One hardly knows where to start. General Convention 2009 of the Episcopal Church began on July 7. In her opening remarks the Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori had many things to say but this paragraph in particular has attracted attention:
The crisis of this moment has several parts, and like Episcopalians, particularly the ones in Mississippi, they’re all related. The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.
Read the whole thing here. You do not have to register.
Heresy. Besides my difficulty in understanding just what she is trying to say I find it remarkable that any Episcopalian at this stage of the game let alone the Presiding Bishop can use that word with a straight face. And all the turmoil in the Anglican Communion and in the Episcopal Church in particular? Apparently that has nothing to do with words and actions and decisions by the Episcopal Church and its leadership. No – it is all the fault of those nasty conservatives who adhere to a pernicious heresy. Thank you Presiding Bishop for clearing that up.
The Presiding Bishop is not entirely wrong. Of course salvation is not solely an individualistic matter. Nor is salvation simply a matter of saying the correct words. But orthodox Anglicans know this. The Presiding Bishop is engaging in sophistic caricature.
Another bishop, who asked not to be named, described Bishop Jefferts Schori’s view of salvation as being difficult to reconcile with the vows taken at baptism and Paul’s statement on confession (Romans 10:8-10).
Professor Christopher Seitz of the Anglican Communion Institute noted that the presiding bishop needed to define her terms. If by the “Western heresy” she meant the individualism of the Enlightenment, the priority of the individual conscience as articulated by Kant, or the need for individual certainty in science and history suggested by Lessing, “these are bedrock foundations of TEC liberalism.”
As a matter of history, there is no individualist heresy, the Rev. Ephraim Radner, professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto told The Living Church. Jesus calls individuals “by name” and saves them “one by one,” he said, and a catholic theology cannot deny this.
“Her remarks would suggest simple ad hominem arguments against conservative evangelicals, masking as theological incoherence,” Fr. Radner said.
Read the whole thing at Living church.
Precisely. Professor Seitz recognizes the irony and hypocrisy behind what the Presiding Bishop says. And Ephraim Radner articulates well her underlying intent.
Doctor Mark Thompson offered some of the most trenchant and devastating dissections of what the Presiding Bishop offered:
The Presiding Bishop’s “ignorance of the Bible and Christian theology is nothing short of breathtaking” the Dean of Moore College in Sydney, Dr. Mark Thompson told CEN.
The presiding bishop’s condemnation of the culture of individualism was not misplaced, Dr. Thompson said, but the theological approach she was taking to address the problem was erroneous. “No one was suggesting that Paul ignored the corporate implications of shared salvation,” he observed, but an “unrelenting dichotomy between the individual and the corporate” was a modern phenomenon.
Augustine, Luther, the Protestant Reformers and the Anglican divines all taught that “God’s purposes are deeply relational and hence the very opposite of fragmented, isolationist individualism. Yet they also extend further than simply corporate identity to call on human persons as persons to repent and believe the gospel,” Dr. Thompson said.
For evangelical’s “more serious still” was the presiding bishop’s “caricature” of a confession of faith that she said made salvation dependent “on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus,” Dr. Thompson said.
The confession that “Jesus Christ is Lord” was “certainly a form of words,” but “they are never simply words,” he explained. “They represent a fundamental orientation of life which includes a willingness to have our thinking and behaviour shaped by the One we acknowledge has such a supreme claim upon us,” he noted.
Read the whole thing at Conger. You do not have to register.
This is why I say the Presiding Bishop is partly right – but for all the wrong reasons. She does not appear to understand what she is talking about. And insofar as she does understand it appears she is projecting onto others what is most true about herself and the Episcopal Church. Something about beams and motes.
One of my best friends – who was ordained a deacon and then a priest in the Episcopal Church through this diocese – commented that many of the clergy in this diocese have an “infantile theology”. I am afraid Presiding Bishop Jefferts-Schori demonstrates this all too well. Bishops are not just theologians – but bishops should be theologians. Something about teaching and defending the faith once delivered to the saints.
