Albert Mohler: The Bishop [Schori] Discovers Heresy?

Friday, July 17, 2009

Excerpt:
Don't miss this -- the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church openly lamented a focus on evangelization that would seek conversions for such a focus would divert the attention of her church from ecological, economic, and other political imperatives. This was the main thrust of her address, with this central theme indicative of her larger episcopal agenda.

The bishop is simply not concerned with seeing persons come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. She has made this clear over and over again and her convictions were well-known when she was elected as the denomination's Presiding Bishop. Shortly after her election, she spoke to TIME magazine concerning Jesus Christ: "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." She explicitly denies that conscious faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, and has done so on multiple occasions.

The irony of all this was not lost on many Episcopalians and other observers. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church finally summoned the determination to apply the word heresy --- and then applied this most serious term of odious rejection to the Gospel itself.

Of course, this reality is far more tragic than ironic. It does not take long for a church that is severed from Scripture to move from recognizing genuine heresy and denouncing it, to denying the very possibility of heresy at all, and then to reclaiming the word only to use it as an instrument of attacking the very heart of the Christian faith.

Eighteen centuries ago, Irenaeus (a bishop who sought to defend the faith against false teachings) warned his church and explained that heresy is often "craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) more true than the truth itself." Well, heresy has taken off its disguise in the case of Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori. Here we see heresy -- true heresy -- in its most undisguised form. full essay-don't miss this!