Donatism

A church of martyrs asks a question

In the Great Persecution that began in 303, some North African clergy saved their lives by handing over the Scriptures to be burned. When Caecilian became bishop of Carthage around 311, many refused him, believing he had been consecrated by one of these ‘traitors’, and set up a rival bishop. The movement took its name from Donatus, who soon led it.

Their question was a serious one. How could a church that had kept faith at the cost of its martyrs' blood receive the betrayers as if nothing had happened? Christ means to present his bride "holy and blameless", "without stain or wrinkle" (Ephesians 5:27), and the Donatists held that the church on earth must already be so. Sacraments and ordinations given by clergy in grave sin were void. Following the martyr-bishop Cyprian (d. 258), who had taught that there is no baptism outside the church, they rebaptized those who came to them from the catholic church.

Augustine's answer

Councils at Rome (313) and Arles (314) ruled for Caecilian, but the division persisted for generations. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, answered that the church is holy because Christ its head is holy, not because its members or ministers are spotless. The church without blemish is what Christ will make her at the last day; in this age wheat and weeds grow side by side. He read the parable of the weeds as a picture of the church:

Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat into my barn.

Matthew 13:30

So too with the sacraments. Christ is the one who baptizes; the minister is only his servant. "Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow" (1 Corinthians 3:7). Augustine asks, "What hindrance is the badness of the minister, when the Lord is good?" Augustine Christ's baptism, he says, is "so holy a sacrament, that not even a homicide's ministration can pollute it" Augustine. Baptism given in the name of the Trinity is therefore not repeated, though Augustine taught that it bears its fruit only in the love and unity of the church.

The story has a dark side. Donatist zealots attacked catholic clergy; imperial laws bore down on the Donatists, more heavily after a conference at Carthage in 411 ruled against them. Augustine came to defend this coercion, and later centuries used his reasoning to justify persecuting dissenters.

What the churches kept

Most churches today hold that a minister's sin does not void a sacrament. The Catholic Church teaches that the sacraments act ‘by the work performed’ (ex opere operato), not by the minister's worthiness. The Augsburg Confession, article 8, condemns by name the Donatists, who denied that the ministry of evil men may be used in the church Augsburg Confession, art. 8, and the Westminster Confession says:

neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the piety or intention of him that doth administer it, but upon the work of the Spirit, and the word of institution

Westminster Confession 27.3

The Donatists' concern was not foolish. The church is called to holiness, and several Reformed confessions count church discipline among the marks of a true church. But the church's purity is not ours to complete, and who truly belongs to Christ will be shown at the last day; Augustine's mixed church foreshadows the later distinction between the visible and invisible church. At the Reformation opponents sometimes called the Anabaptists new Donatists, but the Anabaptists' question was different: not the worthiness of the minister but the faith of the one baptized. The story is told more fully in the lesson Augustine, doctor of grace.