Peace Plans? Rick Warren’s or Christ’s?

The New Testament clearly relates the divine plan for global peace in and through Christ.

Ultimately, wars and rumors of wars are determined. Not until Jesus returns will nations fulfill Isaiah”s prophecy of beating spears into pruning hooks.

The way the church as a ministry is to work for global peace now is through the evangelism that will see the Kingdom of Messiah arrive in its fullness according to Ephesians 6 and Isaiah 52.

It is therefore no coincidence that to entertain the alternative Rick Warren P.E.A.C.E. Plan, we must first reject the one of Christ.

Warren does a “cut and paste” hatchet job on the text of Acts chapter 1 to argue by a conspicuously flawed exegesis that the church should not focus on eschatology and the return of Christ as Prince of Peace. While in Acts 1 Jesus was replying to questions about the restoration of Israel as a kingdom, Warren substitutes the apostle’s question with the text of Matthew 24:3 where they ask about the last days. Hence, Warren falsely teaches that Jesus told the apostles to avoid the issue of the last days, while the entirety of Matthew 24 & 25 specifically addresses it.

Warren thus has Jesus answering a different question to the one asked, by twisting Scripture out of context in a manner that would make a Jehovah’s Witness blush.

Once rejecting the Words of Jesus read in context, Warren then proposes a plan of his own invention, owing more to the Dominion Theology of theonomic reconstructionists than the Word of God. His is built on a view of church planting, making no mention of evangelism, followed by equipping leaders in his Purpose Driven model of leadership based not on Scripture but on a combination of Peter Drucker style Communitarianism based on General Systems Theory (an institutionalized/Government controlled private sector i.e. faith based vouchers etc” ¦) and business marketing philosophies and the consumerist psychology “Possibility Thinking Gospel”  of Norman Vincent Peale prot ƒ ©g ƒ ©’ Robert Schuller. This, together with the New Age views of Ken Blanchard and the post modernism and Gnosticism of Brian Maclaren is then compounded with a social gospel based on education, assisting leaders, care for the sick, etc. But there is a conspicuous absence of any mention of the Gospel the Bible teaches is central to peace.

But why should he include the Gospel given the fact that in his book Warren flatly rejects preaching the Gospel in the New Testament sense because he teaches against warning the unsaved to repent in contradiction to biblical evangelism as in Acts 2:38.

It is therefore not surprising that the gurus Warren uses to promote his peace plan are John Ortberg and Jim Wallis, a pair of theocratic hooligans who want to carve up the nation Israel to create an Islamic Palestinian State, in addition to that already demographically and historically existing in Jordan.

Ortberg and Wallis understand neither Scripture nor Islam. When Israel gave up the Gaza Strip and withdrew from southern Lebanon, Islamists simply used those areas left by Israel in its quest for peace to continue their jihad and launch missals and rockets. Wallis and Ortberg idiotically feel that response should be to award the Moslems more land in the quest for peace. They seem to offer no solution to the Islamic persecution of Christians in the Moslem countries. In their quest for peace, this is all but ignored.

Warren’s gospel is not the biblical Gospel. And Rick Warren’s Peace Plan is not the biblical plan for Peace.

As Jeremiah and Paul warned:

‘Woe to them who say Peace, Peace when there is no peace’.
For ‘when men say Peace, Peace – then the end shall come’.

J. Jacob Prasch
Moriel Ministries