Apologists Concerned About Rick Warren's Alignment With 'Holy Father'

Charisma News ^ | 12/3/14 | Mark Andrews

[marshmallow]

"Christian unity" is one of those terms that stir up a whole spectrum of—sometimes emotional—opinions.

On the one hand, we know that Jesus prayed to the Father concerning future believers "that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you" (John 17:21a, NIV).

On the other hand, charismatics know it is almost pointless to discuss the gifts of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12, 14) with Baptists or most anyone else from a mainline denomination. And Protestants of just about any stripe get riled up when they hear Catholics talking about papal infallibility or their adoration of the Virgin Mary.

It's on this latter point that Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and successful author, has waded into a hornet's nest of controversy by telling a Catholic News Service interviewer that Protestants and Catholics "have far more in common than what divides us" and that Catholics do not "worship Mary like she's another god."

Regarding Warren's view that Catholics do not worship Mary, Matt Slick, writing on the website of the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry, goes into great detail with material from Roman Catholic sources that say Mary is "the all holy one," is to be prayed to, worshipped, that she "brings us the gifts of eternal life" and she "made atonement for the sins of man."

If that's not putting her in the place of Christ as a god-like figure to be worshipped, then what is it?

"We believe in Trinity, the Bible, the resurrection, and that salvation is through Jesus Christ. These are the big issues," Warren says. "But the most important thing is if you love Jesus, we're on the same team."

To Warren's point about being on the same team, Slick.....

[metmom]

What is stuning Boatbums...is they DO bow, light candles to, fold their hands in prayer, mouth prayers to, these images and yet somehow in their twisted thinking this is not worship.....so it begs the question then what do they do when they do worship Christ if bowing, and praying, and sying prayers is only veneration?

Or HOW do they worship Christ if all those actions are only venerating?

What's left? Let me guess, they'll tell us eating Him is worshiping Him.

[metmom]

It occurred to me that Mary was just as likely to not even know how He was going to deal with it, as in performing the miracle.

Mary COULD HAVE just presumed that He would take charge and order more wine and pay for it.

There’s nothing in the text that tells us either way.

It’s just generally presumed that she knew He was going to perform a miracle.

One thing to consider in that scenario that does make it likely, is that the disciples, until the time Christ was crucified, seemed to have it in their minds that Jesus was going to establish an earthly kingdom. Even THEY missed the suffering servant, Lamb of God, role of Jesus. The fact that Jesus came the first time to deliver us from our sin.

It seems likely that Mary made the same error.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"Well, yeah, but who ever proposed such an idea?"

You did.

"Jesus told us to love the Lord our God with ALL our heart, soul, mind, and strength.... If we give any portion of that to Mary, then we are not giving God ALL of it.. And if we are giving God all of it, there's no room left for Mary."

[metmom]

While prayer can be simple conversation, that does not mean all simple conversation is prayer.

No, intercessory prayer WITH and FOR other believers isn’t the issue. I don’t pray TO other believers.

And plenty of prayers TO Mary have already been posted that demonstrate that those prayers are way beyond simple conversation. I do not commit my whole being body and soul to other believers to live for them nor do I ask them to do for me what only God can do.

[metmom]

OK, back to post 2212 which started this whole thing.....

The part of the prayer to Mary that I posted was this....

My Queen, My Mother, I offer myself entirely to thee. And to show my devotion to thee, I offer thee this day, my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my heart, my whole being without reserve.

Wherefore, good Mother, as I am thine own, keep me, guard me as thy property and possession. Amen.

Let me ask you this then....

Are you OK with someone praying that prayer?

[Mrs. Don-o]

We've been through this before, but I'll repeat for greater emphasis.

New Testament Apostles and Martyrs---- in the following quotes, Stephen, Paul and John --- addressed religious leaders as "father," and referred to themselves as "fathers" of their converts:

Acts 22:1
“Brothers and fathers, listen to the defense that I now make before you."

Romans 4:16
For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”)—

1 Corinthians 4:15
Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel.

Philemon 1:10
I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment.

1 John 2:13
I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning.

In none of the above cases is "father" used to mean, literally, begetter or sire or daddy or pop. It is used to mean "father in the faith," "spiritual father," --- the same way Christians have, for millennia, called their spiritual leaders "father."

Context!

[Mrs. Don-o]

"No, intercessory prayer WITH and FOR other believers isn’t the issue. I don’t pray TO other believers."

Yeah you do, because prayer in this sense is communication. Any time you have communication -- especially in the Lord--- especially spiritual conversation, with any other believer, that is prayer as we understand it.

The big misunderstanding comes in when people suppose that "pray" and "adore" are in every case synonyms.

Speaking as a homeschooling mom (here I give my glasses in an officious tilt) everyone past middle school knows that words can have more-restrictive and less-restructive meanings, the exact understanding of which is going to depend on genre, custom, interpretive community, context.

Prayer in the sense we are speaking of, is not adoration; it is contact or communication.

In this sense, if I say "Metmom, please pray for me and mine" --- I am praying to you.

It always used to mean that, but now it sounds antique:

"Pray, m'lady, wilt thou grant me a boon?"

[af_vet_1981]

The miracle of the wine at Cana was designed to show Jesus' authority to perform miracles on the natural order, in proof of His messianic claims. It is not designed to showcase that Jesus responded differently to Mary than to any other believer. If anything, the focus seems quite the opposite, that it demonstrates 1) Jesus was willing to mildly rebuke her for drawing Him into a public display of His power before the official beginning of His public ministry,

No, this explanation is a common error. The assumption of a rebuke does not, apparently, give proper consideration to the Hebrew behind the Greek, nor the Hebrew family relationship, nor the fact that she knew He would do the miracle, nor the fact that He did the miracle. It does fit the anti Mary/Miriam tradition though and is quite common in some circles. The Catholics have this right.

[metmom]

What did Jesus teach us about prayer?

And if prayer is simple conversation, then why even have a word to distinguish it?

[CynicalBear]

Then there is “I formed you in the womb” and “before you were born” comments from God.

[CynicalBear]

Thank you for that.

[Elsie]

Between lightning and earthquakes; poor ol’ Moroni is takin’ a beatin’!

[Elsie]

I’m amazed and in wonder, at the absolute lively interactive interdependence of His Body, which is all of us as His members, with Him who is our Head.

And not some little wafer.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I will answer your question. First, let me ask you to consider the style of this poetic genre. It is ardent and courtly -- effusive love, not a manual of doctrine --- and it follows the literary form comparable to 19th century romanticism, as in Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
....
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Devotion comprising all "depth and breadth and height" must refer to God the infinite, not man the finite; and "the ends of being and ideal grace" are terms divine, not human.

Yet I'm fairly confident that Miss Barrett did not think Mr. Browning was actually Almighty God. That's the way people wrote in letters to each other! Everyone, even casually, signed off as the other's "Obedient and humble servant" and pledged their "ne'er dying devotion!"

And not just 19th century Romantics. You even have the greatest of Calvinist Puritan poetesses, Anne Bradstreet, to her husband Simon who was far absent from her:

My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay more,
My joy, my magazine of earthly store,
If two be one, as surely thou and I,
How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?
.....
My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn;
Return; return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn.

"My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life"?

She calls him a sun god, "Sol"?

Doesn't she owe this to Jesus, not Simon Bradstreet?

But who would criticize her poem for that? I would imagine only people whose wimples were a little too starchy, and whose eyes were a little too close to their noses. None of the Puritans did.

And check out how this same Anne Bradstreet wrote of Queen Elizabeth I:

Here lies the pride of Queens, pattern of Kings:
So blaze it fame, here’s feathers for thy wings.
Here lies the envy’d, yet unparallel’d Prince,
Whose living virtues speak (though dead long since).
If many worlds, as that fantastic framed,
In every one, be her great glory famed.

Another on Queen Elizabeth I:

Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie,
Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky
Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime,
And so has vow’d, whilst there is world or time.
So great’s thy glory, and thine excellence,
The sound thereof raps every human sense
That men account it no impiety
To say thou wert a fleshly Deity.

Now. Do you honestly think this 17th century New England Puritan thought that Elizabeth I was the "pattern of KIngs," and that if there were "many worlds" she would be famed in all of them?

Or that she really thought it were "no impiety" to say she was "a fleshly deity"?

So we're dealing with a fervent, florid devotional style that people offered to sovereigns and spouses. Similarly over-the-top--- to us --- are the extravagant hyperboles and obsequies found in Shakespeare and Michelanelo's sonnets. They strike the modern ear as embellishment in the Liberace range--- overheated flourish: but this was the devotional style of the courtly and the romantic age.

Now as to your question:

No, this sort of Marian prayer is not used liturgically (official public prayer) and no, it is not part of my personal prayer life --- though I do love the Litany of Loreto.

However, understood in its context, keep in mind that people were motivated to reach heights of devotional rhetoric which would exceed what people were shoveling on the jeweled head of Elizabeth I of England. Which was quite a challenge: because whatever was highest of the high should go to Christ's fair mother, the maid of Nazareth.

Many may not read this with sympathy or even comprehension. But so few in our age have any comprehension of the language love and devotion of ages past, no culture beyond the Kardashians.

Now, doctrine is a separate thing, and we will surely have plenty of straightforward disagreements there. That's OK by me. But I am simply advising you that an antique style seems excessive because, by our dim cultural lights, they are like a ton of winky-lights on a 10-pound Christmas tree. By their lights, it pertained to the honor of Christ that His sweet mother should be more greatly magnified than any proud and powdered Bess in London or any Empress of Byzantium.

[Mrs. Don-o]

He done prayer he gave us was he one that begins “Our Father.” But we have many more prayers than that, and so do you.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Who is Moroni?

[Mrs. Don-o]

No. Now, stop that. We don't worship a wafer. I could get you a box full of wafers from some online Church Supply Store and you could use them to make puff pastries for all I care.

We worship Jesus Christ, really and substantially present --- Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity--- under the forms of bread and wine.

[Springfield Reformer]

SR: The miracle of the wine at Cana was designed to show Jesus' authority to perform miracles on the natural order, in proof of His messianic claims. It is not designed to showcase that Jesus responded differently to Mary than to any other believer. If anything, the focus seems quite the opposite, that it demonstrates 1) Jesus was willing to mildly rebuke her for drawing Him into a public display of His power before the official beginning of His public ministry,

AF: No, this explanation is a common error. The assumption of a rebuke does not, apparently, give proper consideration to the Hebrew behind the Greek, nor the Hebrew family relationship, nor the fact that she knew He would do the miracle, nor the fact that He did the miracle. It does fit the anti Mary/Miriam tradition though and is quite common in some circles. The Catholics have this right.

Convince me. I agree there is an underlying Hebrew idiom.  It occurs in a number of places.  But I don't think it means what you appear to think it means:

Judges 11:12  And Jephthah sent messengers unto the king of the children of Ammon, saying, What hast thou to do with me, that thou art come against me to fight in my land?

1 Kings 17:18  And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son?

2 Kings 3:13  And Elisha said unto the king of Israel, What have I to do with thee? get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother. And the king of Israel said unto him, Nay: for the LORD hath called these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab.

2 Chronicles 35:21  But he sent ambassadors to him, saying, What have I to do with thee, thou king of Judah? I come not against thee this day, but against the house wherewith I have war: for God commanded me to make haste: forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not.

The Hebrew phrase of interest in each of these cases is

מַה־לִּ֥י וָלָ֖ךְ

Part of the problem is taking the vav that occurs between "to you" and "to me" as always purely conjunctive, as would be the case if we consistently rendered it as the English "and."  But this isn't English.  The speaker isn't putting the "you" and the "me" on the same side of the negotiating table.  This is evident from the context of the passages above.  The key is in that first component, mah, which sets the table for how to process the you/me component.  The basic meaning of mah is "what?" an interrogatory, and the speaker in this idiom is setting up a contrast of interests between himself and the other person, as if to say "what [is] to you [that is also] to me?" Or put another way, what common interest exists between you and I?  

The Greek equivalent is: Τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί

Which transliterates to "ti emoi kai soi."

The Louw-Nida Semantic Range Lexicon renders this as "for what reason are you saying or doing this to me?"  If you plug that back into each of the above OT passages, it works perfectly to capture the sense.

In sum then, either way we approach it, we see the phrase is definitely a challenge to the relevancy of Mary's inquiry, especially when seen in light of it's OT usage.  As rebukes go, it was quite mild, as friendly and loving as it gets, but still a challenge.  He never said He wouldn't do it.  Only that based on His mission, she had no basis for expecting such a thing.  And yet she trusted that He would do something and He did.  So I don't see the problem here.  I understand that Rome promotes such a view of Mary that challenging her special pull with Jesus seems wrong to those who have accepted that unfounded tradition.  But that is a subjective impression.  In reality, Mary is not flawless.  No human but Jesus ever was.  Nor does she have any greater access to or influence over Jesus that any other believer. Jesus said so explicitly.  It is no disrespect to her to be honest.

PS:  metmon, I never considered that she might not even have been thinking of a miracle.  You could be right.  But just off the top of my head, I'm inclined to think she was thinking miracle, because of the general way she instructed the servants to respond, i.e., she left it wide open, not "he'll give you some money so you go get the wine," but "whatever he tells you."  No, that doesn't lock it down, but I think it exposes her complete confidence He was going to do something special.

Peace,

SR

[boatbums]

Nope. Just pointing that sola scriptura doesn’t work and Protestant anti-Catholics don’t care if it doesn’t as long as they all keep attacking Catholics. Do souls sleep until the resurrection? If they don’t, then you can instantly see why Lone Rangers playing God with the scriptures doesn’t work.

Are you not familiar with what Scripture refers to as "disputable matters"? Apparently, Paul said they existed among Christians and were not cause to doubt the sufficiency of God's sacred Scriptures OR affect the unity we have in those areas that Scripture DOES teach. Rather than this disproving sola Scriptura it reinforces the surety we have in Scripture, the Holy Spirit's work of leading us into all truth and the liberty Christians have on nonessential doctrines. Here is the fourteenth chapter of Romans that addresses this:

Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.

One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.

You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. It is written:

“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God.’”

So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister. I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean. If your brother or sister is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy someone for whom Christ died. Therefore do not let what you know is good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and receives human approval.

Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a person to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother or sister to fall.

So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself by what he approves. But whoever has doubts is condemned if they eat, because their eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

So, sorry, Vlad, as much as you seem to relish the thought that disputable matters trashes the authority of Holy Scripture, you are proven wrong once again BY Holy Scripture.

[caww]

...." There is no indication whatsoever that there is any “schism” in the Body, or that anyone ceases to have this intimate connection with Christ or with Christ’s other members, when they are in heaven".....

God did not qualify His prohibition to not contact the departed by saying that the Israelites were permitted to contact the spirits 'of their own dead',... or the spirits of the godly prophets..... Contacting the dead is wrong...and He was very clear about that.

"...should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?" Issaiah 8:19

Further...The dead can not be consulted, but a demon can,...and they love to immitate the departed.

A Christian who is seeking anyone but Jesus to intercede.." will be defiled by them...... I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19

n Deuteronomy 18:10-12,....... God advises the Israelites to reject the practices of the people living around them....... Using His strongest language yet He says:...... "Let no one be found among you.... WHO CONSULTS THE DEAD.... Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD.

The word "necromancer" describes those who seek the departed...be it an individual or one who is seeking on they're own .... "Hebrew definition.... 'a seeker of the dead.' This is much the same as 'one who conjures up spirits.'

Necromancy:..... the conjuring up or contacting the dead. One who investigates, looks into, and seeks information from the dead.

Lev 20:6 God sys.........“‘The person who turns to the spirits of the dead and familiar spirits to 'commit prostitution by going after them', I will set my face against that person and cut him off from the midst of his people.

There is no possible misunderstanding or misinterpretation.... the Bible unequivocally condemns the practice of contacting the dead.