4.2.4 The Doctrine of the Word of God.
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Fundamental to everything that Warren teaches, is the basic belief that the Bible is the Word of God; outside of that belief Warren has no foundation for his pronouncements on church growth and church health. Stuart Murray, in his book “Church Planting” has an interesting point to make about church planting which in many ways might astonish many evangelicals. He suggests: "Many church growth practitioners wish to undergird their (church planting) strategies with biblical foundations… there is no need for such a foundation. Church planting can be valued as a sensible, even God-inspired, contemporary expression of mission, whether or not it has a biblical precedent."
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Church planting has much to commend it without recourse to biblical precedents; that thinking would find numerous critics and yet the challenges to be my witnesses and to go and make disciples ends up inevitably in church planting, so one can see where Murray is coming from in his thinking. Warren began his search for principles to help him develop his Saddleback model but unlike Warren, Murray did not need to go searching for the obvious; the basic question arises: How many ways can “Go and make disciples” be interpreted? Evangelism, discipleship, church growth is the supernaturally natural development of the church..It took Warren six months search to clarify a traditional position that he needed to take in the development of his church model.
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Some clarification on the centrality of the Word of God in Warren’s ecclesiology is needed. Modern ideas on religion have usually followed the evolutionary trend, which understands religion developing through Animism into Judaism and then finding its expression in Christianity.Warren would not subscribe to that evaluation, and his use of the Bible suggests that he would believe something completely other.
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He reads the scriptures not as the promotion of the theory of the evolution of religion; on the contrary he would see religious practice as devolution, and that devolution continued where there was no special revelation from God. Because of Warren’s belief in the Sovereignty of God and subsequently his belief in special revelation, he suggests that mankind has been directed back to God and the outworking of that experience is Christian faith as biblically recorded.
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Orton Wiley explains: "The origin of religion must be traced back to man’s original constitution. Man was made for personal fellowship with God, and as originally endowed had personal integrity and a sufficient knowledge to preserve him in the state in which he was created. But with the fall and the introduction of sin, fellowship was broken, and man’s mind became darkened by the loss of the spiritual light, which forms the true principle of illumination in the things of God.
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We must therefore, with stump, regard of natural religion as an attenuated and diluted remainder of man’s original constitution and endowment.".Warren like Wiley believed that the Christian religion is distinctive and totally unique; because of that uniqueness Christianity becomes exclusive, while at the same time totally inclusive. Christianity included all that is necessary to know how to be rightly related to God in Christ.
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For Warren, Christ is the final and full revelation of God to the world. He clearly demonstrates in one of his sermons on “Saving Grace”[3] that salvation is absolutely free, therefore Christianity is “fundamentally different from every other religion”.[4] In the light of that, the collective written stories in the New Testament about Jesus’ words, actions and attitudes reflect that special revelation.
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Warren began by accepting the written historical record of the life, death, resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ as final and authoritative. He does not challenge in any way that the Bible is the inspired Word of God; it is final in authority, given to teach and train in doctrine so that the Christian’s practice would be perfected. His vast use of the scriptures would clearly indicate his dependence upon them, particularly in his search for principles.[5]
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It is not surprising that Warren takes this view, for Criswell has already indicated that Warren’s ministry is “grounded and rooted in the infallible and inerrant Word of God”.[6] By using the words “infallible and inerrant” to describe Warren’s understanding of the Bible he indicates the evangelical way to explain biblical authority.
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The idea of complete trust in and the trustworthiness of the text is reflected in Criswell’s comment about Warren’s attitude to the scriptures.If Warren had not subscribed to such a position he would have not included Criswell’s observation in the introduction[7] to his book. The Westminster Confession[8] of Faith speaks of the Bible’s “infallible truth.”
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On the other hand, inerrancy signifies the complete trustworthiness of a source of information which is without mistake. Augustine suggested; “I believe most firmly that none of these authors has erred in any respect of writing”,[9] Warren accepted without reservation that “the Bible is God’s inerrant guidebook for life”.
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a. Inspiration & interpretation.
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Warren’s main challenge was not the inspiration or authority of the scriptures, but how he would go about interpreting those 1st century experiences in the light of the fact that he was a 21st century Westerner. Added to that was the challenge of transcending 2000 years of church history, to engage with documents which may well hold principles and a process but also accommodate translational error and private interpretations of texts in the English language, created to suit another time and context.
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A tremendous weight of responsibility imposed itself on Warren to produce a good hermeneutical evaluation of the biblical text. His hermeneutical evaluation of the biblical text would be the key to understanding his ecclesiology and the reason he has had such a major influence on the modern church.
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Alongside that evolved the challenge from modern scholarship; can Warren’s hermeneutics stand intense scrutiny? While Warren does not talk specifically in a particular section about hermeneutics, he continually interprets scripture in a fashion that is suitable for the advancement of his Saddleback model.
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b. Hermeneutical challenges.
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What rules, principles or guidelines did Warren use to gain an in depth understanding of the New Testament text which supposedly supported his five principles ecclesiology? The major scholarship problem has always been the inability to fully engage in any direct manner with the New Testament texts thereby gauging the intent of the authors as they engaged through their writings with a first century context.
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Is the product of that engagement simply transferable to a 21st century situation? Bosch comments that any hermeneutical approach should be under-girded with caution.He suggests that the Bible is not to be treated as a storehouse of truths on which we can draw at random. There are no immutable and objectively correct `laws of mission` to which exegesis of scripture gives us access and which provide us with blue prints we can apply in every situation.
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Our missionary practice is not performed in unbroken continuity with the Biblical witness; it is altogether ambivalent enterprise executed in the context of tension between divine providence and human confusion. The church’s involvement in mission remains an act of faith without earthly guarantees.Hermeneutics concerns itself not only with the interpretation of a specific text but also with the understanding of any act of communication i.e. oral, verbal, non-verbal, etc.
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The very nature of language itself is a massive barrier to hermeneutical evaluation.Many issues have challenged scholarly endeavour, particularly the understanding of how a philosophy of language is constructed; then there is the mine field of theories of meaning, literary theory and other disciplines which when grouped complete the science of hermeneutics.
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Key to the credibility of Warren’s impact and influence on the 21st century church has to be the quality of his hermeneutical interpretation and consequently its results. That being the case there are historical backcloth, cultural conditions, personal circumstances, intellectual weaknesses of writers and specific situations into which their words were delivered to be understood before interpretation can be honestly reflected.
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David Bosch comments: The profound dissimilarities between then and now imply that it will not do to appeal in a direct manner to the words of the biblical authors and apply what they said on a one to one basis to our own situation.We should, rather, with creative but responsible freedom, prolong the logic of the ministry of Jesus and the early church in an imaginative and creative way to our own time and context.
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One of the basic reasons for doing this lies in the fact that the Christian faith is an historical faith.God communicates his revelation to people through human beings and through events, not by means of abstract propositions. This is another way of saying that the biblical faith is incarnational, the reality of God entering into human affairs.[12]
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Have Warren’s discoveries been the product of safe hermeneutical interaction with writers, texts and historical setting? Can his evaluation of “why” the church exists and “what” it was meant to be, be trusted? Those two challenging questions which Warren had to face caused him to believe that the church exists because of the Sovereignty of God, the influence and power of the Holy Spirit, the authority of the Scriptures and the possibility of man receiving special revelation through the word of God.
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The outworking of this would be divine-human partnership or an incarnational expression of the power of God in and through believers, who when grouped together introduced the local visible church as a reflector of those divine qualities.Warren’s ecclesiology is an in depth expression of firstly his understanding of three particular aspects of man’s personal spiritual experiences with God, and the development of four important doctrines which become the pillars of Saddleback. .
Warren’s answer to the questions “why does the church exist and what is it meant to be” is clearly summed up in his interpretation of spiritual experiences and a defined doctrinal position which when practically outworked would initiate an environment for church health and church growth.
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Along with these two levels, he adds the five New Testament principles he discovered: worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry and mission, placing them at the heart of the development of his ecclesiology. To be true to Warren’s strong views on context, it will be necessary to understand the context out of which these principles were gleaned.
[1] Stuart Murray, Church Planting, Milton Keyes, Paternoster Press, 1998, 61-86.
[2] Wiley O., Christian Theology Notes, Birkenhead,Vol 1, L.Hawker, EBC notes, 1975, 104.
[3] www.Pastor.com sermon 1-10 Warren, Saving Grace.
[4] www.Pastor.com sermon 1-10 Warren, Saving Grace.
[5] Warren, The Purpose Driven Church, 96.
[6] Warren, TPDC, 11.
[7] Warren, TPDC, 11.
[8] Sinclair & Wright, The Dictionary of Theology, Leicester, England, IVP, 1998, 337.
[9] Sinclair & Wright, TDOT, 337.
[10] Warren, TPDC, 354.
[11] Bosch, Transforming Mission, 430.
[12] Bosch, Transforming Mission, 181-189.