Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about the Donatists. This is my second message in the series Kingdom Christians through the centuries. Now the Donatists were a group of Christians who lived in North Africa around the time of Constantine, and for several centuries later. So we're starting around 300 and going for several centuries after that. They were one of the very early groups of what I call kingdom Christians.
That is, committed Christians who wanted to live fairly literally by the teachings of Jesus Christ, and who ended up separating from the Catholic Church in order to do that. Quite interestingly, I was raised in a sect that claimed the Donatists as their spiritual predecessors in history. However, when I left that group, I learned that all kinds of churches with widely differing beliefs also claimed the Donatists as their ancestors as well.
So this made me wonder, well, who really were the Donatists, and what did they believe? Well, that's what we're going to be talking about tonight. First we're going to look at their history, how this group came into existence, its controversies with the Catholic Church, and then its eventual demise. Next, we're going to talk about some of the profound issues that this movement was caught up in. I want to begin by giving you a little background information about North African Christianity in general.
Or to be more precise, I should say northwestern African Christianity. I'm speaking about the area that would encompass the modern-day countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. In the days of the Donatists, this part of Africa consisted primarily of rural villages and towns, and it still does today, for that matter. The primary city in this region was Carthage, which had once been the capital of the Carthaginian Empire.
Now, two very significant early Christian leaders had come from this area of North Africa. One was Tertullian. He has left us a lot of writings, and when you read his works, you very quickly see that Tertullian is someone who stood for a rigorous, uncompromising type of Christianity. And a man who was willing to take on the rest of the whole church if he thought that it was becoming worldly and lax, which it was. But Tertullian wasn't unique in that aspect in North Africa.
That was a general tendency, I would say, of North African Christianity. Another leader from this area was Cyprian, who ministered around the year 250. Ironically, Cyprian had sided with Rome against one of the First Kingdom movements, the Novatianists. And yet he himself didn't hesitate to stand up to the Bishop of Rome when he thought that that bishop was wrong. And the time came where that very thing happened over the issue of baptizing heretics and schismatics who came to the church.
The Bishop of Rome had the policy that if you were baptized in the name of Jesus, even if it was by the Gnostics or the Montanist Sect or whoever, then your baptism was valid. All that was needed was for the bishop to lay hands on you, to receive you into the church proper. But Cyprian said no, there is no salvation outside of the church. And so if you are baptized by either schismatics or by heretics, then that's not a valid baptism. And so you need to be baptized, not just have hands laid on you.
And that was what was practiced there in North Africa. And all the churches, in fact, of North Africa stood behind Cyprian in this matter against the bishop of Rome, who was, at that time, Stephen. Well, in the end, Stephen excommunicated Cyprian and everybody else who held to his position. Yet these Christians were willing to suffer this excommunication rather than to compromise their beliefs. What's more, they didn't feel like they were truly excommunicated from the body of Christ.
They felt that the bishop of Rome was the one who had excommunicated himself. He was the one in Schism because of his policy. And they weren't trying to make him fit their policy. They were saying, you practice what your custom is in Rome. We'll practice what our custom is in Carthage. But the bishop of Rome said, no, you're going to do it the way we do it in Rome. Well, that rift was healed shortly after the death of Cyprian and Stephen.
But they illustrate, those events illustrate that North African Christians tended to be uncompromising, ready to suffer imprisonment, and martyrdom if necessary, and they were unafraid to take on the whole rest of the church if they felt they were right. During the last 40 years of the third century, from about the year 260 AD to AD 300, the Church enjoyed an unprecedented time of peace.
There was sporadic local persecution, but there was no more empire-wide persecution like they had had around the year 250 under Emperor Decius. This seemed like a blessing to the weary, beleaguered church, which had survived wave after wave of vicious persecution ever since the time it had been planted. However, with the lack of persecution, the church was beginning to lose its first love, as well as its separation from the world. Discipline became weak, particularly in large congregations like in Rome.
In fact, that had given rise to the Novatianist movement in Rome around the year 250. Even in Carthage, which had usually been known for its rigorous, uncompromising Christianity, many of the church leaders were now becoming quite lax. Well then suddenly the peace of 40 years ended, catching most Christians off guard. In the years 303 and 304, Emperor Diocletian initiated the most sweeping persecution the Church had ever experienced. Christian prayer houses everywhere were burned down.
Soldiers dragged men and women into prison and tortured them with every kind of hideous torment that twisted minds could think of. Church leaders were ordered to hand over all copies of the Christian scriptures to be burned. Most of the Christian leaders refused to do so, but many of them complied with this order, and they became known as traditores. That's Latin from the verb tradere, which means to hand over. And it's where we get our English word traitor from those traditores.
Well, among these traditores were the Bishop of Carthage himself, and his right-hand man, a Presbyter named Caecilian, openly sympathized and supported this bishop and other traditores like him. However, the faithful Christians in prison, who were known as confessors, they denounced both Caecilian and their bishop, and others like them.
In fact, these confessors preached that only those who remained steadfast in this persecution would enter paradise, bringing to mind the words of Jesus to the seven congregations in Revelation. And also Jesus' words where He said," He who denies me before men, I will deny before my Father." Well, as you can imagine, Caecilian bristled at the preaching and accusations that these faithful confessors were making, and so he even prevented Christians from taking food to them in the prison.
See, in those days, and I think it's still true in some parts of the world, the prison didn't feed you. If you were to keep from starving to death, someone had to bring you food, usually members of your family. But in the case of Christians, their family was not just those who were related to them by blood, but the whole family of Christ. Well, this persecution continued blazing against the Christians for eight long years.
And during these eight years, this worldly bishop and his right-hand man, Caecilian, were in power, and they made life pretty miserable for the confessors and for Christians who supported and helped them. But yet, despite all of this, the Roman government couldn't destroy Christianity. In the end, the Kingdom of God prevailed. It hadn't been an easy battle, but Christians had shown Satan that he couldn't defeat the Kingdom of God through brute force.
Exhausted and weary from this, Emperor Diocletian in 311 issued what's known as the Edict of Toleration, which ended the persecution. In fact, in acknowledging defeat, the Emperor asked the Christians for their prayers. Diocletian then retired from office and later committed suicide. Well, now that the persecution was over, the faithful Christians in Carthage and in other places of North Africa, Africa, were ready to take the traditores to task, particularly Caecilian and his bishop.
However, right after the persecution ended, the Bishop of Carthage died. Now, as I've said before, many of the presbyters in Carthage had become spiritually lukewarm and worldly. It wasn't just Caecilian. And these worldly presbyters wanted Caecilian to be ordained as the new bishop, because they didn't want somebody who would be uncompromising in that position.
However, it had been a long established custom in Carthage that the bishops from the neighboring province of Numidia would come to Carthage and ordain or consecrate any new bishop. But the worldly presbyters there in Carthage realized that these other bishops were not likely to ordain Caecilian as bishop, based on his record during the persecution, they would put somebody else in who had a more godly record, and that would probably not be good for the worldly bishops.
So they went out and found some other bishops to quickly ordain Caecilian. So when the bishops from Numidia arrived, they discovered that Caecilian had already been ordained. I mean, this was really underhanded and ungodly, and the Numidian bishops were quite incensed, but they weren't sure what to do. So they went back to their homes, and the next year, the leading bishop of Numidia, convened a council of 70 bishops.
They all came to Carthage and held a council, and they deposed Caecilian as bishop, based on several things. Number one, his election had been irregular, which was certainly true. Number two, he had been cruel to the confessors in prison, which was also true. And number three, one of the bishops who ordained him was himself a traditor. He had turned over scriptures to the Roman authorities to be burned. And they said, well, that made his ordination invalid.
And then the 70 bishops selected another brother named Majorinus, who was a Presbyter, and ordained him as the new bishop. And they left, assuming that would end the matter. They had deposed Caecilian, appointed somebody else, and ordained him, and now everything could get back to normal. But that didn't end the matter because the lukewarm clergy, they weren't about to give up without a fight. So Caecilian refused to step down, and he refused to acknowledge the authority of those 70 bishops who had deposed him.
And he refused to leave the church building there in Carthage. So now you had two bishops in the city of Carthage, both claiming to be the only valid bishop of that city. And this was an almost unheard of thing. The same thing had happened with Novatian about 60 years earlier in Rome, and that had shocked a lot of people, including even the ones in Carthage who refused to accept Novatian back at that time. But times were changing. And as it turned out, Caecilian was not particularly outstanding in his lukewarmness.
He wasn't something unusual. This was the direction the whole church was actually going. As I said, the church as a whole was losing its love and was sinking into the world. In fact, in just a few years, nearly the entire church would make some significant compromises with the world through Constantine. So they didn't necessarily look down upon Caecilian. Most of the bishops around the world were likewise worried about these rigorous, uncompromising Christians getting into places of power.
So they tended to back up Caecilian. He had powerful friends in many places, including the Bishop of Rome. Now, Majorinus, the bishop selected to serve instead of Caecilian, and the Christians who supported Majorinus, who were by far the majority of the Christians there in North Africa, and as I said before, when we say North Africa, we really mean Northwest Africa. Anyway, they naturally felt that they represented the true Church of North Africa.
And they saw Caecilian and his supporters as just simply ungodly usurpers. And they were assuming all the rest of the church looked upon the matter the same way. And so they were utterly shocked to discover that the whole church didn't come to their aid. In fact, it took them several years to really grasp what was happening that the rest of the church was going to support Caecilian.
Meanwhile, while all of this was going on in North Africa, Constantine had become the ruler of the Western Roman Empire, and he was quite favorably disposed towards Christians. In fact, Constantine adopted a decidedly pro-Christian policy. In a matter of just a few years, Christians went from being a persecuted minority to being the court favorites. Now I personally believe that Constantine sincerely wanted to promote Christianity throughout the Empire. On the other hand, he was an unregenerated man of the world.
So naturally, the only way he knew to promote Christianity was through human means. For example, he felt quite certain that the prayer houses that the Christians had had, many of which had been destroyed in the great persecution under Diocletian, he felt that these were insufficient to accommodate the large numbers of people who would now be flocking to the Church now that he, the emperor, was personally promoting Christianity.
So he issued a decree that required places of Christian worship throughout the Empire to be substantially enlarged. Not only that, he put the construction of these new church buildings under the oversight of the Roman provincial governors. And one of these new church buildings was going to be there in Carthage, where this controversy was going on.
Well, Constantine continued to rack his brain to think of other ways he could" bless the Church." Because I think he sincerely believed that if he promoted Christianity, if He blessed the Church, then in turn, God would bless His Empire. Before long, Constantine noticed that most of the Christian bishops and presbyters lived in poverty. And he didn't think this was at all suitable for representatives of the one true God. So he began paying salaries to the bishops and presbyters out of state funds.
Furthermore, Constantine exempted all of the bishops, the presbyters and the deacons from taxation, and he exempted all church buildings from property taxes. Now, at the time of Constantine's reign, it had actually begun, in fact, back in the reign of Diocletian. Roman taxes were extremely high. In fact, they kept getting higher. So to have a tax exemption was quite a considerable benefit.
Now, as I've mentioned, in Carthage, there were, at this time, two rival bishops, two sets of elders, two bodies of believers, and each one claimed to be the legitimate church in that city. Well, now in the past, this controversy would have been purely an internal church matter. But Constantine's" blessings to the church" created a whole new issue. Because you had two bishops. You had Majorinus, and you had Caecilian, both claiming to be the legitimate bishop of Carthage.
So which one was going to receive this handsome salary offered by the state? Which bishop, and which group of presbyters would receive tax exemption? Which bishop would have charge of the new magnificent building that had been constructed at state expense? Well, initially, Constantine's government recognized Caecilian as the rightful bishop of Carthage. So Caecilian was provided with a state salary, and rather he and all of his clergy were exempted from taxes.
Well, outraged by this, Majorinus, who is the rival bishop, and his supporters filed a complaint with the Roman Pro Consul of Africa, saying that they were the lawful church in Carthage. Fellas, look, you're paying this to the wrong person. We're the church. Well, the pro consul didn't know what to do, so he forwarded the complaint to Constantine. Well, Constantine didn't know what to think. He had never heard of a situation like this.
I mean, pagans didn't have theological controversies and things, so he was on entirely new ground. So he naturally appointed the Bishop of Rome as a mediator to hear this out and make a decision. Well, meanwhile, Majorinus, this rival bishop had died. And so his followers, which I shouldn't say his followers, because this was the majority of the church there in North Africa, they ordained a new bishop. And the man they ordained to replace Majorinus was named Donatus, and it's where the name Donatists come from.
Now Donatus was quite a vigorous Christian and quite outspoken. Well, anyway, as I said, Constantine appointed the bishop of Rome to hear the case, and after listening to the evidence, he ruled in favor of Caecilian against the Donatists. Well of course this wasn't surprising because the Bishop of Rome was actually a friend of Caecilian. Before I go any further, I should probably mention that the name of the bishop is Donatus, D-O-N-A-T-U-S. And the ones who supported him were called Donatists.
The distinction is harder to make when you're speaking, when you're writing, it's very clear who you're talking about. Well, anyway, feeling that that wasn't really a fair trial, the hearing before the Bishop of Rome, the Donatists asked Constantine to appoint someone more impartial to hear their case. I mean, they were still convinced if just an impartial council will hear us out, they're certainly going to side with us. So Constantine accommodated them.
He called for a council of bishops to be held in the province of Gaul, which is modern-day France, to hear their case. And this council met in Arles in the year 314. And they heard both sides out. And once again, they sided with Caecilian. Well, the Donatists weren't willing to accept that decision. So they appealed another time to Constantine. This is now the third time. And Constantine told him that he would come to North Africa himself and decide the matter.
Well, he never made it to North Africa, but in 316, two years later, he finally did render a personal decision on the matter, and he ruled against the Donatists as well. Well, despite losing all three of these hearings, the Donatists refused to accept Caecilian as their bishop. And so this led to a permanent split, or permanent, at least for several centuries, of the church in North Africa. And the majority of the Christians in North Africa sided with Donatus, the bishop, and with the ones who supported him.
Sadly, as a result of these events, the precedent had been set for the Roman Emperor to convene church councils and to personally adjudicate internal matters of the Church. So in just a few years, the Christians had not only gone from being the persecuted to now being the court favorites, in that short period of time, the wall between church and state had largely crumbled. So had the wall of separation separating God's kingdom from the kingdoms of the world, at least in the practice of the established Church.
Of course, God's true kingdom is never going to be connected with the kingdoms of this world. And the irony in all of this is that the Donatists helped to bring all of this about. So who were the good guys in this, and who were the bad guys? Well, it's not easy to say. I mean, neither side was completely right, and neither side was completely wrong. In a few minutes, we're going to be looking at some of the ecclesiastical and spiritual issues that were raised by the Donatists.
But before we do that, I think at this point I can certainly say the Donatists were wrong in some of their basic concepts, and I think they were overly harsh and unforgiving. But their opponents, the majority of the, not the majority of North Africa, but the majority of the rest of the church, who we'll call Catholics, I think were even more in the wrong.
That's because the type of Christianity that had existed for nearly 300 years, a Christianity that truly knew Jesus as its Lord, a Christianity that was separate from the world, all this was about to end. And the Catholics were totally blind to this. So I think the Donatists actually had good reason to break from the Catholic Church at this point, but not necessarily over the issue of who was the right bishop. Let me just give you an example.
I mentioned that Constantine had convened the Council of Arles to hear their case. Well that same council made other decisions involving other matters not connected with the Donatists. One of them, the bishops of that council, actually condemned Christian soldiers who left the military. The practice from the time of Jesus up until then had been that Christians don't go to war. Before the year 170, there's no evidence that any Christians ever were even in the army.
And later, we do have evidence of Christians in the army, but it was only people who were already soldiers before they converted to Christianity. But before they could get baptized, they had to agree either to leave the army, or that they would never use the sword in any way, which would mean often they were going to have to lay down their lives as martyrs.
And so for now, the bishops to condemn a Christian who leaves the army indicates that a profound shift in the whole ethos and nature of the Church was taking place. It was at this time that Donatus, the bishop, made his famous statement," What does the Emperor have to do with the Church?" And it was a good question. What was the Emperor doing interfering in the affairs of the Church and trying to regulate it?
But of course, the Donatists didn't have clean hands in this matter because they were the ones who originally had gone to Constantine and asked him to intervene. Anyway, because the Donatists refused to accept his decision, Constantine published a severe edict against them, confiscating their property and subjecting them to exile and prison. And all this is ironic because just a few years previously, Constantine had issued the Edict of Milan, which granted freedom of religion to everybody.
Now just a few years later, the state was once again persecuting people, but this time it was on behalf of the so-called Catholic Church. It was on the behalf of so-called orthodoxy. And unwittingly, the Donatists had now become caught up in one of the most significant shifts in the history of Christianity. Because the Catholic Church had begun to believe that God had ushered in a new era with Constantine. Times had changed.
The old rules no longer applied like not serving in the army and not resisting evil, non-resistance, those sort of teachings. They were all thrown out in just a matter of a few years. And they saw the state now, instead of as a third party, something apart from the kingdom of God, they saw it as an integral part of the kingdom of God. And the emperor was God's minister, and he had the responsibility to protect orthodoxy and to promote the church.
And to the great shame of the institutional church of that time, none of its leaders protested against the persecution of the Donatists. And so in just a few short years, the Church had gone from being the persecuted to now being the persecutor. Of course, the church felt its hands were clean because it had not personally instigated the persecution. Constantine had initiated it on his own. Yet by the church's silence, I believe that the leaders incurred a very heavy responsibility.
Well, regardless, Constantine's persecution only made the Donatists stronger. And Constantine quickly saw that this wasn't solving matter. So in the year 321, just a few years before the Council of Nicaea, Constantine quit persecuting the Donatists. Well, the Donatists had representatives at the Council of Nicaea, and they agreed with the theology of that council and its definition of the divinity of Christ. After the council, the Donatist Church in North Africa continued on and it flourished.
And it now came to represent apostolic Christianity far better than the established Catholic Church did. That's because most of the Donatists did not accept all the new innovations that were coming into the church after the Council of Nicaea, such as we've talked about the church being involved in the military and heavily entwined with the states, serving in state offices.
The church's teaching against oaths, against accumulating wealth, all of that, to a large degree, was thrown out or at least changed during the time of Constantine. So we have in North Africa in the Donatists now a more authentic example of Christianity, of what it originally was. And in this case, they were very similar to their counterparts, the Novatianists, and yet the two groups never got together. Well, now let's go just quickly, I'm gonna shift gears here and go back to the history of the Roman Emperor.
Now, even though Constantine purported to be converted to Christianity, and certainly theologically he was, and he tried to promote Christianity and the many laws and enactments that he brought about. Contrary to what a lot of people think, when the Roman Empire became so-called Christian, it didn't help matters as far as the internal affairs of the Empire. It made things only worse. Because Constantine just enacted all of these building programs.
I mean, he made Constantinople his new capital, which meant a whole lot of building had to go on there. He was using state funds to build new church buildings all around the empire, things like that. And there just wasn't enough money to pay for all of these things. So he continued to increase the taxes. They were already far higher than what they had been back in the days of Caesar Augustus and the pagan emperors of that day, but he made them even more burdensome.
In the end, it was the poor who carried the brunt of this oppressive taxation, the poor and the middle class. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. When taxes were raised on real property, then the landlords raised the rent that they charged tenants. In fact, things got so bad that this was actually one of the causes of the rising monastic movement, that it became almost impossible to stay on your landlord's land and work.
Taxes were so bad, you're better off just abandoning it and fleeing to the desert, which is what thousands and thousands of Christians did. I'm not saying there weren't spiritual motivation as well, but the oppressive taxation was also one of the big motivations for this. And it's actually ushered in eventually the feudal system that we know in the Middle Ages, because then the emperors started making laws binding tenants to the land, creating serfdom as we know it in the Middle Ages.
That started during the reign of the Christian emperors. In North Africa, the vast majority, almost the entire rural population of" Christians" were Donatists, but the Catholics controlled most of the cities. And there was a class distinction between the Catholics and the Donatists. The Catholics tended to be wealthier, better educated. Most of the Donatists were poor and uneducated.
Because of the social injustices and disparate inequalities between the rich and the poor, a social reform movement of sorts grew from within the ranks of the Donatists. Because the Donatists could contrast themselves the poor with the Catholics, the powerful and wealthy.
And ironically, although the Donatists as a group maintained the early Christian position of non-resistance, opposition to taking up swords, a dissident group grew up from within them that was willing to use violent means to try to right some of the social wrongs in their area. This dissident group were called circumcellions. Nobody knows where that title came from. It doesn't have anything to do with circumcision. We know that.
Anyway, the circumcellions were willing perhaps not to use the sword, but to use heavy cudgels to bring about sort of a Robin Hood kind of justice. Because a lot of the poor farmers were losing their land because the wealthy creditors would take it from them when they either couldn't pay their taxes or couldn't pay their debts. Many of the poor were forced into outright slavery or, as we said, into a form of serfdom.
So these circumcellions, armed with cudgels, would suddenly swoop down on the houses of wealthy creditors, shouting," Praise to God!" And then they would force the creditor to sign a document forgiving the debt of the poor farmer. As I said, they were sort of a precursor to Robin Hood. Sometimes they would suddenly encircle a caravan and make the master change places with his slaves, letting the slaves ride while the master either walked or carried the slave.
In fact, the circumcellions so terrorized the wealthy that creditors in some places became afraid to even try to collect debts. Now it's important we understand that the Donatist leaders did not condone the action of the circumcellions. In fact, they themselves asked for protection from the Roman armies because sometimes they found themselves being cudgeled by these circumcellions. Nevertheless, the state and the Catholic Church associated the circumcellions with the Donatists and tended to equate them together.
And this hurt the Donatists witness considerably. It's very similar to what happened with the Anabaptists and the Munsterites in the 16th century. One of the cardinal teachings of the Anabaptists was non-resistance. We don't take up the sword. And yet there was a small group of people who were labeled as Anabaptists, who basically took over the town of Munster, and they weren't afraid to use the sword to defend it and to take it over.
And so thereafter, everybody accused the Anabaptists who were peaceful people with really being Munsterites. And if we don't stop them, they're going to take over us. It's the same way with the Donatists. And I think part of this was they wanted to make this equation. Let's paint them all with the same brush, and that way it'll be easier to get rid of the Donatists. In the year 347, the Emperor Constans, who was one of the three sons of Constantine, finally exiled Donatus out of North Africa into Gaul.
As a result of this, Donatist pamphleteers began attacking Constans, describing him and his court as an abode of Satan. They increasingly developed a theology of separation of church and state, plus they continued their original theme of separation from the world in general. Now one place where they made a grave mistake theologically, I believe, is thinking of themselves as the church, as the Catholic Church. They didn't call themselves Donatists. They saw themselves as the Catholic Church.
But like you say, the literature of their opponents labeled them as Donatists and labeled everyone else as the Catholics. Now I know today Catholic has a bad connotation to it, but originally it meant universal, the one true church. I had mentioned earlier how Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage in the year 250, had taken a strong stance that there was no salvation outside of the church.
That if somebody was baptized by some other group, whether they were Orthodox and yet had broken from the main group, or they held us some kind of heresy. It didn't matter. They were not part of the church, and nothing they did was valid. Their baptisms, their communion, their ordinations, et cetera. So if you came from one of those groups under the policy of Cyprian, and that was the policy generally throughout North Africa, or at least Northwest Africa, then you had to get rebaptized.
We'll see that theology continued over with the Donatists. There can't be two true churches, so either they were the true church or the Catholics were, the people who call themselves Catholics. And so naturally, they felt, well, we're the one true church. So they came then to condemn everybody else throughout the whole world, and they saw themselves as the last faithful remnant of the Church on earth.
And so anyone who came to them and wanted to join them who had formerly been a Catholic or anything else, they had to get rebaptized because they would refuse to accept the baptism of the Catholics as valid. So their theology ended up essentially saying the true church exists only in North Africa. Well, anyway, under the pagan emperor Julian, they petitioned the Empire to receive back their property which had been confiscated from them, and he granted it back to them.
Because of course he was happy to help anybody who wasn't a Catholic. However, under the next emperor Valentinian, who was a Christian, their churches and their property was taken away from them again. Well, like most restoration movements in Christianity, donatism declined spiritually over time. After two or three generations, their members didn't have the same kind of revolutionary zeal that their forefathers had had. And so pretty soon you start having schisms and scandals.
And in some sense, they became the new establishment in North Africa because they were the majority. And so, in a sense, the Catholics in North Africa were this small minority, and the Donatists, as I said, were actually the establishment. A lot of their theology was created on the run, so to speak, and it wasn't really carefully thought out, such as claiming that they were the one true Catholic Church on earth.
And so Augustine, who was a Catholic who lived in North Africa as well, he used all of his energy to persuade, or at least to try to persuade the Donatists to come back into the Catholic Church. I don't think his arguments did very much to persuade very many Donatists to abandon their church and join the Catholics, but his writings probably played a major role in keeping very many more Catholics from joining the Donatists.
Well, exasperated with his lack of success, Augustine became more and more receptive of the idea of maybe the emperor should use his force, the force of the sword, to bring the Donatists back into the Catholic Church. And when the emperor did that and had a measure of success, this was in the late 300s we're talking about, then Augustine basically came up with a theology to justify and rationalize persecuting them and forcing them with the sword back into the Catholic Church.
Well, although a large number of Donatists did eventually come back into the Catholic Church because of being persecuted by the emperor, there were still literally hundreds of thousands of them who refused to ever come back to the established church, preferring death to any kind of compromise. But the loss of a large number of their members, probably a minority, but a large minority from, again, being forced back into the Catholic Church, so to speak.
When you couple that with the continuing loss of zeal over a period of time, the Donatists in a century or so became a much weaker group of people. And then when the Vandals, these Germanic barbarians, swept through North Africa at the beginning of the 5th century, well then this weakened them even further because a lot of their houses were burned down. Any buildings they still had that the Roman government hadn't taken from them were taken from them by the Vandals, many of them slaughtered, et cetera, et cetera.
Many probably fled to the Catholics for protection because that's where the emperor's armies were. And yet a small Donatist church did continue on for several centuries. And it better represented original Apostolic Christianity, or Kingdom Christianity, as I call it, than did the Catholic Church. Now in saying this, I don't mean to say that all of the Donatists were true Christians and none of the Catholics were. I'm saying as a body, they better represented kingdom Christianity than did the body of Catholics.
Yet a small Donatist Church did continue on for several centuries, in fact, a total of around 400 years. They were still around in the 7th and 8th centuries when the Muslim invaders finally reached that part of North Africa, and both they and the Catholics disappeared in the Muslim invasion. Whether they were all slaughtered or imprisoned or capitulated, we don't know. We just know they disappear from the history books after the Muslim conquest of North Africa.
Now I want to talk a bit about the beliefs of the Donatists. We've discussed their history. What did they believe? Well, actually in matters of theology and worship, there was extremely little difference between the Donatists and the Catholics of the early 4th century. If you want to know what the Donatists believed on any particular theological subject, you can listen to any of the messages that I've made on what the early Christians believed, because the Donatists believed all of the same things.
To put it another way, if you don't like what the early church believed, you're not going to like what the Donatists believed either. In fact, the Donatists never accused the Catholics of their day of holding to theological errors, nor did the Catholics accuse them of holding to false doctrines. The gulf between the Donatists and the Catholics was not over theology. It was over ecclesiology. What is the Church? What is its relationship to the world? What's its relationship to the state?
How do the Church's sacraments or ordinances operate? Actually, these are not minor issues. They're quite serious and profound. Now, in the course of discussing the Donatist history, we've already talked quite a bit about their view of the relationship of the church to the state. They taught that the church should be completely independent of the state. We've also seen how they sort of backed into this position.
Initially, they were quite happy to have the state involved in their dispute, and only when the state and the part of the church connected with the state rejected their appeals, did they then come to this other theology? But how they came to it is not necessarily that important. The bottom line is that the Donatists did end up recognizing that the church should not be connected with the state, and they were among the very few of their days who saw that and who spoke out against it.
Alright, now let's look at the issue of the sacraments. This was one of the original issues between the Donatists and the rest of the church. And the Donatists' basic position was that the unworthiness of the minister performing the sacrament, or ordinance as some churches call it, totally invalidates the sacrament.
Now in specific, the issue they were dealing with was that one of the men who ordained Caecilian as bishop was a traditor or traitor, someone who had betrayed Christ by handing over the scriptures to be burned. So then the Donatists said, well, therefore, according to the Donatists, his sin automatically canceled out his office. He was no longer a bishop, because he had committed this sin. Therefore, he could not validly ordain anyone.
So then Caecilian wasn't a bishop, because the man who ordained him had committed this sin, which automatically nullified his position or office of oversight, and therefore anyone he ordained was not validly ordained. Likewise, since Caecilian's ordination wasn't valid, anyone he ordained wasn't validly ordained. But now we do need to remember that this was not the only reason, or even the main reason, why the Donatists rejected Caecilian as bishop.
Remember, one of his sins was that he had actually opposed Christians who wanted to give help to the confessors in prison, the ones who wanted to bring them food and clothing, things like that, that he tried to prevent them from doing that. Now I think that was very good grounds for rejecting him as a bishop. But see, the Donatist position was those sort of things automatically invalidated what he did.
Well now if we take that position to its logical conclusions, then a baptism performed by an unrighteous minister isn't valid. So the person isn't baptized even though they think they are. The basic Donatist argument was, someone can't impart to something else, something that they don't have themselves. If I'm dead in my sins, I can't impart life to someone else. So anyone I baptize is not validly baptized. And anyone that person baptizes isn't gonna be validly baptized and on and on.
Well, I think we can all see the inherent weakness of this position. For example, in the case that started all of this, the man who consecrated Caecilian and his bishop asserted that he never had handed over the scriptures, that he had only pretended to. He had handed some Gnostic scrolls to the authorities, and that's what they burned, not the sacred scriptures. So was his office automatically taken from him?
Because people thought he had done something wrong when his only sin was to trick the Roman authorities and make it look like he was cooperating with them? Well, what kind of sin is sufficient to cancel out a person's ministerial authority? If someone tells a lie, do they automatically lose their office as a bishop or elder? What about if they get a speeding ticket? What if they don't properly pay their taxes? And how does an individual know when a minister's authority has automatically ended or not?
I mean, even the Catholics acknowledged that a minister could be deposed for serious sins, and that once he was deposed, then he could no longer validly administer the sacraments. I mean, they weren't saying that once you were ordained, you were forever ordained even if you were deposed. But the Donatist position was that all of this happened automatically. But what if it's hidden sin? What if no one even knows that a particular bishop is maybe carrying on an adulterous relationship?
Does that mean everything he did was invalid? No one's been validly baptized, no one validly married or ordained during that time. I think we'd all see that's a scary proposition. Now the main spokesman for the Catholic position was Augustine. And he argued that the true minister of every sacrament is actually Christ. The minister is merely, that is the earthly minister, is merely his unworthy agent, and that the unworthiness of the agent has no effect on the efficacy of the sacrament.
For example, many, if not most of the Israelite priests of old were unworthy, yet the burnt offerings they offered on behalf of the faithful were still valid. So long as a minister has been ordained by a proper bishop in the church with the right words, and so long as he administers the sacraments with the right words and in the manner prescribed by the church, then according to Augustine, the sacrament is automatically valid. So who was right? Augustine or the Donatists? Well, I don't think either one was right.
I think they were both asking the wrong question based upon a very fallacious presupposition. Oops, now I guess I'm sounding like a lawyer, aren't I? Well, what was this presupposition that I say was in error? Well, I think the wrong assumption both sides made was that a bishop or Presbyter is a priest in the manner of the Old Testament priest or the pagan priest. Their error is something that's often referred to as sacerdotalism, which my dictionary defines as unwarranted or excessive dependence on a priesthood.
Sacerdotalism, which comes from the Latin word meaning priest, views a presbyter or a bishop, not as primarily a preacher, and not simply as an overseer or leader in the church. It doesn't view his office as something that's perhaps similar to the Old Testament offices of elder, or prophet, or to the teachers in the Jewish synagogues. No, Sacerdotalism views the primary function of a bishop or a presbyter as that of a priest. He somehow has special power to perform rites, such as baptism, ordination, communion.
And it's not just an issue of church authority. Has this person been authorized to do these things? No, Sacerdotalism says that a layperson, or even a deacon, has no power to perform most of the sacraments. Likewise, a person who has been improperly ordained, if they don't have a line of succession behind them, then they have no power either. And such a person might ordain someone else. Well that person has no power. Any sacraments he administers are invalid.
Actually, in the end, there wasn't really that much difference between the position of the Donatists and Augustine, which essentially became the official position of the Roman Catholic Church. I mean, at the time, it seemed like they were at opposite poles, but they both led to a type of Christianity where everything happens automatically. Sacerdotalism was one of the errors that began creeping into the church around AD 200, and it continued to grow throughout the third century.
So it was already a presupposition of most Christians at the time the Donatist controversy started. And that's why both the Donatists and the Catholics had a somewhat similar view of the ministry and of the sacraments. Actually, both the Donatists and the Catholics saw the sacraments as something that work automatically, mechanistically, depending on the status of the priest who performs the sacrament. The difference was that in the Donatist system, everything is automatically canceled by God.
It doesn't allow God the power to forgive, to intervene, to have some flexibility. But in the Augustinian system, everything is automatically approved by God. His system denies God the power to withhold His presence because of sin or a lack of faith.
Well, the end result of Augustine's system, which prevailed, was that the Catholic Church ended up with people who essentially were" automatic Christians." Everyone in the entire kingdom was baptized, regardless of their personal faith, regardless of the household faith. And then everyone in the kingdom was automatically confirmed when they reached a certain age.
They mechanically confessed their sins to a priest, and so long as they perform the required penance, say so many Hail Marys or gives so many alms, then you're automatically forgiven. Grace is automatically bestowed on the members of the Church through the Eucharist or Mass, because it's administered by a priest who has the right line of succession, and if he says the right words, and even after a person is dead, masses are automatically said and this automatically takes away years of punishment in purgatory.
I mean, that was a belief by the time we get into the Middle Ages. They didn't believe that in the days of Donatus. Can't you see? The end result is a mechanical religion that requires no inner life, no relationship with Christ, no living faith, and no holiness. Now, I don't mean that Catholics did not teach the need for an inner life and a relationship with Christ and holiness.
And I certainly don't mean that no Catholics had those sort of things, because unlike what the Donatists thought, people weren't just automatically somehow out of the church, because the leaders of the Church were compromising with the world and watering down Christianity. You still had many faithful, committed, zealous Christians, not just in groups like the Donatists and the Novatianists, but in the state church as well. The State Church made it harder, perhaps, to be that kind of Christian there.
It tended to lead you away from that. But there were people who nevertheless walked with Christ even in that setting. But now in contrast to that kind of mechanistic, automatic Christianity, biblical Christianity is relational. The only priest we need is our high priest, Jesus Christ. The important thing in baptism, in communion, in an ordination, are the spiritual state of the person who's receiving the baptism, or receiving communion, or being ordained.
The standing of the person who administers the ordinance or the sacrament is actually quite secondary. Nothing is automatic. Everything is relational, turning on an obedient love relationship with Jesus Christ. Closely tied to the issue of the sacraments is the issue of what is the church? To the Donatists, the Church was the community of the pure. It was the wheat after the chaff had already been separated from it. But to the Catholics, the church was a dragnet filled with clean and unclean fish.
The unclean fish would be ultimately separated out by the angels at the end, but in this life, the two are in the dragnet together. To the Donatists, the Church would always be separate from the world. In contrast, the Catholics believed that the world would eventually be converted, and that the Church would fill the whole world, and win it all over to Christ. So the Donatists rejected the whole new spirit and new ethos that was sweeping over nearly the entire Church during the days of Constantine and after him.
The Donatists remained vigilant and disciplined, while the rest of the Church was slowly sinking in a mire of worldliness and laxity, such that in a few decades, there was very little to distinguish Christians from any other Roman citizen except who they worshipped. Yet this whole ecclesiastical issue is not necessarily quite so simple in black and white. One of the issues we have to look at is what effect does the presence of sinners have on the remaining members of the body?
To the Donatists, a sinful minister contaminated everyone in the flock. Not only did he lose his status as a true minister, but they lost their status as Christians. And that's why the Donatists rebaptized the Catholics who came over to them. Ultimately, the Donatists ended up saying that Christians throughout the entire world lost their status as Christians because they recognized Caecilian's ordination. Even all of the thousands and thousands of Christians who never even heard of Caecilian.
Well first they said those Christians in North Africa who recognized Caecilian as a bishop, well they forfeited their Christianity. Well, because the councils of bishops in Rome and later in Gaul had decided in favor of Caecilian, then they said all of those bishops lost their standing as Christians too. And so did all of the individual members of their congregations, unless those individual Christians left their congregation and somehow joined up with the Donatists.
And because the Christians in the East, who weren't even personally involved in any of this, because they were in communion with the Bishop of Rome and with the churches in Gaul that had recognized Caecilian, then they all lost their standing as Christians as well, not just the bishops, but every last member of their congregations. Well, I think we can all see that the Donatist position was simply too extreme and not really well thought out in this matter. Yet the Catholic system had its major problems as well.
Now it is true that the Ante-Nicene Church did view the church as a dragnet that brought in clean and unclean fish, just as Jesus had mentioned in his parable about the kingdom. Now there were some groups who took issue over that, such as the Montanists and the Novatianists, whom we've already spoken about. But in general, the church said, yes, there's going to be sinners inside the church. The church is not just a haven of the perfect.
On the other hand, the situation that we had after Nicaea was vastly different from the situation of the Primitive Church. It's true that both the Primitive Church and the Post-Nicene Church use that same parable, but we're really comparing apples with oranges, not apples and apples. That's because in the primitive church, the presence of persecution weeded out already, anybody who was going to be lukewarm, who wasn't ready to lay down their life for Christ.
I don't mean that you didn't have anyone like that in the church, but the nature of persecution and the nature of the discipline in the church weeded out the majority of the tares of the unclean fish. I mean, the primitive church said, yes, the church does exercise mercy. It doesn't automatically kick everyone out who has sinned if they are repentant. And the primitive church said, we know that not everybody in our congregations, not all professing Christians, are ultimately going to be in the Kingdom of Heaven.
That even though we have strict church discipline, there's still going to be plenty of unclean fish in this dragnet. But now the Post Nicene Church, the Post Constantinian Church, was an entirely different thing. Because they were simply saying, with the aid of the Roman state, we're just going to encompass the entire empire. And everybody in this whole empire is a Christian. If they haven't been baptized yet, well, then they have to be baptized. Now, I'm a little exaggerating when I said everyone.
I mean, they did allow the Jews to stay outside the church. The Jews were persecuted, but not every last member of the Empire was baptized, but the vast majority were. The primitive church was a body of Christians that was decidedly separate from the world. I mean, even the pagans said that and commented about that. But the church in Augustine's day was decidedly one body with the world. So, yes, I think that parable does mean that there's going to be unclean fish in Christ's kingdom until he returns.
But it's not justification for having a state church and imagining that every last member of your country is a Christian because they were baptized either as an adult or as an infant or whatever. Christianity doesn't work that way. In conclusion, let's sum up some of the things that we've talked about. We've seen that the Donatists somewhat stumbled onto the Christian scene at a momentous time in the history of Christianity.
The church was undergoing dramatic changes, and Christ needed some heroic Christians to stand up and say," Look, we're not going to go along with this." And the Donatists happened to be the ones who were on the scene. As we've talked about, they were definitely earthen vessels. They had their shortcomings and a lot of their ecclesiastical positions really weren't well thought out. But I do think that God used the Donatists.
Now, I don't know that they would have taken their strong stand on separation of church and state if Constantine had decided in their favor. I sort of think that they probably wouldn't have. Maybe there would have then been another group who would have been saying we need separation of church and state.
But be that as it may, regardless of their guilt or innocence in that situation, they were among the few to stand up and say," What does the Emperor have to do with the Church?" Even if they weren't the most eloquent spokesman for the position of Kingdom Christianity, at least they did stand up and object to what was happening to the Church, not just on the issue of ordination, but the whole compromise with the world.
Let me read to you a few brief excerpts from the writings of one of the Donatist leaders who lived around the year 400. His name was Petilian. Now we don't have a lot of their writings because they were destroyed. They were not the ones in power, and so their writings were confined to the flames. But because of the debate going on between the Donatists and Augustine, a lot of what they did say was preserved by Augustine so that he could refute it. So that's why we have these excerpts that we do.
I'm going to read to you. Petilian wrote talking about the Catholics," You carry on war without license against whom we may not fight in turn. You desire to live when you have murdered us, but our victory is either to escape or to be slain." If Jesus gives us this warning in the case of Jews and pagans, you who called yourself Christians ought not to imitate the dreadful deeds of the Gentiles? Or do you serve God in such a way that we should be murdered at your hands? You do err. You do err.
For God does not have butchers for His ministers. Love never fails. This is to say in short," Love does not persecute, does not inflame emperors to take away the lives of other men, does not plunder other men's goods, does not go on to murder men whom it is spoiled." I'm still reading from Petilian. Jesus Christ never persecuted anyone.
We advise you, therefore, if so be that you will hear it willingly, and even if you don't willingly receive it, yet we warn you that the Lord Christ instituted for Christians not any form of slaying, but one of dying only. For if he loved men who thus delight in battle, he would not have consented to be slain for us. What have you to do with kings of this world, in whom Christianity has never found anything except envy toward her? You too do not cease to murder us, who are just and poor.
Poor that is, in worldly wealth, for in the grace of God, not one of us is poor. We who are poor in spirit are not apprehensive for our wealth, but rather we feel a dread of wealth. We, as having nothing, and yet possessing all things, look on our souls as our wealth, and by our punishments and blood, purchase to ourselves the everlasting riches of heaven. End of quotation. Well, that was Kingdom Christianity that Petilian articulated.
This was the type of Christianity that Jesus had founded and that the early Church knew. To be sure, the Donatists had their weaknesses and their imperfections. Like the Christians before them, they weren't brilliant theologians or ecclesiastical thinkers. That's because living the Christian life meant more to them than arguing intricate points of theology or ecclesiology. They were among the last ones in their era to say that Christians should not take up the sword and should not persecute anyone.
They were among the last in their era to believe in separation of church and state. Now it's true, as we've talked about, that their candle was eventually snuffed out, after lasting for several centuries. Yet their example influenced and inspired other groups of kingdom Christians throughout the centuries down to our own day. The Waldensians later raised many of the same issues as had the Donatists. Even still later, at the time of the Reformation, the Anabaptists raised these same issues once again.
In fact, the opponents of the Anabaptists called them Donatists. The Donatists suffered viciously for their witness. Yet in the end, the Donatist's position on Church and State has become the predominant view of all Christians. Most Christians today, at least here in the United States, firmly believe in the separation of church and state, and in freedom of religion. And most Western Christians recognize now that it is wrong for a Christian to persecute others.
So when Donatus asked his famous question," What does the emperor have to do with the Church?" He didn't ask it in vain. For in the end, Donatus has outlived his persecutors, and the Donatist view of church and state has become the dominant view held by most professing Christians.