Audio only:
Joe reviews the recent debate between RZ and Doug Wilson on Schism, and gives the Catholic response.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I wanted to review a thoughtful debate that recently happened over on the channel Reformation Red Pill between Redeem Zoomer and Pastor Doug Wilson. The subject of the debate was on the sin of schism. Now, particularly was on whether or not Doug’s denomination, the CREC is schismatic, but it’s really about much more than that, this problem of schism within Protestantism. And you might imagine that as a Catholic, my review’s going to be, oh, these two Protestants made terrible arguments. But no, that’s not the case at all. Quite the opposite. It was a great debate. They both made very good points. I’ve interacted with both of these men in the past. They’re capable articulate defenders, their respective theological traditions. And as strange as this might sound, I actually think the two men both succeed in proving their core arguments.
And in fact, each man got the other one to concede what I think was a critical, devastating point. So I want to look at each side’s case and what I think it proves. And then since I know many of you are wondering why in the world RZ doesn’t just become Catholic if he’s so against schism, I want to tackle his arguments there at the very end. Redeem Zoomer’s core case is that schism is horribly evil, that many modern evangelicals are schismatics without knowing it and that many Protestants today have simply conflated the sins of schism and heresy.
CLIP:
The archetypal scripture passage about schism is Cora’s rebellion in the book of numbers. Cora rebels against the divinely instituted authority of Moses and many follow him. So God tells the faithful to separate from Cora’s rebels and then God has the ground swallow all of them up. Throughout church history, this has been widely interpreted as a passage warning about how much God hates schism and by schism, they meant establishing rival church structures thereby dividing the church. If we wish to identify as historic Christians in any sense, we must acknowledge that skism is a grave sin.
Joe:
A quick word on Cora’s rebellion. In Exodus 19, God had told Israel that it was to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, but God also set up within Israel, the Iranic priesthood. So not everybody gets to offer sacrifices in the way this institutionalized priesthood does. So number 16, Cora argues for a kind of priest who of all believers. He says, “You have gone too far. For all the congregation are holy, every one of them and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?” Moses responds by telling him that by seeking the priesthood in this way, he set amongself up against God. Core and his schismatic followers then try to offer up worship and the ground beneath them opens up and they’re swallowed up. This is fitting. Schism literally means to tear, so God’s response to this chorus schism was a literal schism of the earth.
And notice Cora’s not offering worship to a false God. He’s offering worship to the true God, but in a schismatic way. Does that passage have any bearing for Christians today? Well, according to St. Jude, it does. He warns about those who walk in the way of cane and abandon themselves for the sake of gain for Balaam’s error and perish in chorus rebellion. So it seems like rebellion from the visible church is mortally sinful now just as rebellion from the Ironic priesthood was mortally sinful in the Old Testament. In Galatians five, when St. Paul is describing damnable sins of the flesh, he lists both divisions, likegestasier and heresies. Now elsewhere, he describes divisions as schisms saying that there should be no schism in the body of Christ, but that we should be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. If you believe Christ created a visible church, it makes sense that Paul would treat skism and heresy as distinct sins.
Skism breaks the external unity of the body of Christ while heresy attacks the internal unity of the Christian faith. But if you have a view that the body of Christ is just this invisible spiritual reality of Christians of all different denominations, well, then it’s easy to see how you might blend heresy and skism into the same sin. So Arzie is right to distinguish them and he’s right to show that schism involves and has always been understood as involving a break from the visible institutional church.
CLIP:
The church fathers, performers, and Scottish Westminster divines define schism institutionally and said that if there is a true church in your land, it is the sin of schism to set up any parallel church structure. That means it is schismatic to voluntarily leave an existing denomination and create a new one and that’s schismatic to simply start a new one out of thin air. This may sound shocking, not only to evangelicals, but many who consider themselves classical Protestants. Evangelicals usually define schism as identical to heresy. Most Protestants today don’t think it’s sinful or schismatic for a group of pastors to plant a new unaffiliated church or denomination, but they’d be surprised to hear what the historic Protestant views are. The Belgic Confession, which is one of the optional CRAC confessions, says in Article 28, we must join the visible church wherever God has established it and not withdraw from it and not neglect to join it.
Joe:
Already, you might be wondering how Arzee could believe this and still defend the reformers breaking from the visible church. I want you to hold that thought. We’re going to get back to it in part three because he’s actually got an answer that is worth addressing on that subject. But for now, I want to consider a different question. Is schism still wrong if there’s evil stuff happening in the visible church?
CLIP:
Many Protestant divines made colorful warnings about the sinfulness of leaving one of these established Protestant churches. Robert Bailey, one of the Scottish Westminster divines, said, “Not even heresy in the church or blasphemy of the sacraments justifies leaving. Henry Hemman said leaving the church of England would be worse than murdered.” So clearly they didn’t think you could just start a new denomination in a place where there were true churches already.
Joe:
I agree with Arzee’s view, but I do think it’s worth acknowledging he is kind of cherry picking which reform Protestants he’s citing as authorities and he actually admits this. He just says those other reformed theologians don’t follow the views of the church fathers.
CLIP:
Of course, you can find some theologians in the reform tradition with a more separatist mindset, but those theologians are not consistent with the Patristic witness.
Joe:
I think the important question isn’t what this or that Scottish Presbyterian believed about schism. I think the better question is whether those beliefs are true. So the strongest part of the case that Zoomer makes is that biblical Israel shows us very concretely, very vividly that schism is wrong even in the face of corruption and evil.
CLIP:
In scripture, the National Church of Ancient Israel was frequently hijacked by pagan demon worshipers who sacrificed babies, but nobody ever established a parallel church on the grounds of apostasy in the mainstream one. Instead, the prophets were loyal and reformed the church many times.
Joe:
I think that’s a really strong point, particularly for Christians who understand the relationship between old covenant Israel and the new covenant church. The ancient Israelite priests were doing about the worst things imaginable and it still was not justifiable to go into schism from them. Now, Doug pushes back on that point slightly, but he does so in a way that I think ultimately backfires on him.
CLIP:
Did you know that in Alexandria the Jews had a temple there too?
Joe:
Yeah.
CLIP:
Okay. The priests who served in the temple in Alexandria were sons of Zadoc who were the true priests.
Joe:
What Doug’s referring to is what’s called the Temple of Onias and the thing is this works against Doug’s point because the Jews of Israel didn’t regard this Egyptian temple as valid and later rabbis were quite explicit. Sacrifices and vows offered in the false temple did not count. A priest who had served at the temple of Vanias and the altar there, he was disqualified from ever serving at the true altar in Jerusalem and he wasn’t permitted to offer sacrifice at all. The Jews of Jesus’ day were really quite clear that proper worship had to be done in the temple in Jerusalem. Even the Samaritan woman recognizes this. It’s why she says to Jesus, “You say that in Jerusalem is the place for men ought to worship.” So Zummer pushes back against Doug on this point and this leads to Doug making a really important admission that even when Israel was at its worst, the prophet sent by God never set up a rival temple or a rival priesthood.
CLIP:
In scripture, none of the prophets ever separated from the established temple structure and started a parallel priesthood on the grounds of heresy in the temple structure.
Yeah, I’ll buy that. Yeah.
Joe:
I love Doug’s humility. I love his willingness to admit this point, but it is a devastating admission. The practice of Israel shows that even in the face of parishy, sin and scandal, even when the leaders of Israel were openly pursuing false gods, God never authorized a religious schism. He never called the faithful of Israel to leave the corrupted body to go out and form a new denomination. In short, nobody in the Bible behaves in the way that modern evangelicals do when they leave denominations when it seems like things aren’t going to go their way. Now, plenty of people in the comments pointed out that the strength of this argument really turns on seeing a particular kind of connection between Israel and the church, that some people are going to say, “Who cares about what happens in the Old Testament? Who cares what happens to Israel?
We’re in a different situation in the church.” I understand that point, but Zumer preemptives, I think. He quotes the Scottish Presbyterian Robert Bailey who offers several New Testament examples in which Christians sinned and which there was sin in different Christian churches and schism was still not permitted.
CLIP:
Robert Bailey, in his dissuasive against the errors of our time, and by the way, he was another Scottish Wetzminster divine says, “In one Corinthians, fundamental errors, open idolatry, grievous scandal, bitter contentions, profanation of the Lord’s table. In Galatians, such errors as destroyed grace and made Christ of no effect. In the church of Ephesus of Laudasia and the other golden candlesticks, diverse members were so evidently faulty that the candlestick is threatened to be removed. Yet from none of these churches did any of the apostles ever separate nor gave they the least warrant to any of their disciples to make a separation from any of them.” The
Joe:
Galatians example there is crucial and it’s going to come up again. Catholics are often condemned for allegedly believing in another gospel other than the one actually taught by Jesus Christ. Now that is a false charge against the church, but seemingly a true charge against the local churches in Galatia in the first century. St. Paul rebukes him by saying that, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel. Yet even here, St. Paul gives no instructions authorizing anyone to separate from these churches. They’re called to reform them from within by turning back to God, by turning back to the gospel, not to break away from them by going into schism. And in Matthew chapter 18, Jesus tells believers to take disputes with one another to the church. But as Zummer points out, that doesn’t really work on the standard evangelical model.
CLIP:
Allowing for organizational schism makes social and theological schism unfixable. The visible church can’t enforce any binding decrees on believers if they can always just set up a new church in the same place if they disagree. The visible church can’t mediate disputes between believers if anyone can get up and join a different church that nobody see and nobody sees that as sinful. As
Joe:
I say, this is the crux of what I take Redeem Zoomer’s argument to be. And I think he’s absolutely right. And I think he argues this case well. Modern evangelicals have disregarded or at least gravely misunderstood the biblical prohibitions against schism and the existence of all of these different Protestant denominations would have certainly horrified the early Christians. Now, Redeem Zoomer briefly mentioned Saint Siprian, but Siprin was explicit that schismatics were actually worse even than those who had denied Christ and denied the faith in the face of persecution. In his words, he who has lapsed has only injured himself. On the other hand, he who has endeavored to cause a heresy or a schism has deceived many by drawing them with him. In the former, it is the loss of one soul and the latter, the risk of many. And whereas the man who lapsed in the face of danger, understood himself to have sinned and could repent?
The schismatic becomes puffed up in his heart and pleasing himself in his very crime separate sons from their mother, entices sheep from their shepherd and disturbs the sacraments of God. Whereas the lapse has sinned, but once the schismatic sins daily. That is how serious the problem of schism is. So given all of this, why do I say that Doug Wilson also makes a convincing case? Because where is Redeem Zoomer focused on a principle, a true one that schism is wrong? Doug points out that Redeem Zoomer doesn’t actually have a realistic solution to this problem in real life in his model. And they’re both right. Protestants have a grave problem with schism and there’s no mechanism within Protestantism capable of solving it, not even in principle. Now, Doug pressed the practical difficulties well, but I want to make sure you understand first what Redeem Zoomer’s actual position is.
He argues that there should be one church per nation, so there should be a national Protestant church of America and he claims that this is the view of the early church.
CLIP:
Early churches ecclesiology, I think the correct ecclesiology is that nations are the highest level of jurisdiction. So one nation rejecting the authority of another nation isn’t schism at all. It’s just autocephaly, just autonomy. So the bishop of Rome, like the rallying cry of the English reformation, for example, is the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in the realm of England.
Joe:
Now, he is right that this was a rallying cry for the Anglicans, but is it really true that the early church taught that nations are the highest level of jurisdiction in the visible church? Saint Irenes seemed quite explicit back in 180 that the true church is global and his words scattered throughout the whole world, but still a single house speaking with one voice in total harmony. So he writes that the churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gal, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya. In other words, you shouldn’t find a different form of Christianity when you cross a national border, but that’s exactly what you do find in the British model that Arzia is promoting. The Church of England was formed in 1531 when the English Parliament declared Henry II Supreme head of the Church of England.
It’s Episcopalian, meaning it’s governed by bishops, but the Church of Scotland next door just past Hadrian’s wall is Calvinist Presbyterian recognizing no head of faith other than the Lord God. When King Charles Itempted to unify England and Scotland under a single Episcopal church, this led to two wars between the English ground and the Scottish covenantors called the Bishop’s Wars and the two Scottish theologians that redeemed Zoomer cites in his debate, Samuel Rutherford and Robert Bailey were allied to the covenantors. The covenantors ended up winning. They prevented there from being a unified Protestant church over all of Great Britain. And so today you have a situation where there’s this Scottish Episcopal church that is a rival denomination to the church of Scotland and Scotland and various Presbyterian churches in England that arrivals to the Anglican church. When Doug Wilson presses him, Redeem Zoomer admits that within his model, it seems that British Methodists are schismatics because they broke away from the Church of England, but American Methodists aren’t schismatics because they didn’t directly break away from anybody.
But it would seem by that same reasoning, you’d also have to say that a member of the Church of England who moves to Scotland would have to become part of the church of Scotland or would be aschismatic and vice versa as if you should change denominations whenever you pass Adrian’s wall. How are the early Christians able to avoid those kinds of absurdities? How could they proclaim on faith in an undiluted form held in common across Germany, Spain, Gall, Egypt, and Libya? Because they didn’t actually believe that the nation was the highest level of authority in the church. St. Cyprien spoke of the episcopate throughout the world as one and undivided and said that like the one son lighting the whole world, the church too sheds the light of Christ over the whole world, yet it is one light which is everywhere diffused, nor is the unity of the body separated.
Her fruitful abundance spreads her branches over the whole world. So this idea that the highest level of authority in the church is going to be at the national level is not true, which is why you can have things like ecumenical councils that bind the global church and win national churches like the church in Egypt break communion from the global church because they reject an ecumenical council. We don’t just say good enough, that whole national church is regarded as schismatic. It’s why St. Augustine can accuse the Donatists in North Africa of schism because they separate themselves from the Catholic church, which he called the unity of all nations. But on Zoomer’s model, a nation’s church breaking off communion with the broader church wouldn’t be schism. It would simply be autocephaly. So I think it’s worth questioning whether Zoomer’s model is in fact the actual ecclesiology of the early church.
I think it’s also worth asking whether this British model of ecclesiology actually works even in Great Britain. But even if you think it does work there, the one place that obviously doesn’t work as Doug Wilson is quick to point out is America. We don’t have a National Church of America that everyone can join. We never have. Redeemed Zoomer is forced to acknowledge this, but his solution is-
CLIP:
If you’re an America and you can trace your denomination organizationally to an established European state church, you’re good.
Joe:
Frankly, that seems a little arbitrary. If the standard is that the Bishop of Rome have no jurisdiction in the realm of England, why should American Christians be bound under pain of sin of schism to choose a European state church to join? Surely the Archbishop of Canterbury have no jurisdiction in the realm of America. We literally fought a war about that. But even if you assume Zoomer standard to be true, it doesn’t give us a single Protestant church of America.
CLIP:
How many legitimate churches are there in the United States? I mean, denominations, let’s say, I mean.
Seven. Now there are some debatable cases, but the ones that have a very clear line of jurisdiction back to the colonies are seven, the seven main lines, except I’ve replaced disciples of Christ with RCA.
Joe:
The seven mainline denominations are sometimes called the seven sisters. I’m going to refer to this as the seven sister’s problem and I think it’s devastating for Zumer’s case. He realizes, of course, there’s not a single church of America. So his best solution is that we could just pick from, I assume he means the following seven denomination, the United Methodist Church, the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, American Baptist Churches USA, United Church of Christ, or he says the reform church in America. But Doug immediately realizes that this completely undermines the principle of one church per country.
CLIP:
But Richard, all the mainline … This is important. All the mainline churches that you’re pointing to existed in the same country.
Yeah. Now we didn’t get to this in the debate, but that’s only because they were all established in different American colonies and then the country united and we didn’t have a Caesar to forcibly unite them. I have videos explaining why America’s an anomaly where there are seven parallel mainline jurisdictions. It’s basically because the different Protestant churches were established in different colonies and then the country unit and there was a proposal to have one of them be the established Church of America, but they couldn’t agree on which one it was. So it’s not good that there’s seven parallel churches. There should only be one, but good luck trying to achieve
That. Not only is it not good, it’s schismatic.
Joe:
So Doug is right on this point and Zoomer has to admit America is an anomaly. If this was Europe, he could argue that Protestants can fix a problem of denominationalism, at least within their own country by all becoming members of the local church, the Presbyterian church in Scotland or the Lutheran Church in Germany or the Anglican church in England, but there’s no equivalent body in America, never was. So Zoomer just tells people to either be Episcopalian or Lutheran or Presbyterian and that’s not one church that doesn’t solve the problem of unity. But as Doug points out, this is still endorsing schisms, just fewer schisms. Redeemed Zoomer argues that seven denominations is better than 40,000. Leave aside the inaccuracy of the 40,000 number. That just isn’t an adequate answer. If you found a man with thousands of lives and told them to at least have just seven wives, you’re not exactly defending monogamy.
You’re just defending a slightly less extreme form of polygamy. Redeem Zoomer and the moderator, Joshua Hames, actually point to this.
CLIP:
As many Christians and theologians and pastors have noted throughout history, let’s say I went and evangelized some tribe in the bush and the chief then has multiple wives. It’s a common understanding throughout church history that it would be a graver sin for that man to, if he had three wives to divorce his wives.
I’ve
Never
Thought that parallel. That’s an interesting parallel because like, yeah, it’s wrong to get a new wife, but if you just wake up one day and you’re married to seven women, who are you going to kick out?
Joe:
So I suppose it needs to be said. It’s not okay to have seven wives even if you’re a convert. And similarly, it’s not okay for there to be seven different denominations with competing jurisdictions that are not in union with one another. As for this idea that it was some kind of longstanding Christian principle that was worse for polygamists to divorce their multiple wives, that’s just not true. A convert with many wives is legally allowed to retain one of them. He must dismiss the others. Traditionally, you kept the first wife that’s a little more relaxed these days, but either way, it was the responsibility of the bishop to then see to the moral social and economic care of the other women who would be divorced from this man. That’s the actual Christian practice. Christ does not have seven brides and neither should we. But the more Doug presses Zoomer on the seven sister’s problem, the more I think it becomes clear just how big of a problem this is for Zoomer’s view on both a theoretical and a practical level.
Now, let’s just take the United Church of Christ. It’s a radically liberal denomination today, but it is sort of descended from the Puritans
CLIP:
Ironic
Joe:
And since the Puritans were once the established state religion in Massachusetts Bay colony, Zoomer argues that that’s sufficient for them to be considered an established church and so it’s not schismatic to join them. Now leave aside all of the theological problems within the UCC today and let’s just focus about whether or not Redeem Zoomer’s idea makes sense. The UCC formed in 1957. It was a merger of four different Protestant denominations. Two of those four denominations claimed roots in the Puritans of New England, but the Puritans themselves were schismatics who broke away from the Church of England and the Church of England broke away from the Catholic church. Now, even if you think the reformation was justified, even if you think England was right to go into schism over an issue of divorce and adultery, how can you possibly justify the existence of the Puritans and the Episcopalians as two legitimate simultaneously valid denominations?
Either the Church of England is too impure to be part of and so it’s not a true church or else the Puritans are schismatics and you should side with the Church of England. But the one position that seems impossible to hold is that they’re both legitimate sister churches and that you can just choose those two or five others. So that’s the theoretical problem. What Zummer is laying out is self-contradictory if you know anything about the history of these different sects, but it also undermines his ecclesiology on a practical level. Remember, the original debate was on whether Doug Wilson’s denomination, the CREC is schismatic, but as Doug points out, the CREC didn’t break off from any of those seven sister churches. In fact, as he cleverly points out, the formation of the CREC actually reduced the number of Protestant denominations in the world by two.
CLIP:
The CREC began with three congregations that were independent and I grant that that kind of independency in church polity is a problem and is not biblical. So we joined together with two other like- minded congregations, thus reducing the number of denominations by a total of two.
Joe:
So let’s say, just as a hypothetical, that Doug is convinced by Zoomer’s message. What is he supposed to do? How’s he supposed to know which of the seven denominations he’s supposed to join?
CLIP:
So what would happen if I went to the PC USA and asked to join?
Most likely you’d probably be received. It depends on which Presbytery, but I know of … That might sound ridiculous. I know a PCA pastors who believe a lot of the same things you do and are in the PCUSA
Yeah, but they don’t say them the way I do.
Okay. It depends on the Presbytery. It is quite possibly. USA, what about the United Church of Christ? There’s a pastor, Reverend Jake Dell in the United Church of Christ who brags about how he doesn’t let Democrats be members of his congregation and because it’s a congregational polity structure, basically nobody can prevent him from doing that. You could absolutely bring Christ’s church into the UCC.
Joe:
The one thing that the UCC today still has in common with its Piritan forebears is that it is congregationalist. In other words, the congregation is the highest level of practical authority. Each individual congregation can decide what to believe or what not to believe about Christianity. The UCC’s website clarifies that there is no centralized authority or hierarchy that can impose any doctrine or form of worship on its members. So even something like the Nicey and Creed is received merely as a testimony, not as a test of the faith. So Doug points out that it’s not actually clear he could become a member of the UCC because he’s a Presbyterian and not a congregationalist, but if he could become one, it’s only because the UCC stands for so little that virtually anyone could become a member. That seems to be a serious problem for Zoomer’s view that this is going to be some kind of path to church unity.
Take the example of Zach Dell, the pastor Zoomer cites to. Now, Zach Dell was an Episcopalian priest who broke away from the Episcopal church to join the UCC in order to avoid church discipline.
CLIP:
What I found is as soon as I started to speak up that I was really basically just shone the door both in terms of employment opportunities and then I was the victim of a disciplinary campaign that was weaponized, particularly because of my involvement with Ri Conquista. By that point, it was used basically to blackball me and my prospects for employment in the church. So I resigned in 2024 and began looking in greener pastures and I knew that there were conservative congregational churches. I didn’t know much about them.
Joe:
So Dell is a guy who tried to implement Redeem Zoomer’s reconquista strategy. It immediately does not work in real life and he gets disciplined by his church body. Instead of accepting that church discipline, he then leaves the Episcopalians and becomes a congregationalist and Zoomer holds this up as a model of how this can work, but remember that a major part of his original argument is-
CLIP:
If you’re free to separate from any church and start a new one, then that church has no normative authority, just a suggestive one. If this is true, it should go without saying that all non-denominational churches are schismatic since they formed independently of any existing authority structure or jurisdiction.
Joe:
So how exactly is hopping from one mainline denomination to another any different than hopping from one denominational church to another? For that matter, since there’s no higher authority within congregationalism, how exactly is going from one congregational church to another any different than going from one non-denominational church to another? Now, Redeem Zimmer to his credit acknowledges this is a problem. He concedes that the seven sisters problem strikes a serious blow against his view.
CLIP:
How does that work with this kind of multiple jurisdiction kind of situation?
It does strike a blow. It’s not good for there to be that. That’s why it’s the responsibility of the magistrate to force all the true churches in their country to unite. If we had a magistrate that was obeying God, it would force all the main lines to unite into one church. So it’s not good that there are seven parallel main lines at all because yeah, if you’re disciplined by the peace of USA, you can join the United Methodist Church and vice versa. That’s not good.
Joe:
Right. So realizing that his model of church doesn’t really work in the real world in America, Zoomer’s proposal is instead that the magistrate, he says, Caesar to Doug, the magistrate here, I assume he means President Donald Trump. The magistrate has to force all these seven sisters to unite into one church. Now bear in mind, when King Charles I tried to do this in real life in Scotland, it led to two wars and the king failed. Robert Bailey and Samuel Rutherford cited against the Crown. So how would that work in America? A country that explicitly forbids the establishment of an organized state church is legally forbidden. Well, here we have to address the peculiarity of Zoomer’s grasp of early American religious history.
CLIP:
In America, the Methodist Episcopal Church was just a reconstruction of Anglicanism after the Church of England yanked away all bishops in jurisdiction from the Anglicans in America to punish them for the revolutionary war. So they had no bishops in America, but as we know, Anglicans and all Protestants have believed in national churches. So nobody questioned that there should be a church of America after the Revolutionary War distinct from the Church of England. Problem is the Anglicans had no bishops. The Church of England yoinked them all away.
Joe:
Zoomer is right. There were no Anglican bishops in the United States after the American Revolution, but he’s wrong in thinking that this was because the Church of England yoinked them all away. There were never any bishops in America to yoink away. Despite attempts by Anglican clergy going back to 1706, there were not any Anglican bishops living in America prior to the Revolutionary War. It’s only in 1784 after America has secured his independence from England and is preparing to pass the First Amendments that Anglicans are first able to have their own resident bishop in the US. So you might be wondering why in the world were there no Anglican bishops in the 13 colonies? Because the American people were almost fanatically opposed to the idea of an established church of America. So I was baffled to hear his claim that all Protestants have believed in national churches or that nobody questions that there should be a church of America after the Revolutionary War distinct from the Church of England.
These claims could scarcely be further from the truth. Let me put it this way. John Adams, one of the founding fathers, second president of the United States, said that what caused American colonists to turn against the British parliament as much as any other cause was a fear that England was trying to establish episcopacy throughout the 13 colonies. In Adam’s words, the objection was not merely to the office of a bishop, though even that was dreaded, but to the authority of parliament on which it must be founded. One of the most famous Presbyterians in America at this time was John Witherspoon. He was president of Princeton University. He’s actually the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. And as Kevin DeYoung has said, he did more than any single person to establish a national Presbyterian church in the United States, but that national Presbyterian church was never to be an established church and Witherspoon’s own support for the war against the English ground was doing no small part to his fear of Anglicanism.
The Presbyterian Church and the American colonies made him chair of what was called the General Convention for Religious Liberty. This was an organized body set up to fight against the established religion that Zoomer claimed everybody was for. The convention reached out to the committee of deputation of dissenters in England and it collaborated with them against the Establishment of a state church in America. In a 1768 letter, they wrote to them that the late attempts of the Episcopalian missionaries among us to introduce an American Episcopate have given a very general alarm to our churches who fled from the unmerciful rigor and persecution of Diocesan bishops in our mother country. And they say, we have abundant reason to believe that such would be the jealousies and uneasinesses of all other denominations of Christians among us that we cannot but tremble at the prospect of the dreadful consequences that could not be prevented from taking place upon the establishment of an American episcopate.
They even pointed out that there were Episcopalian regions that were against the establishment of local bishops as well. Now, of course, the creation of an established American church is also explicitly forbidden in the First Amendment. That was a concession it included precisely as a way to get more Americans to support the new Constitution. Now, some Protestants thought that there should be an established church at the state level, but even that was controversial. If you know anything about the history of, for example, Rhode Island and state churches were also outlawed quickly in much of the country. For example, North Carolina’s 1776 Constitution makes it illegal for a non-Protestant to hold public office, but it also outlaws the establishment of any one religious church or denomination in this state and preference to any other. The point here isn’t just that Zoomers plan to unify Christianity would require breaking several state and federal laws as well as abolishing the First Amendment is that the version of American Protestantism he’s trying to get us to return to never existed in the first place.
It’s a false traditionalism, pretty much completely divorced from the facts of history. But Zoomer needs that kind of counterfactual world in which President Trump can legally force all Christians in America to be Episcopalians because without such a fantastical plan, he just doesn’t have a plan at all.
CLIP:
There is a way to fix it if the state gets involved. Until the state gets involved, it’s really hard to convince seven mainlines to voluntarily unite and none of them stay behind. Now, it’d be great if that happened. It’s probably the duty of a peace USA and the Episcopal church, the United Methodist Church to all merge, but there’s no way … I don’t want to say no way. It’s unrealistic that that would happen without just conceding to complete theological indifferentism. So that might be a greater sin. It’s a greater sin to unite around liberalism than to not unite.
Joe:
Now, Zummer is right about this. Without the involvement of the state, he has no plan to fix the problem of denominationalism. The seven sisters are never going to unite by their own power. They’re never going to just voluntarily join together. And he’s not able to cite any clear principle for why Protestants should side with any one sister over the six others. And in any case, if the seven sisters did unite, it would only be by affirming complete theological and differentism. I mean, you could imagine if you came up with a creed something like God either exists or doesn’t exist, you could theoretically unite everybody in the whole world as one body, but it would be a body that stood for nothing. Arzi’s right. He has correctly identified this devastating schism problem within Protestantism that undermines the unity and integrity of the church. But without Trump creating a national church of America, he has no realistic plans that would actually solve the problem at all.
He can’t even tell Protestants today which of the seven sisters to join. Of course, there is an obvious answer to this problem. If schism is the evil that Arze, I think rightly regards it as, then the reformation was evil and everyone should be a part of the Catholic church. The seven sisters should go home to their mother. That’s a clear principle of unity. It makes sense and it actually accords better with the actual patristic evidence. Rome is the icon of unity cited to by many of the church fathers, for example. So it seems like the Catholic church won this debate without even being involved, right? Well, RZ is actually prepared for that objection and his argument is, I want to admit, stronger than many Catholics give him credit for it being.
CLIP:
The only reason the reformation was justified was because Rome see a true church with valid jurisdiction when she infallibly bound all of her members to commit idolatry and assent to false doctrine. Samuel Rutherford, the chief Scottish divine at Westminster said a separation from Rome was only warranted due to Romex communicating the faithful, just like the Jewish church excommunicated the apostles and it was not warranted until then. Doug and I would agree Rome still has vestiges of the church in valid baptism, but it isn’t the true church with magisterial authority.
Joe:
That clip I think is a little choppy. So I believe what he said was the only reason the reformation was justified was because Rome ceased to be a true church with valid jurisdiction when she infallibly bound all of her members to commit idolatry and to assent to false doctrine. Now, as I said, that is a stronger position than Catholics sometimes acknowledge. It is a stronger position than we sometimes realize because Arzi is not saying the Catholic church is a false church because there are errors in it or sins in the church. He doesn’t think schism is justified even due to the presence of sin, error, blasphemy, heresy, even child murder. And he can’t think skisman is justified under those circumstances because the seven denominations he’s trying to get Protestants to join are guilty of supporting every one of those things. Rather, his argument has to be that a church ceases to be a true church, not if it permits heresy, but if it binds its members to heresy.
That view is principle that makes sense. We can actually even agree with a lot of those principles. If your bishop or your country or your commanding officer demands you do something sinful, you must obey God rather than men. But the mere fact that your bishop or president or commanding officer is a sinner isn’t enough to justify disobedience. The problem is what happens when you apply that to the visible church itself? As I point out in my book, Pope Peter, if the church isn’t infallible, this creates an impossible catch 22 for Christians. If God permitted the church to teach error as binding doctrines, then every Christian clergy and lady alike find themselves in this impossible position of having to either embrace heresy or go into schism. But that is exactly what RZ claims happened. Now there are two problems with this view. First, the losing side of any fight within the church is almost always going to think that their right in the church is wrong.
So if your position is that the church has doctrinal authority unless it teaches falsely, then in practice the church has no real doctrinal authority. You actually see this illustrated beautifully. By the way, Doug and Zoomer, talk about the Council of Jerusalem.
CLIP:
Now let’s say is a Judaizer who’s going to argue for the Judaism case at the Jerusalem Council. Is he already a schismatic?
No, there’s a difference between between being a heretic and a schismatic.
Okay. So the judgment has to be applied. So when Paul says, if it’s a different gospel-
Even if it is applied, you’re not necessarily a schismatic. You might be a heretic. The Arians who were kicked out were not necessarily schismatics. They were heretics and they were justly expelled. You’re a schismatic if you voluntarily leave.
Or if you are kicked out, you’re kicked out and you go down the street and you start doing your thing all by yourself.
If you are unjustly kicked out … So no, if you are justly kicked out and you start a new church, that makes it schismatic. If you are unjustly kicked out, then it’s not schismatic.
Joe:
But what schismatic that gets communicated is ever going to say, “Yeah, I deserve to be excommunicated for my heretical teachings.” Obviously, a Judaizer is going to think the council of Jerusalem got it wrong and he’s going to think that the apostles are the real schismatics, unless he recognizes the apostles as having some special authority to teach even undisputed questions where they’re right and he’s wrong. But both Doug and Zoomer agree that the Judaizer could be right. That is, they both acknowledge that even though the Council of Jerusalem claims to speak on behalf of God in Acts 15, these two gentlemen both seem to think that it could have just as easily gone the other way and the apostles could have instead taught damnable error as true doctrine.
CLIP:
If we are an angel from heaven preach to you a different gospel, Paul says, “Let him be anathema.” And the point I needed to finish from that Galatians one section is that Paul was writing this in the run up to the Jerusalem Council not knowing which way it was going to go. So for all he knew, he was anathematizing James. So James and Peter stood fast, but Paul didn’t know. This whole thing came out of a hot controversy at Antioch where men from James were representing James falsely. And so Paul collided with them, Barnabas collided with them. So on the way to Jerusalem, Paul anathematizes an apostle, anybody, the founder of the denomination, if he teaches something different than God damn that guy. And so had the Jerusalem Council, this is an important thought experiment, had the Jerusalem Council gone the wrong way and they said, “Oh, Gentiles have to become Jews to become Christians.” What would the Apostle Paul have done?
Would he have continued to plant churches? Would he continue to preach what he was preaching? It seems to me that if he’s anathematizing anyone who’s going contrary to it, he would have kept right on going.
Well, it depends on whether the faithful in that church were ex- communicated, whether they were prevented from being part of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. There are many robbery councils in church history that happened, but then they are rejected by the church.
Joe:
So I want to be perfectly clear. If the apostles and elders can come together in council, declare Christian doctrine on behalf of the Holy Spirit and you still can’t trust the church to be the pillar and foundation of truth and to get this right. It might secretly just be a robber council teaching false doctrine. Then you can see the impossibility of this model of the church. How could the Judaizers possibly know whether their excommunication was justified or not? I mean, they could always hold that hope that someday the judgment of history would vindicate them. Someday, the Council of Jerusalem is going to be recognized as a robber council. According to Doug and Zummer, even St. Paul himself didn’t know ahead of time whether the council was going to teach heresy or truth. So that’s one problem. It undermines the legitimacy of any doctrinal authority of the church, even at the time of the apostles.
Saying the church has doctrinal authority unless it is wrong is seemingly saying nothing at all. You might as well just say, “You know what? You’re right when you’re not wrong.” That’s axiomatic. But the second problem is historical. If Zoomer is right that the Catholic Church was a true church and seemingly was the true church, since there wasn’t some other denomination around with competing jurisdiction, the question is when did it cease to be the true church? If you’re a Catholic, I think this is a good question to press Protestants on because you’ll find many Protestants today who claim the Catholic Church ceased to be a true church when it allegedly anethematized the gospel of the Council of Trent by condemning the Lutheran understanding of justification. In the words of the Anglican Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, we know that the Church of Rome and excommunicating us for confessing Christ has excommunicated herself.
We believe that the sin of the separation between us lies at her door. So that’s a common Protestant talking point, but it only works if you don’t think too deeply about it or look too closely at the timeline of history. If the church was still the church until the Council of Trenton in the 1560s or the excommunication of the English schismatics in the 1530s, that means the reformers broke communion from a true church back in 1517 to 1520 and were schismatics. Because remember, the original fight between Martin Luther and the church had absolutely nothing to do with justification by faith alone or whether Henry II could get an annulment or not. Luther was moved to write his 95 thesis back in 1517 because he was scandalized by the Dominican preacher, Johann Tetzel’s preaching about indulgences because Tesla was preaching as if an indulgence could be purchased.
Now, Luther, I think was right to see Tetzel’s preaching as erroneous, but Arzee has already established that somebody else preaching error is not grounds for you to go into schism. Remember, by Zoomer’s argument, even if Tetzel had killed a baby at the altar in the church as an offering to demons, that still wouldn’t have justified Luther going into schism because ancient Israel already had to deal with that. So none of that has anything to do with Solopite. This is about corruption in the church and about alleged abuses around the doctrine of indulgences. And Luther at the time is not some great champion of Solopite as he would himself explain. It was only in 1519 that he came to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Prior to that point, he describes himself as just an angry monk who hated God. He said, “I did not love.
Yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” So that’s the God hating Luther protesting the church and getting excommunicated. It’s not the Luther of later Protestant mythology, boldly teaching about Solaphide and getting excommunicated for that. No, the real Luther was to quote the man himself a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience and his extremely troubled conscience showed in his disturbed view of sin and grace. So propositions for which Luther was actually excommunicated included his claims like, “In every good work, the just man sins,” or, “A good work done very well is a venial sin, or no one is certain that he is not always sinning mortally.” Now, hopefully, whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, you can agree that it’s not good for a disturbed monk to be teaching these false teachings as if they’re Catholic doctrine. I think on a careful review of the case, Protestants would have to admit that Luther was in fact teaching error even from their own perspective, that he then refused to back down from these errors and so his excommunication was justifiable.
It doesn’t work to say the Council of Trent justified the reformation or some other event after the reformation. Instead, Redeem Zumer makes a better argument. He follows Rutherford in arguing that it was instead at the Council of Constance that the Catholic Church ceased to be the true church.
CLIP:
Doug also asks, “Does everyone individually need to be ex- communicated for schism to be warranted?” If there is a binding doctrine that binds you to things that you do not believe, then you are all ex- communicated. So before Martin Luther was even born, the Council of Constance excommunicated automatically anyone who would not admit, anyone who taught the quote unquote heresies of Jan Huss and John Wickliffe that you need to receive the bread and the wine in communion, which is what Jesus said to do. The Council of Constance excommunicated anyone who held to basic Protestant doctrines. So it wasn’t just that Luther was personally excommunicated. Anyone, whether Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran Methodist who holds to Protestant doctrines is automatically ex communicated from the Roman Catholic Church. And according to Rutherford, that is the only reason why separation from Rome was warranted.
Joe:
Now, as far as I can tell, Zummer is actually factually incorrect on this point. I may be wrong about that, but I believe that while the Husseins were heretical, there are only eight offenses that are automatic excommunications in the Catholic church and believing that it is a matter of divine law that the laity must receive from both the host and the chalice is simply not one of them. Nevertheless, leave that question to one side. It’s true that if you believe in the reliability of councils, councils like the Council of Constance, then Protestants are certainly teaching heresy. And if you think the council heird by teaching that as binding doctrine, it would seem by RZ’s standard to mean that the church is no longer a true church. Nevertheless, it seems like choosing the Council of Constance is a bit arbitrary. After all, there are much clearer issues in which Protestants part from the teaching of the church.
The fourth ladder in council back in 1215 defined transsubstantiation and declared heretics who rejected the teaching as excommunicated and unethematized, or go back even further, the veneration of icons, back in the second Council of Nissan 787, one of the first seven ecumenical councils. It anethematizes anybody who rejects artistic depictions of Christ as well as anyone who rejects any written or unwritten tradition of the Catholic church. In fact, we can go back even further. The first Council of Constantinople in 381 required heretics returning to the Catholic church to anethematize every heresy, which is not of the same mind as the holy Catholic and Apostolic church of God. By any of those historic standards, by any of those teachings of economical councils, Protestants would seem to stand condemned, which leads us to one of two conclusions. Either Protestantism is false or redeemed Zoomer’s reasoning is true, but the true church actually ceased to exist well before the Council of Constance sometime in the first millennium.
And it’s not enough to say that, “Oh, maybe the true church continued to exist, but in a spiritual sense, even after the visible church fell into heresy,” because Redeemed Zoomer points out that’s a heretical misunderstanding of the church.
CLIP:
Is Christ divided? Says Paul, “You could appeal to spiritual unity, but it’s desetic and mysterian to separate the physical and spiritual. You can’t just start a new denomination because you think the others aren’t good enough. That’s schism.
Joe:
So where does all that leave us? Well, Redeem Zimmer has rightly recognized that Protestants fail to appreciate the need to be part of the visible body of Christ. People today are much too comfortable with this damnable sin of schism and it’s honestly refreshing to hear a Protestant say this. Meanwhile, Doug Wilson is right that Arizi’s own views don’t actually permit him to hold any kind of coherent solution to the problem. You end up just deciding which of the seven sisters you want to join to, and if you don’t like her, you can jump to the next one. Arzi’s own views seem to have the visible church ceasing to be a church well before the reformation and that seems to leave no true church on earth in any visible form. Now, maybe there’s some great Protestant answer to that problem. It doesn’t come up in this debate and I don’t personally know an answer that doesn’t fall into all of the same problems that Redeem Zoomer and Doug Wilson highlight.
So let’s end with this. If Catholicism is true, it’s clear how Redeem Zoomer and Doug Wilson can both be right. They’re both right about the problems in one another’s views and there’s a solution to the problems that they’ve highlighted, namely come home to the church. But if Catholicism isn’t true, if Protestantism is true, then we have a grave problem with schism and there appears to be no solution other than hoping Donald Trump fixes it by creating some really good church of America or else shrugging off the problem of schism. And the gravity of this unfixable problem becomes particularly acute when you do something like look at the Anglican communion today where we see the sort of British model RZ promoting simply coming apart at the seams. You can find more on my take on the problems within the Anglican communion and what this means for the future of Anglicanism right here.
Otherwise, for Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.