Schism And The Redeemed Zoomer (Part 7): Was The Reformation An Act Of Schism?

by on September 1, 2026 | Comment

The Protestant Reformation undeniably divided the visible church in Western Europe. Congregations ceased communion with Rome, rejected papal jurisdiction (the pope), reconstituted worship according to Scripture and the early church,1 and established new ecclesiastical governments. In that descriptive sense, the Reformation involved schism: An enormous breach occurred. The more important question, however, is whether the Reformers were guilty of schism. Division is sometimes sinful, but the party that visibly departs is not necessarily the party that morally caused the breach.

A common defense of the Reformation argues that the Reformers did not leave Rome; Rome expelled them. And this is true! Martin Luther was threatened with excommunication and then formally cast out. On this account, the Reformers remained innocent because they were involuntarily excluded. Redeemed Zoomer has pressed a similar principle: Separation is justified only when believers are formally excommunicated or subjected to persecution severe enough to drive them from the church.2

This explanation contains part of the truth, but it cannot bear the full weight placed on it. It describes Luther’s personal history better than it describes the Reformation as a whole. The Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Presbyterian streams did not arise through the same sequence. Some leaders were formally excommunicated. Others rejected papal jurisdiction before a final sentence was pronounced. Entire cities, nations, congregations, and territories reformed their churches corporately. In several cases, worship and church government were reconstructed without every minister or member first being individually expelled. As with most historical studies, it is messy.

The Reformers’ deeper defense was therefore not simply “Rome excommunicated us.” It was that Rome had corrupted the gospel, imposed unlawful worship, claimed authority Christ had not given, and persecuted those who called the Roman church back to Scripture. Formal excommunication was one manifestation of the breach. It was not the only possible cause or proof of it. A century later, Francis Turretin summarized the classic Protestant defense with a maxim he attributed to George Cassander: “It is not separation that makes a schism, but the cause.”3 Turretin argued that when an ecclesiastical body embraces fundamental error, commands idolatrous worship, rejects correction, and compels submission to its corruptions, separation may become not merely lawful but necessary. The cause of the separation is not the one who withdraws but the one who gives cause for withdrawal.

The Lutheran Stream: Excommunication and Territorial Reform

Luther’s case initially appears to establish the excommunication argument. In 1520 Exsurge Domine condemned forty-one propositions associated with Luther and gave him a limited period to recant. After Luther refused and publicly burned the bull, Leo X issued Decet Romanum Pontificem on January 3, 1521, declaring Luther and his adherents excommunicated.4 Luther did not simply resign his membership and establish another communion because he preferred its atmosphere. Rome condemned his teaching and cast him out.

But Lutheranism was not created merely by adding congregations to the personal excommunication of Luther. Worship was reformed in Wittenberg and elsewhere. Evangelical ministers were appointed, and territorial rulers organized churches within their lands. Thousands of Christians entered Lutheran churches without first receiving individual sentences of excommunication. The historical question therefore cannot be reduced to whether every separating person had exhausted a Roman disciplinary proceeding. Rome’s sentence reached beyond Luther personally to his public adherents. Even so, it did not constitute an individualized disciplinary judgment against every Christian who later entered a Lutheran territorial church, let alone other churches. The growth of Lutheranism cannot be reduced to the multiplication of Luther’s personal excommunication.

The Lutheran confessions also defended their churches on broader grounds. Article 28 of the Augsburg Confession accused the Roman bishops of instituting new services, burdening consciences, and abusing excommunication, while insisting that ecclesiastical authority exists to preach the gospel and administer the sacraments.5 The Lutherans professed willingness to retain bishops if the bishops would permit the gospel and cease attacking evangelical churches. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession therefore placed responsibility for the division on those who condemned and persecuted the truth, warning that they would answer for the schism they had occasioned.

Thus, Luther’s excommunication mattered, but it did not create the entire case. Rome’s abuse of authority and condemnation of the gospel explained why its excommunication was wrongful and territorial churches could proceed with reform.

The Reformed Stream: Reformation Before Expulsion

The Swiss Reformation presents a more direct challenge to the narrow rule. Zwingli preached against practices he believed contradicted Scripture, including the Mass, compulsory fasting, clerical celibacy, and the veneration of images. At the Zürich disputation of 1523, he defended his Sixty-Seven Articles before the city council.6/sup> The council then authorized ministers to preach according to Scripture and progressively reordered the city’s worship. Zürich did not wait for every minister and citizen to be formally excommunicated by the bishop of Constance before reforming its church.

The same pattern appeared elsewhere in the Reformed world. Geneva, French Protestant congregations, and churches in the Low Countries organized preaching, sacraments, discipline, and ecclesiastical government under conditions of suppression and persecution. Their justification rested on the conviction that Christ, speaking in Scripture, possessed greater authority than bishops who forbade the gospel or corrupted the sacraments.

Calvin acknowledged that Rome had expelled Protestants “by anathemas and curses,” but he did not make that the foundation of his defense. He argued that the cause of estrangement was that Rome could not tolerate “a pure profession of the truth.”7 In other words, the doctrinal and spiritual breach preceded and explained the juridical sentence. Rome’s anathemas were evidence of its hostility to reform, not a procedural act that suddenly transformed an otherwise sinful departure into an innocent one.

The Belgic Confession stated the principle confessionally.8 Christians must distinguish the true church from false assemblies by the pure preaching of the gospel, the proper administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of discipline according to God’s Word. It identified the false church by its elevation of its own ordinances over Scripture, corruption of the sacraments, reliance on men rather than Christ, and persecution of those who rebuked its errors. This is not an ecclesiology in which institutional possession and completed disciplinary process settle every question. Christ’s Word judges the institution.

The Anglican Stream: Jurisdiction Rejected Before Final Excommunication

The English Reformation is doctrinally and morally complicated. Henry VIII’s initial breach with Rome was driven heavily by his marriage and the succession, not by a mature evangelical concern for justification by faith. No Protestant should defend every motive or action involved. Nevertheless, the chronology creates serious problems for the claim that separation became permissible only after excommunication.

Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, defining Henry as “supreme head on earth” of the Church of England and thereby severing England’s ecclesiastical links with Rome. Whatever one makes of earlier threatened, incurred, or suspended censures, Paul III’s public sentence excommunicating and deposing Henry was promulgated on December 17, 1538, several years after the jurisdictional breach.

If a credible threat alone is sufficient, the Anglican case may be made to fit the rule. But that creates another problem. It would mean Henry’s jurisdictional and dynastic break could be justified because Rome threatened him, while the Zürich or Scottish churches might be condemned because their corporate reforms did not wait on identical paperwork. The moral character of separation would then depend more on Roman procedure than on the truth of the gospel, the lawfulness of worship, or the authority of Christ.

The later protestantizing of the Church of England under Edward VI and Elizabeth I involved the reconstitution of public worship through the Book of Common Prayer, doctrinal standards, and a renewed rejection of papal supremacy. The English Church claimed to be the ancient church in England reformed, not a religious society created from nothing. Excommunication formed part of the story, but the decisive institutional act was the repudiation of a jurisdiction England judged unlawful.

The Presbyterian Stream: Scotland Reformed Its Existing Church

Presbyterianism belongs within the broader Reformed tradition, but the Scottish Reformation deserves separate treatment because it supplies perhaps the clearest test case. The Church of Scotland was not founded by one minister leaving his congregation after receiving a personal letter of excommunication. Protestant preaching spread through martyrdom, exile, clandestine meetings, political conflict, and the organization of the Lords of the Congregation. John Knox himself endured imprisonment, exile, denunciation, and outlawry, but the national Reformation was not constructed on the claim that each participant had first been formally expelled.

In August 1560, the Scottish Parliament approved the Scots Confession, rejected papal authority, condemned doctrine and practice contrary to the Reformed faith, and outlawed the Mass.9 The result was a corporate reformation of the church within Scotland. The modern Church of Scotland continues to trace its Reformed identity to the ecclesiastical settlement of 1560.

The Scots Confession justified this action by appealing to the marks of the true kirk: the true preaching of God’s Word, the right administration of Christ’s sacraments, and discipline administered according to Scripture. It also denied that the judgment of any doctor, church, council, realm, or nation could bind the conscience when it contradicted the plain Word of God.10

The Scottish Reformers, therefore, did more than react to expulsion. They rejected papal jurisdiction, abolished corrupted worship, confessed the Reformed faith, and reconstructed the church’s government. Anyone who argues that the faithful must wait until excommunication must either condemn the Scottish Reformation as schismatic or enlarge “threat of excommunication” until it includes outlawry, persecution, suppression of preaching, compulsory false worship, and constructive exclusion. Once the category is enlarged that far, the narrow rule has effectively been surrendered.

Who Caused the Breach?

The Reformers did not deny that visible separation had occurred. They denied that they bore the principal guilt for it. Their claim was that Rome had already violated the church’s unity by obscuring justification, corrupting worship, burdening consciences, usurping Christ’s authority, and refusing correction from Scripture. When Rome then condemned, silenced, or persecuted those who confessed the gospel, it made visible a breach it had already caused materially.

That claim must itself be tested. Not every accusation of corruption justifies separation. Churches contain error, sinful ministers, defective discipline, and imperfect worship without ceasing to be true churches. The Reformers’ argument required more: foundational doctrinal corruption, imposed practices contrary to God’s Word, authoritative suppression of the gospel, and an institutional refusal of reform. Their confessions therefore appealed to objective marks of the church rather than personal preference or impatience.

Formal excommunication remains highly relevant. A wrongful sentence can reveal that a church has expelled the faithful for confessing the truth. But Scripture does not grant an unfaithful judicatory the exclusive power to determine the exact moment at which obedience to it becomes impossible. A church may constructively exclude believers before pronouncing its final sentence by requiring false vows, forbidding faithful preaching, compelling corrupt worship, or making submission to error a condition of ministry and communion.

Was the Reformation an act of schism? It produced a separation, but this does not mean the Reformers were the schismatics. Luther’s excommunication confirms Rome’s responsibility in his case, but it cannot explain Zürich’s territorial reform, England’s rejection of papal jurisdiction, or Scotland’s corporate reformation. The Protestant defense was larger and more substantive: Rome caused the breach by opposing the gospel and refusing reform according to God’s Word.

The party that leaves an institution is not always the party that abandons the church. Sometimes those who retain the buildings, courts, endowments, and historic name have already departed from the doctrine, worship, and government Christ gave his people. The question is not merely, Who walked out? Nor is it merely, Who signed the excommunication? The decisive question is, Who departed from Christ and his Word?

Notes

  1. For more on this, see particularly John Calvin’s The Necessity of Reforming the Church, trans. Casey Carmichael (Reformation Trust, 2020), where he lists faithful worship as the top priority in the Reformation, followed by justification by faith alone.
  2. Redeemed Zoomer (@redeemed_zoomer): “Schism is sin. The church must be as organizationally united as possible. Separation is only justified if one is wrongfully excommunicated like Luther was,” X, September 19, 2024. See also Caitlyn Beebe, “Redeemed Zoomer and Gavin Ortlund Debate Church Splits, Merits of Evangelicalism,” Juicy Ecumenism (blog of the Institute on Religion and Democracy), June 2, 2025, https://juicyecumenism.com/2025/06/02/redeemed-zoomer-gavin-ortlund-church-splits/.
  3. Francis Turretin, Disputatio octava et ultima de necessaria secessione nostra ab Ecclesia Romana et impossibili cum ea syncretismo (Geneva, 1674), thesis 3, 227.
  4. Leo X, Exsurge Domine, June 15, 1520, Papal Encyclicals Online; Leo X, Decet Romanum Pontificem, January 3, 1521.
  5. The Augsburg Confession, art. 28.77–78, The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Conclusion, 2–3.
  6. Huldrych Zwingli, The Sixty-Seven Articles (1523); “Zwingli Archives: Public Debates,” Christian History Institute. The first Zürich Disputation was held on January 29, 1523, after which the council encouraged Zwingli to continue preaching according to his articles.
  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.2.6. Calvin says that Rome’s inability to tolerate “a pure profession of the truth” was the cause of estrangement; he mentions the anathemas but insists that “the cause should first be ascertained.”
  8. Belgic Confession, arts. 28–29. Article 28 commands believers to join the true church even when civil authorities forbid it, while article 29 identifies the true and false churches by their relation to Christ’s Word, sacraments, discipline, and treatment of those who rebuke their errors.
  9. “History of the Church of Scotland: The Reformation of 1560,” Church of Scotland. The Scots Confession was approved in August 1560; four days later Parliament rejected papal authority, condemned doctrine and practice contrary to the Reformed faith, and outlawed the Mass.
  10. The Scots Confession (1560), chaps. 18 and 20. Chapter 18 says that antiquity, title, succession, location, and numerical superiority are not sufficient marks of the true kirk; the decisive marks are the preaching of the word, administration of the sacraments, and biblical discipline. It also denies that a doctor, kirk, council, realm, or nation may bind the church against the plain Word of God.

©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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