Schism And The Redeemed Zoomer (Part 9): Westminster And The Question Of Schism

by on September 8, 2026 | Comment

Schism is a serious sin. Presbyterian history gives us no warrant to treat the visible church as a purely voluntary association from which Christians may withdraw whenever they are disappointed, inconvenienced, or persuaded that they could construct something better. This is why church members take vows when they are united with a local congregation. Yet the gravity of the word schism can sometimes conceal the very question that must be answered. To say that unlawful separation is schism is true, but it does not tell us which separations are unlawful.

The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) never uses the word schism. It does, however, address the theological question that must come first: What is the visible church, and by what standards is a particular church recognized as a true church of Jesus Christ?1 Once that question is answered, the question of schism becomes clearer. Separation from a true church without sufficient cause is sinful. Separation from corruption is not necessarily separation from the church.2 And separation from an ecclesiastical institution that has ceased to function as a true church of Christ cannot be condemned merely because that institution retains its name, property, and organizational continuity.

The Confessional Framework

Westminster begins by distinguishing the catholic visible church from its particular expressions. The visible church under the gospel consists of those throughout the world who profess the true religion, together with their children (WCF 25.2). It is Christ’s kingdom, house, and family. No national church, denomination, general assembly, or corporate body is coextensive with that catholic church. Particular churches belong to the visible church; they are not identical to it.

The Confession then supplies the criteria by which such churches are evaluated. How do we know whether a church is true? It is “more or less pure” according to the doctrine taught and embraced, the administration of the ordinances, and the performance of public worship (WCF 25.4). These are theological and ecclesiastical marks. Westminster says nothing here about institutional age, legal succession, possession of property, numerical size, or civil recognition. A church’s claim to be a church rests on its relation to Christ through his gospel, ordinances, and worship.

This creates a spectrum. On one end, even the purest churches remain subject to mixture and error. A church need not be perfect in order to be true. Serious sins may exist among its members. Ministers may teach errors. Discipline may be inconsistently administered. Worship may require further reformation. None of these issues, considered by themselves, necessarily destroy the church. This is the confessional ground for patience, protest, discipline, and reform rather than hasty separation.

Yet Westminster also identifies an outer boundary. Some churches have so degenerated as to become “no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan” (WCF 25.5). A church may therefore lose what it once possessed. Its lampstand may be removed (Rev 2:5). The key is remembering that its institutional machinery may continue after its ecclesiastical character has been forfeited. That this is true is seen in the Reformation itself. Rome remains an institution even after Luther renounced its jurisdiction.

Any Presbyterian account of schism must preserve both truths. A separation that is too quick forgets that the purest churches have mixture and error. We are called to bear with one another in our faults (Rom 15:1) Institutionalism, however, forgets that some churches cease to be true churches of Christ. The decisive question is not simply whether someone departed from an existing organization. It is whether that organization remained a true church and continued communion with it remained lawful.

Rutherford: Separation from Corruption and Separation from the Church

Samuel Rutherford was one of the Presbyterian divines at the Westminster Assembly. As such, he is often cited as a source of Presbyterian understanding when it comes to the visible church. He is cited as a determined opponent of separatism in his work The Due Right of Presbyteries. He wrote during the establishment of the Church of Scotland. In his work, he distinguishes between separation within a church and separation from it, between partial and total separation, and between refusing corrupt acts and erecting a separate ecclesiastical body. He did not believe that every error, scandal, or defective administration justified a new church.

His ninth consideration states the principle succinctly: “There is no just cause to leave a less clean church (if it is a true church).”3 The parenthetical qualification is not incidental. It contains the central premise of the argument. Rutherford’s prohibition applies to a less pure church that remains a true church. This is why the rest of his discussion is more discriminating than the claim that believers must remain until formally expelled.

Rutherford says that when the greater part of a church turns to essential idolatry, separation is required. He approves refusing corrupt worship while maintaining whatever lawful communion remains possible. He also affirms that a church lacking the apostolic foundation is to be forsaken. When the majority defects from the truth while a faithful minority remains, he can even describe the majority as the separating party and the faithful few as the church “in the case of right discipline.”4

Rutherford therefore places a heavy burden on those who would erect a distinct church. Negative or partial separation may be required before positive separation is warranted. Protest, noncompliance with sinful acts, and communion with the sound part of the church must be considered. But his categories do not make formal excommunication or persecution the sole condition of lawful separation.5 The controlling questions are whether the true faith remains, whether Christ’s ordinances remain, whether communion can be maintained without sin, and where the church stands in relation to the apostolic foundation.

Rutherford’s position is demanding, but it is not institutionalist. The majority, the courts, and the corporate structure do not automatically constitute the church in the highest sense. Truth may retreat to the smaller and weaker party. An institution may accuse the faithful of separation while it is itself departing from Christ.

The evidence of this is what took place only a few years after Rutherford wrote Due Right of Presbyteries. In 1651 the Church of Scotland divided over the Public Resolutions, which permitted former Engagers and other previously excluded men to return to public and military service. Rutherford and the Protesters believed that the Resolutions violated both the Word of God and Scotland’s covenant obligations. When the general assembly approved them, Rutherford did not simply conclude that the majority had spoken and therefore conscience was bound.

Instead, Rutherford and his allies challenged the lawfulness of the assembly itself. They argued that the Resolutioner-controlled assemblies had violated the established acts and constitution of the kirk and had acted contrary to the Covenants. Consequently, they referred to these meetings as “pretended assemblies” and denied that their decisions possessed the authority of a lawful general assembly.

This is important. Rutherford did not think that the mere possession of the institutional machinery settled the question of ecclesiastical legitimacy. The Resolutioners had the majority. They controlled the recognized general assembly. They could impose discipline and accuse the Protesters of schism. Yet Rutherford maintained that a church court acting contrary to the church’s prior constitutional commitments and covenantal obligations could forfeit its claim to lawful authority.

The dispute soon became more than a protest against a single decision. Rutherford and the Protesters continued to meet and act ecclesiastically apart from the Resolutioner-controlled courts. By 1652–53 the rupture had produced parallel assemblies and competing claims to the lawful continuity of the Church of Scotland. The Protesters did not understand themselves to be founding a new church. They claimed instead that the Resolutioner assemblies were unlawful and that they were continuing the faithful, covenanted Church of Scotland.

This historical episode puts Rutherford’s earlier language in a striking light. When he had written that, in a case of defection, “the best though fewest is the church,” he was not articulating a principle that had no practical consequences. Within a few years he belonged to the smaller party, rejected the authority claimed by the ecclesiastical majority, and maintained that the majority’s possession of the courts did not make its acts lawful.

It is true that the separation would be healed by 1660, but it is a helpful reminder that a quote-mining approach to history flattens out the facts on the ground that would be helpful. Rutherford claimed in the separation that he was not violating the principles because he was objecting over constitutional violations, foundational errors, and that he was continuing the true church, not separating from it.

Baillie: The Apostolic Churches and the Duty of Patience

Another individual appealed to in this debate is Robert Baillie, also a Scottish divine at the Westminster Assembly. He makes the antiseparatist case with equal force. In A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time, he points to the grave disorders of Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Laodicea, and the other apostolic churches. Nevertheless, he writes, “from none of these Churches did any of the Apostles ever separate.”6 He says, “What to Moses and the Prophets was not a sufficient cause of separation from the Churches of their time, is not a sufficient cause for us to separate from the Churches of our times.”7

Read in isolation, these sentences might appear to establish an unlimited rule: However corrupt a church becomes, believers must remain. Its context shows otherwise. Baillie was answering those who required convincing evidence of regeneration in every church member and who treated the presence of hypocrites, scandalous persons, or defective discipline as proof that a church was falsely constituted. His argument is that visible churches have always contained wheat and tares, honorable and dishonorable vessels, and good and bad fish. The church visible is not identical with the elect.

Baillie therefore reinforces Westminster’s warning against the notion of a perfectly pure church. Corinth remained a church amid faction, scandal, sacramental abuse, and doctrinal confusion. Galatia remained a church while Paul confronted teaching that threatened the gospel of grace. The appropriate apostolic response was rebuke, discipline, and reformation—not immediate abandonment.

But the apostolic examples do not prove that a church can never cease to be a church. And this is key: The churches remained under the authoritative correction of Christ through his apostles. Error was being condemned rather than constitutionally protected as an equally legitimate expression of Christianity. Moreover, the threatened removal of a lampstand in Revelation 2:15 means that the status of a church is not forever. Baillie proves that serious corruption does not automatically unchurch a body. He does not prove that no doctrinal defection, corrupt worship, or official rejection of Christ can ever do so. In fact, to read him that way undermines the Reformation itself.

His argument should still make every advocate of quick separation uncomfortable. Have ordinary remedies been pursued? Has the error been clearly identified? Is the church correcting it, tolerating it through weakness, officially protecting it, or imposing it on the conscience? Is communion itself sinful, or merely difficult? Baillie requires those distinctions. He does not permit the question to be settled by impatience.

Gillespie: Purity and the Pursuit of Unity

Last, we come to George Gillespie. He also was a member of the Westminster Assembly. His work fits this discussion because his writings hold together two concerns that are often separated: the purity of Christ’s worship and the visible unity of Christ’s body.

In English Popish Ceremonies, Gillespie argues that institutional claims cannot make corrupt worship harmless. “A church is in so far true or hypocritical as it mixeth or not mixeth human inventions with God’s holy worship.”8 This is not a complete definition of the church, but it shows that Gillespie evaluated churches according to doctrine and worship, not merely according to historical continuity or lawful possession. A demand for peace cannot sanctify what Christ has not commanded.

At the same time, Gillespie was not content with permanent fragmentation among the Reformed. In the concluding appeal of “Wholesome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty,” a tract published anonymously but traditionally attributed to him, he urged the Presbyterian majority and the Independent dissenters to pursue accommodation rather than settle for separate toleration. “We will not despair of unity in this world,” he declared.9 He called them to pray, labor, and press toward agreement because division hindered the preaching of Christ and the edification of the church.

This is a substantial concession to the antiseparatist concern. Presbyterianism at its best does not celebrate division. It does not turn every scruple into a jurisdiction or every disagreement into a denomination. Gillespie desired a visible unity grounded in a shared confession, ordered worship, and faithful government.

Yet his pursuit of unity was not doctrinal indifference. He opposed attempts to create peace with Rome by minimizing differences concerning the faith. Nor did he think ecclesiastical authority could bind consciences simply by issuing commands. Unity had to be in Christ’s truth and according to Christ’s institutions. The same Gillespie who pleaded for accommodation also resisted ceremonies that he believed corrupted worship and violated conscience.

Gillespie therefore belongs in this discussion precisely because he refuses the false choice between truth and unity. Truth without charity can become sectarian pride. Unity without truth becomes an ecclesiastical fiction. Christian unity is the common submission of Christ’s people to Christ’s word.

Returning to Westminster

Rutherford, Baillie, and Gillespie do not supply an identical formula for every possible controversy. Nor should their personal judgments be treated as though they were additional chapters of the Confession. Yet their arguments help expose the real structure of the question.

A true church may be deeply corrupt and still remain a church. Therefore, separation cannot be justified by the mere existence of error, scandal, weak discipline, or imperfect worship. The faithful ordinarily must labor, testify, suffer, appeal, and seek reformation. This is the force of Rutherford and Baillie.

But a church’s institutional existence does not guarantee that it remains a true church. A body may corrupt the gospel, overthrow the apostolic foundation, pollute the ordinances, and impose sinful terms of communion. At that point, refusing its corruptions may be the means of maintaining communion with Christ and his catholic, visible church. This is the boundary recognized by Westminster and assumed within the distinctions of these Scottish writers.

This does not give private Christians a blank check to declare churches false whenever they lose an argument. The Confession provides marks, not an excuse for self-will. Judgments must be made soberly, publicly, biblically, and with due use of ecclesiastical remedies (church courts). The burden for constituting a separate body is grave necessity, not preference.

But neither does Westminster permit a court or denomination to make itself indefectible. A categorical rule that the faithful must remain until formally excommunicated, regardless of what the institution teaches, worships, protects, or commands gives the organization a permanence that the Confession explicitly denies.

Unity in Truth

James Walker’s10 later account of Scottish theology provides a fitting conclusion because he does not allow modern Presbyterians to minimize the historic concern for unity. The older Scottish divines, he says, conceived of the visible church as “one great spiritual republic.” They did not regard denominational multiplication as normal or desirable. For them, “schism was a great reality.”11

That concern should be recovered. The fractured condition of Protestantism is not an achievement to celebrate. Christians should desire fuller visible communion, pursue reconciliation wherever possible, and refuse to make minor differences permanent walls within Christ’s kingdom.

Walker, however, also explains that this concern did not require laxity about doctrine and life. The church was still obligated to preserve the truth and purge corruption. Most significantly, he acknowledges the limiting principle: A separated church could defend its position only by showing that “severance was necessary, because communion was no longer possible or lawful.”12

This is a severe standard, but it is not the claim that separation is lawful only after formal expulsion. It asks whether continued communion can be maintained faithfully and without sin. It demands necessity, not passivity; catholicity, not corporate absolutism.

The Presbyterian ideal is therefore not unity at any price. It is unity around the truth, beneath the kingship of Christ, through the faithful preaching of his gospel, the right administration of his ordinances, and worship governed by his Word. We ought to mourn division and labor against it. But the visible unity we seek must be recognizably Christian. An institution cannot preserve the church’s unity by making peace with the denial of the church’s Lord.

In the end, Westminster directs us to ask not merely, Who left the institution? Where are Christ’s gospel, ordinances, worship, and lawful authority being maintained? This is the confessional question beneath the question of schism.

Notes

  1. The controlling ecclesiological material is WCF 25.2, 4–5.
  2. Francis Turretin (1623–1687), De Necessaria Secessione ab Ecclesia Romana Disputationes (Disputations concerning the necessary separation from the Roman church), (New York, 1848), 182. “For it is not separation that makes schism, but the cause.”
  3. Samuel Rutherford, “Considerations” 1–10, in The Due Right of Presbyteries; or, A Peaceable Plea for the Government of the Church of Scotland (London, 1644), 253–55.
  4. Rutherford, Due Right of Presbyteries, 255: “When the greatest part of a Church maketh defection from the Truth, the lesser part remaining sound, the greatest part is the Church of Separatists; though the maniest and greatest part in the actual exercise of Discipline be the Church; yet in the case of right Discipline, the best though fewest is the Church.”
  5. For those who have not been following this series, this is the claim of my interlocutor Richard Ackerman, aka @RedeemedZoomer, in his posts on X and in his debates.
  6. Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London, 1645), 159–60. Baillie’s surrounding argument concerns the demand for visible proof of regeneration in every church member and the use of mixed membership as a ground of separation.
  7. This is an important quote, as it is a go-to for Redeemed Zoomer in all his debates.
  8. George Gillespie, A Dispute Against the English Popish Ceremonies Obtruded on the Church of Scotland (1637), author’s preface to The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Edinburgh, 1846), 1:68.
  9. George Gillespie, “Wholesome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty” (London, 1645), 39–40. The tract’s traditional attribution to Gillespie has been defended from early biographical testimony.
  10. James Walker (1821–1891) writes about Scottish Presbyterian history from a hope for unity while also remaining in the Free Church of Scotland, which separated from the Church of Scotland in 1843. This was lauded by such Presbyterian scholars as Charles Hodge and others of the Old Princeton persuasion.
  11. James Walker, The Theology and Theologians of Scotland: Chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1888), 95, 103–4.
  12. Walker, Theology and Theologians of Scotland, 104.

©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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