The Power and the Glory Finished
I finished reading Greene’s The Power and the Glory a about a week and a half ago. I must say that I am very impressed with the book. If I were to sum up the book quickly I would say: The Donatist controversy in a modern setting. Or possibly: St. Augustine speaking through Greene and schooling the modern world on the real meaning of Grace.
The Donatists were heretics who had a foot hold in the North Africa Churches of the fourth and fifth centuries. The believed that sacraments performed by lapsed or heretical clergy were invalid. They also held that the spiritual authority of those clergy were no longer binding either.
While this may sound good at first to our flesh, who is always looking for some merit, some filthy form of uprightness, a moments consideration shows this line of doctrine to be unsound. We you baptized by a Bishop who recanted his faith under the persecutions? Your baptism was not really a baptism. Even if that Bishop later repented. Which brings us to another point, repentance. They did not have a very high view of repentance. Lapse after you were baptized? No more grace for you. Married by a clergy man who has an earnest but misguided view of the Incarnation? You marriage is no longer valid. That means you have been fornicating, and if you are already a baptized Christian… well, that is bad and no more grace for you. Took the Lord’s Supper from an unworthy elder? Then it really was not the Lord’s Supper, just some bread and wine.
It is also a convenient doctrine for those who do not like the authority of the Church. Do not like the minister’s sermon? He is an unworthy minister, his spiritual authority is no longer binding. We do not have to listen to him.
Of course the Church, lead in all Truth by the Holy Spirit, saw this doctrine to be the error that it was and condemned it. Then after it was condemned it was fought against and the dirty lie was stamped out as an organized doctrinal system until some modern Churchmen, to ’spiritual’ to be bothered by history and sound teaching, resurrected it in some Pentecostal and Fundamentalist circles.
At any rate, Christ’s Bride saw that the Biblical principals were that God created the offices of the Church, man did not. We could not create them, we can not reshape them, we will never be able to abolish them. They are what they are. We do not have men who are fit for the offices. We are all unfit to serve in these offices. They are only imposed upon us by a loving God. And even then those He chooses for His offices in the Church are not always the men that we would choose. In this way we see that the power is not in the man but in the office, because the office belongs to God and not to the one holding the office.
This is the frame work that Greene tells his story in. It works well with his two main characters: a whiskey priest who is very aware of his own sinfulness and a morally upright and ethical atheist who enforces the stringent laws against the Church.