Rick Warren Wants Us to Learn from Henri Nowen (Mystic)

By Ken Silva

In posts such as Rick Warren Dangerous Man For The Gospel this online apologetics and discernment work Apprising Ministries has been among those who’ve been reporting on an ill-advised decision by Dr. John Piper to bring Purpose Driven Pope Rick Warren into the Desiring God Conference 2010 as the keynote speaker.

As I’ve pointed out before, sadly, it got even worse when Dr. Piper offered the below defense of his decision; and so, Warrengate is still slowly simmering:

At root I think [Rick Warren] is theological and doctrinal and sound.
(as cited Online source) 

Warren’s Twitter bio humbly informs us that he is a “Radical Christian, Loves&mentors next generation leaders, Saddleback pastor, Leads Global PEACE Plan & church planting network”; in other words Warren, arguably the most visible pastor in the Southern Baptisit Convention—itself the largest Protestant denomination in the United States—influences many, many people around Christian circles.

To give you some further perspective, Warren’s Twitter account tells us he has 153, 661 followers and he tweeted the below not long ago:

(Online source)

The “Nouwen” in the above tweet is the deceased Roman Catholic mystic Henri Nouwen. I told you recently in Christian Broadcasting Network Peddling Contemplative Spirituality—even today—Nouwen remains a leading teacher of the anti-biblical, and spiritually corrupt, Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) perpetrated in the pretending to be Protestant evangelical by Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster with his trusty spiritual twin Dallas Willard, under the guise of so-called Spiritual Formation.

Here we have Warren sending sheep to an apostate (at best) wolf who gave his life in service to a gospel contrary to the one you received (c.f. Galatians 1:9) in the Roman Catholic Church, which has placed its anathema upon the very Gospel of Jesus Christ itself. Ah, but what’s a little thing like the Protestant Reformation to Rick Warren; he can defecate upon the blood of the martyrs because he’s bigger than the Reformation. And what’s the Scriptures to Warren; only his personal playground where he romps with his Play-Doh Bible to twist in any shape he wishes.

We also have another case o the irrational philosophy gleaned from pagan religions: Hiddenness is the place of purification. Huh; what does that even mean, hiddenness. Yet guru Nouwen, and apparently PDL pope Warren, think ala Zen Buddhism we purifiy ourselves in the practice of “Christian” transcendental meditation in an altered state of consciousness, the so-called “silence and solitude” of Contemplative/Centering Prayer (CCP).

One of the Golden Buddhas of contemplative spirituality, Roman Catholic mystic monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968), had a lifelong devotion to CSM and its crown jewel of CCP would make him more like the Buddha than the Christ, which you can see in Thomas Merton And The Buddhas. Merton talks about this myth of supposed “true self” when he speculated that at “the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.”[1]

A couple of quick points: 1) This is actually a denial of the doctrine of original sin; and 2) if we are “untouched by sin” in “the center of our being,” then we don’t need a crucified and risen Savior. And following are a couple of the “revelations” Nouwen received after his own devotion to spurious CSM:

One of the discoveries we make in [contemplative/centering] prayer is that the closer we come to God, the closer we come to all our brothers and sisters in the human family. God is not a private God. The God who dwells in our inner sanctuary is also the God who dwells in the inner sanctuary of each human being.[2]

Today I personally believe that Jesus came to open the door to God’s house, all human beings can walk through that door, whether they know about Jesus or not. Today I see it as my call to help every person claim his or her way to God.[3]

I ask again: Why would you want to follow the toxic teaching, and practice the spirituality, of Henri Nouwen when it turned him into a universalist?
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End notes:
[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander [New York: Doubleday, 1966], 158, emphasis mine.
[2]  Henri Nouwen, Here And Now [New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1994], 24, 25, emphasis mine.
[3] Henri Nouwen, Sabbatical Journey [New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998], 51, emphasis mine.

(HT: Apprising Ministries)