Episcopal Church drives over cliff and enjoys the descent

The one and only David Virtue eviscerates the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA after her comments that individual salvation is the "great Western heresy."

In her opening address to the church's General Conference in California, Jefferts Schori said it was a "heresy" to believe that an individual can be saved through personal faith and trust in Jesus Christ acknowledged in a prayer of repentance.

She said that view is 'caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus.'

According to Schori, it is heresy to believe that an individual's prayer can achieve a saving relationship with God. "That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy."

Ms. Jefferts Schori is dead wrong.

The entire message of both Old and New Testaments is God's pursuit of man, not man's search for Ubuntu.

Her ridiculing of personal salvation in favor of social amelioration through Millennium Development Goals is little more than a rehash of the Social Gospel of the Sixties that has seen a massive hemorrhaging of mainline denominations in America.

Jefferts Schori is on the wrong side of history. Her, and the church's understanding of mission - to save the world for God - is arrogance and hubris. No one human being, organization or ministry has that capacity. God alone has the power to save the world. Jesus himself admitted that the poor would always be with us.

We are called to be obedient to The Great Commission, "to go into all the world and preach the gospel" of God's grace, inviting people into his kingdom based on the very (and personal) call to repentance.

It is not about a "formula", as Jefferts Schori caricatures it. The Sinner's Prayer is not a recitation of the Four Spiritual Laws. Formula faith is not real faith; it never has been and never will be.

Many of those who have come to faith in Jesus Christ have wrestled with that call. St. Paul's Damascus Road experience was no "Ubuntu" moment. Neither was the experience of John Bunyan of Pilgrim's Progress, an everyman character, which centers itself on his journey from his hometown, the "City of Destruction" ("this world"), to the "Celestial City" ("that which is to come": Heaven) atop Mt. Zion. He is only and finally freed from the weight of his burden - the knowledge of his sin - when he repents of his sin at the foot of the cross.

Jefferts Schori will have none of that kind of faith or talk.

Read the rest here.

Tagged anglican bible christianity episcopal jefferts schori salvation theology
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