Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about the Novatianists. They were one of the first kingdom movements outside of the established church. In fact, tonight's message is the first in a series of messages on kingdom Christians through the centuries. Well, what do I mean by a kingdom Christian? When I use that expression, I'm referring to Christians who are committed to living fairly literally by the teachings of Jesus Christ, particularly including His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.
I'm talking about Christians who recognize that God's kingdom is a present reality, and that as Christians, we're citizens of that kingdom. And we live under a different set of values and a different set of laws than the world lives. Now, one of the questions that kingdom Christians have had to ask through the ages is, at what point do I leave the established church, because they've strayed so far from the original vision of Jesus Christ for His Church?
Do I stay in and work for reform, or is the situation hopeless, and so I leave the church? And it's not an easy question because Jesus wants His people to all be one. In fact, His last prayer before He was arrested, he prayed to His Father that all of His followers, not just the ones who were alive in His day, but those who would hear the message later, that we would all be one just as He and His Father were one, so that the world might believe that He, in fact, was sent by His Father.
You can read that prayer in John 17, verses 20 and 21. So a Christian's first response, I think, will always be," Let's stay in and try to work for reform." But sometimes the situation is so deep that the very nature of Christianity has changed, and that the institutional church is beyond reform. And it's time for a group to leave, lest they, too, should be pulled into a compromise with the world themselves. But when is it time to do that? Ah, that's the problem. Knowing when it's time to leave.
Knowing when conditions aren't just simply a momentary bump in the road, but rather that the church has actually made a wrong turn and is going down a different road and that it's never going to return to the Kingdom Road again. Have you ever had the experience of following a map or trying to follow it, and you're in an unknown territory, and you end up turning off on the wrong road. But you don't know it right away.
But perhaps when the road narrows down into a small lane, it gives you a clue, hmm, I wonder if I took a wrong turn somewhere back, and maybe you turn around and go back. I've had to do that lots of times. But it's not always easy to know that you've made a wrong turn.
I remember several years ago when my wife Deborah and I were in Scotland, and we thought we would take a quick tour, we only had like a day or two to do this in, that we would take a quick tour of northern Scotland, the Highlands, and then come back, and we had to get back in London to catch our plane. Well, way up there in the Highlands, some of the roads got so narrow that you weren't sure whether you were on the actual highway or not. In fact, I remember at one point, the road became one lane.
And I don't mean a right lane and a left lane, you know, just one lane on each side. No, I mean one lane for both sides. And so if you met an oncoming car, you had to back up and find a place that were built into the roads every mile or half a mile or something. They had a little rounded area that you could turn off and let a car get around you. And several times I was sure we were on the wrong road, but no, that was the actual highway.
Now, when we're dealing with the Kingdom of God, we have to remember that its values and its characteristics are actually upside down, for the most part, from what we would expect in ordinary life. For example, when the church makes a wrong turn, the road doesn't actually get more bumpy, and it doesn't get narrower. It's just the other way around. When the church is off its mark, well then the road gets smoother, and it gets wider.
And if we aren't looking at things through kingdom spectacles, we're going to think that everything's rosy, that God is really blessing us. And so that makes it harder to discern when the church has actually gone beyond the point of reforming. And it's time to leave lest we too get pulled into its many compromises. From the vantage point of church history, I would say that the Church left the road of apostolic Christianity in the fourth century during the reign of Constantine.
But even then, I can't point to a specific date or event and say, ah, that was the absolute turning point. Because there were actually three key events during the reign of Constantine, any one of which that you could point to and say," Okay, at this point, the church had gone down the wrong road, had turned off the narrow road that leads to salvation." One of those events was when Constantine began paying salaries to the church ministers, and the church went along with this.
Because this was the first step toward creating a state church and for the church to become intertwined with the world. It made the bishops and presbyters actually officers of the state. So perhaps any group of Christians would have been justified leaving at that point. But then about ten years later, Constantine initiated a civil war against his own brother-in-law, Licinius, who was the ruler of the eastern half of the Roman Empire.
It had been set up where Constantine was the ruler of the West and Licinius was the ruler of the East, but Constantine wanted to rule the whole thing. And so he invaded the territory of Licinius and overthrew him. Now what was significant about this was that for the first time in the history of Christianity, you had bishops actually accompanying the troops to battle and blessing them, the way pagan priests had formally done.
Also, for the first time, you had Christian soldiers who were participating in the actual killing. Now there had been Christians in the Roman armies in the 3rd century, but they were there only with the understanding that they could never use the sword. They could never harm anybody else. And maybe that was even a compromise to allow converted soldiers to stay in the army, but that's another whole issue.
But now in this war, you didn't just have Christians who were in the army because they couldn't get out, but who were there specifically to fight on behalf of Constantine and to kill these other soldiers. And they even brought large crosses as military standards to take into battle with them. So I think a person could point to that. The Civil War with Licinius being, okay, at this point, Christianity had definitely turned down the wrong road, it was time to leave.
But then there was another key event in the year 325, just shortly after the Civil War. When Constantine called for the Council of Nicaea to settle the dispute concerning the nature of Christ's divinity and the sense in which He was begotten from the Father. The issue had centered around a presbyter in Alexandria named Arius, and so sometimes it's called the Arian Controversy or Arian Heresy. Now this council was significant because it was called by the Roman Emperor who was not a Christian.
I don't mean that he just didn't live a Christian life. I mean, he wasn't even baptized. He was not, in any sense of the word, considered a Christian by the church, or he should not have been, I should say. But here he was calling this council to convene, and then he actually presided at it.
In fact, he's the one who suggested that they adopt a whole new creed, I shouldn't say a whole new creed, adopt a new creed, modify the creeds that the churches had used for several centuries, and insert in it a new word" homoousian," which means the same nature as that Jesus, the Son of God, is Homoousian with the Father. He's the same nature as the Father. Now that's correct theology, and it fits what the pre-Nicene Christians had believed. I don't have a problem with the Word.
But I have a problem with any creed that makes Orthodoxy turn on a word that is not even in the Scriptures. That was something new when the church agreed to that. Because now they were saying the Bible wasn't adequate. You needed to go a little bit further to accurately define the faith, to take care of all the new problems that might arise through the centuries.
And sure enough, as a result, shortly after the Council of Nicaea, both Constantine and the Church began proclaiming that the decision of that council was inspired by God, just the same as Scripture was. They put it on the same level as Scripture. To make matters even worse, after the council ended, then Constantine declared a law that made it illegal to even own any writings by Arius, the one who had been condemned at the council.
And anybody who would be caught with his writings in their possession or in their homes would be put to death. Now that was definitely a major turning point, the beginning of the church persecuting people it viewed as heretics, and even putting them to death. So after all three of those events, and you can pick which one was the worst of the three, but certainly after the third one, I think it'd be safe to say it was time to break company with the established church, because it was quickly becoming a hybrid.
It was no longer the pure church that Jesus had established. It was a combination now of church and state, of things of God and things of the world all mixed in together. But of course, we're looking at that now from the vantage point of history. We can look back and see what happened. People who lived at that time, of course, didn't have that clarity of vision. They didn't see where all of this would be leading.
And since it happened one step at a time, they got used to one step, they absorbed it, and then the next compromise they had to make, okay, they absorbed that. And of course, this all seemed like not that the church was turning down the wrong road, but that they were turning down the right road, because suddenly now there was an end of persecution. The government, instead of persecuting them, was trying to help them. And so it seemed to them that God is blessing the church.
We're doing something right, that God is blessing us. But of course, Jesus said," Blessed are you when you're persecuted." So they forgot that upside-down nature of God's kingdom. But the truth is, even after that third event, when the church had definitely, I think, irreparably gone down the wrong way, it wasn't going to ever return. And yet nobody left the church at that time that we know in any recorded history. There was no kingdom movement that started out of that at that time.
There were later on, but not there after the Council of Nicaea, nobody said," Okay, that's it. We're leaving." You may be wondering," Okay, what does all this have to do with Novatianists?" Well, the reason I'm giving you this background information is because our message tonight is the first in a series of messages about kingdom movements of groups of people who left the church, and they didn't necessarily all leave at the very time they should have, or leave all at the same time.
There were different crises for different groups. The Novatianists were listing the first because they actually left the church about 75 years before the Council of Nicaea. So instead of being a reaction to those things, they had left the church long before. Now the Novatianists get their name from their founder, a Christian who was named Novatian. Now, of course, they didn't call themselves Novatianists. They certainly didn't see them as we are followers of Novatian.
He just happened to be the lightning rod that they were attracted to. He was the person that they gelled around the movement. In fact, even in their own day, they were not necessarily called Novatianists by their opponents. They were often simply called schismatics. They were sometimes known as the Cathari or the pure. We could say the Puritans is what some of their opponents call them. They saw themselves as simply the church. You know, we're the true church that the institutional body of Christ has left us.
In fact, it's not the body of Christ. The institution that calls itself the church has left is no longer Christ's true body and we're the ones preserving true Christianity. That's how they saw things. Now, Novatian, whom they're named after, he was born around the year 200, probably in Italy. Now his parents were not Christians, so he grew up with Roman pagan beliefs, and he received an advanced education. In fact, he was quite studied in Stoic philosophy.
We don't know when or how he first became acquainted with Christianity. All we know is that at some point, when he was at a mature age, sometime over the age of 40, he became gravely ill and thought he was going to die. And so at that point, he called for Christians to come and pray for him. So as I said, at some point earlier in his life, he had obviously been witness to, and a seed had been planted.
Because now in his deathbed, he wanted Christians to pray for him, and he asked them to baptize him, which they did. However, instead of dying like he thought he was going to do, he ended up recovering from the illness, and he became a very committed Christian thereafter. In fact, before long, he was ordained as a presbyter or as an elder in the church in Rome.
And ministering there in Rome as a Presbyter, he wrote several theological works and works on the Christian life, some of which are still around with us today. He was definitely one of the more capable or gifted presbyters who were in Rome at that time. In fact, many scholars are of the opinion that Novatian's work on the Trinity was unequaled theologically in the West by anything that was written before the year 350.
Now, not only was Novatian a gifted leader and a learned theologian, but as a writer, he presented Christianity in the Latin language. In fact, he was the first leader in Rome to write his works in Latin. Now Tertullian had done that, but Tertullian didn't live in Rome. He lived in Carthage. So Novatian was the first Roman presbyter or any leader who wrote in Latin. However, Novatian lived at the time when the church in general was becoming increasingly lax, and in particular, the church in Rome.
In fact, not too many decades before Novatian, one of the presbyters in Rome, named Hippolytus, had broken ranks with one of the bishops of Rome over the lax discipline that he was exercising. And for a while you had, you might call it one of the first kingdom movements. It never grew very large, and it ended, I think, in just a matter of a few years. As it turned out, both the Bishop of Rome and Hippolytus were arrested and were martyred together, and they made peace with one another before they died.
Well, now the problem had cropped up again. You had lax Christianity growing, and Rome was the center of it. And Novatian wanted to see the church in Rome return to its first love, and to return to the type of careful discipline it had once practiced. At one time, Rome had been the model church throughout the whole world. I think it certainly was in the New Testament period. When other churches were going off into heresies or dividing, things like that, Rome had held pretty firm. It had been an anchor.
The Christians there for the whole worldwide body. And the church in general looked to Rome as an example. So if it was setting a bad example, it wasn't just a local problem. It was affecting Christianity throughout the whole world. And so Novatian was concerned with originally reforming the church there in Rome. And even his enemies, who don't say very nice things about them, they had to admit this. I'm going to read to you from one of their quotations.
It said," He wept over the sins of his neighbors as if they were his own. He carried the burdens of his brethren as the apostle exhorts, and strengthened them with his exhortations, any who were weak in the divine faith." In the year 250, the Church throughout the Roman Empire was struck with a severe crisis.
The new Roman Emperor named Decius issued an edict that required all Roman citizens throughout the Empire to demonstrate their loyalty to the state and to the gods of the state by performing a public sacrifice to the gods. And this decree was rigorously enforced throughout the empire, and it resulted in a sizable number of Christian martyrs, particularly in the large cities. The Decian persecution was something new because up until that time, persecution had normally been very localized.
It would break out maybe in the city of Rome, or the city of Lyon in France, or Gaul at that time. But over in Alexandria, Egypt, everything was fine. But now this was different. Everywhere, Christians were persecuted, coming from the Emperor himself. Well, Fabian, who was the bishop of Rome at that time, was almost instantly martyred.
And after his death, the Christians at Rome decided they ought to wait before they ordain a new bishop because he would be martyred himself, no doubt, shortly after they ordained him, because the empire was particularly looking for the bishops. Cyprian, who was the bishop in Carthage, had to go underground during this whole time period and shepherd the Christians there from various hideaways.
So what happened in Rome is that after Fabian was martyred, the body of elders or presbyters there in Rome ran the affairs of the church. And it seems that Novatian, who was an elder there, acted as the leader or the spokesman for the body of elders.
Something else that was different about the Decian persecution is that for the first time in the history of Christianity, most of the Christians who had not been able to flee or to hide when the persecution hit ended up offering sacrifices to the state gods or compromising in some other way. For example, some of the Christians would bribe a public official to give them a certificate saying they had sacrificed even though that they hadn't.
Or another situation, the Christian man and his wife, they ordered the family nurse, some sort of servant who was taking care or helping take care of the children. And so they told her she was to go and sacrifice on behalf of the family, things like that. And this was just a shock to the rest of the church, and they felt such shame that this had happened. In the past, they had always stood up heroically to persecution.
Sure, there were always some who compromised, who denied Jesus Christ in the face of persecution, but it had always been a small minority. Something definitely had changed in the spiritual makeup of the church that now they were unable to stand up firmly to this. And Novatian was quite a committed Christian, and he was determined to reverse the course of things. And so during that year, it was a little bit more in the year that he was basically the, you might say, the acting bishop in Rome.
He was the leader, spokesman of the body of elders there. He did what he could to tighten church discipline. Well, mercifully, the Decian persecution was not long-lived because Decius himself was killed in battle the next year. And when he was slain, a new emperor was selected and he ended the persecution. Well, the Christians definitely saw this as an answer to their prayers, and I certainly believe that it was an answer. But now the church had a real problem on its hands.
There were all of these Christians who had compromised in the persecution, but they all wanted back in the church. And if the church just simply said," Okay, we know you're sorry. Come on back. Everything's fine." Well, that would be just endorsing that course of action. It'd be quite a slap in the face to the thousands of martyrs and the confessors, men and women who went to prison, endured tortures, rather than to deny Christ, even though they ended up not being put to death.
So the ministry in the church realized there was quite a problem here, and they were going to have to come up with a policy of how to deal with these people who were known as the lapsed LAP SED. Well, at the same time, now that the persecution was over, it was time to select a new bishop for the Church in Rome. And no doubt Novatian assumed that he would be the one chosen since he had been acting somewhat in that role during the persecution.
However, not all of the other elders, in fact, probably the majority of them, didn't subscribe to the rigorous type of Christianity that Novatian believed in. They knew if this man is appointed Bishop, everything is going to tighten up for all of us. And as for the lapsed, Novatian is expressing the opinion that they should never be given ecclesiastical forgiveness. Now we're going to talk a little bit more about that. That did not mean he didn't think God could forgive them.
But anyway, realizing all of these things, the presbyters bypass Novatian, and instead they picked another presbyter named Cornelius, who was much more lukewarm or moderate in his Christianity than Novatian. And he would keep the status quo the way it was. Now it's quite likely all of this was worked out under the table, and the elders knew what Cornelius would do and not do when they decided they would go ahead and nominate him for ordination as bishop.
Well, when Novatian and five of the other presbyters at Rome heard that it was going to be Cornelius who was going to be ordained, they were quite incensed. In fact, they refused to attend his ordination. Because to them, selecting him as bishop was basically saying that Rome was now officially accepting this easier, less disciplined type of Christianity that had led to all of these compromises during the persecution. And the fact that this was the church in Rome made it even more significant.
Because originally, say, for example, in the times of the New Testament, the church in Rome was a model of biblical Christianity to all of the other churches. It was, of course, the largest church in the world. And when I'm saying church, I mean all the Christians gathered in Rome, they didn't all meet in one place, the citywide church.
It was the largest, it was the most prosperous, meaning that often it was the Christians in Rome who were helping other churches where there had been famine or things like that because they had more material prosperity. And Rome had taken a position of leadership after the apostles had died. Now, it wasn't given any official authority over other churches, but other churches, particularly in the West, looked to Rome for leadership, for counsel advice, things like that.
And so if the church in Rome was basically officially taking a position of a mediocre kind of Christianity, well, that was going to spread worldwide. But there was this remnant in Rome who wanted to return to the kingdom kind of Christianity that was so representative of the Church in the 1st and 2nd centuries. They wanted a church that would emphasize holiness and uncompromising faith in the heat of persecution.
So they selected Novatian to be the bishop of Rome, and three bishops from the south of Italy came to Rome and ordained Novatian as the bishop of Rome. So now you had two rival bishops. You had Cornelius saying, well, I'm the official bishop of the Roman Church, and you had Novatian saying," No, I am." Well, who would win out? Well, the one who could persuade the rest of the church to support him in his claim as bishop.
So right after Novatian was ordained, both he and Cornelius quickly tried to win all of the other bishops, at least of the major cities throughout the empire, to their side. And they sent messengers and letters out throughout the empire. And the Bishop of Antioch sided with Novatian. He's the rightful bishop of Rome. But the bishops of Alexandria and Carthage sided with Cornelius. In fact, in the end, the vast majority of the bishops throughout the Empire sided with Cornelius.
He was selected by the proper procedures. There had been no improper things going on there, and the majority of the Christians in Rome wanted him to be bishop, including the majority of the presbyters or elders there. So in the end, Novatian was left with the ones there in Rome who had supported him, plus various scattered congregations throughout the world, or more typically, small groups of believers scattered in various churches throughout the world. So, Novatian was now faced with the issue.
Do I just drop all of this and go back into the church, or to those of us who all feel this way, do we continue on as a separate church outside of the main institutional body? And he chose the latter decision. And so he and his supporters organized a rival church. Now, in their minds, they weren't being schismatic. They felt it was Cornelius and the Lax Christians who had forced this upon them, that they were the ones leaving the road of true Christianity.
That the main body, who were calling themselves Catholics, meaning universal, that they were corrupting the body of Christ.
Now, the specific issue that the Novatianists and the Catholics took issue over was the question of what do you do with the Christians who denied Christ during the persecution, the ones who were called the" lapsed." Well, Cornelius and Cyprian and the majority of bishops, at least in the West, and I think all over the empire, felt like the Church should extend ecclesiastical forgiveness to these people if they were truly repentant and after they had spent a number of times a number of years as a penitent, being
barred from communion, but attending church.
And I know at least in one place in North Africa, the bishops decided ten years that someone who's denied Christ in persecution, particularly by offering a sacrifice to a pagan god, even though they're repentant or professed to be repentant, that they have to be simply hearers, barred from communion for ten years. Now, to most Christians living today, that would sound pretty strict. In fact, maybe even extremely severe.
Well, all I can say is it just shows the difference between the Church of today and the Church of the Third Century, because that was the view of the ones who were seen as worldly and lax, that we hold them out 10 years. The Novatianists said that the church should never extend ecclesiastical forgiveness to ones who sacrificed to idols, or any other major sin, the kind of sin that John described as a sin unto death. And they certainly felt like offering a sacrifice to a pagan god was a sin unto death.
Now, unless we misunderstand them, I want to make it clear that the Novatianists did not say the church should bar the door to those people. Don't ever let them back in the church again. They're out, that's it. And they didn't say that God would not ever forgive those people. But their position, particularly on the issue of denying Christ, was this: Look, Jesus Himself clearly said," He who denies me before man, I will deny before my Father." It's right there in the Scriptures.
So after Jesus said this, what right does the Church have to then extend ecclesiastical forgiveness to the very ones that Jesus said," I'm going to deny before my Father?" Now, if Jesus wants to extend extra mercy, if he wants to grant them pardon despite what he said, well, wonderful. But Jesus is the one and the only one who has the authority to do that. The Church has no authority to presume to do what Jesus has not made it clear that He is willing to do.
So the Novatianists encouraged the lapsed to come to church, to repent, to pray for God's mercy. And they believed that if a person was truly repentant, then they could reasonably expect that God would forbid them, excuse me, would forgive them, that this was not a sin unto death. They had not committed the unpardonable sin. So who was right? The Catholics or the Novatianists? Well, probably most of us are more comfortable with the Catholic position.
And again, when I'm saying Catholic, this isn't the Roman Catholic Church. The word Catholic simply meant universal, the worldwide church. That's how the term was used in the third century. It did later come to mean something more than that. I would say the Novatianist position is probably too harsh, but I understand where they're coming from. Now, if that's all their whole movement was about, was just that simple issue of do we admit the lapsed back into the church after a period of repentance?
If that's all it was, I would say that they were schismatics. I certainly wouldn't be giving a message about them as one of the kingdom movements. But there was something more to their movement than that. Because Novatian only lived seven years after his ordination. Just seven years after being ordained, Novatian was martyred. During the Valerian persecution under the Emperor Valerian.
So now if the issue was personalities or it was just dealing with that one issue, then I think the whole thing would have crumbled on his death. But the movement spread all throughout the Roman world, except in North Africa. I don't think they had any adherence in North Africa, but just about everywhere else, even though they were a minority, and the movement lasted 500 years.
Now, it's hard for me to believe that a movement that was based on nothing else in that one issue of discipline, let alone on personal jealousy, would have even lasted 50 years, let alone 500. So that tells me, OK, there is something more here involved than simply what the record shows. And that's because I think, as I've said, that their writings ended up being destroyed.
We have Novatian's writings before he broke with Rome, but everything they wrote afterwards has pretty much been destroyed or was never preserved. But what I'm seeing here, the scenario that I'm seeing, is actually not too unusual with kingdom movements. Often there is a particular issue that ends up being the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. In this instance, the straw was the issue of extending ecclesiastical forgiveness to the ones who denied Christ during persecution.
Now, as I said, I think actually Novatian was wrong on this issue. I think the Catholics were right. A long period of repentance, but that the Church can grant forgiveness to those who are truly repentant. But this isn't unusual with kingdom movements. Often they start over an issue that I would say, and probably most of you, they're wrong on that point. But often, that issue is not the totality of what that group was about. In fact, often it was more of a side issue.
An example would be the Anabaptists of the 1500s. They were given the name because they didn't accept the statewide enforced infant baptism, that everyone who's born suddenly becomes a member of the church, regardless of what kind of Christians or even if their parents are believers at all. And they said," No, you know we're going to have voluntary baptism of people who believe." Well, that's not the flagship of anabaptism.
I mean, that was a big issue to them, but there were issues that were far greater and that far more identified that movement. But that became the flag issue that they were persecuted over. Well, I think it was the same with Novatians. I don't think that the Novatian movement was all about extending ecclesiastical forgiveness or not to the lapsed. I think that was simply a lightning rod that sort of forced the hand of people because it was the immediate thing. We have to make a decision right now.
And the ones who were very much scandalized by the fact that so many had denied Christ and that the Church needed to take steps to regain its first love. But see, these deeper issues that were behind that, often those issues don't come to the forefront. Often they're hard to verbalize. But I think what the Novatians were seeing was that there was now a general, a persistent pattern of compromising apostolic Christianity, that the church was losing its first love.
They were seeing that the church now was beginning to love the world, which meant that they were an enemy of God. So I think the Novatianists were right in their estimation of the condition, the spiritual condition of the Church, even though they were wrong on the flagship issue, the lightning rod issue that started the movement. I say that the Novatians were accurate in their assessment of the state of the Third Century Church, because look what happened 75 years later.
The church as a body had compromised with the world. It was becoming a state institution. Christians were killing each other with a sword, and the church was now persecuting heretics and dissidents. And I don't believe that the Church of the 4th century would have compromised so quickly with Constantine if it had not already lost its first love, at least in a significant measure. So I think the Novatianists ended up being in the right place at the right time.
Since they had left the Catholic Church before all of the Constantinian compromises had happened, they were largely spared from these corruptions. So they were able to continue on primitive Christianity, Kingdom Christianity, long after the institutional church had compromised with the world. In fact, I'm sure as the Catholic Church went down the road of worldliness and union with the state, the Novatianists no doubt felt quite vindicated. Now you might be wondering, doctrinally, what did the Novatianists believe?
Well, the answer is that generally speaking, they believe no differently than the Catholics of the 3rd century. In other words, if you don't like the beliefs of the early Christians, you're not going to like the beliefs of the Novatianists, because they're essentially one and the same. The only issue that anyone mentions is their differing view on treatment of Christians who had committed a sin unto death, that such sins should be only forgiven by God, not directly by the Church.
In fact, during their entire 500-year history, none of their detractors, none of the Catholic writers, accused them of holding to any heretical views or different views than the rest of the church. Of course, over the centuries, the Roman Catholic Church did add quite a number of beliefs, particularly in the West. And it would appear that the Novatianists were insulated from those theological changes. But we don't really know because not much is said about them after about the year 425.
They're just very scant references to them. So, because we don't have any of the Novatianist writings, we don't know exactly what their feelings were about the rise of mariology in the church, the combination of church and state, how they felt about the introduction of statues and images in the churches. My guess is that they preach against all of these innovations, because if they went along with the Catholics, well, certainly at some point, they would have just joined back with the Catholics.
What would have been the point of being persecuted if they weren't holding to some beliefs that were different? But we don't really know that for certain. Plus, we have to keep in mind that every movement inevitably goes through changes over the centuries if the movement lasts more than a century. So often that a movement that starts off with a lot of faith and vigor sometimes becomes quite lukewarm after a century or two. That may have happened to the Novatianists, but we don't really know.
In fact, we would know almost nothing about the Novatianists after the death of Novatian himself, if it were not for the church historian Socrates who wrote around the year 439. This was nearly 200 years after the beginning of the Novatianist movement. Now when I mentioned Socrates, this isn't the same person as the famous Greek philosopher. The historian Socrates was a Catholic Christian who, like I say, lived in the early 5th century.
And he seems to have been sympathetic towards the Novatianists because he couldn't help but notice their godliness, particularly in contrast to the worldly Catholic Church around him. So as a result, he does make a number of references to the Novatianists in his church history, and most of these are quite favorable towards them. At the same time, he does point out internal controversies and schisms that they were having during his lifetime.
Socrates in his history relates several interesting accounts about the Novatianists. They had the misfortune of being persecuted not only by many of the Catholic emperors, but also by the Roman Arian emperors when they were in power as well. Anyway, during the reign of one of the Arian rulers, the Novatianists, I think this was in Constantinople, got wind that the Roman government was going to demolish one of their churches.
So all of the members of the congregation rallied together, and they went down to the church building, and they themselves dismantled it stone by stone, timber by timber, tile by tile. And because they all worked together in unison, they were able to get the whole building taken apart before the Emperor's soldiers got there. Then they took the materials to a more isolated location where they wouldn't be molested, and they rebuilt the church there.
Years later, when the Arian persecution ended, they took the building back apart again and they rebuilt it at its former location. Socrates also relates how when Emperor Theodosius convened a meeting of all the various Christian groups and sects who were not part of the Catholic Church. And after hearing them all out and hearing their reasons why they would not join with the Catholic Church, he ended up condemning all of them except the Novatianists.
He allowed the Novatianists to continue to have peaceful possession of their own church buildings because they held to the Nicene definition of Christ's divinity. As a result of this, the Novatianist churches flourished during his reign. In fact, they had three large congregations in Constantinople, the capital city. Socrates also relates two miraculous events that occurred concerning one of their bishops named Paul. Bishop Paul was an educated man who had taught Latin for a living.
However, after he was made bishop, he devoted himself to a very simple, disciplined life, very similar to that that was lived by the monks of that time period. He fasted and prayed regularly. He took care of the poor, and he regularly visited those in prison. Often he would intercede on behalf of various prisoners before their judges, and because of his reputation for such godliness, often the judges would honor his requests.
Anyway, while he was bishop, there was a certain Jew who found that he could receive all sorts of gifts by pretending to convert to Christianity. Now this was in the late 300s when Christianity itself was quite different from what it had started out in being. Anyway, this Jew would go to one church, get baptized, receive gifts there, and then he would go to some other church in a different part of the city, where they didn't know him, and then he'd do the same thing all over again.
And once he made most of the Catholic churches, then he went to several of the non-Catholic ones. And so in the course of his carrying out this fraud, he made it to the Novatian Church where Bishop Paul presided. And he told the bishop that he wanted to become a Christian and be baptized. So Paul told him that first he would have to be instructed in the faith, excuse me, faith, and then he would have to fast and pray for several days.
Well, the Jewish man complied with this, at least for a while, but he didn't want to fast for an extended period of time. So he kept imploring the bishop," Please let me be baptized now." So finally, Paul said," Okay, we'll allow you to be baptized." So he led the Jew to the baptismal font that they had in their church building, which was a large pool with a drain at the bottom of it. And the water could be drained out into the public drainage system from there.
But anyway, they had the pool filled with water, and the bishop prepared to baptize this Jewish man when suddenly he noticed that all of the water in the pool was gone. He assumed that one of the drains hadn't been fixed securely, so he double checked them all. He had the pool filled up again with water. And then when the Jew prepared to step into the water, suddenly the water vanished again. Well, Paul, after this second time, sensed that God was doing something here.
So he immediately told the man that either he must be some kind of evildoer, or else he had already been baptized before. Well, when people gathered around to see what was happening, someone in the crowd recognized him as someone who had been baptized just a few weeks before by another bishop in the same city. So his fraud was found out. Another account that Socrates relates concerns a great fire that had broken out in Constantinople.
In fact, it was the greatest fire that the city had ever endured up to that time, and it ended up destroying the greater part of the city. It swept through the public baths, the granaries, and destroyed about everything in its path. Well, finally, it approached the church building where Bishop Paul presided. So the bishop ran to the church and knelt down beside the altar, praying to God to preserve the church.
And he didn't just pray for his own church building, but for the whole city as well, praying that God would spare the rest of the city. And he stayed there at the altar as the fire approached the church building at the risk of his own life. According to Socrates, the fire reached this church building. The flames came in through the windows and the door, but they did no damage. In fact, the fire destroyed all of the buildings that surrounded the church, but the church building itself escaped unscathed.
And the fire raged on for two days and nights more before it was finally extinguished. And the people of the city were just in utter amazement that this one building, a Novatianist church, had been unharmed, that most of the people of the city began to regard it as a place of deserving a special veneration. I mean, even pagans were noticing something special about this church.
And thereafter, according to Socrates, the Novatianist congregation every year commemorated this miracle and the preservation of their building. Well, throughout his history, Socrates fills in a lot of the events about the Novatianists up to the year 439. But again, now his history is a history of the Catholic Church, of the Church in general. These are just small items scattered throughout his history dealing with the Catholic Church.
But beyond Socrates, we really don't have a whole lot of information about the Novatianists after the death of Novatian. We do know that their sanctity and their moral vigor attracted quite a number of adherents. And their overall vision of a Messianic Church, a Kingdom Church, one that was heroic and always at conflict with the world, and yet never being conquered by the world. That was what they stood for.
We know that they spread all throughout the east, which is where they were the strongest, even though Novatian himself had been a presbyter and then later a bishop there in Rome. We know they spread down into Egypt and as far west as Spain. We know, for example, that in the year 429, the pope at that time, Celestine, took away their church buildings there in the city of Rome.
We know that they were around at the beginning of the 7th century because the patriarch of Alexandria, a man named Eulogius, attacked them and denounced them in his writings. After that, we don't know a whole lot more about them. Most historians think that the Novatianists were either eventually persecuted out of existence, or that their numbers gradually dwindle and they were eventually absorbed back into the Catholic Church. We really don't know.
All we know is that they disappear from the historical records after the 7th century. Now I've read romanticized stories about the Novatianists that have them surviving all the way into the Middle Ages and eventually connecting up with the Waldensians. But there's no historical evidence whatsoever to support those kind of stories. It would be nice to think that something like that happened, but there's just no evidence for it.
We do know, though, that after the Novatianists, there were other kingdom groups, and they all had essentially the same vision of a purified church that would be separate from the world. Like the Novatianists later groups, like the Waldensians, the Lollards, and eventually the Anabaptists, they were all willing to suffer persecution from the Catholics rather than to accept a watered-down, compromised form of Christianity.
These groups all eventually came to the same conclusion, and that was that it was hopeless to try to reform the institutional church, the Catholic Church. Any vision of restoring primitive Christianity was going to have to be carried on outside of the Catholic Church. So whatever all of the facts actually were surrounding the original founding of the Novatianist Movement, the original break they had with the rest of the church.
We do know this, that the work and the suffering of Novatian and his supporters at that time wasn't in vain. Because of what they did, a church that maintained much of the spirit and the lifestyle of the primitive church continued on for at least 500 years. Otherwise, it would have largely been snuffed out with the things that happened with Constantine. And we know this, that the Novatians left a witness and other groups later on through the centuries were able to build on that witness.
And like the Novatianists, they too could work towards the restoration of apostolic kingdom Christianity.