Wesley Corpus

5. How Phavorinus [Favorinus, so called from Favera, his birthplace, was a Benedictine, who in 1512 became librarian to the future Leo X. He was made Bishop of Nuceria in 1514, and died in 1537. He compiled a Greek Lexicon.] or many more may define heresy or schism I am not concerned to know. I well know heresy is vulgarly defined ‘a false opinion touching some necessary article of faith, and schism a causeless separation from a true Church.’ But I keep to my Bible, as our Church in her Sixth Article teaches me; therefore I cannot take schism for a separation from a Church, because I cannot find it so taken in Scripture. The first time I meet the term there is 1 Corinthians i. 10: I meet with it again, chap. xi. 18. But it is plain in both places by schism is meant not any separation from the Church but uncharitable divisions in it. For the Corinthians continued to be one Church, notwithstanding then strife and contention; there was no separation of one part from the other with regard to external communion. It is in the same sense the word is used chap. xii. 25. And these are the only places in the New Testament where the term occurs. Therefore the indulging any unkind temper towards our fellow Christians is the true scriptural schism. Indeed, both heresy and schism (which are works of the flesh, and consequently damnable if not repented) are here mentioned by the Apostle in very near the same sense; unless by schisms be meant rather those inward animosity which occasioned heresies -- that is, outward divisions and parties. So that while one said, ‘I am Paul; another, I am of Apollos,’ this implied both heresy and schism: so wonderfully have latter ages distorted the words ‘heresies’ and ‘schisms’ from their scriptural meaning! Heresy is not in all the Bible taken for an error in fundamentals, nor in anything ere; nor schism for any separation from the communion of others. Therefore heresy and schism in the modern sense of the words are sins that the Scriptures know nothing of.