Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

CYPRIAN AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
The influence of two great North African bishops, both of Carthage, must be mentioned in
relation to Christian Unity.
The first is Cyprian (c.200-258 AD). Cyprian was born and brought up in an upper-class
pagan family and was converted to Christ as a young man. Intensely earnest about his
Christian faith, on baptism he forsook pagan ideas and literature, concentrating solely on the
Christian Scriptures. In his rejection of Greek pagan ideas he was like Tertullian (c.170-200
AD), another great church leader in Carthage, who once wrote, „What has Jerusalem to do
with Athens?‟ Some Christian leaders in the Early Church, like Clement of Alexandria
(c.150-215 AD), had tried to encompass some aspects of Greek philosophy within Christian
truth; not so Cyprian or Tertullian.
Cyprian is particularly important to a history of Christian Unity in that he lived and suffered
during times of persecution and had to deal with the question of „Does the Church have a
place for Christians who have fallen away from the faith but want to be restored to the
Church? Is the Church only for those who are strong and pure, or has it a place for the weak
and sinning?‟
This is a question that Christians in Eastern Europe had to face on the demise of Communism
at the end of the 1980s. During the 1960s and 70s I got to know one or two churches behind
the „Iron Curtain‟ and saw how one church dealt with one of its members who had, for 20
years, gone over to the Communists, becoming a Party member and spying on his fellow
Christians. When he wished to rejoin the church he had left, it is good to record that he was
freely welcomed back into fellowship.
Cyprian had fled in the Decian Persecution (205-251 AD), the first systematic persecutions of
Christians, and, returning to Carthage, found that the Church there (and generally throughout
the empire) was bitterly divided about what to do with the „lapsed‟. The Emperor had
demanded that all citizens should make a pagan sacrifice and some Christians did (named the
„sacrificati‟); others (the „libellatici‟) bought certificates („libelli pacis‟) saying they had
sacrificed when they had not.
Cyprian also found that those who had stood firm (known as the „confessors‟) were easing
the lapsed back into the Church. Cyprian influenced two church councils in Carthage which
followed (251 and 252 AD) to lay down the moderate discipline that the lapsed should only
be allowed back into Church after due repentance and penance. But for Cyprian it was the
local bishops who had the rule in the matter.
The persecution had given rise to schisms of believers who could not accept such easy
restoration of the lapsed, and Cyprian‟s high view of the authority of the bishop came into
play. As long ago as the middle of the 1 st Century, Ignatius of Antioch had insisted that
nothing ought to be done without the authority of the local bishop; Cyprian followed this
tradition. For him, the question of the lapsed was a matter for the bishops.
The consequence of this was that the Church of the (accredited) bishops became the only
place where a Christian could find his home. Unity was the issue. Outside of the Church, the
single, universal church throughout the world, there was no salvation. The charismatic
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