Cyprian

Overview

Cyprian was bishop of Carthage in Roman North Africa in the mid-third century.¹ He spent much of his episcopate confronting a crisis over whether Christians who had sacrificed to pagan gods under persecution, and so lapsed from the faith, could be restored to the church.² His letters on that question, and on the unity of the episcopate, became standard reference points for later writers on church government and discipline: John Calvin quotes him repeatedly against Roman claims to papal primacy, and Herman Bavinck cites the same material independently in his own account of the early church’s view of the episcopate.³⁴

Life and Ministry

A persecution produced large numbers of Christians who had sacrificed to pagan gods rather than face death, and when it eased, Cyprian faced the question of whether, and on what terms, these “lapsed” believers could be readmitted to the church.² A rigorist party held that they should never be restored; a rival party, the Novatians, made the same demand part of a formal schism.⁵ Cyprian took a middle course: those who repented were readmitted, but only after solemn penance culminating in reconciliation by the laying on of hands, a rite he called peace.²

Later writers who quote Cyprian’s own correspondence find a man more pastorally lenient than the custom of his day. Answering critics who found him too soft on the lapsed, he wrote: “Our patience, facility, and humanity are ready to all who come. I wish all to be brought back into the Church: I wish all our fellow-soldiers to be contained within the camp of Christ and the mansions of God the Father. I forgive all; I disguise much; from an earnest desire of collecting the brotherhood, I do not minutely scrutinise all the faults which have been committed against God.”² Calvin, who otherwise judges the formal penitential system of Cyprian’s era excessively severe, singles out this letter to argue that Cyprian personally “disapproved” of the public rigor even where he submitted to it.²

Theological Contribution

On the unity of the episcopate, Cyprian argued that the bishops of the church, though many, together held a single, undivided office: “The episcopate is one, part of which is held entire by each bishop, and the Church is one, which, by the increase of fecundity, extends more widely in numbers. As there are many rays of the sun and one light, many branches of a tree and one trunk… so the Church… sends her rays over the whole globe, and yet is one light… still the head is one, and the source one.”³ Bavinck cites the same teaching independently, in a translation that brings out its collegial force: “all bishops are equal, maintain a certain independence, share in the same episcopal dignity, are as it were one bishop, are jointly the head of the church,” bound to preserve “the love of [our] heart, the honor of [our] colleagues, the bond of faith and the concord of the priesthood.”⁴ Both writers read Cyprian as evidence against a later Roman development: in the third century, no single bishop, including the bishop of Rome, held authority over the others.³⁴

On restoring the lapsed, Cyprian’s own description of the process became the standard account later writers drew on. Those who had sacrificed under persecution “act as penitents for a certain time, next they come to confession, and receive the right of communion by the laying on of hands of the bishop and clergy,” with the consent of the congregation required alongside the bishop’s own judgment.² Cyprian opposed the Novatian position that the lapsed could never be restored at all, insisting instead that repentance, followed by formal penance, could bring them back to communion.⁵²

On baptism, Cyprian, agreeing with a council held at Carthage in 256, argued that infants should be baptized on the second or third day after birth rather than waiting for the eighth day, on the ground that an infant bears no sin of its own to wait out, only Adam’s inherited guilt.⁶ Charles Hodge independently cites the same letter as evidence that the early church already read Adam’s sin as the ground of infant guilt and infant baptism alike.⁷

Historical Significance

Calvin devotes an entire chapter of the Institutes to turning Cyprian’s own words against the Roman primacy he had never himself claimed for any single see, arguing that “the true method of unity is that which Cyprian admirably describes,” a unity of equals rather than of one bishop over the rest.³ Bavinck extends the same history: the early church’s model of collegial, equal bishops, which Cyprian still held, was gradually displaced by Rome’s claim to primacy, a development Bavinck credits to Leo I in the fifth century, not to Cyprian’s own.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 13, “The Washing of Regeneration,” 144-154. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 12, 453-471. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
John Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 6, 353-364. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
John Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 1, 280-303. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 128-276, at 149-150. ↩