John Piper Interviews Rick Warren

Finally, the long-awaited interview of Rick Warren by John Piper has posted. Just last week, the 90 minute interview was released. I found the interview interesting and informative. I do think Rick Warren has gotten a bad wrap from us Reformed folk.

Warren doesn’t like to identify with the Calvinist label. Can we really blame him? He wishes that proponents of the Doctrines of Grace would be more gracious. I wish the same.

In the interview, it comes out that Warren is a monergist and believes in unconditional election. He’s uneasy with limited atonement as popularly conceived. His book The Purpose Driven Life was not originally intended for unbelievers, and he never expected it to sell as well as it did. Warren bemoans some of what he said in the book, wishing he would have been more clear in his emphasis on repentance.

Piper has very little criticism of The Purpose Driven Life really, and the book is what the interview is primarily about. Piper is aghast at some of the bitter reviews he’s read of the book. In Piper’s reading of it, he just doesn’t see it that way.

John Piper does challenge Rick Warren with regards to ensuring the legacy he leaves through his influence over thousands of pastors is one that encourages them to go deep and to explicitly root their ministries in theology. Part of Piper’s aim in the interview too, is “that the thousands of pastors and lay people who look to Rick for inspiration and wisdom will see the profound place that doctrine has in his mind and heart.”

I believe that Warren took the opportunity to clarify himself and his ministry and ran with it. He knew he was speaking to many critical voices through this interview. That said, he doesn’t come across as artificial or canned. The impression I got is that it’s the same Rick Warren, and that he’s been misunderstood more than people are willing to admit.

Am I now a rip roaring Warren guy? No. I’m cautious still with Warren’s ministry. But I am happy to have heard what I did of it. I’m more optimistic and hopeful for him and his influence. I’m also thankful that people like John Piper are willing to interact with people like Rick Warren. I think that there is a friendship budding here which can have a positive effect both ways. Piper can be encouraged to be more practical and think bigger dreams, and Warren can be challenged to be more explicit about how theology shapes his vision, and to be more careful with his influence over pastors all over the world.

The naysayers and critics will dismiss this interview altogether. They’ve already judged Warren (contrary to Romans 14), and now are going to be even tougher and more critical of John Piper. But I am willing to bet that if you listen to Piper’s three conference messages shared at Saddleback last month, you won’t find him back-pedaling. Piper apparently didn’t end up speaking at Saddleback church beyond the DG conference that Saddleback hosted. But 2,000 people attended the conference and so an important message was shared to the people who were in attendance.

I’ve spoken my mind about the Warren-Piper scandal before You can see several posts on this question here. And I’m willing to hope for the best on this. I doubt we’ll see Piper waver and falter in his message now. I am not sure we’ll see Warren change. But I hope people are challenged to think through secondary separation and other matters that something like this raises. Do we have to be ultra-critical of anyone not quite like us? Do we have to think the worst when we see a 2 minute video clip of someone being grilled on Larry King Live? Can we agree to disagree on such questions over someone’s ministry? Is it okay that I approve of Piper’s embrace of Warren and that you disapprove of it? Can we still be friends and get along?

I hope this scandal is behind us now. God will be (and is) the judge. We can rest in His sovereignty. Until then, remember, we’re not ministering on behalf of Piper or Warren or anyone else. We have to be faithful with where God has put us. I’m not of Piper or of Warren. I’m of Christ. But I respect both of these men and pray God’s continued blessing on their ministry.

Harold Camping and a Replay of “The Great Disappointment”

On a special day, everyone felt on edge. An influential Bible teacher with numerous followers had prophesied that this very day would be the day Jesus returned. That day came and went leaving his followers severely disappointed.

Sound familiar? I’m not speaking of May 21, 2011 and Harold Camping, but October 22, 1844 and William Miller. The Millerite movement (no they weren’t known for beer drinking), were followers of William Miller’s Adventist teachings about Christ’s Second Advent (or arrival/coming). Using the most influential medium of his time, newspapers (similar to Camping’s use of radio today), the Millerites spread an “end-times” message far and wide. Their movement fractured eventually and spawned numerous other Churches and cults (or sects). The Seventh Day Adventist church directly rose from the Millerite movement, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ founder Charles Russell was influenced by Miller’s movement as well.

October 23, 1844 was known as “The Great Disappointment” because the predictions concerning October 22 didn’t happen. The dates had been shuffled and reshuffled around already prior to October 22, so they really couldn’t come up with a new date. Eventually, many of the Millerites simply changed their view of what was to happen from being a physical coming of Christ to being only a spiritual event.

Today, the Seventh Day Adventists continue to teach as an article of their faith that on October 22, 1844, Jesus entered the Holy of Holies in Heaven to begin the final phase of his work: the investigative judgement. Jesus is investigating every man’s work and accomplishing atonement for some and not for others. He’s reviewing the books, and wow, there must sure be an awful lot of books for the omnipotent Son of God to view since it’s been almost 170 years since he started! [See this link for more info on “the investigative judgement and the SDA church.”

Yesterday night, I listened as Harold Camping, today’s William Miller, explained away his failed prediction. The Judgement Day predicted did actually happen. It was a spiritual judgement, however. He did make a mistake. He took the prophecies too literally. Of course, October 21 will still be the physical end of the world, in Camping’s book. But this is no setback now. He reached for a card from the Seventh Day Adventist’s playbook. But I wonder if his followers will buy it? Will they continue to be greatly disappointed?

History repeats itself. End-times hysteria has been running rampant in America for more than 250 years now. It’s allowed cults like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses to flourish. Other groups with seriously defective teaching have emerged, like the Seventh Day Adventists. Doctrinal systems have also arisen which have not helped the church. Disputes over extreme variations of dispensationalism or hyper-preterism have an end-times factor behind them.

What exactly is it that contributes to the end-times mania? And why can’t we see past it? I hope to explore some of these issues in a series of posts spread out over the next couple weeks. But feel free to share your thoughts here in the comments.

The chart above was taken from the Wikipedia article on “The Great Disappointment”.

On the Day Before Judgement Day

If you haven’t heard, Harold Camping and FamilyRadio.com claim the Rapture will happen tomorrow and that Judgement Day will begin. The tribulation will last five months and on October 21, the world will end.

The sad part of all this, is that they claim the Bible teaches this and that God has revealed this to them. There has been a world-wide advertising campaign to warn people. The message has been spread via RV caravans, billboards, radio, and more.

The problem is Camping has predicted this would happen back in 1994 too, and will likely recalculate his numbers and come up with a new date once this one fails. Never mind that, his signs say “the Bible guarantees it”.

He gets to May 21 as the date of the rapture, through a far ranging use of Biblical numerology and assumptions. Since “begat” can indicate a father – son relationship or also a ancestor – descendant relationship, it is assumed it always refers to a time period rather than a direct father – son connection, unless other factors make it clear the Bible declares the two names are related as father and son. Because a day in the Bible can sometimes refer to a thousand years, it is assumed that days do refer to thousand-year time periods at important places in the scheme that results in May 21, 2011 being the date of the Rapture. Numbers can have an association or meaning, and then that meaning is applied universally. As in 23 is the number of wrath, 17 is the number of heaven, etc.

The result is a Biblical timeline of history that has a widespread corroboration with numerous numerological twists given to various time periods given in the Bible. For more on the Biblical timeline of history see this explanation. And several links on the left of the FamilyRadio.com website take a deep dive into the numerology.

The story is making headlines around the world. See the New York Times article here, and another story here. USA Today found that many of Camping’s staff don’t actually believe that May 21st is the day.

I’m saddened by the many followers who are being led astray in this. The Bible isn’t a mysterious collection of numbers to be figured out by experts. It has a plain and clear message of God’s redemptive plan for mankind. Jesus may return tomorrow, or even today. I believe that. But if He doesn’t, then Camping has revealed himself to be a false teacher and people should not follow him. I’ll probably say more about this in the future, it will be interesting to see what they say if the Rapture doesn’t happen tomorrow. I’ll leave you with a link to a video clip from FamilyRadio.com. May God help these people realize once and for all that this teaching is dangerous, and it trivializes the Bible’s message to a watching world.

Spirituality, Homosexuality and the Primordial Cosmic Unity

Recently, I’ve explored the issues of homosexuality. I reviewed The Complete Christian Guide to Understanding Homosexuality edited by Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche (Harvest House) and Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill (Zondervan). Both books demonstrate concern and awareness of the plight of people struggling with same-sex attractions yet still aiming to be committed to the Christian call for sexual chastity.

Yes, I do believe Christianity calls us to live a life devoted to holiness and that does mean no sex outside of heterosexual marriage. We are to live in light of God’s created intent for this world: one man, one woman together in mutual love and submission for life, as husband and wife. But this is a fallen world and we all battle sinful urges which compel us to violate God’s standards for a holy life. Innately, and biologically even, we are driven toward pride, dishonesty, sinful strife, jealousy, and yes we are drawn to fantasize sinfully over objectified people of either gender. Some struggle one way, others another, but just because we were born as sinners and have a bent toward sinning, doesn’t mean we are not called to “abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.”

I wanted to point out a significant book review which brought up something I hadn’t truly considered before when it comes to this controversial topic. Dr. Peter Jones of Westminster Seminary, California, reviews a new book by Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (IVP, 2011). His review is worth the long read as it covers where we are in evangelical Christianity today on this issue. One of the points in his review is “the worldview implications of sexuality”. Without further ado, I want to excerpt a good portion from his review here for your benefit. Please do read the whole review, however.

Such thinking not only ignores biblical morals but also denies biblical cosmology. Homosexuality and other forms of sexual blending have deep religious significance within pagan cults. Paris mentions the berdache, the he/she that appears in over one hundred tribes as a “two-spirit” man or woman who functions in the opposite gender, but she claims we know little about them, except that they perform spiritual rituals (67). She also mentions ethnic groups in Siberia, Borneo and the Philippines that “grant religious roles for those of ambiguous sexual biology or those of same sex attraction” (67-8). Never once does she inquire as to what those religious roles might be, nor the spirituality there practiced.

The End of Sexuality fails to recognize that homosexuals have functioned consistently, from the mists of time and all over the globe, as occultic shamans in all kinds of pagan religions. Mircea Eliade, a world-renowned authority on world religions, and one of the architects of the new spirituality, demonstrates that through time and space a commonplace figure in the pagan cultus is an emasculated priest. This common religious universal, or archetype, is identified with a particular kind of spirituality. We see the myth of a bisexual or androgynous god in ancient Mesopotamian and Indo-European nature religions, as well as in the myths of Australian Aborigines, African tribes, South American Indians and Pacific islanders, all still surviving today. In all these religions, observes Eliade, “ritual androgynisation” is a “symbolic restoration of Chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” Homosexual androgyny, the joining of male and female in the same person, functions in these countless traditional religions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum…symboliz[ing]…perfection…[and] ultimate being.”

Homosexuality is not limited here to morals or the lack thereof. It is employed as the attempt to define the very nature of the cosmos as inherently divine. It is for this reason that the Old Testament denounces homosexuality in such strong terms, since it is a sign of pagan religion. Paris’s dismissal of Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality as “the five or six passages” fails to see the injunctions as part of a major polemic against anti-creational paganism. The context of the much-cited prohibition against homosexuality states, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan” (Lev 18:3; see Lev 20:23). Leviticus presents sexual activity between two men as an example of the pagan religion of the Canaanites, which the people of Yahweh should avoid. In other words, it is the religion (implicit in the act, in its rejection of God the Creator), more than the morals, which is in view.

Certainly, not all homosexuals see these religious connotations, nor have they come to homosexuality for religious reasons. Nevertheless many contemporary homosexuals see this deep connection. It is what J. Michael Clark, professor at Emory University and Georgian State University, and a gay spokesman, understood about the berdache. Clark, once a Christian, could not find an adequate place for his sexuality in biblical faith, and turned to Native American animism for an acceptable spiritual model. He found in the berdache, this androgynous American Indian shaman, born as a male but choosing to live as a female, “a desirable gay spiritual model,” because the berdache achieves “the reunion of the cosmic, sexual and moral polarities,” that is, the classic pagan “joining of the opposites.” …

Other notable contemporary homosexuals understand their sexuality in occultic religious terms. Professor Emily Culpepper, an Ex-Southern Baptist and now a lesbian pagan witch, sees gays and lesbians, in her words, as “shamans for a future age.” She reserves a spiritual role for homosexuals, for a shaman is “…a charged, potent, awe-inspiring, and even fear-inspiring person who takes true risks by crossing over into other worlds.”

A contemporary gay theorist, Toby Johnson, inspired by the modern-day popularizer of pagan mythology, Joseph Campbell, believes that present-day gay consciousness represents a new religious paradigm, for:

  • it undermines the authority and legitimacy of the institutions of traditional religion;
  • it helps to see the world with a harmonious, non-dualistic vision;
  • in its ecstatic pangs of longing inspired by same-sex beauty, it experiences reverberations and recollections of humanity’s common mystical oneness with Gaia; and
  • it helps humanity to get over dualistic, polarized (male-dominant) thinking, and thus save the world in awareness of common planetary identity.

With the place of homosexuality firmly established as an essential component of cultic and religious nature worship, it was inevitable that a Jungian, June Singer, would give the ultimate expression of the deeply religious importance of homosexuality. She said already in 1977, “the archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to …the primordial cosmic unity, that is, it is the sacrament of monism, functioning to erase distinction…[this understanding of sexuality was] nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal God-image.”

Clearly, Singer’s non-binary definition of sex does not fit “a Christian understanding” of creation (34). How powerfully, in its pagan self-understanding, it opposes what Paris also opposes, a “rigid sexual dimorphism” (32). Paris says that “viewing sex on a spectrum…male and female…positioned on the same line, not in two separate categories…makes a credible space for intersex people,” but, alas, such a view also makes an enormous space for occultic spirituality–once the connection of sex with spirituality is made (33).

The theological implications of this opposition to sexual binary categories are enormous. Such naiveté plays into the hands of the non-binary, or non-dual spirituality, which, in its Hindu form, is taking over much of the Western mind and soul. Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West, calls this a spiritual “revival,” based on the Hindu term Advaita, meaning “not two.” The spiritual synthesis, to which progressives believe we are advancing, will be “non-dual,” non-binary. Goldberg declares that Advaita and “non-dual…oneness, unity around non-separation” are “the generic term[s] increasingly used to describe the present and coming spirituality in America””meaning that God and the world are not two.”

I apologize for the lengthy quote, but I wanted Dr. Jones’ case to be established here. This spiritual aspect of homosexuality needs to be understood as evangelicals grapple with the increasing prominence of this issue today. The “otherness” of the Bible’s teaching on this issue should make sense given this wholistic viewpoint. It really is a different spirit and a different religious perspective that fights against the Created order presented in Scripture.

For more on this check out my review of Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill particularly. There I explain how I see Christianity impacting those who have homosexual tendencies.

[HT: Sharper Iron Filings]

The Reformed Expository Commentary Series, 50% off at WTSBooks.Com

I highly recommend the Reformed Expository Commentary Series from P & R Publishing. The commentaries are written by superb pastor-teachers from a Reformed standpoint. They deal with the exegetical questions but make sure to apply the text pastorally. And the series explicitly aims to be Christ-centered in its approach.

You can read my detailed review of Daniel Doriani’s commentary on James here. After reading that commentary, I have wanted to get the whole series. With this new sale at Westminster Bookstore, just announced, I was able to pick up the last volumes I don’t already have.

Here’s the scoop: if you purchase three or more titles, you can get a 50% discount. If you purchase the set, it’s 52%. Individual volumes are discounted 45%. Plus, if you purchase a few volumes you can qualify for the $1 shipping with UPS. On my order, it was only 1 buck total for shipping — you can’t beat that.

Check out the sample pages from the latest volume in the series, 1 Kings by Philip Graham Ryken.

Watch the trailer below, and read the series description, then go check out Westminster Bookstore’s sale.