A recent TIME magazine cover story asked: “Does God want you to be rich?” While the answer from many pulpits is a resounding yes, some Baptists have spoken against an increasingly popular health-and-wealth message.
The prosperity gospel — also known as “name it and claim it,” “word of faith,” “positive confession” or “seed-faith” theology — teaches that God wants His children to prosper and enjoy good health. It calls on followers to claim the prosperity that is the birthright of every Christian.
“The word-faith movement has been with us for some time, growing in modern popularity since the 1970s,” said Lorri MacGregor, founder of MacGregor Ministries Outreach, during the Evangelical Ministries to New Religions (EMNR) Conference put on by Watchman Fellowship Feb. 8–10 at The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham. “Some in the church have viewed word-faith as a fad and indeed it was, but if fads stick around long enough, they become movements. And if movements stick around long enough, they become accepted as denominations.”
She said today most Christians accept it as a “bona fide part of the body of Christ.”
But Rob Bowman, who also spoke at the EMNR Conference, said the prosperity gospel has brought Christianity a long way from 20th-century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s message that “when God calls a man, He bids him come and die” to the message that “God wants to make your life easier.”
Bowman, apologetics and interfaith evangelism manager of the North American Mission Board’s cultural evangelism division, credits Joel Osteen, pastor of Houston’s Lakewood Church and a popular TV preacher, as being a major proponent of this shift in theology.
“The Bible says, ‘God takes pleasure in prospering his children.’ As his children prosper spiritually, physically and materially, their increase brings pleasure to God,” Osteen wrote in his best-selling book “Your Best Life Now.” “Your lot in life is to continually increase. Your lot in life is to be an overcomer, to live prosperously in every area.”
Proponents of the prosperity gospel present it as a positive antidote to the negativism and judgmental attitude they say drive some people away from Christianity. They point to Old Testament passages that seem to equate material wealth with God’s favor and New Testament teachings about abundant life.
Bowman agrees that a positive outlook on life is a healthy thing, but he said a big difference exists between that and believing that faith should produce health and wealth.
MacGregor said proponents of the prosperity gospel say if you want wealth, then compel God to supply it, backing up their claim with Scriptures such as Philippians 4:19.
“This commanding of God is supposed to compel God to release wealth into the hands of the word-faith devotee. Trouble is God promises to supply our needs, not our greeds, if we sacrificially serve Him,” she said.
This — among other instances of doctrine twisting — places the movement squarely in the category of a cult, MacGregor said. It’s a fact, she added, that in the world of cults, two things happen: man is exalted and God is reduced.
“This is certainly the case in the word-faith movement,” MacGregor said. “The God of the word-faith movement controlled by the word of man is not the God of the Bible.”
Suzii Paynter, director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas’ Christian Life Commission, agrees that the God of the prosperity gospel is too small. “It makes Him into a behavioral psychologist who resorts to external rewards to manipulate the rat-race human beings. That’s in contrast to the transforming God C.S. Lewis describes in ‘Mere Christianity’ — the God who overhauls our hearts so that we truly desire His goodness and His will on behalf of others, not to accumulate for ourselves.”
The prosperity gospel has roots deep in the Pentecostal Holiness movement. But church historian Bill Leonard believes Baptists also provided fertile ground where the teaching could grow.
“It’s somewhat implicit in small but significant ways in the old tithing testimonies Baptists used to have,” Leonard, dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., said. “The message was that tithing brought blessing. It was not the major message, but it was present.”
Revivalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries also promoted an early form of the prosperity gospel, he noted.
Leonard views Evangelist Oral Roberts as a significant influence on current prosperity gospel preachers through the “seed-faith” teaching he promoted on his TV programs, in his crusades and through the school he built in Tulsa, Okla.
Roberts taught his followers a three-step process for success: Recognize God as the source of your total supply. Plant a seed of faith. And expect a miracle.
The most manipulative TV evangelists present a simple formula as well, saying God will multiply and return to the giver whatever amount is given to a particular ministry. Leonard equates this to playing “a spiritual lottery.”
It is a misunderstanding of faith that if we do certain things, “God will deliver for us,” he said, comparing it to the medieval church’s practice of selling indulgences.
Christians whose faith rests on the shaky foundation of promised material prosperity may become disillusioned and bitter when reality doesn’t match the promise, he added. “The landscape is littered with people who gave money and got nothing.” (ABP, TAB)
Prosperity gospel laden with doctrine twisting, some Baptist leaders say
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