Half Alive, Not Dead

If we refuse the repentance of people who can still face their own conscience with some confidence, because what they did can be borne with, then at once — along with their wives and the children they had kept safe — the devil’s invitation hurries them off into heresy or into a split. And it will be charged against us on the day of judgment that we did not care for the wounded sheep, and that for the sake of one wounded sheep we lost many sound ones. The Lord left the ninety-nine that were whole and went after the one that had wandered off and worn itself out, and when he had found it he carried it home on his own shoulders. We do not so much as look for the lapsed; we drive them off when they come to us. And while the false prophets never stop laying waste and tearing at Christ’s flock, we hand the dogs and the wolves their opportunity: the people a hateful persecution failed to destroy, we ruin by our own hardness and our own want of feeling. [a]

And what becomes, dearest brother, of what the apostle says? “I please everyone in everything, not looking for what is good for me but for what is good for the many, so that they may be saved. Follow my example, as I follow Christ’s.” And again: “To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak.” And again: “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; and if one part rejoices, all the parts rejoice with it.”

The philosophers and the Stoics work on a different principle, dearest brother. They say that all sins are equal, and that a serious man should not be easily moved. But there is a wide difference between Christians and philosophers. And when the apostle says, “Watch out that nobody carries you off through philosophy and empty deceit,” we are to stay clear of the things that do not come from God’s kindness but are born out of the presumption of an over-rigid philosophy. [e]

About Moses, moreover, we find it said in the Scriptures, “Now the man Moses was very gentle”; and the Lord says in his Gospel, “Be merciful, as your Father also had mercy on you”; and again, “The healthy have no need of a doctor; the sick do.” What sort of doctoring can a man practice who says, “I treat only the healthy, who have no need of a doctor”? We ought to give our help and our healing art to those who are wounded. And let us not think them dead. Let us rather look at them as lying half alive — men we can see were wounded in a persecution that killed; and if they had been altogether dead, they would never afterwards have become, out of those very men, confessors and martyrs.

But there is something in them that a later repentance can strengthen into faith, and repentance arms strength for what is good — strength that could not be armed at all if a man were to fall away through despair. That is what happens if he is cut off from the church harshly and cruelly and turns to the ways of the nations and to the world’s business; or if, once the church has thrown him out, he goes over to the heretics and the splinter groups. And there, even if he is put to death afterwards for the name, he is still standing outside the church, cut off from her unity and from her love, and he cannot be crowned in his death. [h]

And so it was decided, dearest brother, after each man’s case had been looked into, that for the present those who had only taken certificates should be received back, and that those who had actually sacrificed should be helped at the point of death — because there is no confessing among the dead, and because nobody can be pressed by us into repentance if the fruit of repentance is taken away from him. If the fight comes first, he will have been strengthened by us and will be found already armed for the fight. But if sickness bears down on him before the fight comes, he goes with the comfort of peace and communion.

We do not prejudge, though; the Lord is to be the judge. Only this: if he finds the repentance of these sinners full and sound, he will then ratify what we have settled here. And if anyone plays on us with a pretence of repentance, God is not mocked, and he looks into a man’s heart; he will judge the things we looked into imperfectly, and the Lord will correct the sentence his servants passed. [k]

And still, dearest brother, we ought to remember what is written: “A brother who helps a brother will be lifted up.” And the apostle has said: “Each of you look to yourselves, in case you are tempted too. Carry one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfill the law of Christ.” And when he rebukes the proud and breaks down their arrogance, he says in his letter, “Let the man who thinks he is standing watch out that he does not fall”; and in another place he says, “Who are you to judge somebody else’s servant? He stands or falls to his own master — and he will stand, for God is able to make him stand.”

John, too, shows that Jesus Christ the Lord is our advocate, the one who pleads for our sins. He says: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ our support; and he himself is the offering that puts our sins away.” And Paul the apostle wrote in his letter: “If, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, how much more, now that we have been counted righteous by his blood, will we be saved from wrath through him.”

When we take his love and mercy into account, we ought not to be so bitter and cruel and unfeeling in the way we look after the brothers. We should mourn with those who mourn, and weep with those who weep, and lift them up as much as we can by the help and the comfort of our love — neither too rough and too stubborn in pushing their repentance away, nor, on the other side, too slack and too easy in handing them communion recklessly. [n]

Look: a wounded brother lies there on the field of battle, struck down by the enemy. On one side the devil is working to kill the man he has wounded; on this side Christ is urging that the man he redeemed should not be altogether lost. Which of the two do we help? Whose side are we on? Do we take the devil’s part, so that he can finish the job, and walk past our brother where he lies flat and lifeless, the way the priest and the Levite did in the Gospel? Or do we do what priests of God and of Christ should do, and copy what Christ both taught and did, and snatch the wounded man out of the enemy’s jaws, so that we can keep him, healed, for God the judge?

And do not think, dearest brother, that the courage of the brothers will be reduced by this, or that martyrdoms will run short, because repentance is relaxed for the lapsed and the hope of peace is held out to those who repent. The strength of men who really believe stays unshaken. In people who fear God and love him with their whole heart, their integrity holds steady and firm. [p]

We grant adulterers a time of repentance too, and give them peace. Yet virginity does not run short in the church because of it, and the glorious purpose of continence does not go slack through other people’s sins. The church is crowned with so many virgins and flourishes; chastity and modesty keep the level of their own glory. The strength of continence is not broken down because repentance and pardon are made easy for the adulterer.

It is one thing to stand and wait for pardon, and another to reach glory. It is one thing to be thrown into prison and not to come out until you have paid the last quadrans, and another to be handed the wages of faith and courage on the spot. It is one thing to be tortured a long while for your sins, and cleansed, and purged for a long time by fire; another to have purged every sin by suffering. It is one thing, in short, to be left hanging until God passes sentence on the day of judgment; another to be crowned by the Lord at once.

And in fact some of the overseers here in our province, among those who went before us, thought that peace was not to be granted to adulterers at all, and shut the door of repentance against adultery altogether. Still, they did not withdraw from the body of their fellow overseers, and they did not break the unity of the whole church by pressing their severity or their censure — as though, because some men granted peace to adulterers, the man who did not grant it should be cut off from the church. While the bond of harmony holds, and while the undivided pledge of the whole church lasts, each overseer arranges and directs what he himself does, and will have to give the Lord an account of what he meant by it. [r]

But I am amazed that some are so stubborn that they think repentance is not to be granted to the lapsed, and suppose that pardon is to be refused to a man who repents, when it is written, “Remember where you have fallen from, and repent, and do the first works.” That is certainly said to a man who has plainly fallen, and whom the Lord is urging to get up again by what he does; because it is also written, “Almsgiving delivers from death” — and not, of course, from the death that the blood of Christ once put out, and from which the saving grace of baptism and of our Redeemer has already delivered us, but from the death that creeps in afterwards through sins. [u]

And in another place time is granted for repentance, and the Lord threatens the man who does not repent. He says: “I have many things against you, because you allow your wife Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and to lead my servants astray into sexual immorality and into eating what has been sacrificed to idols. And I gave her time to repent, and she will not repent of her immorality. Look — I will throw her onto a bed, and those who commit adultery with her into terrible trouble, unless they repent of what they have done.” The Lord would certainly not be urging them to repent if he were not promising mercy to those who do. And in the Gospel he says, “I tell you, in the same way there will be joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, more than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.” For since it is written, “God did not make death, and he takes no pleasure in the destruction of the living,” then plainly the one who wants nobody lost wants sinners to repent and by repentance to come back into life.

So he cries out through Joel the prophet and says: “And now, this is what the Lord your God says: turn to me with your whole heart, and with fasting and with weeping and with mourning; and tear your heart open, not your clothes, and come back to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and full of kindness, and he thinks better of the harm he had appointed.” In the Psalms, too, we read God’s rebuke and God’s kindness together. He threatens at the same moment as he spares; he punishes in order to correct, and when he has corrected he keeps. “I will visit their offenses with a rod,” he says, “and their wrongdoing with lashes. All the same, I will not take my mercy from them altogether.”

The Lord also, in his Gospel, sets out the love of God the Father and says: “Which of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? So if you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?” Here the Lord is setting the father a man has in the flesh alongside the eternal and open-handed love of God the Father. [x]

But think about it. Suppose that evil father here on earth has been deeply offended by a sinful and worthless son, and then sees the same son changed later on, the sins of his earlier life put away, brought back to sober and decent living and to the discipline of a clean life by the grief of his repentance. The father is glad, he gives thanks, and with the eagerness of a father’s delight he throws his arms around the son he had once cast out. How much more, then, does that one true Father — good, merciful, loving; who is himself Goodness and Mercy and Love — rejoice over the repentance of his own sons! He does not threaten punishment against people who are now repenting, or mourning and lamenting; he promises pardon and kindness instead. That is why the Lord in the Gospel calls those who mourn blessed: the man who mourns calls mercy out. The man who is stubborn and proud piles up anger against himself, and the punishment of the judgment that is coming.

And so, dearest brother, we have decided this. Those who do not repent, and who give no evidence of grief for their sins with their whole heart and with an open, spoken lament, are to be shut out completely from the hope of communion and peace if they only begin to beg for it in the middle of sickness and danger. It is not repentance for sin that drives them to ask; it is the warning of death pressing on them. And a man who never thought about the fact that he was going to die does not deserve to be comforted when he dies.

Now, dearest brother, about the character of Novatian. You asked for word to be written to you about what heresy he had brought in. Know first of all that we ought not even to be curious about what he teaches, so long as he teaches outside the fence of unity. Whoever he is, and whatever he is, a man who is not in the church of Christ is not a Christian. He may boast of himself and announce his philosophy or his eloquence in lofty words; but a man who has not kept brotherly love and the oneness of the church has lost even what he was before. [y]

Unless he strikes you as an overseer — a man who, after an overseer had been made in the church by sixteen fellow overseers, works with bribes to have himself made an adulterous and outside overseer by the hands of deserters. There is one church, spread by Christ throughout the whole world into many limbs, and one office of overseer, spread through the harmonious number of many overseers. In the teeth of what God handed down, in the teeth of the joined and everywhere fastened unity of the whole church, this man is trying to make a human church, and is sending his new apostles through a great many cities to lay some new foundations of his own appointing. In every city and through all the provinces there are overseers already appointed, men old in years, sound in faith, tested in trouble, put on the proscription lists in the persecution — and he dares to create other, false overseers over them. As if he could either wander over the whole world with the persistence of his new venture, or break apart the framework of the church’s body by spreading his own quarrel through it! He does not know that men who split the church are always hot at the start, but cannot grow or add to what they have unlawfully begun; they collapse at once, and their evil rivalry collapses with them.

And even if he had been made an overseer before this, he could not hold the office now, since he has cut himself off from the body of his fellow overseers and from the unity of the church. The apostle warns us that we should hold one another up and not withdraw from the unity God appointed, and he says: “Bearing with one another in love, working hard to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” So the man who keeps neither the unity of the Spirit nor the bond of peace, and separates himself from the company of the church and from the assembly of the priests, can have neither the power nor the honor of an overseer, since he has refused to keep either the unity or the peace of that office.

And then think what a swelling of arrogance it is, what a forgetting of humility and gentleness, what a boasting of his own pride, that a man should either dare, or think he is able, to do what the Lord did not grant even to the apostles: that he should think he can tell the weeds from the wheat; that, as if the winnowing shovel had been handed to him and the threshing floor were his to clear, he should set about separating the chaff from the grain; and that, since the apostle says, “In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of clay,” he should think it is for him to pick out the vessels of gold and silver, and to look down on the vessels of wood and clay, throw them away and condemn them — when the wooden vessels are not burned up until the day of the Lord, in the flame of God’s own burning, and the clay ones are broken only by the one to whom the rod of iron has been given. [ad]

Or if he appoints himself the searcher and the judge of hearts and inmost thoughts, let him judge in every case alike. He knows what is written — “Look, you have been made well; sin no more, in case something worse happens to you” — so let him separate the swindlers and the adulterers from his own side and from his own company. An adulterer’s case is by a long way both graver and worse than the case of a man who took a certificate, because the second man sinned under compulsion and the first by his own free choice. The man with the certificate thought it was enough for him that he had not sacrificed, and a mistake led him wrong. The adulterer has broken into another man’s marriage, or gone into a brothel, down into the sewer and the filthy pit of the crowd, and has fouled with disgusting uncleanness a body that had been made holy, and God’s temple. As the apostle says: “Every sin a man commits is outside the body; but the man who is sexually immoral sins against his own body.” [ae]

And yet even to these people repentance is granted, and the hope of lamenting and making amends is left open, according to the saying of the same apostle: “I am afraid that when I come to you I will have to mourn over many of those who have already sinned and have not repented of the uncleanness and the sexual immorality and the indecency they have committed.”