Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6710640.ece

Bishop N. T. Wright comments on the vote at the General Convention to ordain practicing homosexuals as Bishops in spite of requests by the Anglican Communion to refrain from doing this

Both the bishops and deputies (lay and clergy) of TEC knew exactly what they were doing. They were telling the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other “instruments of communion” that they were ignoring their plea for a moratorium on consecrating practising homosexuals as bishops. They were rejecting the two things the Archbishop of Canterbury has named as the pathway to the future — the Windsor Report (2004) and the proposed Covenant (whose aim is to provide a modus operandi for the Anglican Communion). They were formalising the schism they initiated six years ago when they consecrated as bishop a divorced man in an active same-sex relationship, against the Primates’ unanimous statement that this would “tear the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level”. In Windsor’s language, they have chosen to “walk apart”.

Granted, the TEC resolution indicates a strong willingness to remain within the Anglican Communion. But saying “we want to stay in, but we insist on rewriting the rules” is cynical double-think. We should not be fooled.

Of course, matters didn’t begin with the consecration of Gene Robinson. The floodgates opened several years before, particularly in 1996 when a church court acquitted a bishop who had ordained active homosexuals. Many in TEC have long embraced a theology in which chastity, as universally understood by the wider Christian tradition, has been optional.

That wider tradition always was counter-cultural as well as counter-intuitive. Our supposedly selfish genes crave a variety of sexual possibilities. But Jewish, Christian and Muslim teachers have always insisted that lifelong man-plus-woman marriage is the proper context for sexual intercourse. This is not (as is frequently suggested) an arbitrary rule, dualistic in overtone and killjoy in intention. It is a deep structural reflection of the belief in a creator God who has entered into covenant both with his creation and with his people (who carry forward his purposes for that creation).

Paganism ancient and modern has always found this ethic, and this belief, ridiculous and incredible. But the biblical witness is scarcely confined, as the shrill leader in yesterday’s Times suggests, to a few verses in St Paul. Jesus’s own stern denunciation of sexual immorality would certainly have carried, to his hearers, a clear implied rejection of all sexual behaviour outside heterosexual monogamy. This isn’t a matter of “private response to Scripture” but of the uniform teaching of the whole Bible, of Jesus himself, and of the entire Christian tradition

Follow the link at the top of the page. This is well worth it.

The triennial running of the Biblically Focused is underway again at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention ’09. This is an event similar to the Pamplona running of the bulls but instead it involves opening of the church’s proverbial doors and then the Presiding Bishop, the House of Bishops or the House of Deputies start a heated competition with each doing something so egregious and un-Biblical that it sends those who actually believe in the truth and intent of the gospel running to the parish exits in droves. This year Presiding Bishop Katherine Schori wasted no time in getting the ball rolling and jumping off to a commanding point lead over both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies with these remarks.

“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.”
“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 all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.”
“We are our siblings’ keepers and their knowers, and we cannot be known without them – we have no meaning, no true existence in isolation”

Knowing that both Houses have a few things up their sleeve, I don’t suspect that the Schori will have such a dominating lead for the entire convention; however she did set the bar rather high. Let’s take some time and examine her remarks and compare them with what scripture tells us.

“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.”

She calls individual salvation the “great Western heresy” which in itself is a great heresy. To be a heresy something must have be counter to Biblical teachings. To my knowledge there are no scriptural teachings that declare that the individual cannot be saved nor be in a right relationship with God. In fact the Bible teaches us just the opposite. In Ezekiel 18:20-28 the Lord God says

The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.
“But if a wicked man turns away from all the sins he has committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, he will surely live; he will not die.
None of the offenses he has committed will be remembered against him. Because of the righteous things he has done, he will live.
Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?
“But if a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked man does, will he live? None of the righteous things he has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness he is guilty of and because of the sins he has committed, he will die.
“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear, O house of Israel: Is my way unjust? Is it not your ways that are unjust?
If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin, he will die for it; because of the sin he has committed he will die.
But if a wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is just and right, he will save his life.
Because he considers all the offenses he has committed and turns away from them, he will surely live; he will not die.

This speaks specifically to the individual and states with total clarity that the individual is the one saved. The sins of the father are not visited upon the son and likewise salvation belongs to those who repent on an individual basis. What the Presiding Bishop states runs completely counter to what the Lord teaches us in scripture and is thus a heresy and a false teaching. She doesn’t even have a scriptural basis in which to misinterpret and inaccurately arrive at what she concludes. It appears that she just made this up because she believes it’s a feel good thing to say. In saying this she is attempting to give false hope to unrepentant sinners. A misguided belief that because she declares that as a group their sin is not a sin but is in fact a blessing from God they can indulge in their sin to their heart’s content. Now who is occupying a place that only God and take?

“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 all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.”

Idolatry… interesting. I would think that picking and choosing from the Bible the aspects of God’s character that one finds acceptable and discarding those things that are troubling is in fact constructing a god of one’s own imagining, in short making an idol. This is precisely what Presiding Bishop Schori has done. She has built a god that agrees with her point of view, holds it up for others to see and claims that this is the real god to worship; a virtual Asherah Pole for the postmodern, Episcopal Church to worship and sacrifice to. In creating her false idol she and TEC constructed a new gospel because the gospel that was handed down to us from Christ and the Apostles is not compatible with the idol that she and TEC have created. Paul warned us about this in Galatians 1:8-12

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!
As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!
Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up.
I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

How can someone honestly look at the teachings in the New Testament and say that they are the same ones taught to us by Christ Jesus? If anything her approach is to rehash and repackage the first and second century Gnostic heresies. New age feel good-ism to suppress the truth of the Lord and lead the gullible down the wide path.

“We are our siblings’ keepers and their knowers, and we cannot be known without them – we have no meaning, no true existence in isolation”

To be frankly honest here, I’m not even sure what this means. Who is she defining as our siblings? Who are they to define me? My existence and meaning are in the Lord Jesus Christ and without him my life has no purpose and meaning. Without God and the Spirit guiding my steps I can be in a crowd and still be all alone; but with God doing for me what I cannot do myself, I maybe be lost in a wilderness and have all the company I need. Whether in quiet solitude and prayer or in fellowship with my loving brethren I am never alone for I am always in the company of saints and angels, all being obedient to the Lord.

Does Presiding Bishop Schori believe that God is incapable of dealing with individuals and maintaining individual relationships with all His creation? Does she see him as too busy to be concerned with and care for each person He has created and placed upon this world? Perhaps when Christ told us that not a bird lands on the ground without God knowing it and when the psalm said that each of our hairs are numbered and known to God that these words were simply hyperbole?

Now who is putting God in a small box?

Another Pilgrim