If we must have an officiating priest, surely we can do better than this vulgar huckster.

[BR_Parkway]

http://www.slate.com/id/2207148/

It is a fact that Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., was present at a meeting of the Aspen Institute not long ago and was asked by Lynda Resnick—she of the pomegranate-juice dynasty—if a Jew like herself could expect to be admitted to paradise. Warren publicly told her no. What choice did he have? His own theology says that only those who accept Jesus can hope to be saved. I have just missed the chance to debate on CBS with one of Warren's leading allies and defenders, the Dallas preacherman who calls himself Dr. Robert Jeffress. In the opinion of this learned fellow, even though Mitt Romney "talks about Jesus as his lord and savior, he is not a Christian. Mormonism is not Christianity."

It is also a fact that Rick Warren proclaims as his original mentor a man named Wallie Amos Criswell, who was the inspirational figure in the rightward move of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1960s. Rightward in that time and context meant exactly what you might suspect it did—a cold hostility to any civil rights activism on the part of the churches. Theologically, it also meant the crack-brained idea of "dispensationalist premillennialism," or, in other words, the imminence of planetary death and the corollary joys of the "rapture" that would snatch the true believer into the skies just in time.

In his own " purpose-driven" words, Warren has described the dismal nutbag Criswell as the "greatest American pastor of the 20th century" and has told us of the mystic moment in the 1970s when he himself was granted a laying on of Criswell's hands. (The promise, you may not be startled to hear, was of a large and prosperous congregation in the young man's future.)

I think we are all entitled to ask and to keep asking every member of the Obama transition team until we receive a satisfactory answer, the following questions:

• Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews?


• Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons?


• Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and an already nuclear Pakistan, by a half-educated pulpit-pounder raised in the belief that the Armageddon solution is one to be anticipated with positive glee?

[nancyr]

1. These are tenets of the Christian faith.

This Criswell fellow wasn't the one who dreamed up these beliefs. I grew up in a mainline Protestant church and it taught that Jews must be converted to Christianity in order to get to heaven...and that Mormons were not Christians. This sort of thinking is nothing new.

[xiamiam]

2. but it is so backwards.....sorry but it is...nt

[razors edge]

3. I nominate this guy.