Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

The Novatian church government was substantially that of Baptists of our own
time. Bishop — episcopos — then meant what it meant in the first churches
and what it now means with Baptists — a pastor, superintending the church of
which he was pastor. Prelatical bishops in the Novatian age were just sprouting
— not sufficiently adopted to be a characteristic of any large body of
Christians. That the bishop of Rome was not a prelatical bishop is evident from
the fact that Novatian was a bishop by an ordination, which gave to him no
prelatical charge. Says Cornelius:
“When he was converted he was honored by the presbytery, and that by the
power of the bishop [the pastor] pacing his hand upon him [according him] to
the order of bishops.” f142
Having by this no charge he became a candidate for pastor of the church of
Rome. Of this age, Mosheim says:
“But it is to be care-fully observed, that even those who, with Cyprian,
attributed this pre-eminence to the Roman prelate, insisted at the same time,
with the utmost warmth, upon the equality, in point of dignity and authority,
that subsisted among all the members of the episcopal order. In consequence
of this opinion of an equality among all Christian bishops, they rejected, with
contempt, the judgment of the bishop of Rome, when they found it ill-founded
or unjust, and followed their own sense of things with a perfect
independence.” f143
To the charge that the Novatians would never restore to church membership
one who had been excluded for a gross offence, even on his repentance:
Admitting this true, it only proves an error of discipline, not so bad as when
easily proved guilty, to retain such — a thing often now done, and even done
in Baptist churches.
To the charge that the Novatians held there was no forgiveness from God for
such, the answer is,
(a) They taught no such thing.
(b) Even if they did teach it, it is no worse than, by retaining them in the
church, to teach they are on the road to heaven.
Says Adolf Harnack, one of the most eminent and critical historians:
“Down to 220, idolatry, adultery, fornication and murder, were punished in
the Catholic church by formal excommunication. … This practice was first
broken by the peculiar power which was ascribed to the confessors, in
accordance with an archaic idea which lived in the end of the third century,
and then by an edict of Pope Calixtus I., which spoke of re-admittance into
the church as a possibility. The edict caused the schism of Hippolytus; but as
the schism was healed towards the middle of the third century, it seems
probable that the successors of Calixtus returned to the old, more rigorous