Is Jesus Christ the one and only Savior of the human race? After all, He said He was. "I am the door" (John 10:9), and "no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6).

But according to the Presbyterian Church USA, He isn’t. In a study commissioned by the PCUSA’s own research service [see www.pcusa.org/research/panel/index.htm ], a majority of Presbyterians reject Christ’s claims.

Asked to agree or disagree with the statement, "only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved," a sample of 5,000 Presbyterians mostly disagreed. Only 39% of ordinary church members agreed, 35% of pastors, and 22% of "specialized clergy" (ministers serving not as pastors, but full-time in a school or seminary, hospital, church bureaucracy, or any other non-pastoral position).

The report does not tell us by whom or what these people expect to be saved, if not by Jesus Christ. Possibly they weren’t asked. Maybe we can figure it out by looking at their actions.

As reported in the February issue of The Layman, the PCUSA’s San Francisco Theological Seminary has appointed "a leading advocate" of "gay rights" as its interim president. This individual is on record as saying St. Paul "was wrong" in calling sodomy a sin in Romans Chapter 1, and that the church should perform same-sex "marriages" and ordain openly practicing sodomites as clergy. He has a list of formal theological credentials as long as your arm, but belief in Holy Scripture isn’t one of them. Never mind. According to the study, only 16% of PCUSA members, 5% of the pastors, and 3% of the specialized clergy agree that the Bible is the literal word of God.

Meanwhile, the PCUSA has joined other so-called "churches" in a lobbying effort in favor of publicly-funded abortions.

So… if you believe that Jesus Christ was a liar or a crackpot, that the Bible is wrong about a lot of things, that sodomy is not a sin, and that killing off the next generation of humanity is only "choice," and must therefore be protected—hey, come on down! The PCUSA is just the place for you.

One might ask why people who don’t believe in Jesus or the Bible bother to go to church at all. That’s easy: they get to fellowship with like-minded people, all of them so smart and worldly and sophisticated that they could just kiss and hug themselves from head to toe. It’s so intoxicating to be smarter than Moses and the prophets, smarter than the apostles, smarter even than God Himself, who was wrong about that sodomy thing.

It might be justly said that the PCUSA is just another moribund liberal denomination that’s hemorrhaging members left and right and may not be around much longer; but that would be to miss the point. All of these liberal denominations started out as real churches before descending into unbelief and paganism. But we digress.

If its leading theologians are saying Paul was wrong, then the PCUSA can blithely ignore his injunction, "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." (Romans 12:2) If there’s one thing that they’re doing, it’s conforming to this world—or at least to that part of it that gets praised by the media and movie stars and appointed to presidential advisory panels, these days. It’s so important to have the good will of intellectuals.

But to return to our question: if Jesus Christ is not the Savior for these people, who or what is?

Their behavior answers the question. Salvation lies in works of the flesh, their own works. Works that the secular humanist Christ-hating world deems praiseworthy—abortion, fornication, repudiation of the scriptures, supporting the expansion of state power, insisting on the truth of man-made Global Warming and on statist "solutions" to it: here is their Christless, God-free formula for salvation. Who needs Paul, when you can get high fives from Harry Reid?

All these apostate liberal churches are labeled "mainline" by the media, indicating their acceptance by the secular world. Like Esau, they have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Are there still good and faithful Christians in the PCUSA? To be sure—many thousands of them.

But what they’re doing there, what they expect to accomplish within a church whose leaders reject the Bible while embracing sodomy and abortion—well, that question would stump King Solomon himself.

Copyright by Lee Duigon