Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori: An Heretical Piñata

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori: An Heretical Piñata

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue DD
www.virtueonline.org
October 28, 2015

Next week Katharine Jefferts Schori, the 26th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, will be history.

For many it can't come too soon.

During her occupation as the titular head of the Episcopal Church for nine years, she uttered more heresies recorded by any sitting bishop, with the possible exception of John Shelby Spong and more recently Charles E. Bennison, Bishop of Pennsylvania, whose line that "Jesus was a sinner who forgave himself" might earn them both a place in the sixth circle (heresy) of Dante's nine circles of suffering located within the Earth.

But she did try hard and the Inferno might still be her reward.

Over the course of nine years, she variously denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the full deity of Christ, referred to Jesus as "mother Jesus" at one point, and said St. Paul should have listened to a demoniac girl for spiritual guidance.

She was the perfect ecclesiastical piñata.

Every time she uttered a heresy or two, I would whack her and the piñata would break open and more heresies would pour out of her. Her staff would patch her up again and on she would go.

One of her most memorable and public apostasies was the occasion at one general convention when she said that individual (personal) conversion (to Christ) was a western heresy and likened it to "work" rather than that of free grace. She has publicly said that Muslims do not need converting to Christ and that she would never tell them they do, and that Jews are saved under the first covenant. This got my attention, naturally, and I hit her hard. The piñata never stood a chance.

Her farewell speech this past week was a picture of subterfuge, lies and spin.

"I am deeply grateful for what God has been up to in the midst of our journey together."

That "journey" has cost the Episcopal Church a loss of nearly 200,000 ASA members and tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits for properties that the courts are now granting to those departing TEC. Her ultra-liberal, theologically-challenged credentials earned her the dubious title as the Church's first dictatorial female Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church who managed to alienate the entire Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church and most of its evangelicals. She is leaving a church in rapid decline with more than two-thirds of the church made up of women over 60. A third of TEC's rectors are women. None of the women priests and bishops have shown any ability to make the Church grow, preferring to sound off on the platitudes of social reform rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Her latest and last fiasco was to get yet another woman in a miter, which came to a crashing halt...literally. Heather Cook, the wannabee Suffragan Bishop of Maryland got seven years in jail this week for killing a cyclist while texting and for leaving the scene of an accident. Of course, the Church had to disown her, but it was further evidence that Jefferts Schori, who knew Cook had a drinking problem, did nothing to stop the consecration from going forward. Political correctness cost the life of a young man and crippled his family for life.