The Episcopal Church: the Nature of its Disease

It is no overstatement to claim that “no Christian standard or doctrine is safe” in the hands of leadership that has effectively abandoned Scripture as the supreme authority for life.  The new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has already shown that the Gospel itself – the good news that God sent His only Son to die for our sins and reconcile all of creation to Him – isn’t safe in her hands.  Jesus himself said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).  His apostle Peter declared the same when questioned by the Jewish high priest and elders in Jerusalem:  “there is salvation in no one else [besides Jesus Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).  In sharp contrast, when Time asked, “Is belief in Jesus the only way to get to heaven?”, Bishop Schori replied:

We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.

Dispelling any doubt about her denial of this basic tenet of the Christian faith, Bishop Schori later explained in an NPR interview:

For Christians, we say that our route to God is through Jesus.  That doesn’t mean that a Hindu doesn’t experience God except through Jesus.  It says that Hindus and people of other faith traditions approach God through their own cultural contexts;  they relate to God, they experience God in human relationships, as well as ones that transcend human relationships;  and Christians would say those are our experiences of Jesus, of God through the experience of Jesus.

Bishop Schori, of course, is not alone in her radical deviation from Christian teaching concerning the uniqueness of Christ.  For example, our own bishop, The Rt. Rev. Peter James Lee, who is often counted among the more conservative leaders of the Episcopal Church, told our rector in a letter last week that teaching the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is an “ideological” position that “exceeds the witness of Scripture.”  For those of us who believe that, indeed, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, Bishop Lee’s statement is an appalling one.

Not even the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus, taught time after time in the Scriptures and affirmed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, is safe in the hands of Episcopal Church leadership.  As the Apostle Paul so forcefully put it, “if Christ has not been raised” our faith is “useless,” and “we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 19).  Paul taught that we are saved by confessing Jesus as Lord and believing in His resurrection (Romans 10:9-10).  Nonetheless, Bishop John Chane of Washington, DC described the biblical account of Jesus’ bodily resurrection as “at best, conjectural.”  Continuing, he said that:

the resurrection accounts in the four Gospels are “contradictory and confusing”; and that the significance of Easter is not that Jesus returned to actual life but “that even death itself could not end the power of his presence in the lives of the faithful” (Can Two Walk Together, Except They Be Agreed? p.13).

Notwithstanding these clear examples, some may resist the characterization that the leadership of the Episcopal Church has abandoned Scripture as the supreme authority for life.  Let’s consider the notion of “supreme authority.”  Like others at The Falls Church, I believe that the Scriptures “sufficiently teach God’s will for His world, and have supreme authority for faith [and] life . . . .” (TFC, Our Beliefs).  I acknowledge that the Scriptures are “God’s Word written” and contain God’s truth, even though truth may evade human discernment from time to time.  As the “supreme authority,” the Scriptures serve as our lens to make sense of His works in general revelation – revelation in creation, culture and conscience.  See Psalm 111:10 (“The fear of the Lord [i.e., obeying his statutes, precepts, commands, ordinances] is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding”).  Only through His special revelation do we receive a sufficiently clear roadmap for navigating this time-bound journey.  Without the Word’s guidance, we are vulnerable to being led down dangerous paths and may even become entirely lost. 

The leadership of the Episcopal Church has a very different notion of authority when it comes to the Scriptures.  As I observed previously in a longer essay:

While they say the Bible occupies a “privileged place” in their Episcopal Church, that place seems far below any reasonable notion of a place of “supreme authority.”  What I hear them say is that a plain sense reading of the Bible [at most] may be “privileged” in that it may be presumed true, but that presumption of truth can be rebutted by an accumulation of conflicting human experience[, sacramental, cultural and/or personal].  As a result, with respect to any given topic, the Bible appropriately may have one truth for you, another truth for them, and another for me.

In moments of candor, Episcopal leaders themselves have professed a less-than-Christian notion of Scriptural authority.  The Bishop of Pennsylvania has said, “we [the Church] wrote the Bible and we can rewrite it” (Can Two Walk Together, Except They Be Agreed? p.12 n.12.).  Speaking on the issue of homosexuality, Frank Griswold, Katharine Jefferts Schori’s predecessor as Presiding Bishop, admitted that:

the Episcopal Church is in conflict with Scripture.  . . .  So one would have to say that the mind of Christ operative in the church over time . . . has led the church to in effect contradict the words of the Gospel (id.).    

It is this fundamental disagreement over the supreme authority of Scripture that has driven my church – with deep sadness and regret – to consider whether to sever its ties with the Episcopal Church.

Additional resources: 

Rev. Dr. John W. Yates, II, The Falls Church, Discerning God’s Call:  Discernment and Holy Communion, sermon preached November 5, 2006

Episcopal Church USA, To Set Our Hope on Christ (presenting the denomination’s leadership’s theological explanation for confirming as bishop a non-celibate homosexual)

Rev. Leander Harding, Commentary on “To Set Our Hope On Christ” (substantively thorough rebuttal of “To Set Our Hope on Christ”)