In the early church the classical conflict over the weeds and wheat was
Donatism. Heir to the rigorist tradition of Tertullian and Cyprian, the Donatists argued that the church should be a holy body and that the traditores, those who, under threat of persecution, handed over the Scriptures to the Roman authorities to be burned, should be excluded at least from the clergy if not from the church itself.
The bishops' disagreement about alternative episcopal oversight (Bishops delay oversight decision, May) is essentially a question of
donatism.
The Cathar church represented a threat of a magnitude that Latin Christianity had not seen since the gradual rubbing out of
Donatism and Arianism in the early Middle Ages.
At first glance, such a point of view might seem close to
Donatism, which maintained that sacraments administered by unworthy clerics and other traditores (betrayers of the faith in Christ) cannot be "effective".
It was the birthplace alike of vernacular theology and of Western theology through the African lawyer-theologians Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, and it was the source of innovative, socially conscious Christian movement s like
Donatism, which perhaps produced the first liberation theologians.
Other heresies, like
Donatism, Manichaeanism or Pelagianism, were combated by post-Nicaean patristics -- but they never achieved the extent of Arianism.
A theologically inclined friend of mine maintains that this spectacle is less an example of American Puritanism than of
Donatism. The Donatists, a fourth-century Christian sect arising in North Africa, believed that the validity of church sacraments depended on the spiritual state of the priest.
"The actual principles of Manicheism, Platonism, Pelagianism,
Donatism, and pagan aristocracy can be detected in the worldview of contemporary Americans....
When it is coupled with Montanism and
Donatism -- that centered not on theology but on strictness of Church discipline, a pattern begins to emerge.
That alter had once denied Christ (or that Damasus claimed he had) does not mean he cannot have been a rigorist (one thinks of the shady past of some who espoused
Donatism in Africa).
Donatism - a separate regional variety of Christianity in North Africa from the early fourth century AD was viewed as dissenting, heretical, schismatic, and dangerous by its orthodox critics, but was every bit as committed to its own texts, hierarchies, church buildings and edifices, readers, deacons, priests, bishops, and elaborate defences of their authority and prerogatives, as were any 'orthodox' Catholics in Italy or elsewhere.
"At the very beginning of his book," writes Guarino, "Vincent enumerates a long list of heresies besetting the church: Arianism,
Donatism, Pelagianism, and the list proceeds on and on.
