Evangelicals throughout the centuries have maintained that by justification by faith—and by faith alone—sinful human beings are in Christ made right before the all Holy God.1 Justification itself is a judicial declarative act on the part of God alone.

Degrading the nature of God to the level of a doting person who craves for a relationship with sinful mankind is part of what one finds in Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life movement. Reading the Bible is displaced by the advice to “gather a small group of friends and form a Purpose-Driven Life Reading Group to review these chapters on a weekly basis.”1 “The last thing many believers need today is to go to another Bible study.”2 Most serious of all, in place of the Gospel, Warren merely formulates a whispered prayer and urges one to find one’s “true self.”