could be forgiven as two laks, in fact his name for the shepherd of Hermas was now the shepherd of the adulterers and Tatolian held an even stricter view that forgiveness could not be granted to those guilty of adultery and fornication. Currently the sins that worried the church fathers in this early period were sexual sins, how to deal with people who had fallen into sexual sins and wanted to be restored to the fellowship of the church, well that issue was never really solved, but before long another sin was viewed as even more perplexing. The problem of this emergence of another sin, we would call it apostasy, comes in the 3rd century, the middle of the 3rd century you recall was the time when a D.C.S. required all people to sacrifice to the Roman gods before about the year 250 persecution had been present from time to time, but sporadic now the first systematic empire-wide persecution comes and there was throughout the Roman world 18 months of terror in which Christians face death if they did not comply to the edict of D.C.S. Many Christians did die during that time, but also many apostatized, so the church soon had to deal with the problem of the lapsed, because when persecution ended there were many of those who had sacrificed, made the sacrifices, or had bribed officials to get the little document that said they had sacrificed even if they had not, but had gotten off by deceit or by compromise, and when it was all over they felt very bad about that, they were sorry for what they had done and they wanted to come back into the church. Well, so many had apostatized, it was an act, a major act of apostasy, on such a massive scale, but it threatened the very identity of the church. Could the Christian church let all these people back in? Was it possible for these fragments into which the church had divided to be regathered? Could the laps be restored to the church? And how could they be restored to the church?

One interesting thing that started to happen at this time was that some people, not church officials, fishups and presviders, but people called confessors began to arise in importance. A confessor was someone who had stood true during the persecution, and refused to sacrifice, and honored the name of the Lord. Often had been persecuted and injured, but for one reason or another, not killed during the persecutions. People that it stood true, but who lived through the persecutions. You can see that these confessors would become heroes to the Christians, and greatly venerated in the churches. The tradition developed that it was the confessors who could forgive the lapsed. If someone had failed, that person would go to a confessor and ask for forgiveness, and the confessor in many cases, perhaps in most or all cases, would grant that forgiveness. That situation, though, was problematic. For one thing, it brought in a new level of power into the church that was not in the official government of the church, these charismatic leaders with their reputation for courage and sanctity. And some people believed that all of this was too easy, after all others had suffered and died during the persecutions. And was it possible for a person who had fallen, simply to go to someone like a confessor and be forgiven and restored, that seemed cheap forgiveness. The people who really said, all this is too easy, were the novations. Novation was a Roman presbyter who became a bishop, a rival bishop to another bishop, and supported a very rigorous position, which basically said that the lapsed could not be forgiven. The church must be a pure church with people who had stood true and could not be compromised by the inclusion of people who had failed during the time of the persecution. The dissident church began to grow all across the Roman Empire from Asia-Mina to Spain, but many of the novations were in North Africa and the novations were concerned about this issue and about the conversion of the multitudes into the church. They felt that the standards were being let down and that the church was no longer a pure and holy church. It's in the midst of all this debate and dissension that we have the great North African church father Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage. Cyprian was not a novation, he was part of what we could call the Catholic church. And it's Cyprian who gave a lot of thought in concern to the question, what really is the church? And many of the ideas that we will think about for the rest of this course, we can trace back to Cyprian. Cyprian believed that there was one church only. There could not be two churches. There could not be a Catholic church and a novation church because Christ has only one body. Christ has only one bride. There's only one to church. And Cyprian held that outside that true church. There is no salvation. Consequently, baptism outside the true church, novation baptism, for instance, is no baptism at all. It's invalid. So a person being converted from the novation church into the Catholic church would have to be baptized into the Catholic church. Cyprian held that the real authority in the church belonged to the bishops, not to the confessors. Although he greatly honored the confessors, actually when the persecution came, Cyprian fled, he always felt bad about that because he was afraid that he had in some way let down the church by fleeing. But that was not considered the same thing as compromising his faith. He simply laughed and lived in a safer place until the persecution ended. Later, he was martyred, however. So if he was sorry that he had escaped from the earlier persecution, he did honor God by his martyred at a later date. The authority for Cyprian in the church belonged to the bishops, not to the confessors. However, he said, the bishops have to be spiritually qualified men. If you're not a good man, you can't be a good bishop. You can't be simple and be a bishop. Christ's spirit could not be where Christ's law was broken, he said, and God will not hear the prayer of a guilty priest. And that's going to become a very important point in a few moments as we come to the next step of the Donatist controversy. The authority in the church belongs then to the bishops. Therefore, laps restoring lapsed clergy is a very serious matter, clergy who had fallen away and denied the faith. To restore that person is difficult and serious because the clergy must be holy in their lives. But members of the church who are repentant can be properly disciplined and restored with care. Cyprian did not make it too easy, but he did admit that God forgives sins, at least in the lives of ordinary church members, and they can be restored to the fellowship of the church. Now, actually, all of this is what we would consider a rather moderate position. Now, Cyprian tries to make his way between what he sees as the two extremes, those who are too strict and those who are too lacks. And he was greatly criticized then by both sides, some who felt that he went too far, and those others who felt that he did not go far enough. Now, all of this died down. Cyprian died. Persecution ended. We have another long period of peace, and the issues seemed to have been forgotten, but we come then to the problem intensified because of another persecution, the last of the great persecutions, persecution of Donaclisian, which began in 303 and lasted about 10 years. The requirement this time was not sacrificed, but the surrender of the scriptures. People were required to give over the scriptures that they had in their homes or in their churches, and those were burned. Many people did exactly what they were asked to do. They were called by the Christians, Trototorus, or traitors, where we get our word traitor from people who hand over things, and these members of the church were handing over copies of the scripture. Sometimes they handed over books that were not really copies of the scripture because the canon was being solidified, and there were some books that were clearly outside the canon, but Roman officials hardly knew the difference between canonical and non-canonical books, and so some people got off by turning over a non-canonical book. But the problem was a real problem. There were others who did turn over the books of the scripture to the authorities, and finally we come back to the same problem that we had before. After the persecution is over, and people are sorry for what they have done, can they be allowed back into the church. The leader of the strict group this time was the man named Donatus, and the strict movement found itself largely in North Africa. They call it Donatism. Donatus was a rival bishop of Carthage, and his movement began because when a bishop of Carthage was ordained, he was ordained, at least Donatus claimed this, by a bishop who himself was a trotatorace. This bishop had handed over the scriptures during the persecution, and now he ordained the bishop of Carthage, which according to Donatus was an invalid act because you have a simple bishop who is really a traitor. He has no power to ordain another bishop, and so Donatus claimed to be the true bishop of Carthage as over against the bishop who had been ordained by a lapsed bishop. So claiming Cyprian's support, both sides will claim Cyprian now. There's something from Cyprian that the Donatists can take and something from Cyprian that the Catholics can take, but claiming Cyprian's support, the Donatists insisted on a pure church. They were the pure church. Catholic church was the mixed multitude. The Donatists said we are the church of the martyrs, a pure and holy church as over against the worldly church of the Catholics. The debate became more than a debate in North Africa because the theological issue here was fueled by social and academic discontent. There was a good bit of anti-Roman feeling in North Africa, and it was easy for the Donatists to capture this anti-Roman feeling, not really liking the Romans and the Roman rule. This was largely among the native, unique population of North Africa. So when we have this struggle, which becomes really more than a struggle, almost a war, actually it does become a war, there are a lot of mixed elements there, the religious element, social element, political element. We'll discover, as we study church history, that religious wars are almost never, perhaps never purely religious wars or other issues that complicate the situation. If you look at the history of Northern Ireland in the last several hundred years, you can see that illustrated so clearly. By the middle of the fourth century, the Donatists had become increasingly fanatical and violent. They were sometimes called the Circumseleons, the radical Donatists, those were people, according to their name, that lived in tents. They would surround a church or a village, and living in intense raid, the Catholic settlements, and often destroy the Catholic churches, and foot to death, Catholics. These Circumseleons were very careful, not to use swords in their fighting against the Catholics, because after all the Lord had forbidden the use of swords, but they got really big sticks, clubs, which Christ said nothing about, and used that in their fight against the Catholics. Here's a Donatist pig, continuing for the faith, and he's got his big club there. Well, I want to skip ahead now about a hundred years, and talk about a man that we're going to spend a lot of time with, Saint Augustine, where you haven't really introduced Augustine yet, but we will. But it's necessary at this point to skip ahead to St. Augustine because the Donatist problem was one that he inherited. He was, say, Bishop in North Africa. And by the time we come to St. Augustine, Donatism was a very active force in North Africa in life, and had been for almost a century. Perhaps the majority of Christians in North Africa were Donatists. So this was not a small movement, particularly in North Africa, a major movement. The church in the very same block in Hippo as Augustine's church was a larger, more impressive church with another bishop and a larger congregation. So you have something now, seems commonplace to us, they have all churches all over the place, even in the same block, but you can imagine how strange that was at this time to have the Catholic church and the Donatist church in the small town of Hippo in North Africa in the same block. And while Augustine was preaching, he said, in his church, he could hear the singing in the other church. He didn't like that singing much, he described it as the roaring of lions, but a bit biased undoubtedly against this rival church and its singing. But a real problem now, the church split into and how is that issue going to be solved if it can be solved. Well, Augustine had a lot to do with solving it, and I want to talk a little bit about Augustine's views of the church at the end of this lecture now. Augustine insisted that the visible church is not perfect, but is a Pilgrim church. The Donatists had taken their stand on a pure church with saints not sinners. Augustine disagreed. The church is a Pilgrim church, not a pure church. In his anti-Donatist writings, Augustine could point out that even the churches of the Donatists were filled with sinners. There were people in those churches, despite their claims to be a pure church, who were drunkards and adulterers and even some guilty of apostasy. But that's not the major point that Augustine makes. He doesn't say, well, our church is better than your church. We're better than you are, or you're just as bad as we are. He does point out that there are sinners both in the Donatist churches and in the Catholic churches. Augustine says, like Noah's Ark, there are unclean animals in the Ark. The Donatists used Noah's Ark, too, as an illustration. The like was pitched to keep out the water, so we keep out the sinners in our churches, like Noah's Ark, too, but a different kind of Noah's Ark from Augustine's church. But what Augustine really argues here is that the holiness of the church is not based on the lifestyle of its members, but on the purity of Christ. That's what makes the church holy. One holy apostolic church is not because we are so good, but it is because of Christ's holiness. And this is his church, so the church is holy. Of course, it's right for us to strive to be holy like he is holy. But Augustine, I think, was always afraid that the Donatist insistence on a pure church would lead into legalism. That was another battle he was fighting about the same time with the Pelagians, as we'll see. And there was too much in Donatism of a tendency to revert to the law and to say if we are good and righteous and holy, then we find favor in God's sight. It was too much of that for Augustine. He said the church is holy because Christ is holy. And we are a pilgrim church walking through this world, but we're not by any means a perfect or holy church in the sense of our own holiness. Along with that, Augustine insisted that the unity of the church must be maintained. We must neither neglect severe discipline in the maintenance of unity. That is, there's a place for church discipline. It could even be severe, but we must not by intemperate correction break the bond of fellowship. So you try to find a way in which there can be standards and discipline, but not excessive discipline, which will break the bond of fellowship in the church. Augustine liked to quote Cyprian, as I said, both sides claim Cyprian, but one of Augustine's favorite quotes from Cyprian was let a man mercifully correct what he can, let him patiently bear what he cannot correct and groan and sorrow over it with love. Not only did Augustine love that quotation, but John Calvin did as well. He quotes it in the institutes. But as time goes on, the Catholics, including Augustine Field, it's something has to be done. Donatism was finally condemned in a church council, which by this time really means a state church council in the year 411, and Augustine agreed with others that it would be right and proper to use force, if necessary, to cause the Donatists to forsake the era of their ways. After all, Jesus had said, compel them to come in, and so we can compel the obstinate to come into the true church. Unfortunately, this begins a long history that's going to lead to some very disastrous events in the history of the church where force is used for conversion and conformity. As you read Augustine on this, it's really a little softer than it sounds, the way I have just described it. I think Augustine felt it was necessary, but he was reluctant and heartbroken over all of this. He wrote this letter to the Donatists, you too are Christ sheep, he said. You bear the Lord's mark in the sacrament you received, but you strayed and you've gotten lost. There's no reason for you to be angry with me because I'm bringing back the strays and seeking the lost. It's better for me to do the Lord's will. It's he who councils me to compel you to return to his foe. Then to give my consent to the will of the straying sheep and so to allow you to be lost. Don't say then what I always hear you saying, I want to stray, I want to be lost. It is better for me not to allow that at all in so far as it is possible. He doesn't really want to use force, but he feels that it's necessary to do everything possible to bring back the Donatist into the foe. Well, Donatism was broken by this action. It did not disappear all at once. In fact, Donatist churches remained in North Africa all the way down until the 7th century when the Muslims came in and destroyed both the Catholic and the Donatist churches. Some people think that the reason Christianity so failed in North Africa collapsed so completely, was that several centuries of antagonism existed between these two groups of Christians. It made it much easier for Islam to completely overrun the Christian churches in North Africa. It is strange to us because I've been talking now for a long time, a good many lectures on the history of the early churches. So much of this is taking place in North Africa. It's not an area that we think of as a Christian area today at all, a Muslim area, except for a significant Christian minority in Egypt that nowhere else will come later to see that Muslim onslaught and its results in North Africa. Let me say one more word about Augustine's view of all of this. You can tell from the quotation that I just gave, Augustine held that the sacraments had an objective validity unaffected by the spiritual state of the minister. The person being baptized or the person receiving the Lord's supper doesn't have to worry is my minister right with God. If he isn't, then this is not going to do me any good. Augustine said the spiritual value of the sacrament is like light, although it passes among the impure it is not polluted. In a real sense, all ministers, he said, are in effect trotatorase traders, because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So any minister who is administering the sacraments is a sinner, because all have sinned. But the sacrament is not thereby lesson or made invalid because of the person who is giving it. For someone dying of thirst, it matters little whether the person who carries the water is clean or dirty, intelligent or ignorant. The essential thing is not the barra, but the water. Well, the outcome of all of this is something we'll have to study right through the middle ages and up till the time of the reprimation. The church is now saying there is one holy apostolic church outside of which there is no salvation. Cyprian had said that. Cyprian had said, you cannot have God for your father unless you have the church for your mother. And Augustine quoted that too. And John Calvin quotes that too, and agrees with it. Of course, by the time we get to Calvin, we have to ask which church is he talking about? Because the insistence that there is one church did not solve the problem permanently. By the eleventh century and this course, later in this course, we'll see there are two churches. Eastern church and a western church. And in the sixteenth century, the western church divided into the Catholic church and the Protestant church. And almost immediately, the Protestant church divided into many Protestant churches. So the issue is still with us. What is the one true church? The church is a holy church. It has to do with God's gifts to the church, not with the inherent sanctity of members or ministers. And most of Christadam has come to embrace this as true. The church is not the church because of the higher level of sanctification of its members than any other church on the face of the earth. But the church is the church because God has given the sacraments to the church and given the ministry to the church and given the word to the church. This means that generally in church history baptism has been viewed as a valid sacrament wherever it is given so that it does not need to be repeated as a person moves from one church to another. Of course, not everybody agrees with that. The Presbyterian Church in America has refused to require rebatism of Roman Catholics coming into the PCA. But our determination does allow the local church session to make a decision with the person as to whether that person in that session will rebatize or not. So some ways we're somewhat on the fence on this issue. But we have not been willing to declare the Roman Catholic Church apostate or Roman Catholic baptism in valley. There's some Protestants, of course, who do require rebatism, some Protestants that require rebatism of people coming from other Protestant churches. But the general stream of church history has not gone in that direction. So for a thousand years now, for the next thousand years after this, we'll think about one church and then before that thousand years is about halfway through that thousand years, two churches, Eastern church and the Western church, both claiming to be the true church because of history and because of continuity until the Reformation when another way of looking at the church will be brought forward. The church is not based on age or size, but it's based on the presence of Marx, generally described as the true preaching of the word of God and the proper administration of the sacraments. The grass-whithers, flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Yes, in the laps, the people who laps during the time of persecution, how were they disciplined? It was mainly in terms of excommunication or being kept from the Lord's table. Generally for years, it's not a matter of just a short time, but for years excluded from the Lord's supper during which there would be teaching and prayer, not yet to the mechanical connotes of the later Roman Catholic church where people had to say so many prayers or make pilgrimages or buy indulgences. We haven't come into that period yet. Yes, sir. What did Cyprian mean when he said that you cannot have God as your father if you don't have the church as your mother? Cyprian and Augustin would always qualify that by saying ordinarily, so I think they do some possibility of this in prayer, cases being not true, but generally where there is the church, a person must be part of that church to be a Christian. You can't really be a Christian all by yourself. Part of a definition of what a Christian is as a person in fellowship with God's people on earth. So it was their way of discouraging any sort of individual Christianity or private Christianity. Calvin will hold that too, but I think Calvin views, as I believe Augustin did, that it's possible, possible for a person to be a Christian without being a church member, but not ordinarily, and it's certainly possible for church members not to be Christians, and Calvin believe that, as did Augustin, as probably did Cyprian as well. It's a kind of difficult quotation to get a whole other, especially for us, because Protestants tend to diminish the role of the church. We don't see it as quite so important. I think that's a mistake. And when we get a quotation like this, it startles us to think that you could say that you have to be a member of the church, and God is as your father. Of course, we're thinking a member of a particular local church, and that was true back then too, but when there was one church, you were either were in the church or not in the church, and Christians were in the church. Yes, sir.

That's right. The question is what about Peter, they were assaulted with that a lot, and the donatists had a hard time with a lot of biblical text. I think they were tempted to say, well, he's the Roman Pope, and I'm not sure they really wanted to go that way, but they were at least tempted to go that way. The donatists don't really deal very successfully with Scripture. It's one reason that Augustine and the Catholics are able to make their point so well because they can say, well, look, we're all sinners. God has forgiven us. We can't have cheap and easy grays, just easy believism, but there is real forgiveness. You see it with Peter, you see it through the Scripture, and we see it in our own minds. Thank you.