The grace of God is a gift to the community of believers, not for the individual believer, Bishop Jefferts Schori said in her opening statement to the 76th US General Convention, meeting in Anaheim, California from July 7-17. The presiding bishop set the tone and the agenda for the 10-day meeting of the US church’s triennial synod, loosening a broadside against conservative evangelicals, while calling the church to engage in social action.

While offering strong dollops of rhetoric to her supporters among the politically dominant left-wing of the Episcopal Church, the presiding bishop, however, is quietly pulling the Episcopal Church back from direct confrontation with the wider Anglican Communion --- pursuing a policy of consolidating the left’s internal political gains within the Episcopal Church while pursuing an entente with the wider Communion over the question of gay bishops and blessings.

Support for relaxation of the ban on gay bishops and blessings remains high among lay and clergy deputies to convention, but the mood of the House of Bishops at the start of convention was somber --- with little enthusiasm evident among the bishops to repudiate the call by Lambeth 2008 and the ACC for forbearance.

In a wide-ranging address that touched upon the social and economic ills facing the United States and the international community, Bishop Jefferts Schori argued the theological roots of the crisis lay in a culture of selfishness ---- or privileging the individual over the community.

This selfishness of spirit was the cause of a series of “crises” that 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, for such “individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the centre of existence, as the ground of all being.”

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.”

The presiding bishop’s address was received with a standing ovation from the joint session of bishops and deputies. In the convention’s opening press conference, a spokesman for the House of Deputies, Mrs Katherine Tyler Scott of Indianapolis interpreted the presiding bishop’s address as a condemnation of excessive individualism, that had manifest itself in idolatry, which was “the antithesis of what the Episcopal Church stands for” in its social agenda.

The spokesman for the church’s bishops, the Rt Rev Michael Curry of North Carolina, declined to comment on the Presiding Bishop’s statement, offering his own belief that “message of the prophets of Israel” was a communitarian one of mutual interdependence.

The few remaining traditionalist members of the House of Bishops were less encouraged by the presiding bishop’s remarks, with one bishop musing that the presiding bishop’s words were hard to reconcile with Paul’s statement that if one confesses with his lips and believes in his heart that Jesus is his Lord and Saviour; he will be saved, as found in Romans 10:8-10.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams took no questions from reporters during his flying visit to General Convention, while a sampling of the African and Asian bishops and church leaders brought to General Convention by the US church to see firsthand the Episcopal Church’s “unique polity”, found no support for the Presiding Bishop’s doctrines. Few cared to speak out against the remarks, noting that African and Asian cultural norms prevented a guest from criticizing his host while accepting his hospitality.

Professor Christopher Seitz of the Anglican Communion Institute noted that the presiding bishop needed to define her terms. If by the “Western heresy” she means 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 the Episcopal Church’s “liberalism.”

As a matter of history, there is no "individualist" heresy. Jesus "calls" individuals "by name" and saves them "one by one,” Dr Ephraim Radner, professor historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto said. A catholic theology cannot deny this.

“Her remarks would suggest simple ad hominem arguments against conservative evangelicals, masking as theological incoherence,” Dr Radner said.

The Presiding Bishop’s “ignorance of the Bible and Christian theology is nothing short of breathtaking” the Dean of Moore College in Sydney, Dr Mark Thompson told Religious Intelligence.

The presiding bishop’s condemnation of the culture of individualism was not misplaced, Dr Thompson said, but the theological approach she was taking to address the problem was misplaced. “No one was suggesting that Paul ignored the corporate implications of shared salvation,” he observed, but an “unrelenting dichotomy between the individual and the corporate” was a modern phenomenon.

Augustine, Luther, the Protestant Reformers and the Anglican divines all taught that “God’s purposes are deeply relational and hence the very opposite of fragmented, isolationist individualism. Yet they also extend further than simply corporate identity to call on human persons as persons to repent and believe the gospel,” Dr Thompson said.

For evangelicals “more serious still” was the presiding bishop’s “caricature” of a confession of faith that she said made salvation dependent “ on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus’,” Dr Thompson said.

The confession that “Jesus Christ is Lord’ was “certainly a form of words,” but “they are never simply words,” he explained. “They represent a fundamental orientation of life which includes a willingness to have our thinking and behaviour shaped by the One we acknowledge has such a supreme claim upon us,” he noted.

“Perhaps more time should have been given to considering how idolatrous is an institution which demands loyalty to itself above faithfulness to the word which God has spoken,” Dr Thompson said..

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