A similar very existential problem was the problem: What to do with people who are baptized by heretics and schismatics. You know the difference, I hope. Heretics are people who have a different faith, who have deviated from the order of the Christian congregation. Schismatics are people who follow a special line of church-political development, those who split from the church, perhaps because two bishops fight with each other, or some groups don’t want to accept the Roman bishop. So the separation of the Eastern and Western churches is always called schisma. The Eastern church is considered by Rome not as a heretic church but as a schismatic church. Protestantism is considered by Rome not as a schismatic church but as a heretic church, because their foundations of faith are at stake and not only the non- acknowledgment of the Roman bishop.
Now the question was: How was it possible to receive into one’s own congregation people who are baptised by one of these groups. The answer was, again: It is the objective character of baptism which is decisive, and not the person who has performed it. We will see how Augustine carried this through.
Now behind all this stands Cyprian’s idea of the Church: 1) He who has not the Church as Mother, cannot have God as Father. “There is no salvation outside the Church” – extra ecclesia nulla salus. The Church is the institution in which salvation is reached. This again is a change from the early Christian period where the Church was a community of the saints and not an institution for salvation. Of course salvation was going on within it and those who could be saved, and were saved, from paganism and from the demons were gathered in the Church. But the Church itself was not considered to be an institution of salvation but a community of the saints. This is the first emphasis of Cyprian. It is very consistent with the legal thinking of the West.
