2) The Church is built on the episcopate. He says the Church is built over the bishops. This is done by Divine law and therefore it is an object of faith. “Therefore you must know that the bishop is in the Church and the Church is in the bishop, and that if somebody is not with the bishop, he is not in the Church.” Now this is purest episcopalianism – though somehow different from what is called today by this word.
3) The unity of the Church is correspondingly rooted in the unity of the episcopate.
All bishops represent this unity. But in spite of the equality of all of them, there is one representative of this unity: this is Peter and his See. The See of Peter is the principle Church, “from which the priestly unity has arisen, the womb and the root of the Catholic Church.” Now this is before Augustine. The consequence of this, although not yet in Cyprian’s mind, was unavoidably the principate of Rome in a much more radical way than he expressed it.
4) The bishop is sacerdotes (the Latin word for “priest”). The priest’s main function is the sacrificial function. The priest sacrifices the elements in the Lord’s Supper and repeats the sacrifice on Golgotha by doing so. He imitates what Christ did; he offers a true and perfect sacrifice to God the Father within the Church. Here again it was not yet the later Catholic Mass, but it unavoidably would lead to it – (the more so in the primitive nations, with their realistic thinking and tendency to take as real what is symbolic. . . .).Many of the fundamentals of the Roman church existed as early as about 250, Cyprian’s time. And whatever we say against the Roman church, we should not forget that the early developments of Christianity led this way, as early as the year 250, let us say, as an example. And when today one speaks of the agreement of the first 500 years, this is entirely misleading. Of course everybody agrees in the big synodal decisions – Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox – but this agreement is only seemingly an agreement, because the living meaning of all these things was absolutely different from what the Reformers built up as the Protestant doctrine. And if you take a man like Cyprian, then you can see the difference. No Protestant could accept any of these points.
Let me sum up some of the points characteristic of the Occidental tradition: 1) One could first mention the general practical activistic tendency in the West, the legal relations between God and man, the much stronger ethical impulses for the average Christian, not with respect to himself but with respect to the world; and include in this point the eschatological interest, without mystagogical and mystical emphasis. We can say: More law, less participation: that characterizes the West from the very beginning.
