THENEEDOF BAPTISM,
ANDOFTHECHURCH
Baptism was central to membership in the Christian community, in the con-
trast, for instance, carefully made between the baptism of John and that of
Jesus (Mk. 1:8, Bible). The exact nature of the act came into sharp relief in
the increasingly fierce persecutions directed against Christians in the third
century. It is not certain what Jesus’ typically aphoristic remark in Mt.
12:30, “He who is not with me is against me,”meant to signify in its origi-
nal context, but to a bishop of Carthage named Cyprian (d. 256), those
words were a clear statement that heretics and schismatics, those who
had once been members of the Church but who had wandered from its
teaching or its authority, could not expect to be saved. The immediate
issue in the North Africa of Cyprian’s day was the recurrent one that
issued form wholesale defections from the Church in times of persecution
— Cyprian lived through a major Roman persecution in the mid-third cen-
tury. The question for bishops like Cyprian was whether Christians who
had received baptism from the defectors had been truly baptized. No,
announced Cyprian, there is no (valid) baptism outside the Church’s bap-
tism and indeed, “there is no salvation outside the Church.”
Though his views on baptism had soon to be rethought, Cyprian’s
teaching on the necessity of membership in the one Catholic (that is,
universal) Church—“You can’t have God as your Father unless you
have the Church as your mother” was another of his pronouncements.
This was often reaffirmed in the centuries that followed, notably in the
influential Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. In their decree concerning
the Albigensian heresy, the assembled bishops proclaimed that “[t]here
is one Catholic Church of the faithful and outside it no one is saved.”
The most notorious echo of Cyprian, however, occurred about a century
after Lateran IV. In 1302, in an effort to assert the Church’s —and the
Papacy’s—authority in the face of the king of France, Boniface VIII
issued his bill entitled Unam Sanctam, which in its opening words
unequivocally declared: “There is one, holy, Catholic Church, outside of
which there is no salvation.” None. For Anyone.