On Individual Salvation

[cjbanning]

As you know, I've been thinking about salvation lately, trying to work out a Christian soteriology compatible with my various existential commitments--thus the survey of teaching on the soul a couple posts back. I'm not sure how it fits in yet, but I know that the words of Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church, ring true to me:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to 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. It's caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That 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.