Yes Ewan, you wrote…
> According to Warren, “We know today that Dr. King and a great crowd of witnesses are shouting in heaven.”

I suspect that Dr. King and the crowd of witness in heaven would not be shouting what Rick Warren expects. More shouting at him than with him. I think Dr. King would be rolling in his grave.

Garth Penglase

Rick Warren: America’s Dwight Schrute
by Aaron D. Wolf
January 21st, 2009

In an hilarious episode of NBC’s The Office, Dunder-Mifflin übertwerp Dwight Schrute unwittingly adapts the words of several speeches by Benito Mussolini and Karl Marx in order to appear impressive at a conference for salesmen. “Blood alone moves the wheels of history!” he cries, and by the time he gets to Il Duce’s “It is a privilege to fight!” the equally witless conference audience is chanting along with him. “Salesmen of the world, unite!”
Explaining a joke tends to make it unfunny, but it might be helpful here. We, the viewers, laugh, because we know that Dwight’s adaptation is a little, shall we say, inappropriate. We laugh at Dwight, the fascist salesman, and we laugh at his fever-whipped audience, barely suspending disbelief. Yes, it’s possible that a roomful of several thousand salesmen with bachelor’s degrees would not recognize any of these “historic” words. Again, the joke’s on them, and we laugh.
Reflecting on Rick Warren’s invocation at the “historic” inauguration of Barack H. Obama, I wondered: Whom is the joke on this time?
Mainstream newspapers were critical of the choice of “America’s pastor” to deliver this prayer, but here in the afterglow they are praising the prayer as “tolerant.” Of course, they aver, he prayed in the name of Jesus; what do you expect from an evangelical?
Warren invoked “Almighty God, our father,” which is unsurprising. But very quickly, he turns to the Old Testam—er, Hebrew Scriptures to remind God of the Shema: “The Scripture tells us Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one.” Of course, as my dear-departed granny would say, “That’s Bible Scripture.” But of course, that One God is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—the Name imprinted on our foreheads in Holy Baptism. Unsurprisingly, Warren doesn’t go on to clarify that.
What he does go on to clarify, in the very next sentence, is that the one god he’s referring to is Allah. “And you are the compassionate and merciful one.”
Each Sürah of the Koran begins with the phrase, “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate and Merciful One.” Pulling my English Translation of Al-Qur’an from the shelf, I let the book fall open to page 194, Al-Ma’idah, to find the same phrase at the Sürah’s heading. Skimming a couple of pages detailing the prohibition of meats not slaughtered in the name of Allah, I land on condemnations of Christians and the Christian Faith (emphasis original).
O people of the book (Jews and Christians)! Now Our Rasool has come to you to reveal much of what you have concealed from the Holy Books and to pass over much which is no longer necessary . . . Indeed those have committed Kufr (rejected faith) who said, “God is the Messiah, son of Maryam.” O Muhammad, ask them, “Who has the power to prevent Allah if He chose to destroy the Messiah, the son of Maryam, his mother and all that is in the earth?
Get that? In case you didn’t, the publishers provide a handy note in the margin: “Jesus, son of Mary, is not God or son of God” [sic!]. This is the word of “the compassionate and merciful one.”
But wait! Warren closes his prayer in Jesus’ name, right? Here’s the AP’s transcript:
I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus, Jesus (hay-SOOS), who taught us to pray, Our Father [etc.]
Yeshua (”Joshua”) is the Hebrew word for Jesus, and “hay-SOOS” will be familiar to Spanish-speaking viewers who apparently didn’t understand any other word of Warren’s prayer. Who is “Isa”?
Isa is the Arabic word for Jesus, used in the Koran in order to deny His membership in the Godhead, His resurrection, His saving mission.
But see, Warren fans might argue, America’s pastor was making use of a teachable moment. He was showing Muslims that the Isa they subordinate to Muhammad is really . . . well, the “one who changed my life.” Here in this country where we are “united not by race or religion or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all,” we’re all really praying to the same Allah. Now, let Isa change your life.
People of the Book, UNITE!
Warren does remind us (though he is addressing God) that Judgment Day is coming: “And may we never forget that one day all nations and all people will stand accountable before you.” That’s good advice. It meshes with Our Lord’s statement in Matthew 10:
Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
Does invoking Allah and praying to “Isa” amount to confessing Christ before men?
Listen, dude! If Rick Warren were the kind of guy who insisted on invoking the Holy Trinity and leaving out Isa and Allah and Shiva and the Dharma Initiative and Dr. King, he never would’ve been asked to pray in the first place! “Some people will tell you salesman is a bad word. They’ll conjure up images of used car dealers, and door to door charlatans. This is our duty—to change their perception.”
Tee hee. Joke’s on us.

Bill, you made reference to a link from Dwight Schrute at Chronicles Magazine. This link times out – I am v. interested in reading what it says. Any other link, info?

Garth Penglase

Doug Giles at TOWNHALL: http://townhall.com/Columnists/DougGiles/2009/01/25/obama%e2%80%99s_evangelicals_the_liberals%e2%80%99_new_useful_idiots

Jennifer Parfenovics

Neither is it surprising that Warren talked about us not “respecting” the earth given that he also signed the statement Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action which endorses all the popular tripe about global warming.

Ewan McDonald.

Here is how one American Christian assesses the Warren prayer: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2009/01/21/rick-warren-americas-dwight-schrute/

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

Yes it was a fairly bland prayer, offering little solid biblical or prophetic content. I suppose he figured that on this occasion he had to play it safe and not rock the boat. Maybe so. He certainly did not challenge Obama in any serious way, and his remarks were not all that different from the generic feel-good prayer of Gene Robinson: http://www.nhepiscopal.org/artman/publish/article_750.shtml

One keeps coming back to the words which Nathan the prophet uttered to King David (2 Samuel 12:1-11). They are so very different than the words we are hearing today about King Obama.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

According to Warren, “We know today that Dr. King and a great crowd of witnesses are shouting in heaven.” We know nothing of the kind and in fact it is highly likely that if he were alive today Dr. King would repudiate Obama’s policies on a host of issues from abortion to same-sex ‘marriage’. Unlike Obama, Dr King was, after all, a Christian who believed the Bible.

Warren also said, “We are united not by race or religion or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice to all.” This is unbiblical since every person on the earth is indeed of one blood. What does Warren think, that some of us are descended from apes or aliens?

Warren also managed to pay homage to environmentalism by offering repentance for failing to “respect” the earth. It would have been better if he had said something about failing to respect God’s word.

There was also an interfaith component in the fact that Warren closed the prayer in the name of “Yeshua, Isa, Jesus” – Isa being the Koranic name for Jesus.

All in all it was a pretty weak effort and if he wasn’t prepared to pray anything challenging then it would have been better if he had declined the invitation to pray.

Ewan McDonald.

Yes it is true that we must wait a few more days before we learn what Warren actually says/prays. But we do know what he has already said, and it is not sounding too good. When Obama announced the inclusion of homosexual bishop Gene Robinson in the Inauguration, Warren said that Obama “has again demonstrated his genuine commitment to bringing all Americans of goodwill together in search of common ground. I applaud his desire to be the president of every citizen.”

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch