A Church of the Pure
The persecution under Emperor Decius (250) led many professing Christians to sacrifice to the gods. When the persecution ended, the question was whether they could simply be restored. Cornelius, bishop at Rome, favored readmission; Novatian, a respected presbyter and theologian, did not.
Novatian and his supporters formed separate congregations that insisted on a disciplined membership. Their churches spread from Rome to North Africa and the East, and they treated the larger catholic party as having lost its purity, rebaptizing those who joined them. Constantine invited their bishop at Constantinople, Acesius, to Nicaea, where he agreed with its teaching on Christ but would not join its communion.
Novatianists kept a bishop-led order much like their opponents', and most of what we know comes from those opponents. Baptist historians have seen in them an early witness to churches of the regenerate, separated from the growing institution. They refused to join the bishops' party and suffered for it. Yet separatists were not perfect, and the line between Christ's free churches and the institution was sometimes muddy. Theologica records them among the free churches without claiming that every belief they held was sound.
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