Schism and the Redeemed Zoomer (Part 3): Does Heresy Justify Separation?

by on August 18, 2026 | Comment

I always appreciate clarity and directness. These are not missing in the discussions of schism with Richard Ackerman, the Redeemed Zoomer. He has stated his position in the strongest possible terms in an X (formerly Twitter) post on July 20, 2026: “No amount of heresy in the church justifies separation from the church if the faithful are not expelled.” Also on X (July 20, 2026), he has distinguished between many serious corruptions within a church and the allegedly much narrower conditions that would justify leaving it. His concern is understandable. Evangelicals (whom he does not accept as Protestant) are often too quick to treat disagreement as apostasy, inconvenience as persecution, and departure as courage.

But the categorical claim goes too far. It is true that not every error justifies separation. Further, not every heretic within a church makes the church heretical. Not every failed disciplinary case proves that the denomination has abandoned the faith. Churches are composed of sinners, governed by fallible officers, and always subject to some degree of confusion and error.

Yet it does not follow that heresy can never justify separation until the faithful have first been formally expelled. This rule makes excommunication do all the moral work. It leaves no room for the possibility that a church may officially protect falsehood, disable its own confession, require participation in corrupt institutions, and punish resistance without first removing every orthodox believer from its membership rolls. The real question is not simply whether heresy is present. It is whether the church opposes it, tolerates it, protects it, confesses it, or imposes it.

Heresy in the Church and the Heresy of the Church

The Westminster Confession does not teach that a true church must be free from every doctrinal error. Particular churches are “more or less pure” according to the degree in which the gospel is faithfully taught, the ordinances rightly administered, and worship purely conducted. Even the purest churches remain subject to “mixture and error.” At the same time, some churches may so degenerate that they become “no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan” (Westminster Confession of Faith 25.4–5).

These statements must be held together. The mere presence of error does not destroy a church. If it did, there would be no true churches. But neither does institutional continuity guarantee that a body will remain a church of Christ regardless of what it teaches and practices. A congregation or denomination can decline from relative impurity into fundamental apostasy.

We must therefore distinguish heresy in a church from the heresy of the church. An individual minister may teach error while the church corrects him. A theological faction may spread error while the church struggles, perhaps slowly and imperfectly, to restrain it. In such cases, the presence of heresy may demonstrate the need for discipline, not separation. The situation changes when the church uses its corporate authority to shelter the error from discipline, neutralize its confession, or require the faithful to support it. The error then no longer belongs merely to the person teaching it. It has acquired institutional standing.

Not Every Error Is Split-Worthy

The word heresy is sometimes used for any theological opinion that seems especially wrong. That use can obscure the issue. A doctrinal error may be serious enough to disqualify a man from office in a Presbyterian church without proving that he is outside Christianity. A minister who rejects Presbyterian government, infant baptism, or the Sabbath doctrine of the Westminster Standards cannot honestly subscribe to them. But this does not mean he denies the gospel.

Other errors strike at Christianity’s foundation. Paul pronounced an anathema on those who preached another gospel to the Galatians (Gal 1:8–9). He told the Corinthians that if Christ had not been raised, their faith was futile and they remained in their sins (1 Cor 15:17). John said that the one who denies the Son does not have the Father (1 John 2:23). Peter warned against destructive heresies that deny the Master (2 Peter 2:1).

Errors concerning the Trinity, the person of Christ, his substitutionary death, his bodily resurrection, justification, and the only way of salvation are not equivalent to disagreements over the days of creation or the timing of the millennium. Even then, four questions must be asked. What doctrine is being denied? How authoritative is the denial? What has the church done in response? What does continued communion require from the faithful?

The seriousness of the doctrine and the degree of institutional commitment must be considered together. An isolated denial of the resurrection is more dangerous than a widespread dispute over eschatology. Yet the proper response to the isolated denial may still be discipline rather than denominational separation if the church remains willing to act. What categories of error can be discerned?

Isolated Error

The first category is isolated error. A minister, elder, teacher, or member begins promoting false doctrine, but the church’s confession remains clear, and its courts are willing to investigate the matter. The error belongs to an individual rather than to the institution. Separation is ordinarily not justified in this situation. The church should instruct the mistaken, silence the disruptive, and discipline the obstinate. Members should bring concerns to their elders. Officers should make use of the church’s orderly processes.

The discovery and prosecution of heresy may actually demonstrate a church’s faithfulness. Christ did not promise that false teachers would never arise. He commanded his church to recognize and resist them. A denomination does not become heretical merely because a heretic enters it. The decisive question is what the church does after he arrives and is discovered.

Tolerated Error

The second category is tolerated error. The false teaching is known, but church officers fail to correct it. Perhaps they are confused about the doctrine, reluctant to endure conflict, or divided over the evidence. The church still confesses the truth, but its discipline is weak.

This is more serious than isolated error because the failure now belongs partly to the institution. Christ rebuked the churches at Pergamum and Thyatira not only because false teachers were present but because the churches tolerated them (Rev 2:14, 20). Nevertheless, tolerated error is not automatically confessional apostasy. A church may be negligent without formally receiving the error as its own. The proper initial responses remain admonition, discipline, appeal, protest, and patient efforts toward reform.

Patience cannot be limitless, however. Persistent toleration gradually becomes policy. A church that repeatedly refuses to discipline the same foundational falsehood is teaching its ministers and members that the falsehood is permissible, whatever the confession may say on paper.

Officially Protected Error

The third category is officially protected error. Here the church does more than fail to act. Its courts, assemblies, or governing officers actively shield false teachers from discipline. Charges are dismissed irrespective of their substance. Confessional language is reinterpreted to accommodate contradictory positions. Those seeking discipline are treated as the principal threat to the peace of the church. The false doctrine now possesses recognized ecclesiastical protection.

A single bad judicial decision does not necessarily justify departure. Church courts are fallible. The Westminster Confession itself says that synods and councils may err. Their decisions are to be received only insofar as they agree with the Word of God. But a settled pattern of protection is different from an isolated miscarriage of justice. When foundational error is repeatedly sheltered and the denomination’s courts establish that such teaching is permissible, the institution has begun to take corporate responsibility for it.

A church cannot preserve the gospel merely by permitting it to exist alongside another gospel. When orthodoxy and unbelief are treated as equally acceptable interpretations of Christianity, the institution has not remained neutral. It has changed the meaning of its confession.

Confessional Apostasy

The fourth category is confessional apostasy. This occurs when a church authoritatively repudiates, revises, or neutralizes the substance of the faith it formerly professed. The change may occur through constitutional amendment, authoritative reinterpretation, judicial precedent, or a settled refusal to enforce the confession according to its historic meaning.

An institution may retain the Westminster Standards while rendering them practically powerless. It may allow ministers to affirm the same words while assigning incompatible meanings to them. Resurrection may cease to require an empty tomb. Atonement may no longer require that Christ bore the judgment due to sinners. Inspiration may become compatible with treating Scripture’s historical and doctrinal claims as erroneous.

For example, the Auburn Affirmation did not simply announce that all its signers personally denied the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, miracles, or the truthfulness of Scripture. Its institutional significance was subtler. It opposed making the General Assembly’s formulations of these doctrines tests for ordination or good standing and argued that other theories of the doctrines should be allowed.1 The 1927 settlement then deprived the earlier doctrinal deliverances of practical force as universal ordination requirements and placed decisive authority back in the hands of individual presbyteries.2

Thus, the problem was not merely that liberal ministers existed. The church’s confessional boundaries had become incapable of excluding liberalism, requiring faithful ministers to recognize as true ministers those who were not by any historic Presbyterian definition. Institutional continuity is not identical to ecclesiastical continuity. A corporation may retain its name, property, endowments, and historical records while abandoning the faith that once made it a Christian church.

The Imposition of Falsehood

The fifth category is the imposition of falsehood as a condition of office or communion. A denomination may require ministers and members to support agencies that spread false doctrine, participate in corrupt worship, submit to unlawful commands, or remain silent while essential truth is denied. The institution is no longer merely permitting someone else’s error. It is demanding the faithful person’s cooperation.

This is where Redeemed Zoomer’s requirement of excommunication becomes especially inadequate. A minister need not be formally expelled before the church has made faithful ministry impossible. He may retain his name on the roll while being forbidden to fulfill his ordination vows. He may remain technically welcome as long as he finances, submits to, or remains silent about the very corruption he has sworn to oppose.

The Westminster Confession teaches that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Church authority is real, but it is ministerial. Christ has given no church court authority to command sin or require obedience to doctrines contrary to his Word. When fidelity to the institution requires infidelity to Christ, the faithful are not obligated to wait until the institution completes the process by issuing a formal excommunication.

Does Heresy Justify Separation?

Not every heresy does. Isolated error ordinarily calls for correction. Tolerated error calls for discipline, appeal, protest, and reform. Even officially protected error must be evaluated according to its seriousness, persistence, and effect on the church’s confession and ministry. But foundational heresy may justify separation when it becomes the settled policy of the institution—when the church protects it against discipline, neutralizes the confession that condemns it, and requires the faithful to support or submit to it.

Redeemed Zoomer is right to warn against reckless division. Christians should not leave churches over every disagreement, failed case, imprudent decision, or doctrinal imperfection. Separation must be a last resort, undertaken with sorrow, patience, and careful distinction. But last resort does not mean impossible resort.

To separate from a true church over ordinary errors is schism. To separate from an institution that has protected another gospel and made complicity with it a condition of office may be necessary for fidelity to Christ. The decisive question is not merely: Are there heretics in the church? It is: Has the church made their heresy its own?

Notes

  1. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), “An Affirmation Designed to Safeguard the Unity and Liberty of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America,” sections IV–V, commonly called the Auburn Affirmation. The document opposed elevating the five doctrinal statements into tests for ordination and argued that other explanatory theories were permissible.
  2. See Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (Oxford University Press, 1991), 77–103; and Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Eerdmans, 1940), 29–59. The Auburn Affirmation and the 1927 settlement are important because the controversy concerned the enforceable meaning of the church’s existing standards, not simply the presence of dissenting individuals.

©Everett Henes. All Rights Reserved.

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    Post authored by:

  • Everett Henes
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    Everett Henes (MDiv, ThM, DMin) is pastor of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, where he has served since 2008. He is husband to Kimberly and father of five children and grandfather of five (and counting!). He teaches US History and Philosophy of History for Jackson College in Michigan. He is currently working towards a PhD in Humanities with a focus in US Religious History from Faulkner University. In his spare time, he enjoys competing in powerlifting and strongman and teaching homeschoolers Taekwondo.

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