The State Church

AD 311–312 · Free churches · After the Great Persecution, a party of North African bishops refused to accept Caecilian as bishop of Carthage because one of his consecrators was accused of having surrendered the Scriptures. They consecrated a rival bishop, later succeeded by Donatus. When they appealed to Constantine, councils of bishops at Rome (313) and Arles (314) ruled against them, and the state-favored catholic party began to use the empire's power against the separatists. The Donatists taught that ordinances given by unworthy clergy were invalid and rebaptized those who joined them. The division lasted for centuries. They refused to join the state-favored party and were persecuted by it, yet they kept bishops and sacramental errors of their own. Separatists were not perfect, and the line between Christ's free churches and the institution was sometimes muddy.

AD 380 · Catholic Church · Emperor Theodosius I declared that all his subjects must hold the faith of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria, calling its adherents catholic Christians and everyone else heretics. Dissent from the state church became a crime.

AD 411–431 · Heresy & error · Pelagius and his disciple Celestius taught that Adam's sin harmed only Adam and that people can obey God fully by their own free will. Augustine, catholic bishop of Hippo, answered in a long series of writings. Councils of African catholic bishops condemned the teaching, decisively at Carthage in 418, where they also condemned anyone who denied that newborns should be baptized for the remission of sins. The state church council at Ephesus condemned the Pelagians again in 431.

AD 416–418 · Catholic Church · In the Pelagian controversy, North African councils at Carthage and Mileve (416) rejected Pelagius's teaching, and a council at Carthage (418) condemned anyone who denied that newborn infants should be baptized for the remission of sin. Some later collections credited that canon to Mileve, which is why older histories date it to 416. Infant baptism became binding church law in the catholic West, and the free churches that baptized believers only were increasingly treated as heretics.

AD 431 · Catholic Church · Emperor Theodosius II summoned bishops of the state church to Ephesus to settle the dispute between Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril's party met before the bishops from Antioch arrived, deposed Nestorius, and affirmed that Mary is Theotokos, the bearer of God, because the one she bore is God the Son in the flesh. The Antiochene bishops met separately and deposed Cyril, and a reconciliation followed only in 433. Baptists affirm what the title first protected, that the child of Mary is God the Son, because Scripture teaches it, without the later devotion to Mary.

AD 445 · Catholic Church · Leo I taught that Peter's primacy lived on in the bishop of Rome, and an edict of Emperor Valentinian III ordered the western bishops to obey him. It was a decisive step toward the medieval papacy.

AD 529 · Catholic Church · A regional synod of catholic bishops in southern Gaul, led by Caesarius of Arles, rejected the teaching that the beginning of faith arises from human nature apart from grace. It taught that God's grace goes before every right response to Him and condemned the idea that God predestines anyone to evil, but it also tied the grace that frees the will to baptism. Boniface II, bishop of Rome, confirmed its decisions in 531.