Rick Warren: A Voice for the Regenerate Church or the Degenerate Church?
Rick Warren, whose efforts to turn Evangelical Christianity into a psychologized religion based on marketing with his Purpose Driven agenda stunned many who claim to be regenerated, Bible-believing Christians when he appeared on Larry King Live globally, offering an apology to the homosexual and lesbian community for his “apparent” opposition to California’s Proposition 8. (This propostion outlawed legal recognition of same -sex marriage.) He offered this apology in spite of the fact he first created the unambiguous impression he opposed it. Warren’s hypocrisy or Christ-less treachery appear to know no limits. Yesterday’s theological liberal is today’s alledged “Evangelical”.
From his butchering of Scripture out of context, to his reliance on Eugene Peterson’s The Message “” which to any biblical Evangelical schooled in New Testament Greek can only be described as an utter bastardization of Holy Writ ‚ “” Warren has set new limits for spiritual seduction.
On the basis of Scripture, Warren’s translocational hermeneutics, in which he literally “cuts-and-pastes” verses from one book or passage into another to completely change the original meaning, demonstrates categorically that Rick Warren is clearly of the devil ‚ “” an agent of hell dispatched by Satan to destroy what con-artist teleevangelists and ecumenists have not already destroyed of biblical Christianity.
Warren’s perversion of the Gospel by which he replaces the biblical centrality of repentance with a consumer-friendly instruction not to preach repentance would have, at one time, left any biblically-grounded Christian, and certainly pastors, warning others against this deceiver. But not so today.
His exhortation to avoid End Times prophecy, directly contradicting the opposite exhortation of Jesus (achieved by deleting Acts 1: 6 and replacing it with a cut-and-pasted insertion of Matthew 24:3) means that he places his instructions above those of God. This is indeed the spirit of antichrist. Like the Lucifer by whom he is employed and takes his orders, Warren likewise in the character of Satan in Matthew 4 perverts texts out of context in isolation from co-text to create a distorted pretext. This is the devil, and this is Rick Warren.
Warren joined with Brian McLaren (who demands a moratorium on debating the morality of homosexuality and lesbianism until the church decides if it is right or wrong) in forwarding Dan Kimbell’s book The Emerging Church, a post-modern metaphysical philosophy of mysticism drawing on early medieval monastic spirituality with everything from icons to labyrinths to the “lectio divina”. Indeed, a return to the Dark Ages with no objective biblical compass to determine direction. McLaren is, by theological definition, a Gnostic who says the parables of Jesus should rather be interpreted on the basis of “our imagination”. It is Warren’s Purpose Driven lie that is the door into McLaren’s emergence. What is astounding, however, is that these sons of Lucifer are portrayed as “Evangelicals” even though they cannot justly claim any subscription to an exegetically biblical Evangelicism.
What is more perverse than this, however, is that even after Warren’s apologetic backtrack to the homosexual and lesbian community who demand legal recognition of what is biblically an unholy matrimony, Warren is now claiming he is not against such same-sex marriages. And the backlash from Christians has remained muted. Christian bookshops continue to sell his Purpose Driven lie.
Warren spoke at a synagogue but made no proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah as St. Paul and Jesus did when they were invited to synagogues, and as others such as David Hocking have done today. Instead he lectured on his Purpose Driven programmatic approach as the means to grow synagogues as well as churches. One would ask why anybody would want to help a false Judaism rejecting its own messiah to put more Jews on the path to hell? Yet Warren extends his agenda to other religions as well. Now, and most notably, this includes Islam.
Truly born again Arab believers normally address Jesus as “Yesua Hamesa“, but after praying in the name of “Issa” , (the Islamic name for Jesus who is not the Jesus of the Gospels because Issa is not God’s Son) at Obama’s inaugeration, Warren has gone even further. He has now addressed an Islamic convention organized by Islamic organizations funded by oil money from Saudi Arabia which executes people for becoming Christians. Like Obama, Rick Warren offered not a single word about human rights abuses, the persecution of Christians throughout the Islamic world, or the rife hatred of Jews even taught to children in Muslim schools and madrasses. Persecuted Christians are not on Obama’s agenda, and neither are they on Rick Warren’s. Neither, of course, did Warren in any sense present the Gospel to these lost souls.
It is obvious that we have wicked men like George Bush and Barack Hussein Obamas in the White House because we have wicked men like Rick Warren in the pulpit. Backslidden nations get the leaders they deserve. So do backslidden churches.
Muslims, unbelieving Jews, and homosexuals and lesbians are not the cardinal problem. These are unsaved people doomed to a Christ-less eternity unless the true church by God’s grace and with God’s help can reach them with the Gospel. But what is left of the true church?
For too long it has been sandwiched between one lunatic fringe of ultra-Pentecostals and hyper-Charismatics not knowing the difference between charismata and charismania on one extreme, and another lunatic fringe of hyper-Calvinistic kooks and Cessationists not knowing the difference between reconstructionism and the true Kingdom of God on the opposite pole of the ecclesiastical spectrum. Now the center is being satanically subverted.
If Jesus were not coming, I would become very despondent. But Praise God He is coming! Now as the faithful remnant strengthens the things that remain, the question becomes what our strategy should consist of in the meanwhile. The Lord will indeed show us if we ask Him and He has, in a greater sense, already showed us doctrinally in broad terms in His Word.
How can the Body of Christ not remove this demonic and highly metastatic cancer from itself but instead watch not only the lost perish but the church progressively rot to death with this auto-tolerated malignancy? That demonic cancer is indeed the agenda of Rick Warren and Company.
J.Jacob Prasch
Moriel Ministries
