No Baptism Outside the Church

Cyprian and the others, to their brother Stephen: greetings. [a]

We thought it necessary, dearest brother, to come together and hold a council, so that certain matters might be settled and looked into by a common examination. Many priests met there at once, and many things were brought forward and dealt with.

But the matter we had chiefly to write to you about, and to lay before your seriousness and good sense, is one that touches the authority of the priesthood and the unity as well as the dignity of the one church everywhere — all of which stand on God’s own arrangement. It is this. Those who have been dipped abroad, outside the church, and have been stained among heretics and men of a broken-off party with the taint of unholy water, ought, when they come to us and to the church which is one, to be baptized. It is too small a thing to “lay hands on them so that they may receive the Holy Spirit,” unless they receive the church’s baptism as well. Only then can they at last be made holy through and through and be sons of God: if they are born by both of the sacred acts, since it is written, “Unless a person is born again of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

We find that the apostles held to this too, in the Acts of the Apostles, and kept it in the truth of the faith that saves. In the house of Cornelius the centurion the Holy Spirit had come down on the Gentiles who were there — men warm with the heat of their faith, believing in the Lord with their whole heart — and, filled with the Spirit, they were blessing God in various languages. Even so, the blessed apostle Peter, remembering the command of God and the good news, ordered that those same men be baptized, men who had already been filled with the Holy Spirit. Nothing was to look as though it had been left out of what the apostles’ own instruction requires: the keeping of the law of God’s command and of the good news at every point.

But that what the heretics use is not baptism, and that no one who sets himself against Christ can be helped by the grace of Christ, was set out with care not long ago in the letter written on that subject to our colleague Quintus, who is settled in Mauretania, and in the letter our colleagues wrote earlier to our fellow overseers presiding in Numidia. I have attached copies of both.

We add this too, dearest brother, and join it to what we have said, by common agreement and authority. There are elders and deacons who were ordained beforehand in the church everywhere and then stood out as traitors and rebels against the church; and there are others promoted among the heretics by an unholy ordination, at the hands of false overseers and antichrists, against Christ’s own appointment, who have tried to offer false and sacrilegious sacrifices outside, against the one altar of God. If men like these come back, let them be received on this condition: that they share the church’s common life as laypeople, and count it enough that they are received into peace after standing out as enemies of peace. They ought not, on returning, to keep the weapons of ordination and honor with which they made war on us.

For priests and ministers who wait on the altar and the sacrifices must be sound and unstained. The Lord God speaks in Leviticus and says, “No man who has a stain or a blemish shall come near to offer gifts to the Lord.” In Exodus he lays down the same thing: “And let the priests who come near to the Lord God make themselves holy, so that the Lord does not abandon them.” And again: “And when they come near to serve at the altar of the holy place, they shall not carry guilt on themselves, or they will die.”

But what guilt could be greater, what stain more disgusting, than to have stood against Christ; than to have scattered his church, which he bought and founded with his own blood; than, forgetting the peace and love of the good news, to have fought with the madness of an enemy’s quarrel against the people of God, who were of one mind and in harmony? Men like that, even if they come back to the church themselves, still cannot bring back with them the people they misled — those who were overtaken by death outside, and perished outside the church, without its shared life and without its peace. On the day of judgment those souls will be required from the hands of the men who stood out as the authors and leaders of their ruin.

So when men like that return, it is enough that they be pardoned. Treachery certainly ought not to be promoted in the household of faith. What are we keeping for the good and the innocent, and for those who do not leave the church, if we honor the ones who left us and stood against the church?

We have brought these things to your notice, dearest brother, for the sake of the honor we share and our sincere affection. We believe that, in keeping with the truth of your own faith and devotion, you will approve what is no less devout than it is true.

But we know that some will not put down what they have once taken in, and do not readily change their purpose; while keeping the bond of peace and harmony with their colleagues, they hold on to certain things of their own that were once adopted among them. In this we do no violence to anyone and lay down no law for anyone, since in the running of the church each man set over a church has the free exercise of his own will, and will give an account of what he does to the Lord.

We wish you always well, dearest brother, from our hearts. Farewell.