In an edition of PBS’ Religion & Ethics Newsweekly program that aired last September, a video clip of Rick Warren at a speech in Pittsburgh showed him telling the crowd, “Now, let me just be honest with you, folks. There’s nothing new in the book The Purpose-Driven Life that hasn’t been said in historic Christianity in the last 2,000 years. I just put it in one book and said it in a real simple way.”

In his book, Warren not only passes off as new-and-improved all kinds of false religious notions from ancient times, he does the same with pure pagan nonsense.

For one example, he talks about discovering your “S.H.A.P.E.” (listed as Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality and Experience) to “unlock your God-given potential.”

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As Jordan explains, “Warren goes through the idea of the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholy and phlegmatic), but do you know where he got that stuff from? The four personality types originated with Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. In the 2^nd century, Galum of Pergamus took it and popularized it and made it a big thing. Hippocrates said it came about from the phases of the sun. It’s all really just pagan astrology.

“All that kind of information was very popular in Paul’s day, but Paul never said go out and find your personality type! He didn’t say take a spiritual-gifts test!

“Drama and morality plays were a very prominent thing in the Greek Hellenistic culture Paul lived in, but he didn’t say go use drama. He didn’t say to use discussion groups and sensitivity-training programs. He said ‘speak thou the things which become sound doctrine.’

Warren is such a far-gone false teacher he actually recommends in his Purpose-Driven book the book, Secret Pathways, by renowned New-Ager Gary Thomas. Echoing Thomas, Warren says there are nine ways “sensates love God with their senses and appreciate beautiful worship services that involve their sight, taste, smell and touch, not just their ears.” He talks about how some “worship him in nature,” while “traditionalists draw closer to God through rituals, liturgies, symbols and unchanging structures.”

Jordan says, “All this stuff that goes on in Christendom today—experienced-based things that people seek after and love and want that don’t produce maturity—really only produce emotional reactionism and external activities that result in external religion rather than the growth of the inner man.

“Religion focuses on getting a big fat outer man, when what you need is a big fat inner man, and then he just begins to bust out all over. Get that picture in your mind!

“You need your inner man to be a big, robust, healthy person, and when it’s ‘the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me,’ (Gal. 2:20) then that life lives out through you. Then there’s an inner compulsion, rather than that form (of godliness), you’re trying to push down the road.”

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A great article I found recently on the internet, written by David Cloud of Fundamental Baptist Information Center, Port Huron, Mich., asks the question, “Why is C.S. Lewis so popular with evangelicals today?”

Cloud gives a three-part answer, beginning with, “FIRST, NEW EVANGELICALS LOVE C.S. LEWIS BECAUSE THEY ARE CHARACTERIZED BY A PRIDE OF INTELLECT AND LEWIS WAS DEFINITELY AN INTELLECTUAL. He had almost a photographic memory and had a triple first at Oxford in Philosophy, Classics, and English. He was one of the greatest experts of that day in English literature and occupied the first Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University. Since New Evangelicals almost worship intellectualism (a spirit that the late David Otis Fuller called ‘scholarolatry’), it is no surprise that they would look upon the famous intellectual C.S. Lewis as a patron saint.”

The second reason Cloud gives is, “NEW EVANGELICALS LOVE C.S. LEWIS BECAUSE OF HIS ECUMENICAL THINKING AND HIS REFUSAL TO PRACTICE SEPARATION.”

In an overview of Lewis’ ecumenical philosophy and despising of biblical separation, Cloud writes, “In his preface to Mere Christianity, Lewis states that his aim is to present ‘an agreed, or common, or central or mere Christianity.’ So he aims to concentrate on the doctrines that he believes are common to all forms of Christianity--including Roman Catholicism. It is no surprise that he submitted parts of the book to four clergymen for criticism--an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic! He hopes that the book will make it clear why all Christians ‘ought to be reunited’. . .

“In March 1994 the Evangelicals and Catholics Together movement produced its first document. This was a programatic document entitled Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium. It was rightly said at the time that this document represented ‘a betrayal of the Reformation.’ I saw no connection between this and C.S. Lewis until a couple of years later when the symposium Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Working Towards a Common Mission was published. In his contribution to the book, Charles Colson--the Evangelical ‘prime mover’ behind ECT--tells us that C.S. Lewis was a major influence which led him to form the movement (Billy Graham was another!). In fact, Colson says that Evangelicals and Catholics Together seeks to continue the legacy of C.S. Lewis by focusing on the core beliefs of all true Christians (Common Mission, p. 36).”

The third reason Cloud gives is, “NEW EVANGELICALS LOVE C.S. LEWIS BECAUSE OF THEIR SHARED FASCINATION FOR OR AND SYMPATHY WITH ROME. Today’s evangelicals have given us ‘Evangelicals and Rome Together’ and even those who do not go that far usually speak of Rome’s errors in soft, congenial terms rather than labeling it the blasphemous, Antichrist institution that it is and that Protestants and Baptists of old plainly called it. As we have seen, C.S. Lewis considered the Roman Catholic Church one of the acceptable ‘rooms’ in the house of Christianity and longed for unity between Protestantism and Romanism. Lewis believed in prayers to the dead and purgatory.

“Some of Lewis’s closest friends were Roman Catholics. J.R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame is one example. Tolkien and Lewis were very close and spent countless hours together. Lewis credited Tolkien with having a large role in his ‘conversion.’ Lewis was also heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton. When asked what Christian writers had helped him, Lewis remarked in 1963, six months before he died, ‘The contemporary book that has helped me the most is Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.’

“Lewis carried on a warm correspondence in Latin with Catholic priest Don Giovanni Calabria of Italy over their shared ‘concern for the reunification of the Christian churches’ (The Narnian, Alan Jacobs, pp. 249, 250). Calabria was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

“In 1943, Lewis gave a talk on ‘Christian Apologetics’ for a group of priests in Wales (The Narnian, p. 229). From the 1940s to the end of his life, Lewis’s spiritual advisor was a Catholic priest named Walter Adams (The Narnian, p. 224). It was to this priest that Lewis confessed his sins.

“Roman Catholics love C.S. Lewis as much as evangelicals. His books are typically found in Catholic bookstores.”

(Editor’s Note: To read about how the emerging ecumenical church movement, as well as the future religion of the Antichrist, is being hammered together through Roman Catholicism, click on “Back Issues” at the top and scroll down to these three articles: “St. Peter’s Touch Foot-Baal Wear,” Oct. 22, 2006; “Baal Bounces Back,” Sept. 10, 200; and “Ultimate Truth! New and Improved,” Aug. 14, 2006)