The Church and the Right to Judge

The Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore

Southern Anglican Substack

Jan 26, 2026

One of the most difficult tasks entrusted to the Church is not preaching mercy, nor proclaiming hope, nor comforting the afflicted. It is the duty to judge.

Not to condemn — for condemnation belongs to God alone — but to discern truth from error, faith from distortion, obedience from rebellion. Without this capacity, the Church ceases to be a teacher and becomes merely a commentator. She may still inspire, still console, still encourage — but she no longer governs, and therefore no longer guards.

In every age, the Church has been forced to name falsehood when it clothed itself in Christian language. Sometimes that falsehood appeared as doctrinal deviation, sometimes as moral corruption, sometimes as political idolatry. In each case, judgment was not an act of pride but of fidelity: a refusal to allow Christ to be remade in the image of the age.

Recently, strong language has again been used to describe the sacralization of war and nationalism — rightly so. When rulers invoke God to bless conquest, when soldiers are told they die as martyrs for the nation, when the Kingdom of Christ is confused with the ambitions of the state, the Church must speak. Such theology is not merely mistaken; it is a perversion of the Gospel.

And yet beneath the louder controversy lies a quieter, more unsettling question.

Not simply what is heresy.

But who may rightly name it.

For “heresy” is not a casual word. It is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the gravest judgment the Church can pronounce short of separation from communion. To name heresy is to claim not only theological clarity, but moral authority and pastoral credibility.

And here the modern Church stands on uncertain ground.

Judgment Begins at Home

Scripture is unambiguous:

“For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God” (1 Peter 4:17).

The right to correct the world is never granted to a Church that has refused to correct herself.

From the beginning, the Fathers understood that discipline within the Church was not optional but essential to her witness. Cyprian of Carthage, writing in the third century amid schism and persecution, insisted that unity and discipline were the very marks of the true Church. “He cannot have God for his Father,” he famously wrote, “who has not the Church for his mother.” But this mother, Cyprian knew, must also correct her children.

Augustine, confronting both Donatists and imperial pressure, warned that judgment exercised without integrity collapses into hypocrisy. “The Church,” he wrote, “is a threshing floor,” in which wheat and chaff remain mixed — but this did not absolve the bishops of their duty to separate truth from error when doctrine itself was threatened.

And Chrysostom, whose pastoral courage cost him exile and ultimately his life, warned his fellow bishops that authority without discipline invites divine judgment: “The road to hell is paved with the skulls of erring pastors,” not because they taught falsely, but because they refused to correct when correction was demanded.

The Fathers did not imagine a Church that preserved unity by silence. They imagined a Church that preserved unity by truth.

The Modern Collapse of Discipline

Over the last generation, much of Western Christianity — and Anglicanism in particular — has steadily abandoned the practice of doctrinal and moral discipline. Errors long recognized by the Church catholic have been tolerated, then normalized, then institutionalized. Episcopal authority has been exercised selectively, cautiously, or not at all. Unity has been preserved not by confession but by avoidance.

Questions once settled by Scripture and tradition have been reopened not through councils but through committees. Moral teaching has been reclassified as pastoral preference. Public defiance has been met not with correction but with dialogue. The very word “discipline” has come to sound uncharitable.

The result is not mercy.

It is confusion.

And confusion, left ungoverned, becomes fracture.

More damaging still is the quiet erosion of credibility. When bishops decline to correct open rebellion within their own communion, when synods hesitate to define the faith they profess, when shepherds fear the flock more than they fear God, the Church forfeits something essential: the moral standing to judge error elsewhere.

This does not mean that later judgments become false.

It means they become weaker.

The charge may be accurate, yet its authority diminished.

The Political Temptation of Heresy Language

There is a further danger in our present moment.

When heresy is named primarily in geopolitical contexts — when it appears most readily against foreign powers, hostile regimes, or ideological enemies — theological language subtly becomes political language.

The Church begins to condemn most vigorously not the errors that fracture her own body, but the errors that align with external conflicts.

In such a climate, “heresy” risks becoming not a doctrinal category but a strategic one.

This, too, is not new.

In every age, the Church has been tempted to tolerate corruption at home while denouncing error abroad. Augustine warned repeatedly that the credibility of the Church’s witness depends not upon rhetorical force, but upon visible fidelity. “Remove justice,” he wrote, “and what are kingdoms but great robber bands?” The same logic applies to the Church: remove discipline, and what are judgments but empty words?

When heresy is named most confidently against political enemies but rarely against ecclesial rebellion, the world quickly learns that theology has become selective.

And selective judgment soon ceases to persuade.

Authority Is Not Office Alone

True ecclesial judgment rests on three pillars.

First, doctrinal clarity. The Church must know what she teaches, and why. Her judgments must arise from Scripture rightly interpreted within the tradition, not from sentiment or pressure.

Second, moral integrity. Those who judge must themselves live under judgment. Gregory the Great warned that the bishop who corrects others without correcting himself “builds with one hand and tears down with the other.”

Third, pastoral courage. The Church must be willing to correct even when correction is costly — when it threatens unity, reputation, or institutional survival. Athanasius did not preserve the faith by diplomacy. He preserved it by endurance.

Where any of these fail, judgment becomes fragile.

This is why the language of heresy was always used sparingly in the tradition. The Church did not scatter it in interviews or deploy it casually in controversies. She reserved it for councils, confessions, and solemn acts of discipline. It was not a weapon of persuasion. It was a final remedy when teaching itself endangered salvation.

The Deeper Crisis

The present controversy reveals a deeper crisis than nationalism in the East or decadence in the West.

It reveals a Church uncertain of her own authority.

We live in an age in which bishops hesitate to judge their own clergy, synods hesitate to correct their own provinces, and communions hesitate to define their own faith — and yet expect to speak with clarity to the nations.

This inversion cannot endure.

Either the Church recovers the discipline to govern herself,

or she will slowly lose the right to govern anything at all.

For the authority to judge the world is not granted by office alone.

It is granted by obedience.

The Fathers understood this instinctively. Councils spoke with authority not because they were clever, but because they were faithful. Their judgments carried weight because they themselves bore discipline. Their anathemas were feared because their bishops were holy.

When discipline vanishes, judgment becomes noise.

A Final Word

The use of faith to sanctify violence is indeed a blasphemy.

The confusion of nation and Kingdom is indeed a grave error.

The distortion of martyrdom into nationalism is indeed a perversion of Christ.

These things must be named.

But the Church must also remember:

The sharpness of her judgments will never compensate

for the silence of her discipline.

If we wish to speak credibly against heresy in the world,

we must first recover the courage to confront it in the Church.

Only then will our words carry the weight they deserve.