A newsletter I received this week from the Oklahoma organization, Southwest Radio Church Ministries (www.swrc.com), had a plug for a new expose book, "The Dark Side of the Purpose Driven Church."

Reported in it was the fact that the Rev. Rick Warren, the mega-church pastor in southern California who wrote the mega-bestseller, "Purpose-Driven Life," stated in a speech last Spring (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life) that "the word 'Fundamentalist' comes from a document in the 1920s called the Five Fundamentals of the Faith and it is a very legalistic, narrow view of Christianity."

So what are these five fundamentals Warren finds troubling?

1. The innerancy and full authority of the Bible

2. The virgin birth and full Deity of Jesus Christ

3. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead

4. Christ's atoning, vicarious death for the sins of the world

5. The literal Second Coming of Jesus Christ

What's left to leave out?! Maybe Warren doesn't even necessarily subscribe to Jesus Christ dying on the Cross? Maybe he thinks Christ was like a yogi or a monk.

Making all this so disturbing is knowing that not only are millions of people worldwide enthusiastically looking to his book for their spiritual direction, but then there are tens of thousands of preachers globally who've been trained or re-trained through his seminars and, subsequently a growing number of Christian churches have formally adopted Warren's models for their Sunday service, outreach efforts, church activities, etc.

I was listening to Tennessee preacher Ray Watson this past Sunday night (over the free internet service Paltalk.com) give a study from the Book of Revelations.

While discussing the timing of the Rapture, he typed in for people his web address of www.itchyear.org. When I first saw this site name appear on my screen, I was confused, thinking, "What in the world's 'itch year'? "

Then I got it—"itchy ear," taken from II Timothy, in which the Apostle Paul, in giving indicators of pre-Rapture conditions, writes, "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables."

A fable is a concocted story with a moral, a truth, or a lesson of some kind underneath the surface. With Aesop's fable about the tortoise and the hare, for example, we know no tortoise and hare ever sat down and had a conversation. It's not a true event, but it uses the story to convey a meaning.

In Bible study, this literary genre fits in with the allegorical method and it goes completely against God's intentions for His Book to be believed literally. Allegorical proponents say, "Oh, that story about Adam and Eve—we don't care if they were real people or not, it's the truth being conveyed that's important."

This is how you get all these Christians who believe in Darwinian evolution, for one thing.

Neo-orthodoxy, a theology developed by Swiss Protestant Karl Barth (considered "the most important theologian of the twentieth century," according to the editors of Christian History magazine in their 2000 book, "131 Christians Everyone Should Know"), says the Bible is important for its ability to speak to the reader interpreting it. When it does, it "becomes" the word of God for that reader, at that particular time. Neo-orthodox theologians assure, "The errors in the Bible don't affect the reader's ability to encounter God through it."

Of course, this is blasphemy.

In fact, it reminds me of the news story this week about the book author, James Frey, who wrote about his drug addiction in a memoir, and is now accused of purposely fabricating the central episode of the book, including lying about having smoked crack, hitting a cop and being jailed for three months.

Oprah Winfrey, who made the book a runaway bestseller by plugging it on her show's "book club," called into CNN's "Larry King Live" Wednesday night to dismiss the allegations of Frey's whopper falsehoods as "much ado about nothing."

"What is relevant is that he was a drug addict ... and stepped out of that history to be the man he is today and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves," Oprah told King, who was interviewing Frey on his live show. She argued that the book's message of recovery "still resonates with me. . . And I know it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book."

To think Oprah got her TV start as an evening news reporter!

As my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), frequently advises Bible students in regards to the Word's literal trustworthiness, "Just let the Bible have the sense and the meaning that it would normally have. When you come across figures of speech and metaphors in the Bible, you simply give them the intended meaning—the natural common sense meaning that would be obvious in a metaphor."

For example, when Jesus Christ says in Luke 13:32, "Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils . . .", He calls King Herod a fox, but he's certainly not suggesting he's some four-legged animal with a twitchy nose and fluffy tail. He's comparing Herod to a fox, saying he's a cunning guy, but he really isn't that significant. It’s a word picture.

In another example, Christ says in John 10:9, "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture."

"Now do you think Christ's a three-by-six piece of block wood?" says Jordan in a study I have on tape. "No, He's the means of entrance into life. John the Baptist said, 'Behold the lamb of God. You think Jesus was a four-legged 'baa'? That's a word picture to describe who this person is in the plan of God."

According to Jordan, Isaiah 55:12 has long been used by modernist theologians as the supposed "coup de grace" against the literal interpretation of the Bible. The verse says, " For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."

Now, c'mon, is there anybody who can really say that when they read the verse they think the hills are supposed to sing? It's obviously meant like the opening to The Sound of Music: "The hills are alive with the sound of music. . ."

"That's a word picture and it's a very vivid word picture," says Jordan of the Isaiah verse. "All nature's going to rejoice when the King comes and sets up His Kingdom. That's what that chapter's all about. And when the King comes, that creation's going to be delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of god, and creation's going to rejoice because of that. It would take three paragraphs of prose to say what that word picture says. So, you know in the Bible when the Bible's got literal things and you see even the metaphors and the figures of speech. You just give them the literal meaning they would normally have in a general conversation."

The lie by modernists that has done more damage probably than anything else to people's understanding of the Bible is the one that says when you read "Israel," you should think "the Christian church." This allegorical method also says you read "Jerusalem," it means your hometown.

"That's why I tell you these fundamentalists that do that, they're really modernists," says Jordan. "They're using the method of studying the Bible that the wrong camp uses."

While literal interpretation of the Bible is the first fundamental bedrock, or building block, to dispensational Bible study, the second is making the distinctions between Israel and the Body of Christ, and the third is knowing the overall purpose of God in creation.

In defining this three-part foundation, Jordan says, "You know what all theology that rejects dispensationalism focuses on? The salvation issues. That's where the five points of Calvinism comes from. And the five points of Arminianism. That's where the theological discussion about the eternal decrees comes from.

"But dispensationalism understands that God's purpose in creation is bigger than just your salvation. It's really the purpose of God, as it says in Ephesians 1:10, to make Jesus Christ the head of 'all things.' In other words, for God to glorify His Son in the heavens and in the earth through two agencies—the Body of Christ and Israel."

It's when you forget the two-fold purpose of God in glorifying Himself through these two agencies, that the distinctions between the two agencies are lost, and, hence, the literal nature of the Book must be abandoned.

This is exactly where the vast majority of Christianiaty is today, signaling the tremendous applicability of Paul's pre-Rapture warnings about fables.

In fact, Paul further warns in I Tim. 1:4, "Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith." The "endless genealogies" he refers to has to do with giving homage to persons, pedigrees, status, etc.

It's the, "My genealogy goes back to a birch bark canoe," kind of stuff. Paul explicitly says that's what's going to happen to the Body of Christ as it goes into full-blown apostasy, and that's exactly what's happening right now.