Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

Donatus led a protest group on the election of a bishop to the see of Carthage, North Africa.
This was on the grounds that the bishop had been consecrated by a „traditor‟, that is, one who
in the heat of persecution had handed over copies of the Scriptures to the Roman authorities,
who destroyed them. As in the case of the Novatians, Donatus‟s followers wanted to see the
church purged of compromise and to see it following a rigorist life-style.
Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) saw the danger of Donatism and wrote strongly against
it. The Christians of Hippo where he had become bishop were divided into Catholic and
Donatist factions.
Theologically the two sides had much in common, but they differed strongly on the nature of
the church. Some extreme Donatists in North Africa took to violence against the Catholics
and so brought the Donatists as a whole into disrepute.
The question at issue was, is the church a company who are holy, pure, and untainted by any
compromise, as the Donatists held it to be, or is it a company of less than perfect, failing
sinners, as Catholics held and Augustine taught? These differences of view are still with us
today, though it seems that the Donatist view is still a minority one among the mainline
churches. The church is a school for sinners, not a sanctuary for saints.
Sabelianism
About 250 AD the Church in Rome had to deal with a view of the relation of Father and Son
in the Godhead which was decidedly unorthodox. The catholic doctrine was that the Godhead
comprised three distinct Persons in one unity of Godhead. A teacher called Sabellius
proposed that there is no real distinction between the Father and the Son, that the two are
modes or aspects of the One God. His aim was to safeguard the oneness of Deity and, by
blurring the distinctions between the Father and the Son, show that the Father could be said to
have suffered on the Cross.
Arianism
Arianism was the most important and persistent heresy which came to a head in the early 4 th
Century. In Alexandria, Egypt, an ancient city of learning and Greek culture, the Christian
Church had become well established. It upheld a high view of the full deity of Christ. But a
presbyter of the city, Arius, taught otherwise. Jesus could not be equated with deity and
though he could be called both Son of God and logos (John 1.1), he was a created being and
not eternal with the Father, not sharing his deity. Arius probably taught that there was a time
when the Son „was not‟.
His views were refuted by many, especially a champion of orthodoxy, Athanasius (c.296-
373 AD). Arius‟s views were condemned at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), called by
Emperor Constantine, who suggested that the term „homoousios‟ (of the same substance)
should be applied to Christ‟s relationship with the Father. The term was embraced by the
Council and became, for subsequent Councils and Creeds of the Church, the classic way of
defining the relationship of Father and Son.
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