You probably saw a half-dozen links to this month’s feature in Fortune profiling Bram Cohen and his creation, Bittorrent. What you might not have seen is any links to their lengthy article about Rick Warren.
I thought it was a great article, all things considered. The article does take the time to connect Warren with the modern conservative movement, and to imply (usually through quotations or qualifying statements) that both this movement and evangelical Christianity are “scary.” Unfortunately, that’s not too surprising and the article is overwhelmingly positive in spite of it.
This sounds to me like what Peter and Paul in some of their various epistles exhorted the church to do: to live so that the world has nothing negative for which to accuse you. If the only thing that can be said negatively about Rick Warren is that he still calls sin sin, and still maintains that people need Jesus in order to escape hell, then I’d say he’s on the right track; no amount of “rebranding” is going to make those things palatable to the world, and no amount of “reimagining” the Gospel will remove those aspects from it.
In other words, it’s an article worth reading. Enjoy.
