During her opening address to the 76th General Convention on July 7, Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori denounced as “heresy” the proposition that individual believers can find salvation through Jesus Christ.
 
In a wide ranging address that summarized the work before General Convention, the Presiding Bishop stated that the “crises” facing the church all had “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.”
This belief was “caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus,” she said. This “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.”
 
Bishop Jefferts Schori’s was reflecting on the convention’s theme concept of ubuntu, that all creation is inter-related: “I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others.” Drawing upon the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, Bishop Jefferts Schori said there can be no “I” without “you,” and “you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us.”
At a July 8 press conference, a spokesman for the House of Deputies, Indianapolis lay deputy Katherine Tyler Scott, said she understood the Presiding Bishop to have said that excess individualism was a form of idolatry. “This is the antithesis of what the Episcopal Church stands for,” she said.
 
The spokesman for the House of Bishops, the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry of North Carolina, declined to comment on the Presiding Bishop’s statement, responding instead that he believed the “message of the prophets of Israel” was a communitarian one, wherein the people of God must live in mutual responsibility with one another.
 
Another bishop, who asked not to be named, described Bishop Jefferts Schori’s view of salvation as being difficult to reconcile with the vows taken at baptism and Paul’s statement on confession (Romans 10:8-10).
 
Professor Christopher Seitz of the Anglican Communion Institute noted that the presiding bishop needed to define her terms. If by the “Western heresy” she meant the individualism of the Enlightenment, the priority of the individual conscience as articulated by Kant, or the need for individual certainty in science and history suggested by Lessing, “these are bedrock foundations of TEC liberalism.”
 
As a matter of history, there is no individualist heresy, the Rev. Ephraim Radner, professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto told The Living Church. Jesus calls individuals “by name” and saves them “one by one,” he said, and a catholic theology cannot deny this.
 
“Her remarks would suggest simple ad hominem arguments against conservative evangelicals, masking as theological incoherence,” Fr. Radner said.
 
(The Rev.) George Conger reporting from General Convention in Anaheim.
 
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