Fear-Driven Everybody Else?

This makes the second post related to the antics of the Purpose Driven guru in about a week. I am not normally a Rick Warren basher, but it has just happened that way. The material for these two posts found me. I did not go out looking or them. My personal life hasn't been affected much at all by post modernism or the emergent (emerging?) church movement. In one sense, I don't really care. I know that is probably not the right attitude, but there you have it. I spent the first 25 years of my adult life in a small, rural, independent reformed Baptist church. Looking back, I realize I was, in many ways, on an island; isolated from the general evangelical Christian culture. Even these past five years in a "blue-collar" conservative Southern Baptist church with definite sovereign grace leanings, I have not felt the winds of evangelical change on my face at all. I have begun to realize of late that I am affected, though. We all are, in small ways that we don't even realize, unless we stop and look closely. I think with comments like the following that I stumbled across at Dr. Mohler's web log from last Thursday, that we all may soon feel, not just a zephyr, but perhaps a blue north'r. I've trimmed Dr. Mohler's post by about 50% for the sake of space.

Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Community Church and author of the best-selling book, The Purpose-Driven Life , was the subject of an interview in The Philadelphia Inquirer. This is how [that] article concludes: Warren predicts that fundamentalism, of all varieties, will be "one of the big enemies of the 21st century. Muslim fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, secular fundamentalism -- they're all motivated by fear. Fear of each other." Equating Christian fundamentalism with Muslim fundamentalism is both wrong and dishonest. This falls right into the hands of those who argue for a phenomenological definition of "religion" that includes "fundamentalism" as a general reference to any person or movement that refuses to accept the basic worldview of modernity. Adding the therapeutic category of "fear" just adds to the confusion. The motivation of fundamentalist Christianity is fear of Muslims and Jews? And, we might ask, just what definition of Christian fundamentalism operates here?

So what should we do about this problem we call post modernism? Carp and moan and point fingers? Maybe some; for a while; when we need to and have to. Then let's get up and start acting like the Church: quit this therapeutic, moralistic, deism that is so popular even in many conservative churches, and start preaching the whole council of God; preach against sin; preach about the glory of God; preach about a risen Savior, strong to save. Let's start repenting and believing, and start being salt and light in a rotten and dark culture. Let's put legs and hands to our Christianity and go out and minister to a lost and dying world in word and deed.