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Dirk Ficca's comment "What’s the big deal about Jesus?" resonated through our Presbyteries. It is a question that deserves an answer. It seems that our denomination finds itself unequal to the task of making a clear Biblical statement about our belief in Jesus. We have lost our understanding of the nature of Jesus Christ as fully human, fully divine and our faith in His atoning death on the Cross and His bodily resurrection.
So what’s the big deal? Only that without His birth, life, death and resurrection, we would be lost in our sin and the "most miserable of men." To deny these beliefs may result in some kind of religion, but it is not Christianity. We are saved only by the blood of Christ shed for us.
We must return to preaching like Paul and "concentrate only on Christ and Him crucified".
The following are our chief concerns regarding Christology:
1. The watering down of the sola Christo, sola fide from the Reformation “sola” watchwords. The drift of the denomination has been away from the belief that “through faith alone, in Christ alone” do we have any basis for our faith.
- After Dirk Ficca statements in 2000, the weak answer by the GA Council and national offices; the lack of strong correction provided by the 2001 General Assembly. Finally, this weakness was largely corrected by the Office of Theology and Worship paper “Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ.” After more than a year of inability to clearly state our faith in Christ alone, the 2002 General Assembly approved a more strongly articulated Christological paper with only one tiny phrase allowing for the possibility of the “universalist” viewpoint.
- The “Building Community Among Strangers” paper, written by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, was the epitome of our syncretism with more than a one faith-path to eternal life rather than through faith in Christ alone. A paper encouraging evangelism it clearly was not.
- Presbyterian Women’s statements in their “Bias-Free Guidelines” that we should not assume that “Christianity offers something better than other religions.”
- Another example is the Re-Imagining God Conference of 1993 with the support of $64K of denominational funds, the involvement of denominational staff, at least one past Moderator, and seminary professors in this conference and later with the Voices of Sophia long-running movement. This heresy, having never been denied by the Louisville staff or GA Council, was declared heretical by the 1994 General Assembly. Some say this is old news, but the ideas espoused continue in our denomination through:
2. As a denomination, at least in many places of leadership, we have lost our clear understanding of the nature of Jesus Christ as fully human, fully divine, including faith in His bodily resurrection, and His atoning work on the cross.
- There is a loss of strong Christological teaching in our seminaries through the continuing teachings and writing of professors in the vein of Douglas Otatti, at Union Seminary, who does not believe in a bodily resurrection; Anna Case-Winters, associate professor of theology at McCormick Seminary, and Paul Capetz, who do not believe in the atonement, or even a need for the atonement.
- These same distortions of Christology are reflected in the Re-Imagining, Voices of Sophia, and NNPCW (mentioned previously), in the Covenant Network meetings and generally in “progressive theology”. Further, these distortions were not really corrected (part of their directive) by the Theological Task Force’s “Peace, Unity and Purity Report” approved by the 2006 GA.
- The Jesus Seminar, with its clear diminution of the divinity of Christ and the miracles stories of the Bible was invited to hold its meeting at the PCUSA headquarters in March, 2000.
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