Come Out of Her, My People

THE VOICE FROM HEAVEN

Before the Church ever wrote a canon about separation from false teaching, God had written the command in the Scriptures; and the canon we are approaching is only the Church's careful application of it. Hear the command first in its most solemn form, from the last book of the Bible, where a voice from heaven speaks over the great harlot city, the very image of glittering, established falsehood:

Come out, that ye be not partakers. The reason given is the whole theology of the last chapters in one clause: to remain in communion with organized falsehood is to partake of it. The sin becomes shared by the staying.

The Fathers read this voice as a type, a pattern. It is not a command to abandon the Church, God forbid, for the Church is the Bride and not the harlot. It is the pattern of the soul stepping out of every fellowship of falsehood, wherever it appears and whatever holy names it has captured, precisely so as to remain in the true fellowship of God.

So Saint Bede, expounding the verse, heard in the voice from heaven the whole prophetic chorus of separation gathered into one command:

When Lot has departed, it will be destroyed: the going out of the faithful is not the abandonment of a post but the completion of a testimony, God removes His own before the judgment falls, and their departure is itself the last warning given to the city. And Isaiah's clause seals the priestly logic of the whole matter: be clean, ye that bear the vessels of the Lord; for hands that carry the holy things must not be joined to what God has judged.

THE COMMANDS OF THE APOSTLES

The same command runs like a golden thread through the whole New Testament, in the plainest words. Set them in order, and watch how consistent the pattern is.

Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, writes Paul to the Corinthians. A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject, he commands Titus, first patience, admonition, labour for the man's soul; then, if he will not be healed, rejection. Mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them, he tells the Romans. And notice with care who is called the divider: not the one who avoids, but the one whose contrary doctrine caused the division.

The Apostle John, the very apostle of love, goes furthest of all. The bringer of another doctrine is not to be received into the house, nor given a greeting: for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds. Even a greeting, says love himself, makes partnership with the lie. And the Lord's own procedure of correction ends at the same threshold: if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.²⁸

And the apostles lived what they wrote. Saint Irenaeus, who learned the faith from Saint Polycarp, who learned it from John himself, recorded how that first generation treated the corrupters of the truth. When the heresiarch Marcion met Polycarp and asked, Do you know me?, the disciple of John answered: I do know you, the firstborn of Satan. And of John himself, Irenaeus tells that the apostle, entering the bathhouse at Ephesus and finding the heretic Cerinthus within, fled without bathing, crying:

Such was the horror, Irenaeus concludes, which the apostles and their disciples had against holding even verbal communication with any corrupters of the truth. And mark who is fleeing: the apostle of love, the same John who wrote the epistle of the greeting withheld. His flight is not the failure of his love but its instinct; for the man who had leaned upon the breast of Truth Himself could not stand under one roof with truth's enemy and call the standing charity.

THE VOICE OF THE SHEPHERD

The Lord Himself set this discernment into the very nature of His flock, in the parable of the sheepfold; and no passage of the Gospels teaches the wall more tenderly, for here the separation is not an achievement of learning but the instinct of belonging:

The sheep flee the stranger's voice, not because they have examined his credentials, but because they know the Shepherd's. Here is the whole teaching of this book in a pasture. The fleeing is not rebellion; it is fidelity. The sheep that follows every voice wearing the shepherd's cloak is not humble but lost. And the Lord adds the mark by which the hireling is known: that he careth not for the sheep.

When, therefore, the faithful of every age drew back from a strange voice at the altar, they were not judging above their station. They were being sheep, exactly as the Shepherd made them. And to the flock's instinct the Apostle adds the flock's command, in the plainest withdrawal text of the Scriptures:

WHAT THE SCRIPTURES NEVER COMMAND

Set beside these the anathema of Galatians with which this book opened, binding even an angel from heaven, and the witness is complete: separation from open false teaching is not a permission the Scriptures grudgingly allow. It is a command they repeatedly give.

But mark, with equal care, what the Scriptures never command. They never command the faithful to leave the Church because false teachers have arisen within her; the same apostles who wrote these words remained in the one Church, contending inside her against the false brethren. They never authorize the faithful to erect a rival church, to seize the judgment seat, or to pronounce damnation: avoid them is the constant word, not depose them. And they never permit hatred of the erring man. The heretic is rejected after admonitions, which means after labour and hope and prayer, and the door of repentance stands open behind every one of these commands.

Withdrawal from the falsehood, within the fellowship of the truth, in patience and without usurpation: that is the scriptural shape. And the reader will recognize it, in the next chapter, drawn to the millimetre in the Church's canon.