The bishop of bishops argument
Cyprian of Carthage on church unity
Cyprian becomes bishop of Carthage around 249 AD and immediately faces a crisis that will define the rest of his career: what do you do with the people who compromised under persecution?
The Decian persecution requires all citizens to obtain a certificate — a libellus — confirming they have sacrificed to the Roman gods. Many Christians buy or bribe their way to certificates without actually sacrificing. Many actually sacrifice. When the persecution eases, they want to come back to the church.
The confessors — the ones who held firm in prison but were not executed — have been granting certificates of forgiveness to the lapsed, sometimes wholesale, sometimes for money. Bishops are divided about whether these certificates are valid. Schism is erupting across North Africa.
Cyprian writes. He writes constantly — letters, treatises, pastoral letters, theological arguments. His On the Unity of the Catholic Church is the first systematic treatment of ecclesiology — the theology of what the church actually is.
His central argument: the bishop is the principle of unity in a local church. Schism from the bishop is schism from the church. Schism from the church is separation from salvation.
He is also, simultaneously, fighting with the bishop of Rome over who has authority to decide these questions. He insists that all bishops are equal. Rome insists otherwise.
Cyprian is holding two convictions in tension simultaneously: the church must be united, and no single bishop is supreme. He never fully resolves the tension. The church has been arguing about it ever since.
“You cannot have God for your Father who does not have the Church for your mother.”
— Cyprian, On the Unity of the Catholic Church 6, c. 251 AD
“that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that you sent me.”
Cyprian's famous line — you cannot have God for your Father who does not have the Church for your mother — is sometimes quoted as a proof-text for ecclesiastical authoritarianism. It is not that.
It is a pastoral observation: the Christian faith is not a solitary relationship between an individual and God. It is mediated through community, formed in community, sustained in community. The person who decides they can follow Jesus without the church has usually decided they can follow a Jesus they have largely designed themselves.
The church is difficult. It is full of compromised, failing, arguing people — exactly like the Carthaginian church Cyprian was trying to hold together. That difficulty is not a bug. It is the point.
In what ways have you tried to have God without the church? What has that cost you?