The Man on the Middle Cross

How Rick Warren Is Being Kind of a Theological Ninny

A couple of housekeeping items to kick us off this morning. First, I am almost done with Emily Hunter McGowin’s Households of Faith: Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God and I am thinking that I ought to let it sit a day or two before diving in to cut and thrust with my usual demotivational vigor. Second, as per my post on Tuesday where I complained about the Catholic/Christian divide, observing that it used to be that people knew the difference between Catholic/Protestant rather than Catholic/Christian, a lot of people have written to tell me that in the American South, it’s Catholic/Christian, not Catholic/Protestant. Indeed, one dear friend says that that’s an “American” way of speaking. I am happy to admit that I am wrong, though I have spent considerable time on both the West and the East Coast, and only rarely have heard the Catholic/Christian rather than Catholic/Protestant delineation. Might it be more nuanced by geographical region or even denominational preference? I did hear a lot of anti-Catholic rhetoric as a young child, but didn’t often hear that Catholics weren’t Christian—some, of course, aren’t, but that’s true for Protestants as well. Anyway, I didn’t mean to get into a battle over vocabulary. Sorry for getting it wrong!

And finally, to the subject of today’s effort to depress us all, yesterday Rick Warren, on X, produced a succulent piece of theological rot hanging so very close to the ground that someone as short and obtuse as me cannot refrain from picking it. Here is the Tweet:

How charming! I think it is important, before anything else, to post this:

I love to watch that clip with the sound off sometimes to relish how those behind Pastor Begg are suddenly transformed by hearing the good news of the Gospel proclaimed so movingly. It’s pretty wonderful. Anyway, with that out of the way, what about Pastor Warren’s epic take? Let’s take it point by point. First, he quotes the Gospel according to Saint John:

John 19:18 “They crucified Jesus with two others-one on each side & Jesus in the middle.”

Then he observes that:

The guys on both sides were thieves.

That’s partially true. One of the key words to be observed, of course, as Miles does here, is that they both “were” thieves but one of them became a Saint in the final moments before he died. And such were some of you—adulterers, thieves, liars, gluttons—I’m sure you get the gist without me having to go look up the verse.