Friday, November 26, 2021

Scott Butler and John Collorafi Throwing Cyprian Under the Bus to Defend the Vatican I Dogma of the Papacy

  

Although Cyprian is venerated as a saint and martyr in the Catholic Church, the Church did not accept everything he ever wrote. The inconsistencies and even contradictions in his writings fall of their own weight. At the Council of Carthage, in 256, Cyprian had proclaimed that “every bishop has a right to his own opinion,” and “can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another.”

 

Did Cyprian really believe that? Cyprian had asked the Roman bishop to intervene against Bishop Marcian of Arles, because of Marcian’s Novatianist leanings. What if Marcian had responded that “every bishop has a right to his own opinion,” or that he, Marcian, could “no more be judged by another than he (could) judge another?”

 

In his treatise De Unitate, Cyprian had compared the unity of the Church to that of God Himself, writing:

 

There is one God, and one Christ, and his Church is one, and the faith is one, and there is one people joined in solid unity of the body of the glue of agreement.

 

The baptismal controversy showed why the Church needed to have this “glue,” or an absurd situation would have resulted. This is obvious if we consider the alternatives in a purely dialectical way:

 

1. If Stephen was right. Pope Stephen had condemned rebaptism as contrary to apostolic tradition, yet without the power of the keys, Stephen would have been unable to enforce his view. Cyprian, and virtually all the Africans, would in effect be administering “double baptism,” with Rome powerless to intervene.

 

2. If Cyprian was right. According to Cyprian, baptism by heretics was invalid—utterly null and void. Yet Stephen as bishop would be refusing, in effect, to give such converts a real baptism. If so, converts from heresy who entered the church under Stephen were receiving no baptism at all. Yet “every bishop has a right to his own opinion,” Cyprian had proclaimed. Consequently, nobody in the Church could make sure that converts from heresy receive a “real” baptism in Rome.

 

If all bishops have a right to their own opinion, there would be no way to resolve the baptismal controversy: thus great provinces of the Universal Church must resign themselves either to rebaptism (at Africa), or to no baptism at all for converts (at Rome). Either way, the Church would be prevented from proclaiming one faith, one Lord, one baptism, as the Scripture demands Eph. 4, 5).

 

In reality, nothing of the kind happened. While the Church venerates the holiness of Cyprian, the great African did not have the last word in the dispute about rebaptism.

 

Cyprian had confronted a power greater than himself. With all his eloquence, all his conviction, all his magnetism and iron rectitude, he had collided, head first, into the power of the keys.

 

This time, a saint did not prevail. (Scott Butler and John Collorafi, Keys Over the Christian World: The Evidence for Papal Authority (33 AD – 800 AD) from Ancient Latin, Greek, Chaldean, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic and Ethiopian Documents [State Line, Pa.: Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2021], 42-43)