Perhaps this forum is the Church now? Hmm...
I often get the feeling that the most extreme members of the World Wide Orthodox Web have little contact with other Orthodox people in "real time". They also seem to live in areas with little Orthodox presence. This must make it easier to set up imaginary heretics, enemies of the Church ,etc. when they exist as an abstract idea.
On the Donatist Heresy.
From "The Christian Tradition," Jaroslav Pelikan, pp. 308-09.
Donatism charged that the mediation of grace through the church and the sacraments was vitiated when the administrator of the sacraments had lost his
Christian perfection through a serious fall. Augustine's case against Donatism
had been stated fully and repeatedly and had become official church teaching at
the Conference of Carthage in May 411. Beyond the many questions of church
organization, religious persecution, and even social and tribal rivalry raised by
Donatism, the central doctrinal question was: What is the causal connection
between grace and perfection, or between the unity of the church and the
holiness of the church? The Donatist answer to the question was simple and, at least
upon first examination, consistent. "By doing violence to that which is
holy," said Petilian, "you cut asunder the bond of unity." Donatism was no less
insistent than Augustine that there could be only one church. The Donatists also
laid claim to the title "catholic," which theydenied to anyone else. But they
made the unity and the catholicity of the church contingent upon its prior
holiness. Therefore they demanded that the church be purged of those among its
clergy and bishops who had been guilty of betraying the faith under
persecution. Only that church was a true church in which the "communion of saints" was a
communion of genuine, perfect saints. And the only church that met this
qualification was the Donatist community; it alone had true unity, for it alone
had true holiness. Likewise, it alone had the sacraments. "There is," said one
Donatist bishop, "one baptism, which belongs to the church; and where there is
no church, there cannot be any baptism either." The moral pollution of the
church's bishops by the mortal sin of apostasy invalidated the ordinations they
performed, canceled the efficacy of the baptism administered by their clergy,
deprived the church of its requisite holiness, and thereby brought on the fall
of the church. In the name of this demand for holiness, the Donatists felt
obliged to separate themselves from the vast body of those who called themselves
catholic Christians; for there could be no fellowship between the church of
Christ (the Donatists) and the synagogue of Satan (the Catholics).
