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The Book of Numbers
Rick Warren's purpose-driven attack on American Christianity.
By Chris Lehmann

...But any reader who comes to the book expecting a wrenching narrative of a soul's halting progress toward faith will be disappointed. Warren rather abruptly clears away the dramatic climax of most faith narratives: the crowning moment of conversion and rebirth into the spirit. His play for the reader's soul is briskly delivered early in the book: "Wherever you are reading this, I invite you to bow your head and quietly whisper the prayer that will change your eternity: 'Jesus, I believe in you and I receive you.' If you sincerely meant that prayer, congratulations! Welcome to the family of God!" It doesn't feel like a life-shaking epiphany so much as like having someone hand you his business card.

Warren stands apart from his evangelical forebears in another important respect: At no point does he place the newly minted believer at odds with the secular world's imperfect schemes of justice and reward. Historically, even mildly prophetic Christian revivalists have stressed the mandate of broad social reform, and more fiery ones have triggered full-blown crusades, from abolitionism and temperance down through the latter-day civil rights and anti-abortion movements. In Warren's hands, however, God seems keen to promote more of a Kiwanis-level social activism: "You may be given a godly passion for reaching a particular group of people with the gospel: businessmen, teenagers, foreign exchange students, young mothers, or those with a particular hobby or sport." ...

...This, rather than the abundance of marketing techniques and showman gimmicks that inflect Warren's style of self-presentation, is the most troubling feature of Warren's purpose-driven approach. It has historically been the nature of the Christian God to be something of an unstinting task master. Warren's God "wants to be your best friend." And this means, in turn, that God's most daunting property, the exercise of eternal judgment, is strategically downsized. When Warren turns his utility-minded feel-speak upon the symbolic iconography of the faith, the results are offensively bathetic: "When Jesus stretched his arms wide on the cross, he was saying, 'I love you this much.' " But God needs to be at a greater remove than a group hug. Surely we lose something if we apprehend the Bible, and the language of faith, as little more than a lesson book. "If you're not preaching life application," Warren has told one interviewer, "you're not really preaching." Yet if you're only believing in life application, what are you really believing?