The Paradigm of the Cross, Part 1 | Christ, His Cross, His Church

Luke 9:23

So as we kick off the conference, I just want to take you to a familiar text to you, a seminal text, which is Matthew 16, Matthew 16, to see how the cross really is the paradigm of the Christian faith. Matthew chapter 16, this beautiful chapter, beautiful text contains several themes that we will remind ourselves of over this weekend together, gospel themes that unite us together as Christians, gospel themes that bring unity and harmony to our churches and set the tone for our entire ministry.

I’m going to read that section, starting in verse 13 where Peter makes the Good Confession, Matthew 16:13 and following. “Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter replied, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’

“And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven, and I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ.

“From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘Far be it from you, Lord, this shall never happen to you.’ He turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan, for you are a hindrance to me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.’ Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’”

More than twenty years ago, it was back in 2002, Rick Warren and Zondervan publishers published The Purpose-Driven Life. And you’re saying to yourself already, I know, “Twenty years ago; that is ancient history.” And I don’t like to bring up ancient history just for the sake of bringing up ancient history. I’m bringing it up because the, the phenomenon that produced The Purpose-Driven Life and before it The Purpose-Driven Church, what brought that to a reality and made it such an astounding success is with us to this very day, stronger than ever.

The Purpose-Driven Life, published in 2002, was a follow-up to Rick Warren’s earlier hit, 1995, The Purpose-Driven Church. But whereas The Purpose-Driven Church targeted pastors with church-growth philosophy, The Purpose-Driven Life went after the churches, went after the people in the pews.

The core concepts of Rick Warren’s best-selling books come from Donald McGavran, the father of the church-growth movement, and what’s called the “homogeneous growth unit principle.” And the homogeneous growth unit principle states that people prefer to become Christians, notice the prefer language, they prefer to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers. McGavran developed that homogeneous growth unit principle from Methodist missionary J. Waskom Pickett, who published a book back in 1933 about gospel success, and I do put that in air quotes, success in India.

So Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and other church-growth pastors wanted big, ‘successful churches’, so they latched on to this new philosophy, the church-growth philosophy. They learned from McGavran and C. Peter Wagner over at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California.

But Rick Warren learned to market church growth from his mentor, Crystal Cathedral pastor and televangelist Robert Schuller. Robert Schuller was not a Christian, though he claimed to be. He was actually a peddler of positive thinking and self-esteem psychology, the shtick of every motivational guru from Norman Vincent Peale to Tony Robbins.

And this stuff worked. It worked in a pragmatic sense. It, it did what it was peddled to do. Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, others, they discovered that by targeting the wealthy in Orange County, California, or in South Barrington, Illinois, it turns out that wealthy Americans, they’re a lot like Brahmins in India. They also prefer to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, and class barriers. And they, too, they like churches full of people who are mirror images of themselves.

The success of The Purpose-Driven Church in 1995, that was due to Rick Warren’s ability to make this church-growth strategy, to market it and its tactics to pastors, pastors who were desperate to make their churches grow, pastors who had tried year after year after year after weary year to try to teach the Bible, yet to no avail, too many people getting up and leaving. He thought, Something must be wrong. It must be my methodology. So they were the kindling that caught fire with church-growth, church-growth philosophy. And yet, for a number of reasons, these same pastors were unable to discern the unbiblical premise of this church-growth philosophy.

It was not until The Purpose-Driven Life was published in 2002 by Zondervan Publishers, by Rick Warren, some of the fallout of the success of that book started to bring some things to light. More than 50 million copies sold to date. At that time I think it was 25 million copies, but who’s counting once you get that high? But some of the fallout of the success of his book, with the more than 50 million copies sold, that his shrewd marketing and really the worldliness that had driven it became exposed to the public.

For his part, Rick Warren explained the success of The Purpose-Driven Life as the evidence of the work of God. Here’s what he said: “My concern is that no one, neither Zondervan Publishing nor myself claim credit for the astounding success of The Purpose-Driven Life book. The worldwide spread of the purpose-driven message was the result of God’s supernatural and sovereign plan, which no one anticipated.” End quote. What astounding success is he pointing to? What’s the evidence of God’s supernatural work? To date, 50 million copies sold, translated into 137 languages. End of story. Case closed, Supernatural.

It was in 2005 that Tim Challies reported on what happened when Rick Warren tried to suppress the connection between The Purpose-Driven Life and then what would come to light in a book by Greg Stielstra, a book called PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life. Greg Stielstra, he was responsible on the marketing team for the The Purpose-Driven Life. He was a part of Zondervan’s marketing team at the time. He’d, he’d marketed other big-name authors like Philip Yancey, Lee Strobel, Jim Cymbala, Billy Graham, others, and according to Stielstra, he said this: “The success of The Purpose-Driven Life or The Passion of the Christ,” referring to Mel Gibson’s movie, a very Catholic movie, “the success of The Purpose-Driven Life or The Passion of the Christ remains puzzling to many.”

Why would he say they’re puzzling? Because really, they’re not that good. The book itself, The Purpose-Driven Life, according to Warren himself, he says, “None of these ideas are new. They’re not really that explosive.” He says, “Their success remains puzzling to many.” “But not to those who know their secret,” Stielstra said.

What do these remarkable success stories have in common? They each used pyromarketing. Pyromarketing is what he calls it. Now with Rick Warren, everyone thought the wizard had powers, that Rick Warren’s success was indeed supernatural. Turns out it was just Greg Stielstra behind the curtain, pulling all the levers and cranking the marketing machine up. That’s what explained it. There is no wizard, there is no wizardry. It’s just clever marketing, and Stielstra, for his part, he’s just doing his job. At least he’s honest about it. Rick Warren was playing people. He was playing this off as all God’s work when he knew very well this is the work of men.

Stielstra’s four-step approach to pyromarketing, which Rick Warren used, Tim Challies outlines the whole thing, but I’m just going to summarize it just so you know how it works. Rick Warren and Zondervan convinced pastors of mid-sized churches to begin what was called the Forty Days of Purpose campaign. Do you remember that? Remember that? Forty Days of Purpose? It was going on everywhere. You couldn’t get away from it. These campaigns were held in churches, and they promised these pastors and these churches that this campaign is going to build bigger, more successful, thriving churches.”

And so 1,200 pastors signed on the dotted line, 1,200 pastors, their congregations total, totaling about 400,000 people. That’s roughly mid-sized churches, 300 to 400, 500, somewhere in there. Next, Zondervan produced, distributed commercial spots on Christian radio, Zondervan sent discounted copies of The Purpose-Driven Life to all those participating churches, and 400,000-plus people bought them at discounted rates. That started the fire going.

 Zondervan fanned the flame by promoting that book as evangelistic, gathering testimonies of individual people who had said their lives were changed, testimonies of pastors who said their churches just exploded in size. All this stuff works. I knew many Christians, I’ve known many Christians who have told me, sometimes even now, later, looking back sheepishly, Yeah, I, I bought those books and handed them out to unbelievers because I thought they were evangelistic. That’s how they were sold in the Christian bookstores. The Christian retail, retailers talked about it all the time. There were displays everywhere.

Then came the next stage, the final stage, the counting, counting up the numbers, totaling the numbers, reporting the sales figures, gathering data on participating individuals, participating churches, gathering and crunching all that data, getting e-mail addresses, other personal data, everything that they could. And according to Greg Stielstra, he says, “A great deal of scientific evidence for pyromarketing comes from psychology, physiology, and sociology,” he says. And all that data that gathered prepared the publisher for the next marketing campaign.

Now why have I told you that story? I can assure you it is not to be salacious. It’s not to expose Rick Warren, other big name authors, Zondervan, Christian publishers, Christian retailers, the Christian media industrial complex, or whatever you want to call it. I’m not trying to just expose how they have been duping an unsuspecting public. Others have told that tale far better than I can now, in the limited time I have.

My interest, instead, in telling you what happened twenty years ago is to draw attention to that unsuspecting public. That’s where I want to shift your focus, is to those people. There were, after all, 1,200 pastors and their churches who were all complicit in this scheme. They represent 400,000 professing Christians. To date there have been 50 million in book sales, 137 expensive, highly labor-intensive translation projects.

Why is that? How did that happen? And more to the point, how did pastors agree to go along with this, turning their sheep into consumer evangelists? How has everybody been duped so easily into believing that clever marketing tactics are not the work of man, but the work of God himself? Why would they think that? I know there must be a number of different answers to that question, a number of different angles.

We can look at the question and come out with a, a number of good reasons for this, but I want to get to the basic fundamental error. I want to get to the bottom line on this, which I think is a watershed issue and a paradigm-setting pattern of thinking that is revealed here, and it’s endemic to the fallen condition.

It’s in the contrast that Martin Luther identified 500 years ago between the theology of glory versus the theology of the cross. The theology of glory, on the one hand, as opposed, as contra-distinct from, the theology of the cross. It was at the Heidelberg Disputation that was conducted in April of 1518 by the Augustinian Order. Martin Luther was a monk in the Augustinian order.

 Luther outlined the contrast between the theology of glory, that’s his name for Rome’s theology, and he contrasted it there in the Heidelberg disputation with the theology of the cross. Four theses, theses 19 through 22. And here’s theses 19 and 20. Number 19: “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.” Thesis 20: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God, seen through suffering and the cross.”

Now, if you’re out there scratching your head wondering why this is such a big deal, you’re not alone. Hardly seems like a breakthrough. In some ways, it doesn’t even seem cogent or even lucid of, of a comment. And the truth is what Luther said at Heidelberg, it really did identify a watershed way of thinking about theology, not only between Catholics and Protestants, which became clear in his day, but between true Christianity, on the one hand, and every false sub-Christian, sub-biblical version of Christianity on the other hand. In fact, we could say without fear of contradiction, what Luther identified there at Heidelberg identifies a watershed between true Christianity, true religion, the way of God, God-centered thinking, on the one hand, and man-centered thinking and man-centered religion on the other hand.

Trueman, he interprets Luther for us. He tells us why those theses are such a big deal. He says this: “At the heart of Luther’s argument is this: that human beings should not speculate about who God is or how he acts in advance of actually seeing whom he has revealed himself to be.”

All right, as we read in Matthew 16, no one, no one expected the Messiah to show up in Jerusalem only to die on a cross. No one saw that coming. Even his closest disciples, though Jesus had told them several times, predicted it in very clear language as we see in our text, his closest disciples were unable to accept, unable to fathom the thought of him dying on the cross.

When Peter, not getting it, tried to rebuke Jesus before seeing who God would reveal Christ to be, Jesus had to rebuke Peter, didn’t he? He called his thinking nothing short of satanic. That’s strong because Peter had set his mind on the things of man. He was man-centered in his thinking. He’s on the wrong side of the watershed, here, rather than on the things of God.

Again, here’s Luther at the Heidelberg Disputation, April 1518, theses 21 and 22. Number 21: “A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is,” and by that he means, he’s waiting to see what God reveals it to actually be, before he makes a judgement. Thesis number 22: “That wisdom, which sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man,” this is the theology of glory, “is completely puffed up, blinded and hardened.”

Peter had his mind on the things of men, and he was thus susceptible to thinking that was, frankly, from the pit of hell itself. It was demonic and this is the theology of glory. By human wisdom he judged the invisible things of God as being wrong, as being in grave error, as meriting rebuke and rejection. Why? Because suffering and dying on a cross is not glorious. It is anything but glorious. It is the ultimate assault against any person’s dignity. It is not glorious. It is reprehensible. And so Peter said, “Away with this. You can’t think this way, Lord.”

By Luther’s judgment, in that moment Peter was puffed up, blinded, and hardened. Trueman writes this, “The theologians of glory, therefore, are those who build their theology in light of what they expect God to be like. And surprise, surprise, they make God to look something like themselves,” just like the Brahmins in India, just like the seekers entering into Willow Creek or Saddleback Church.

That’s the perennial error of the Jews, isn’t it? Over the entire recorded history of Israel, continued in Jesus’ day, led to the Jews rejection of Christ, and we can look at the Roman Catholic era the very same way, as fundamentally flawed in its man-centeredness, with assumptions and expectations that are set by a theology of glory. They want something that is glorious, something that appears to be great.

And I’d argue that much of today’s evangelicalism is making the exact same mistake now, right now. In fact, many of us in this room have been weaned and reared and raised on this same thinking, and it keeps coming back to us as well. The same theology of glory that persecuted the prophets, that crucified our Lord, that burned reformers at the stake, it is the fundamental flaw of many leaders in the Christian world today, and it is the dominant spirit of our age.

In 2002, as I said, there were 1,200 pastors and their churches who believed God wants them to build a mega-church, that God’s true work is evident in mega-proportions: big numbers, big sales, big movements, big things, big influence worldwide. So when someone comes along to sell them what they so desperately want, surprise, surprise, God looks a lot like exactly what they want.

By contrast, what Luther and the Reformers recovered in their time, might should say rediscovered, was this theology of the cross. The paradigm itself comes from Jesus’ ministry, his life of self-denial, of self-sacrifice, of perfect obedience to his Father’s will, which took him inexorably and inevitably into the cross. The paradigm of the cross only made sense, by the way, after the cross. They couldn’t see it beforehand.

It was only after the cross itself, the historical event, it was only after the Apostles interpreted the cross to us in the New Testament by the Spirit’s ministry of illumination, and only by his enabling, I should say, are we able to see who God is and what he is like. Only by the Holy Spirit can we understand the true meaning of God’s works. Trueman says, “Theologians of the cross are those who build their theology in the light of God’s own revelation of himself in Christ, hanging on the cross.”

In the cross of Christ, which the entire world got wrong, as the centuries have proven, the world is still getting it wrong even today. It’s in the cross of Christ that we see who God is, what he is like, and how he acts. In Christ on the Cross, we see God as he has revealed himself to be in the Incarnate Son, dying, dead on the cross. This is what Christianity really is, what it’s really about. It’s what true discipleship is. It’s what ministry is really about, is the theology of the cross.