Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert M. Price (Selma, NC), Professor of Scriptural Studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is the editor (with Jeffery Jay Lowder) of The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave and The Journal of Higher Criticism. He is also the author of The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?; Deconstructing Jesus; The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts; and Beyond Born Again.

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The Reason Driven Life

Prometheus Books

Contents

Foreword.............................................................................7Introduction.........................................................................11One It Is about You..................................................................23Two You Are a Work of Art............................................................31Three One-Track Mind?................................................................38Four Sons of Dust....................................................................51Five My View Is God's View...........................................................63Six No Changes Are Permanent, but Change Is..........................................72Seven The Mystery of Everything......................................................81Eight God: Planned for Our Pleasure..................................................91Nine What Makes Me Sick..............................................................101Ten The Achilles' Heel of Worship....................................................111Eleven Becoming Imaginary Friends with God...........................................119Twelve Providence and Superstition...................................................127Thirteen Worship That Creates God....................................................133Fourteen I Can't Get No Sanctification...............................................144Fifteen Joining the Sect.............................................................152Sixteen The Greatest of These........................................................160Seventeen A Place to Conform.........................................................168Eighteen Heretics Anonymous..........................................................179Nineteen Price's Ten Commandments....................................................186Twenty Healing Religious Divisions...................................................191Twenty-one Damage Control............................................................199Twenty-two The Character of Christ...................................................209Twenty-three When Is a Religion Not a Religion?......................................216Twenty-four This Paper Idol..........................................................226Twenty-five Jesus with a Jackhammer..................................................234Twenty-six Satan's Sunday School.....................................................243Twenty-seven Temp Job................................................................257Twenty-eight Jerusalem Wasn't Built in a Day.........................................269Twenty-nine Service Industry.........................................................277Thirty Cut Out the Holy Ghost Noise!.................................................283Thirty-one Cogs for Christ...........................................................293Thirty-two Being Who You Are.........................................................299Thirty-three How Twisted Texts Scream................................................307Thirty-four Meetings with Unremarkable Men...........................................313Thirty-five War Is Peace/Freedom Is Slavery/Weakness Is Strength.....................320Thirty-six Made into Missionaries....................................................325Thirty-seven Fabricating Your Life Message...........................................330Thirty-eight The Hidden Agenda of Witnessing.........................................336Thirty-nine Juggling Your Life.......................................................344Forty Not without Reason.............................................................350Bibliography.........................................................................357

Chapter One

Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not. -Protagoras

If one has to choose between different authorities, not they but one-self is ultimate authority for oneself, and this means: there is no authority for him. -Paul Tillich, '"By What Authority?'"

Jumping out of Your Skin

In any journey, including especially one's life journey, it matters as much where you begin as where you end up, or hope to end up. In The Purpose-Driven Life, Rick Warren is rightly adamant on this point. Yet he is wrong, in my humble opinion, as to what the proper starting point is. He assumes, and he wants you to assume, the least likely standpoint for a mortal human being, namely, a God's-eye view. Weary of human speculations about the meaning and purpose of life, Reverend Warren urges us to jump out of our mortal skins and join the Almighty Creator, from whose side we may look down from Mt. Sinai or Olympus or Asgard and see what we could not see from a position too close to the ground: the reason we have been placed here and the goals we ought to pursue. He tells a shaggy dog story eventuating in the well-known quip, "You can't get there from here." You see, Reverend Warren had once gotten lost on a mountain climb and finally found someone from whom to ask directions. The man told him just how lost he was: his destination was on the other side of the range, and he would have to begin on the other side if he hoped to arrive at his destination. Presumably, like J. R. R. Tolkien's Gandalf finding his way through the Mountains of Moria, Warren did find his way to the other side. But he doesn't seem to catch the implications of the humorous clich he quotes: what if you can't get there from here? What if you can't reach the Olympian vantage point of a god?

Warren seems to think it a simple matter for mere mortals to know the will of an invisible divinity. He is like a despairing parent on Christmas Eve, facing down a pile of parts for a complex toy for his child. He can make no sense of the mess, and so he redoubles his quest for a sheet of assembly instructions. There must be one in there somewhere! And, by golly, there is. Let's just hope whoever wrote it had a good command of the English language. And for Warren, who despairs at making any sense of life and its purpose using his own wisdom, there must be an instruction manual for that, too, one provided by the manufacturer: the Bible. Now maybe we can stop wasting time and get with God's program for us.

But not so fast. Warren seems hell-bent on discovering a definitive and infallible set of instructions, and this ought to give us pause for at least three reasons. First, Warren makes a colossal, and colossally dubious, assumption that there needs to be a single, uniform purpose or goal for all individual human lives. The variety of gifts and abilities and interests that characterizes the gloriously diverse human race may be a clue that different individuals have different life-purposes. Personally, I doubt very much whether one can say Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare, and Elvis Presley all had the exact same purpose in life. Granted, all of them lived to express their creativity and acted to enrich human experience. But even then, we're talking about wide generalities, not about specific trajectories for individual persons. And then again, there is nothing to say it is incumbent...