Rick Warren Shares The Secrets Of His Immense Knowledge - Rick Warren's Sermon At Desiring God (Part 7)

The following commentary corresponds to the following video from 23:30 to 28:35



Rick Warren now launches into our need to pursue knowledge with Proverbs 18:15 from another strange translation. Can't this guy just find a literal word for word translation and stick to it? Oh yeah, it would be harder to find those elusive verses needed to support his ideas. Nonetheless, this version of Proverbs 18:15 is reasonably close to the mark - and that doesn't happen so often with Warren.

Warren emphasizes the importance of listening by demonstrating another of his traits - building theology from cliches. We have one mouth and two ears - therefore we should listen twice as much as we speak. There may be wisdom to this counsel, but Warren certainly doesn't heed it as revealed by his "selective hearing" problem in my previous post.

Then comes this bizarre statement that he based on Proverbs 10:14: "If you store up knowledge in yourself you're taking you to heaven". I don't know what to make of this and perhaps one of the readers can enlighten me. It just struck me as weird. But a broken clock gets it right twice a day and so too Rick Warren can stumble upon wise counsel (coupled with a lame joke). The scary thing about Warren, as far as I'm concerned, is that he is knowledgable and theologically trained - many of us can't help but think that his purpose driven propaganda is not done in ignorance, but is a carefully thought out agenda. Warren does demonstrate wisdom when he counsels the audience to start a theological library. I don't buy into the specific amounts of reading he prescribes in books from various eras of church history (25% pre reformation, 25% post reformation, 25% previous century, 25% contemporary). But I do appreciate that Warren emphasizes the importance of church history and the legacy of literary treasures left by the great scholars and theologians of history. If we knew church history then we wouldn't readily buy into purpose driven man centered moralism because we would be vigilant against any drift away from Christ's finished work at the epicenter of all human endeavor.

But the regular farce quickly resumes when, in another brazen display of humility, Warren informs us that he read the entire works of Jonathan Edwards in the last year. That is an absolute mountain of reading and leaves me wondering how he found time for the other 75%. As mentioned in an earlier post, James White even placed a huge question mark over anyones ability to consume all 26 volumes of Edwards in one year. Whatever the case it certainly didn't rub off. Is there anyone else who can see the disconnect (because Piper apparently didn't) between studying the man who preached "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" and preaching "God's not mad at you, he's mad about you" (that is what Warren said in his "gospel proclamation" on the Fox Network). What an absolute mockery of the man recognized as North America's greatest ever theologian.

More to come on this . . .

Go On To Part 8
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