Katherine Jefferts Schori's Muddled Thoughts on Salvation

Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop has attempted to clarify her remarks at the General Convention Opening Session last month in an article in Episcopal Life. She was criticized for teaching heresy from almost every sector of the Church Catholic (except liberal Protestantism) after claiming that "the great Western heresy" is "that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God."

The article follows in red with my comments in square brackets and in [bold].

[Episcopal Life] I always am delighted when people listen to what I say in a sermon or address. Sometimes I am surprised by what they hear. In my opening address at General Convention, I spoke about the "great Western heresy" of individualism (see the full text here).

There have been varied reactions from people who weren't there, who heard or read an isolated comment without the context. Apparently I wasn't clear! [That might be the problem, or it might be that she was too clear.]

Individualism (the understanding that the interests and independence of the individual necessarily trump the interests of others as well as principles of interdependence) is basically unbiblical and unchristian. [This is a bit rich coming from the leader of an Anglican Province that has bulled ahead with its homosexualist agenda despite the pleas of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the majority of the Anglican Communion to hold back from doing what all the Communion leadership has said is unacceptable to the vast majority until there is more agreement! She talks "interdependence, but practices "TEC individualism" in which the desires of individual homosexuals take precedence over Anglican interdependence.]

The spiritual journey, [Salvation is certainly a journey, but it is also an event. (Jn. 1:12, 3:16, Rom. 10:13)] at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is about holy living in community. When Jesus was asked to summarize the Torah, he said, "love God and love your neighbor as yourself." That means our task is to be in relationship with God and with our neighbors. If salvation is understood only as "getting right with God" without considering "getting right with (all) our neighbors," then we've got a heresy (an unorthodox belief) on our hands. [Where is the connection between the idea that we must love our neighbours and the idea that verbal assent to the Gospel is unnecessary or unimportant? The former does not imply the latter.]

The theme of our General Convention, ubuntu, was chosen intentionally to focus on this. Often translated from its original African dialects as "I am because we are," ubuntu has significant biblical connections and warrant. The Hebrew prophets save their strongest denunciation for those who claim to be worshiping correctly but ignore injustice done to their neighbors (e.g., Amos 5:21-24), and Jesus insists that those who will enter the kingdom are the ones who have cared for neighbor by feeding, watering, clothing, housing, healing and visiting "the least of these" (Matt 25:31-46). [Logically, not caring for neighbours may make our profession of faith hypocritical, or possibly even invalid, but it does not make it unnecessary. Neither the OT prophets or Jesus ever implied that.]

In my address, I went on to say that sometimes this belief that salvation only depends on getting right with God is reduced to saying a simple formula about Jesus. Jesus is quite explicit in his rejection of simple formulas: "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven" (Matt 7:21). [Yet Paul says: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." (Rom. 10:13) She is interpreting Jesus in such a way as to create an unnecessary contradiction with Paul. Is Jesus saying that "simple formulas are unnecessary or insufficient in themselves? There is a huge difference; the issue is the difference between how salvation is received initially and how is it worked out in our lives afterwards. The latter interpretation harmonizes Jesus and Paul and thus preserves the authority of Scripture, which makes it a better interpretation.] He is repeatedly insistent that right relationship depends on loving neighbors – for example, "those who say, ‘I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (1John 4:20). The Epistles repeatedly enjoin the followers of Jesus to "give evidence of the hope within you" (1Pet 3:15ff), that "faith without works is dead" (James 2:14-26), that our judgment depends on care for brother and sister (Rom 14:10-12) and that we eat our own destruction [Is she a closet believer in hell or is she just getting carried away rhetorically here?] if we take Communion without having regard for the rest of the community (1Cor 11:27-34). [She is beating a dead horse here. A Wesley or a Luther or an Edwards or a Billy Graham would never disagree with any of these passages, but they would not interpret them as meaning that we obtain salvation by loving our neighbours, as she seems to be doing. She can apparently only conceive of salvation as either a matter of "mere words" or salvation as loving neighbours - both are things we do. She seems to be oblivious to a third possibility; namely, that salvation might be something God does in us and which we receive by faith.]

[Watch the contradiction in the next two sentences.] Salvation depends on love of God and our relationship with Jesus, and we give evidence of our relationship with God in how we treat our neighbors, nearby and far away. Salvation is a gift from God, not something we can earn by our works, but neither is salvation assured by words alone. [She almost tip toes back from the brink here by stating that salvation is a gift. But does she mean to affirm salvation by grace and faith alone? She is contrasting not faith in God's grace versus works here, but rather our works versus our words. Is salvation "given" as a free, unmerited gift of grace or as a reward for loving God and neighbour? Which comes first: salvation or love of neighbour? The whole context inclines the reader to the reward interpretation since there is no mention of faith, grace, sin, repentance, atonement or forgiveness in this whole discussion of salvation, which, after all, is supposed to clarify her theological teaching on the nature of salvation. Now if you were accused of heresy and works righteousness, do you think it would be a good idea to write a clarifying article that omitted all those ideas? Can a biblical theology of salvation be conveyed without using them?]

Salvation cannot be complete, in an eternal and eschatological sense, until the whole of creation is restored to right relationship. That is what we mean when we proclaim in the catechism that "the mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ" [The mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God??? In the Bible that is the mission of Jesus Christ. The mission of the Church is to proclaim the good news of what Christ has done, is doing and will do. This is a pretty gigantic issue to get wrong. My undergraduate 'Introduction to Christian Theology' students would not get away with such a theologically careless statement.] and that Christian hope is to "live with confidence in newness and fullness of life and to await the coming of Christ in glory and the completion of God's purpose for the world." We anticipate the restoration of all creation to right relationship, and we proclaim that Jesus' life, death and resurrection made that possible in a new way. [Here she catches herself and affirms that the death and resurrection of Jesus "made that possible." But this is very vague and ambiguous. How did it make it possible? By this point, how much of a hermeneutic of suspicion is required to suspect that if pressed she would profer some sort of subjective, exemplarist view of the atonement? She must have realized that people would suspect her of holding such a non-objective view of atonement based on the response to her original remarks. Why would she not clarify her view here on the nature of atonement?] At the same time, salvation in the sense of cosmic reconciliation is a mystery. It's hard to pin down or talk about. It is ultimately the gift of a good and gracious God, [Again, the language of gift is not clear; it is really unmerited favor?] not the product of our incessant striving. It is about healing and wholeness and holiness, the fruit of being more than doing. [Now she needs to make up her mind. For several paragraphs it has been all about doing and striving; now suddenly she changes her tack and says it is not the product of our striving. Which is it? If loving God and neighbour in practical ways is how we merit the "gift" of salvation, rather than repeating a "mere verbal formula," then how is it that we can rest in God's grace?] Just like another image we use to speak about restored relationship, the reign of God, salvation is happening all the time, all around us. Where do you see evidence?" [She denigrates the whole idea of a "simple verbal formula" and opposes it to loving God and neighbour because she does not understand that the "empty hand of faith" by which we receive, in a totally passive way, the grace of God in Jesus Christ is the heart of the Gospel and the means by which the Church is preserved from legalism and works righteousness. She has no more understanding of the Gospel than the Judaizers, who accused Paul of antinomianism because he refused to make salvation contingent on keeping the works of the law. Whether it is circumcision or working for social justice, the question Paul addressed to the Galatians remains: "Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?"]

"You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? . . . Consider Abraham: 'He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Understand then that those who believe are children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that those God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: All nations would be blessed through you.' So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith." (Gal. 3:1-9)
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Unfortunately, this "clarification" obscures more than it clarifies. If her point was that salvation is a free, unmerited gift of God that we receive by faith alone and that, as a result of being born again and filled with the Spirit, we naturally do good works as evidence of the reality of our new life in Christ, then why did she not just say so? Her point that good works and love of neighbour inevitably follow from a true conversion is uncontroversial among Evangelicals and Catholics; if that is all she wanted to say, no one could possibly object. But she had to draw the contrast not between true and false profession, but rather between doing good works and loving neighbour versus making a verbal profession of faith. The latter contrast shows a liberal trying to denigrate Evangelical theology as heretical. The former contrast would have been one Evanglicals frequently make themselves.

If you compare the theological writings and sermons of Jefferts Schori (who is the Presiding Bishop, after all, the chief teacher of the Episcopal Church) to the writings and sermons of J. R. W. Stott or J. I. Packer or N. T. Wright, her writings look amateurish, muddled and shallow. There is no reason to suspect, based on how she talks, that she has read widely or deeply in the Christian traditon. She gives no evidence of understanding orthodox teaching on salvation, either in its Augustinian-Reformed varieties or even in its Wesleyan-Arminian varities. She, apparently, from what she writes, could not distinguish between the teaching of Luther on justification and the teaching of the indulgence peddlers or explain what Luther was so exercised about.

Her writings are what one might expect as a legacy of nearly a century of liberal, social gospel theology dominating TEC and nearly a half-century of liberation theology being at the center of its seminary education. A church that could elect such a person bishop is a church that is not just heretical but a church that has lost the ability to distinguish between orthodoxy and heresy. The TEC is in much worse shape theologically than the Roman Catholic Church was on the eve of the Reformation.

Inclusive Language and the Doctrine of the Trinity

Bishop Mark Lawrence of the Diocese of South Carolina in The Episcopal Church (TEC) recently gave an address to the clergy of his diocese. Since General Convention '09 he has been under pressure to lead his diocese out of TEC but after consultation with his leadership has decided to stay and fight. He said bluntly:

"We face a multitude of false teachings, which like an intrusive vine, is threatening The Episcopal Church as we have inherited and received it from our ancestors. I have called this the false Gospel of Indiscriminate Inclusivity because I see a common pattern in how the core doctrines of our faith are being systematically deconstructed."

Two of the specific doctrines he mentioned as under particular attack from the "false gospel of indiscriminate inclusivity" are the doctrines of the Trinity and the Uniqueness of Christ. In his discussion of the latter he had some plain talk for Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori:

"In answering questions about the Uniqueness and Universality of Christ she has repeatedly suggested that it is not up to her to decide what the mechanism is God uses to save people. But, quite to the contrary, it is her responsibility as a bishop of the Church to proclaim the saving work of Jesus Christ and to teach what it is the Scriptures and the Church teach. Anything less from us who are bishops is an abdication of our teaching office. Otherwise how will the world know to whom to come? How will the unschooled within the Church know what they should believe? I do not cite this to be controversial but to reference the pervasiveness of this inclusive gospel that would, in its attempt to include all people and all religions, fail to rightly delight in, celebrate and worship him before whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord."

This sets the context for what I wanted to draw to your attention in his speech. (The bolding is mine.)

"The Trinity. One of the doctrines under barrage in our Church is an orthodox understanding of the Trinity. At the last three General Conventions I have been concerned about the lack of Eucharists according to the rites in the Book of Common Prayer. Even this I might be able to overlook if the rites that were employed were not so devoid of references to God the Father. In more than a few of these worship services the only reference to God the Father actually in the liturgy was the Lord's Prayer. In the name of inclusion there's the perception by some (a variant of radical feminism I suppose) that the references to the Father, and the pronoun "he" is some lingering patriarchal holdover. Yet it has always intrigued me that in all of the Hebrew Scriptures there are only a handful of references to God as Father. If one wants to locate the authority of the Church to worship God as Father one need look no further than Jesus himself. It was he who called God "Abba" and taught the disciples to prayer "Our Father." Frankly, if Jesus got that one so wrong, why should we turn to him for anything?"

Elsewhere in his remarks, Bishop Lawrence makes the point that the false "gospel" of indiscriminate inclusivity is not merely a problem for TEC, but is endemic in our culture. It is coming soon, if it has not already, to a neighbourhood near you. He rightly said that being in TEC is just a matter of being on the front lines. So I think it behooves us to pay attention to what someone on the front lines is experiencing and what his perceptions are.

I raise this issue because of the intense discussion generated by my post the other day about inclusive language. I used to think it was OK to meet the feminists half way by using inclusive language of humans and for contemporary writing but not for God or historical documents (like the Bible or English literature). But now I have given up trying to compromise with an ideology that is determined to sweep all before it in the name of a false gospel.

The problem is that, once the concession is made that traditional language is exclusive of women (which is never was), then the integrity and credibility of all the texts of Western civilization are placed in question. Since everything prior to 1970 uses "non-inclusive language," everything is open to suspicion of being "patriarchial" and thus non-binding. This applies to the concept of classic texts in literature, law, philosophy and history, as well as all theological texts up to and including Holy Scripture itself.

Bishop Lawrence clarifies for us what we are up against. We face a movement of self-proclaimed feminists (which, by the way, includes in its ranks as many or more men than women) that arrogantly and without warrant claims to speak for all women. This movement is so proud and so puffed up that even the venerable doctrine of the Trinity - that which makes Christianity itself - must be tossed away like yesterday's newspaper merely because it violates the ideology that judges all other belief systems by the standard of its own presuppositons.

All of Western history is thus dismissed as oppressive, patriarchial and outdated. In order to be progressive we must start all over again like the French revolutionaries with a new social order, a new law, a new calendar and a new religion. This is the spirit of Jacobinism and it is antithetical to the Christian Faith.

Bishop Lawrence gets to the heart of the matter when he points out that the origin of the Church's doctrine of the Trinity and the source of our langauge of God as Father is not the Old Testament nor Church History, but Jesus himself. His question: "Frankly, if Jesus got that one so wrong, why should we turn to him for anything?" raises the stakes and puts the real issue on the table. I would suggest that the next logical direction for the proponents of the false gospel of inclusivity to go is "beyond Jesus." And that is exactly why the Presiding Bishop's downplaying of Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life is pointing. TEC, like the United Church of Canada, is quickly moving toward a Deist or even post-Christian position.

I fully understand and appreciate the impulse to be open and humble in the face of the feminist challenge and to try to reach some sort of accommodation that makes us appear sensitive to the very real sufferings of women at the hands of men who violate God's law. But to do so in such a way as to undermine the revelation of God's nature and will is perverse and can only add to the brokenness and misery of our world. The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Holy Scriptures that contains it are the answer to the problems caused by sin in male-female relations. Once we let ourselves get maneuvered into allowing them to be portrayed as part of the problem we have become unfaithful to our calling to preach Christ to the world. At that point we fail to be the salt that the world needs to stem the rot of sin.

Katherine Jefferts Schori's False Gospel of Works

Here is a link to a talk by Katherine Jefferts Schori in which she denies that salvation comes by personal faith in Jesus Christ. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxG96wpx60&feature=related

1. She says that every person in world has access to God whether he or she has ever heard of Jesus Christ or not.

2. She says that we have to regard those who reject Christ but live good moral lives, such as Ghandi, as saved. At the very least she implies it by stating clearly they we do not need to evangelize them. (If she thinks they are lost and also that we should not evangelize them, then she is extrordinarily hardhearted and cruel.)

3. She denies that the mission of the Church is to evangelize. Like some sort of hyper-Calvinist, she characterized the "mechanism" of people becoming reconciled to God as "God's business" and not our's.

4. She confusingly inverts both the language and meaning of Scripture by saying that personal faith in Jesus Christ is a work and that salvation by repentance, faith and confession is salvation by works.

The Bible says: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast." (Eph. 2:8-9 NIV) Here the contrast is between faith and works. Jefferts Schori conflates what Scripture distinguishes.

Jefferts Schori's false "gospel" is a message of works righteousness. She talks about living a moral life as the meaning of salvation but does not distinguish between living a moral life as the result of faith versus living the moral life as a substitute for faith. This is what she seemed to imply in her Opening Address to the 76th General Convention of The Episcopal Church:

"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."

The grain of truth here is that the Christian life is inevitably an inter-personal and inter-dependent form of existence. Faith brings us into a new relationship with God, other people and ourselves and these new relationships are essential to Christian existence. Every heresy takes truth and distorts it. The distortion here is the denial that each person - in order to enter into this new form of existence called the Christian life - has to repent of his or her sins, believe the Good News about Jesus Christ and begin to trust in Christ alone for salvation. Jefferts Schori denies this. But the Scripture says:

"That if you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. . . . for 'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." (Rom. 10:9-10, 13 NIV)

In the video clip (at about 2:20) she says: "in some parts of Christianity we have turned salvation into a work, that you have to say I claim Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour in order to be saved. That turns it into a work." So for her, works are the new faith and faith is the new works. She completely inverts the NT Gospel to suit her agenda: which is to redefine Christianity in terms of social justice work, rather than pesonal faith leading to working for social justice and many other things, chiefly among them evangelism.

It can be no surprise that Resolution CO69, which was similar to a recently passed motion in the Church of England General Synod that affirms the uniqueness of Jesus Chirst in a multi-faith world, was rejected by the Episcopal General Convention.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church can be presumed to be a spokesperson for the Church; that is beyond dispute. So TEC tolerates, allows and promotes the heresy that personal faith is unnecessary for salvation; that good works by non-Christians make them Christians even when they explicitly reject Christ as Lord and Saviour. And then to top it off they accuse the orthodox majority throughout history of teaching salvation by works becasue they follow the clear and pervasive teaching of the whole Bible that that salvation comes by hearing the Good News and putting one's faith and trust in it.

It must be stressed that when Jefferts Schori dismissively refers to "some parts of Christianity" that teach false doctrine in her opinion, she is dismissing Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jacob Spener, John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, William Carey, John Stott, Billy Graham, Karl Barth, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and all Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity. Basically, she is cutting herself off from all of Christianity and all of Church history except for a relatively recent tradition of theologically liberalism manifested in the Social Gospel, Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, etc. and embodied in the dying, liberal, Protestant denominations of the Western world and a few of its outposts. Theological liberalism looks huge in the talk shops of Western academia, but it is really a blip on the radar of Chrstianity as a whole, comprising perhaps 10-15% of world Christianity and a tiny little slice of Church history.

It is little wonder, then, that ecumenical relations are in deep freeze as far as TEC is concerned with the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy and all forms of Evangelicalism - meaning about 80-90% of world Christianity. Liberal Protestants basically have only each other to talk as far as ecumenism is concerned. TEC is even in a state of impaired communion with 80% of the Anglican Communion itself!

What we have now in TEC is a heretical, schismatic movement that has cut itself off from the roots of the Faith once delivered to the saints and which has no prospects for the future except degeneration and death. Only a revival and Spiritual renewal through biblical preaching of the Gospel accompanied by a long, hard process of reformation can save TEC. All things are possible with God; the Unitarian Universalist denomination theoretically could be reformed by a similar movement of conversion and renewal. But at the moment, TEC is in a death spiral. Homosexuality is only one aspect of the problem facing TEC, although it is integrally related to the loss of a firm grasp on the Gospel itself and the acceptance of a false "gospel" which is no Gospel at all.