Presiding Bishop Describes Confessional Christianity as "Idolatry" and "Heresy"

I started picking up the threads and comments this afternoon, that the Presiding Bishop High Priestess had gone and done it again.  Rather than relying on others' descriptions and comments, I chose to read the speech for myself, at Pravda Episcopal Life Online. 

I will give her some credit for finally recognizing that TEO is in "crisis", because she talked about "crisis" in the beginning of her speech.  AS I continued to read, however, I do not think that losing membership, declining finances, and the absolute wreck she has made of TEO were what she saw as a "crisis."

If nothing that has transpired before this day has caused good Christians, who happen to also be Episcopalians, to run for the door, this might just do the trick:

The crisis of this moment has several parts, and like Episcopalians, particularly 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 use 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 all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

"Particularly ones in Mississippi"?  Was this a gratuitous shot at Greg Griffith?  Sorry, but I don't get this little reference.

Continuing in her insulting, condescending choice of words and tone, following on her description last week of Jesus Christ as a "tribal savior", the Priestess flatly declares the Christian belief in a personal relationship with God, and our personal confession of our sinful nature and request for God to enter our lives, to be a "Western heresy", a "caricature", and "idolatry."

Do you see what is going on here?  The Priestess, in her elitist, racist view of the world, equates western orthodox Christians with her view of African Anglicans as somehow sub-human, ignorant people who are 40 years behind her in their thinking on Christianity.  Much as does a person suffering from dementia, the Priestess continues to lose her social inhibitions and is stepping further and further into some undescribed form of secular deism, and further away from the Christianity it is her duty to profess.

From the inception of her term as Presiding Bishop, the Priestess has looked down her long, bulbous nose from her perch on what she believes is the higher ground of Christian understanding.  Her perch, however, is instead a Satan's broomstick of intellectualism upon which she has decided that her level of enlightenment allows her to disregard the historic faith of Christianity altogether.  The Priestess appears to think all that "old stuff" is "tribal" and not sufficient for her enlightened existence.

While she was at it, the Priestess tore down another central tenet of Christianity:

We Christians often think the only important part of the Jerusalem story is Calvary, and, yes, suffering and killing in that place still seem to be the loudest news. But Calvary was a waypoint in the larger arc of God’s dream – it’s on the way to Jerusalem, it is not in Jerusalem.

Unh-huh.  Calvary is a "waypoint in the larger arc of God's dream."  Jesus' death on the cross is nothing more than another act in the play, or chapter in the book?  Again, as we have seen time after time with the Priestess, she seems to have a substantial "ick" factor in reconciling herself to Jesus brutal, messy death for our sins.  So, she marginalizes His suffering and atonement for the sins of man, and relegates it to but a "waypoint" in the greater picture of Christianity.

In other words, the High Priestess simply does not get that Jesus' death upon the Cross, and his resurrection as our living Saviour, are the single most important thing we as Christians must understand and accept.  She does not get why Holy Week and Easter are the single most significant time of the church year for Christians.  And, based upon her rejection of individualistic beliefs in God and Jesus Christ earlier in her speech, she does not comprehend that each and every Christian can declare, with utter faith and belief, that "Christ died on the Cross for remission of my sins and so that I can achieve eternal salvation."

The High Priestess additionally makes it abundantly clear the she thinks any of us who do believe in traditional Christianity are idiots - idolatrous, tribal, heretics who do not have her expansive mental capacity so that we, too, can set ourselves above the Word of God and claim to have a higher understanding of God, moreso than any of the Apostles and Saints, and moreso than anyone else in the last 2000 years.

Friends, the decline of TEO has accelerated.  Not only is cafeteria Christianity the order of the day, but the High Priestess has put her heresies on the open, global market for all to see.  I have predicted that this General Convention will result in a heavy load of destruction for TEO; this speech by the Priestess almost guarantees it.

UPDATE:    One of the passages apparently now rejected by TEO is Romans 9: 8-10:  ⁸ But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): ⁹ that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰ For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

Comments

[Mickinfl]

And I describe the ersatz leader of TEC as mendacious and malicious.

Be gone PB.

Repent.

[Jim Doe]

As her apologists point out, the PB is often misquoted or quoted out of context. So I read her entire speech as carried in Episcopal Life. The Curmudgeon is exactly right. The PB does not help her cause with her strange references -- is the suffering in Jerusalem that of Jesus, or those caught up in Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- and I glad I'm not alone in not knowing what "Mississippi" refers to. I think the PB is trying to take an extreme form of Inclusion-ism, to say that we have our identity only in our existance as part of the mass in reconciling all creation to God by fixing all its problems. I see TEC becoming Unitarian-Universalist, just with with "smells and bells." And there is no getting around the implication that Jn 3:16 and two millenia of theology have just been blown out of the water.

[JesusLover]

Jesus died for everyone... you, personally can make no statement to save yourself. We are not condemned to hell one day and saved another. We have always been saved and will always be saved by the grace of our lord. In fact, had Martin Luther not heard those words, you would all be Roman Catholic right now! Stop the hate.. Star the love