Book Description
With more than 25,000,000 copies sold, Pastor Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life has been both a commercially successful best-seller and a widely influential book in the Christian community. In The Reason Driven Life Price offers the first parody and critique of Warren’s bestseller. Warren’s God, Price says, is a “Frankenstein Monster, a divine bully, and an obsessive stalker.”
Following closely the forty-chapter structure of Warren’s book, Price’s point-counterpoint approach emphasizes the importance of reason in understanding life’s realities as opposed to Warren’s devotional perspective. In particular, Price takes issue with Warren’s use of scriptural quotations, demonstrating that many of them have little to do with the points Warren is trying to make.
An important section of the book shows that the popular evangelical notion of “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” is utterly without any scriptural basis. Price also provides many persuasive arguments for the use of reason as a tool for developing moral maturity and an intelligent, realistic perspective on life’s highs and lows. Ultimately, The Reason-Driven Life offers a healthier, alternative approach to wisdom and motivation, says Price, than the simplistic answers and feel-good emotionalism at the heart of Warren’s prescription for life.
Contents
Forward (by Julia Sweeney) 7
Introduction 11
1 It Is About You 23
2 You Are a Work of Art 31
3 One-Track Mind? 38
4 Sons of Dust 51
5 My View Is God’s View 63
6 No Changes Are Permanent, but Change Is 72
7 The Mystery of Everything 81
8 God: Planned for Our Pleasure 91
9 What Makes Me Sick 101
10 The Achilles’ Heel of Worship 111
11 Becoming Imaginary Friends with God 119
12 Providence and Superstition 127
13 Worship That Creates God 133
14 I Can’t Get No Sanctification 144
15 Joining the Sect 152
16 The Greatest of These 160
17 A Place to Conform
18 Heretics Anonymous 179
19 Prices’ Ten Commandments 186
20 Healing Religious Divisions 191
21 Damage Control 199
22 The Character of Christ 209
23 When is a Religion Not a Religion 216
24 The Paper Idol 226
25 Jesus with a Jackhammer 234
26 Satan’s Sunday School 243
27 Temp Job 257
28 Jerusalem Wasn’t Built in a Day 269
29 Service Industry/ 277
30 Cut Out the Holy Ghost Noise! 283
31 Cogs for Christ 293
32 Being Who You Are 299
33 How Twisted Texts Scream 307
34 Meetings with Unremarkable Men 313
35 War Is Peace/Freedom Is Slavery/Weakness Is Strength 320
36 Made into Missionaries 325
37 Fabricating Your Life Message 330
38 The Hidden Agenda of Witnessing 336
39 Juggling Your Life 344
40 Not without Reason 350
Bibliography 357
Comment
“The wittiest, most thorough, and most devastating critique of the religion of the Evangelicals that I have ever read. It left me wondering how the religion of great Protestant heroes of faith like Luther and Bunyan can have turned into the inane religion of Ned Flanders, Homer Simpson’s neighbor.”
– Don Cupitt, Anglican priest, Fellow of Emmanuel College in Cambridge University, religious philosopher, and the author of forty books
“In his own inimitable style, Robert Price in this volume challenges Rick Warren’s bestselling book: A Purpose Driven Life. With the rapier’s sword of Price’s insight wrapped in a devastating sense of humor, he leaves not just Warren but all similar fundamentalistic religious leaders bleeding and exposed for what they are: anxiety-driven, survival-seeking, power-hungry people masquerading under the banner of piety or hiding behind the sounds of the sacred.”
– John Shelby Spong, Author of A New Christianity for a New World