Life's Healing Choices: Rick Warren's and A.A.'s Common Ground

Advocates and adherents to Rick Warren's Celebrate Recovery and Life's Healing Choices recovery systems are quick to distinguish these step - recovery programs from that of Alcoholic's Anonymous.

In this compelling article, Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounders Were Not Christians , the uncanny resemblance between Warren's programs and Alcoholic's Anonymous is alarming. Both use the term "recovery". Both use the "step" approach. Both emphasize group accountability and confidentiality. Both bend the Beatitudes.

Alarming excerpts from the article:

"The 12 Step experience becomes an idol-long-term involvement almost always results in a transference of faith. Bluntly stated, when it comes to sobriety, many Christians end up with more faith in the power of the 12 Step program than in Jesus Christ."

This idol worship is by no means limited to those in AA, but applies to many in "Christian 12 Step" groups.
This transference of faith is subtle, gradual, and frequently inevitable. The result is that sobriety without the 12 Step program will not even be considered. Biblical wisdom, given by concerned and caring believers, is rejected.

Interestingly, the description of the Mason god, the Great Architect, is similar to the higher power worshiped in Alcoholics Anonymous. Masonic researcher Carl H. Claudy notes, "Masonry does not specify any god or creed; she requires merely that you believe in some Deity, give him what name you will…. A belief in God is essential to a Mason but…any God will do…"[6]

Alcoholics Anonymous teaches the "higher power" could be a doorknob, a spirit, a fruit salad, the universe, the Dallas Cowboys (when they are winning), a new age version of Jesus, or anything else. Like the Masons, it doesn't matter what god you believe in-only that you believe in something.

It seems that someone as allegedly devout and well versed in the Bible as Dr. Bob would stay far away from spiritualism and the Masonic organization. He most emphatically did not. Equally perplexing is Dr. Bob's enthusiasm for Emmet Fox's sweet-sounding but heretical book, 'The Sermon on the Mount.'

'The Sermon on the Mount' is based on Fox's heretical interpretation of Scripture. So why would Bible-believing Christians have anything to do with such a book? Would a Christian cofounder of AA really participate in using it as a teaching tool? Or place such heresy in the hands of another alcoholic? AA cofounder Dr. Bob Smith did just this.

"...Some have tried to explain early AA's enthusiasm for various New Thought books simply because the people were, well, voracious readers. But Emmet Fox's 'The Sermon on the Mount' was used to teach."

Rick Warren's twisting of The Sermon on the Mount is heretical. Life's Healing Choices will replace Bibles in the pulpits and study groups across the country, much in the same way as Warren's best selling omnidominational / almost interfaith Purpose Driven Life.

In the same way as the Purpose Driven Life, Life's Healing Choices uses multiple non scholarly versions of the Bible throughout the book to support this therapeutic approach to hurts and hangups.

What's the difference between Alcoholics Anonymous and Rick Warren's systems? Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't' claim to be a church.

See related articles:

Life's Healing Choices: Rick Warren's Imitation Sanctification

Rick Warren's Life's Healing Choices: The Non-Addicted Version of Celebrate Recovery

Life's Healing Choices: Rick Warren Bends The Beatitudes For A Better Life