Custom Without Truth

Cyprian to his brother Pompey: greetings.

I have already set out in full what has to be said about the baptism of heretics, dearest brother, in the letters I sent you copies of. But since you wanted to know what our brother Stephen wrote back to those letters of mine, I have sent you a copy of his reply. Read it, and you will see more and more plainly where he has gone wrong, in trying to hold up the cause of heretics against Christians and against the church of God. [d]

Among other things — some of them arrogantly assumed, some beside the point, and some at odds with what he himself has said, all of it written without skill and without foresight — he added this sentence: “So if anyone comes to you from any heresy at all, let nothing new be brought in beyond what has been handed down: that hands are to be laid on him for repentance. For the heretics themselves, strictly so called, do not baptize the people who come to them from one another; they only receive them into communion.”

He forbade anyone coming from any heresy at all to be baptized in the church; that is, he judged the baptism of every heretic to be sound and lawful. And although particular heresies have their own particular baptisms and their own different sins, he shared in the baptism of them all, and so gathered up the sins of them all and heaped them into his own lap. [g]

And he laid it down that nothing new should be brought in except what has been handed down — as if the man bringing in something new were the one who holds to unity and claims one baptism for the one church, and not, plainly, the man who forgets unity and takes up the lies and the infections of a washing that stands outside what is holy.

Let nothing new be brought in, he says; nothing kept but what has been handed down. Where does that tradition come from? Does it come down from the authority of the Lord and of the Gospel, or does it come from the commands and letters of the apostles? For God bears witness and warns us that what is written must be done, when he says to Joshua son of Nun: “The book of this law shall not depart out of your mouth. You are to turn it over in your mind day and night, so that you may take care to do everything written in it.” The Lord too, when he sent out his apostles, commanded that the nations should be baptized and taught to keep everything he had commanded. So if it is laid down in the Gospel, or contained in the letters or the Acts of the Apostles, that people who come from any heresy are not to be baptized but are only to have hands laid on them for repentance, then let that divine and holy tradition be kept.

But if heretics are everywhere called nothing but adversaries and antichrists; if they are declared to be people to keep away from, twisted out of shape and condemned out of their own mouths — then why should we think them not worth condemning, when the apostles’ own testimony makes it plain that they are condemned by themselves? So no one has any business slandering the apostles, as though they had approved the baptisms of heretics, or had shared the common life with them without the church’s baptism, when what the apostles wrote about heretics is what they did write.

And they wrote it while the more frightful outbreaks of heresy had not yet burst out. Marcion of Pontus had not yet come out of Pontus. His teacher Cerdon came to Rome while Hyginus was still overseer there — the ninth overseer of that city. Marcion followed him, and with greater shamelessness piled further aggravations onto the crime, setting himself more daringly to blaspheme God the Father, the Creator, and arming that heretical madness which rebels against the church with sacrilegious weapons, with greater wickedness and greater determination.

But if it is plain that heresies afterward became more numerous and worse; and if in the past it was never at all laid down or written that hands were only to be laid on a heretic for repentance and that he was then to be received into the common life; and if there is only one baptism, the one that is with us and inside, granted by God’s own favor to the church alone — then what stubbornness is this, what presumption, to put human tradition ahead of what God has ordained? Why not see that God is indignant and angry every time human tradition loosens and passes over what God has commanded? He cries out and says through the prophet Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. They worship me for nothing, teaching the teachings and the commandments of men.” The Lord too, in the Gospel, rebukes and reproves in the same way when he says: “You set aside the commandment of God so that you may keep your own tradition.” And the blessed apostle Paul, remembering that command, warns and instructs us in the same way: “If anyone teaches otherwise, and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and with his teaching, he is swollen with pride and knows nothing. Keep away from a man like that.” [k]

Certainly our brother Stephen’s teaching sets an excellent and lawful tradition before us — one that gives us a fitting authority to appeal to! For in the same place in his letter he added and went on: “Since those who are heretics in the strict sense do not baptize the people who come to them from one another, but only receive them into communion.” This is how far into evil the church of God, the bride of Christ, has been carried: that she follows the example of heretics; that in order to celebrate the heavenly rites, light borrows her discipline from darkness, and Christians do what antichrists do. [n]

But what blindness of soul is this, what a collapse of faith, to refuse to recognize the unity that comes from God the Father and from what Jesus Christ, the Lord and our God, handed down! For if the church is not among heretics, because it is one and cannot be divided; and if the Holy Spirit is not there either, because he is one and cannot be among people who stand outside what is holy, and who are outside — then baptism too, which stands in that same unity, certainly cannot be among heretics, since it can be separated neither from the church nor from the Holy Spirit.

Or if they credit the effect of baptism to the majesty of the name, so that anyone baptized anywhere and anyhow in the name of Jesus Christ is judged to be made new and made holy — then why, in the name of that same Christ, are hands not laid on the people baptized among them, so that they may receive the Holy Spirit? Why does the same majesty of the same name not work in the laying on of hands, when they insist it worked in making the baptism holy? [o]

For if someone born outside the church can become God’s temple, why can the Holy Spirit not be poured out on that temple as well? A man who has been made holy, whose sins have been put away in baptism, and who has been remade in spirit into a new man, has been made fit to receive the Holy Spirit — since the apostle says, “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” If a man baptized among heretics is able to put on Christ, he can much more receive the Holy Spirit whom Christ sent. Otherwise the one who is sent will be greater than the one who sends: a man baptized outside would begin to put on Christ and yet be unable to receive the Holy Spirit — as though Christ could be put on without the Spirit, or the Spirit be separated from Christ.

Besides, it is silly to say that the second birth is spiritual — the birth by which we are born in Christ through the washing that gives new birth — and then to say that a man may be born spiritually among heretics, where they themselves say the Spirit is not. Water by itself cannot wash sins away and make a man holy unless he has the Holy Spirit as well. So either they must grant that the Holy Spirit is there, where they say baptism is; or else there is no baptism where the Holy Spirit is not, because there cannot be baptism without the Spirit.

But what a thing it is, to claim and insist that people not born in the church can be sons of God! For the blessed apostle sets out and proves that baptism is where the old man dies and the new man is born, when he says, “He saved us by the washing that gives new birth.” But if the new birth is in the washing — that is, in baptism — how can heresy, which is not the bride of Christ, bear sons to God through Christ? [q]

It is the church alone that bears sons in the Spirit, joined and united to Christ, as the same apostle says again: “Christ loved the church and gave himself for it, so that he might make it holy, cleansing it with the washing of water.” If, then, she is the beloved and the bride who alone is made holy by Christ, and alone is cleansed by his washing, it is plain that heresy — which is not the bride of Christ, and cannot be cleansed or made holy by his washing — cannot bear sons to God.

And a man is not born by the laying on of hands, when he receives the Holy Spirit; he is born in baptism, so that, already born, he may receive the Holy Spirit. It went the same way with the first man, Adam. God formed him first, and then breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. The Spirit cannot be received unless the one who is to receive it exists first. [r]

But Christians are born in baptism, and the begetting and the making holy that belong to baptism are with the bride of Christ alone, who is able to conceive in the Spirit and bear sons to God. So where, and of whom, and to whom is a man born who is not a son of the church — a man who would have God for his Father before he has had the church for his mother?

And since no heresy at all, and no schism either, can have the making holy that belongs to saving baptism, because it stands outside — why has our brother Stephen’s bitter stubbornness broken out so far as to insist that sons are born to God from the baptism of Marcion, and of Valentinus too, and of Apelles, and of others who blaspheme God the Father? Why does he say that forgiveness of sins is granted in the name of Jesus Christ in places where blasphemy is spoken against the Father and against Christ the Lord God?

On this point, dearest brother, for the sake of the faith and of the reverence that belongs to the priestly office we carry out, we must consider whether a priest of God can give a satisfactory account on the day of judgment if he upholds and approves and goes along with the baptism of blasphemers — when the Lord threatens and says: “And now, priests, this command is for you. If you will not listen, and if you will not take it to heart to give glory to my name, says the Lord Almighty, I will send a curse on you, and I will curse your blessings.” [u]

Does a man give glory to God when he takes Marcion’s baptism into the church’s common life? Does a man give glory to God when he judges that forgiveness of sins is granted among people who blaspheme God? Does a man give glory to God when he claims that sons are born to God outside, from an adulterer and a prostitute? Does a man give glory to God when he does not hold to the unity and the truth that come from God’s law, but upholds heresies against the church? Does a man give glory to God when, a friend to heretics and an enemy to Christians, he thinks that priests of God who stand up for the truth of Christ and for the unity of the church ought to be cut off from the church’s common life?

If that is how glory is given to God — if that is how the fear of God and his discipline are kept by his worshippers and his priests — then let us throw away our weapons; let us hand ourselves over as prisoners; let us hand to the devil the ordering the Gospel gave us, the appointment Christ made, the majesty of God. Let the oath sworn in God’s own army be dissolved. Let the standards of the heavenly camp be betrayed. Let the church give way and yield to heretics — light to darkness, faith to treachery, hope to despair, reason to error, immortality to death, love to hatred, truth to lies, Christ to Antichrist.

No wonder heresies and schisms spring up day after day, more and more often and more and more fruitfully, and lift their snake-covered heads and spit the poison of their venom at the church of God with greater force — while certain men speak up for them and hand them both authority and support; while their baptism is defended and faith and truth are betrayed; while what is done outside against the church is defended inside, in the church itself.

But if the fear of God is among us, most beloved brother; if holding to the faith carries the day; if we keep the commands of Christ; if we guard the holiness of his bride uncorrupted and untouched; if the words of the Lord stay in our thoughts and in our hearts when he says, “When the Son of man comes, do you think he will find faith on the earth?” — then, since we are God’s faithful soldiers, fighting for the faith and for the honest worship of God, let us keep the camp entrusted to us by God with faithful courage. [z]

And custom, which has crept in among some, ought not to stand in the way of truth winning and prevailing. Custom without truth is nothing but error grown old. So let us leave the error and follow the truth, knowing that in Esdras too the truth wins, as it is written: “Truth endures and grows strong forever; it lives and prevails for ever and ever. With her there is no taking of sides and no favoring of persons; she does what is just. In her judgments there is nothing crooked, but strength and rule and majesty and the power of all the ages. Blessed be the Lord God of truth!” Christ showed us this truth in his Gospel when he said, “I am the truth.” So if we are in Christ and have Christ in us; if we stay in the truth and the truth stays in us — then let us hold fast to what is true.

But it happens, out of a love of presumption and of stubbornness, that a man would rather keep hold of his own bad and false position than agree with what is right and true when it belongs to somebody else. Looking ahead to this, the blessed apostle Paul writes to Timothy and warns him that an overseer must not be “quarrelsome or argumentative, but gentle and teachable.” [ac]

Now the man who is teachable is the one who is meek and gentle enough to have the patience to learn. It is an overseer’s business not only to teach but also to learn — because the man who teaches better is the man who grows and goes forward every day by learning better. That is what the same apostle Paul teaches when he warns “that if something better is revealed to someone sitting nearby, the first speaker should fall silent.”

But there is a short road, for religious and straightforward minds, both for putting error away and for finding the truth and drawing it out. If we go back to the head and the source of what God handed down, human error stops; and once the reason behind the heavenly rites has been seen, whatever lay hidden in the dark under a cloud of obscurity is opened up into the light of the truth.

If a channel carrying water — water that used to flow plentifully and freely — suddenly fails, do we not go up to the spring, so that the reason for the failure can be found out there? Whether the springs have dried up and the water has failed at the head; or whether it comes out of the head free and full and has failed somewhere along its course — so that if the fault lies in a broken or leaking channel, and that is why the steady stream no longer runs on unbroken and continuous, then the channel can be repaired and made sound, and the water gathered again and supplied for the city to use and to drink, as full and as plentiful as it is where it comes out of the spring.

That is what the priests of God ought to do now, if they mean to keep God’s commands: if the truth has wavered and shifted in any respect, we should go back to our beginning and to our Lord, and to what the Gospel and the apostles handed down. The ground of what we do should rise from where our order and our origin both took their rise.

For what has been handed down to us is this: that there is one God, and one Christ, and one hope, and one faith, and one church, and one baptism appointed in the one church only. Whoever leaves that unity is bound to be found in the company of heretics; and while he holds them up against the church, he is attacking the sacred pledge of what God handed down. [ae]

We see that sacred pledge of unity set out in the Song of Songs as well, in the person of Christ, who says: “A garden locked is my sister, my bride — a spring sealed up, a well of living water, a garden with the fruit of apple trees.” But if his church is a locked garden and a sealed spring, how can a man who is not in the church get into that garden, or drink from its spring?

Peter too, showing the unity and standing up for it, has commanded and warned us that we cannot be saved except by the one and only baptism of the one church: “In Noah’s ark,” he says, “a few — that is, eight souls — were saved by water; and in the same way baptism will save you.” In how short and how spiritual a summary he has set out the sacred sign of unity! For as in that baptism of the world, in which its ancient wickedness was washed away, no one who was not in Noah’s ark could be saved by water — so no one can be counted saved by baptism who has not been baptized in the church, which is founded in the unity of the Lord after the pattern of the one ark.

And so, dearest brother, now that the truth has been searched out and seen, this is what we observe and hold: that everyone who is turned to the church from any heresy whatever must be baptized with the one lawful baptism of the church — except for those who had been baptized in the church beforehand and had then gone over to the heretics. It is right for these, when they come back and have repented, to be received by the laying on of hands only, and to be brought back by the shepherd to the sheepfold they had strayed from. [ah]

I wish you well always, dearest brother, with all my heart.