Just when you think the Rick Warren conversation couldn’t get more outrageous…Bishop Eugene Robinson made the following statement concerning Obama’s selection of the megachurch pastor as his inaugural invocator:
“I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”
To say that Rick Warren is in error, fine. To say his views are regressive, out of date, fundamentalist would all be understandable given Bishop Robinson’s convictions. But to say the he and Warren do not pray to the same deity seems like a bit of an overstatement. Many progressives become incensed when their conservative brethren suggest that Christians and Muslims don’t pray to the same God. I wonder how many will express disdain for Robinson’s consignment of Warren to a different religion.
The more interesting question is whether or not Robinson is claiming that anyone who disgrees with him on what is clearly the single most controversial issued of the day in Christendom prays to a different God. This will certainly have interesting ecumenical implications, to say the least.