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A review by hillsider
The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
1.0
So much of evangelical Christianity has been tainted by Biblical literalism. A literal reading of the Bible has many contradictions. For instance: Jesus was both baptized by John the Baptist and John the Baptist was already in prison in another gospel. There are many more, but I won’t list them. To quote Chris Hedges: “we took the Bible seriously and therefore we could not take it literally.”
Rick Warren deems the Bible a user’s manual to life, and his book the supplementary guide to interacting with it. The circular logic that the Bible is the literal word of God because within it, it says so. The problem being, many others have proclaimed themselves speaking for God, and better yet, the Bible has been weeded through several times for canon and non-canon. It’s also been translated hundreds of times. My point being, is even if somewhere within the Bible there is the word of God, the likelihood that it is the whole thing, wrung through so many times by human hands is idolatrous.
However, this literalism is not uncommon, especially among American Christians. Warren’s addition to the mix is a particularly self-help type of vaguery that I can’t help but think is purposefully done by him or the editor for wider appeal. If the word can be interpreted so literally, this is a strange thing to do. Purpose #3 is “Be More ChristLike” or something like that, and he defines Christ-like in one line over 6 chapters. Everything else is essentially how to build character. He makes no mention of the sermon on the mount where Christ gives his only actual sermon, laying out his actual radical vision for how to live. But that is exactly why, right? It’s radical. Christ was a radical that would be castigated to the fringe in today’s society, so like in other places he has been whitewashed and cast aside for a simpler, sanitized version.
The other problem with Warren’s take is the emphasis on complete surrender. Interestingly, this is an oft-derided characteristic of Islam I hear about from conservatives. The reason, I had always assumed, was that someone ready to “surrender” was prone to authoritarian power. I can’t speak to Islam, but I can speak to this. If hear me out on the idea that we cannot take the entirety of the Bible as God-breathed and literally true, then we can acknowledge some as incorrect. When we acknowledge some as incorrect, we can then say some might be harmful. Historically, this has been true, as biblical passages have justified everything from slavery, Naziism, and Stalinism. That leaves the preachers to tell us what to do, and if they take the word literally, it’s not much different. If they don’t, then they can use it manipulatively, or even to dangerous ends, even fascistic ones. Lastly, there’s our own head, and I don’t believe we should ever surrender completely to our own head either, as it would be impossible to differentiate between the inner-workings of your brain and the Holy Spirit. You have to use your cognition and conscience/Holy Spirit as a starting point, but be able to make conscious decisions based on the morality you have hopefully gained from the word of Christ. Never should you completely surrender to the forces in your head, lest you be taken in by the worst of your impulses. Therefore, unless God can directly speak to you, this is disastrous advice.
It does, however, explain a few of the political realities of our day. The people reading A Purpose Driven obviously have a little desire to have a little of the control taken away from them. A bit of the authoritarian impulse, if you will. That, combined with the natural human disposition to not be able to empathize with people who are different, and Warren over and over prioritizing “believers” over non-believers as people you should care about can create bad situations where we have celebrity Christians rabble rousing for war and inhumane policy.
Jesus, in his reality, was a pretty radical guy, though. Rick Warren finds it convenient to gloss over the hard truth that he probably wouldn’t have thought it sufficient to give away “most” of his multi-million dollar fortune. He finds it convenient not to mention that he says “do not return evil with evil”, or “turn the other cheek”. “If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them”. It’s this kind of thing that Warren neglects to mention because it’s the difficult stuff that most Christians find impossible to do in modern reality. The thing is, it wasn’t as if it was easy to do in 1BC either.
My dad recommended me this book, and he’s a good guy. If he said he got a lot out of it, I’m sure he did. But if he wasn’t already a good guy with a heart of gold, he might have just been more mired in a dangerously grotesque way of selfishness. And that’s why I think this book an example of harmful writing.
Rick Warren deems the Bible a user’s manual to life, and his book the supplementary guide to interacting with it. The circular logic that the Bible is the literal word of God because within it, it says so. The problem being, many others have proclaimed themselves speaking for God, and better yet, the Bible has been weeded through several times for canon and non-canon. It’s also been translated hundreds of times. My point being, is even if somewhere within the Bible there is the word of God, the likelihood that it is the whole thing, wrung through so many times by human hands is idolatrous.
However, this literalism is not uncommon, especially among American Christians. Warren’s addition to the mix is a particularly self-help type of vaguery that I can’t help but think is purposefully done by him or the editor for wider appeal. If the word can be interpreted so literally, this is a strange thing to do. Purpose #3 is “Be More ChristLike” or something like that, and he defines Christ-like in one line over 6 chapters. Everything else is essentially how to build character. He makes no mention of the sermon on the mount where Christ gives his only actual sermon, laying out his actual radical vision for how to live. But that is exactly why, right? It’s radical. Christ was a radical that would be castigated to the fringe in today’s society, so like in other places he has been whitewashed and cast aside for a simpler, sanitized version.
The other problem with Warren’s take is the emphasis on complete surrender. Interestingly, this is an oft-derided characteristic of Islam I hear about from conservatives. The reason, I had always assumed, was that someone ready to “surrender” was prone to authoritarian power. I can’t speak to Islam, but I can speak to this. If hear me out on the idea that we cannot take the entirety of the Bible as God-breathed and literally true, then we can acknowledge some as incorrect. When we acknowledge some as incorrect, we can then say some might be harmful. Historically, this has been true, as biblical passages have justified everything from slavery, Naziism, and Stalinism. That leaves the preachers to tell us what to do, and if they take the word literally, it’s not much different. If they don’t, then they can use it manipulatively, or even to dangerous ends, even fascistic ones. Lastly, there’s our own head, and I don’t believe we should ever surrender completely to our own head either, as it would be impossible to differentiate between the inner-workings of your brain and the Holy Spirit. You have to use your cognition and conscience/Holy Spirit as a starting point, but be able to make conscious decisions based on the morality you have hopefully gained from the word of Christ. Never should you completely surrender to the forces in your head, lest you be taken in by the worst of your impulses. Therefore, unless God can directly speak to you, this is disastrous advice.
It does, however, explain a few of the political realities of our day. The people reading A Purpose Driven obviously have a little desire to have a little of the control taken away from them. A bit of the authoritarian impulse, if you will. That, combined with the natural human disposition to not be able to empathize with people who are different, and Warren over and over prioritizing “believers” over non-believers as people you should care about can create bad situations where we have celebrity Christians rabble rousing for war and inhumane policy.
Jesus, in his reality, was a pretty radical guy, though. Rick Warren finds it convenient to gloss over the hard truth that he probably wouldn’t have thought it sufficient to give away “most” of his multi-million dollar fortune. He finds it convenient not to mention that he says “do not return evil with evil”, or “turn the other cheek”. “If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them”. It’s this kind of thing that Warren neglects to mention because it’s the difficult stuff that most Christians find impossible to do in modern reality. The thing is, it wasn’t as if it was easy to do in 1BC either.
My dad recommended me this book, and he’s a good guy. If he said he got a lot out of it, I’m sure he did. But if he wasn’t already a good guy with a heart of gold, he might have just been more mired in a dangerously grotesque way of selfishness. And that’s why I think this book an example of harmful writing.