DALLAS (ABP) — 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 Bible says, ‘God takes pleasure in prospering his children.' As his children prosper spiritually, physically and materially, their increase brings pleasure to God,” Joel Osteen wrote in his best-selling book, Your Best Life Now. Osteen is the pastor of Houston's Lakewood Church and a popular TV preacher. “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 judgmentalism 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.
Critics of the prosperity gospel call it shallow and superficial, at best. The God of the prosperity gospel is too small, said Suzii Paynter, director of the Christian Life Commission.
“One of my pet peeves about the prosperity doctrine is that it limits God,” she said. “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.”
Some have even harsher words for the prosperity gospel. At the recent meeting of the National Baptist Convention USA in Dallas, President William Shaw labeled the teaching as “blasphemy” that entices people to follow “mammon” — material wealth and physical wellbeing — rather than follow the self-sacrificial example of Christ.
“Material goods may satisfy, but they do not fulfill,” Shaw said in his presidential address to the nation's largest African-American Baptist group.
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 television 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 says 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,” he said.
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