Taking on the prosperity gospel

A review of: David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge, Health, Wealth & Happiness: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ? (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2011)

By Allan Roy Andrews

          Let’s get a few things clearly in the open.

            The church of Jesus Christ is not in the profit-making business.

            The gospel of Jesus Christ is not proclaimed to make anyone financially wealthy.

            The gospels of the New Testament have more to say about poverty and helping the poor than about gathering riches and becoming wealthy.

            Happiness, in biblical terms, is not something humans pursue or earn (sorry to disillusion fans of the truths proclaimed as “self-evident” by Thomas Jefferson, et al.); it is a gift from a loving God, who asks nothing for his grace and love.

            God doesn’t keep books or hire accountants or collect taxes and fees.

            Nowhere in God’s kingdom is there a place for an emphasis on acquisition of “things” and “monies.”

            The only legal tender in the gospel of Jesus Christ is love.

            Furthermore, the Acts of the Apostles, an extension of the Gospel attributed to Luke, makes clear that the early church was a community of sharing where those who had provided for those who did not have.  (OK, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty that marks a large segment of American conservative Christianity: think welfare and social justice!) That’s right, the gospel that’s recorded in the church of the second chapter of Acts is a church driven by the Holy Spirit to minister to, provide for, and to protect those who, in the language of the New Testament, are lost.

Social Justice as Evil

            Just to get us into the crux of the critique that Jones and Woodbridge are outlining in this good but truncated book, if you listen close enough to the message proclaimed and the innuendos that percolate in the messages of the prosperity gospel preachers (most of whom, not ironically, minister on television), you’ll discover that welfare and social justice come across as evils and anathemas.

            Unfortunately, Jones and Woodbridge shy away from detailed discussion of this phenomenon. They are content to argue that “Jesus gave no systematic, detailed economic plan” (140), and their only confrontation with evangelical thinking that might challenge this point is in a footnote where they describe any “preferential option for the poor” as a “theologically moderate” position (181, fn10).

            Let’s face it, anyone who reads the gospels with honesty and openness cannot help but see that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is revolutionary and counter-cultural; although, Jones and Woodbridge favor a spiritualizing escape from this emphasis:  For them, Jesus “teachings on wealth and poverty are wide-ranging and their spiritual impact is what is usually emphasized” (141).

Prosperity Gospel

            The so-called “prosperity gospel,” with its promoting of health, wealth and happiness, is not only “overshadowing the gospel of Christ,” as the subtitle of this new book declares, it is waging all-out war with the gospel of Christ and making a sham of the authentic love, compassion, and peace that Jesus demonstrated and that the apostle Paul listed among “the greatest” of all gifts from God.

            With that lengthy introduction, let’s commend Jones and Woodbridge for introducing and competently condemning the prosperity gospel as it is proclaimed by several leading TV evangelists, past and present, among them: Oral Roberts, Kenneth E. Hagin, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, and a trio that Jones and Woodbridge describe as “soft” prosperity advocates, T. D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen (several others are mentioned historically).

            Jones and Woodbridge, both members of the theological faculty at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Southern Baptist school  located in Wake Forest, N.C., on what once was the campus of Wake Forest University before the latter relocated to Winston-Salem, are astutely attuned to the theology of the prosperity gospel.

            They single out the errors of doctrine they detect as: 1) a distorted view of God; 2) the elevation of the mind over matter; 3) an exalted view of humankind; 4) a focus on health and wealth; and 5) an unorthodox view of salvation.

            Once establishing these erroneous teachings, the authors devote several chapters to their “corrections.” They begin by demonstrating that “suffering is a normative part of the Christian life” in contrast with the extreme opposition to suffering that the prosperity gospel proponents advocate.

            The second corrective emphasis of Jones and Woodbridge is on the biblical teachings regarding poverty and wealth, which may well be the section of the book that separates the authors and their Southern Baptist orthodoxy from many other evangelicals who share their concern with the errors of the prosperity gospel preachers.

            Next, Jones and Woodbridge demonstrate how the promoters of the prosperity gospel contradict the scriptural call for Christians to be generous givers, what may be called the erroneous practical theology of the prosperity gospel.

            This is not the place to take deep issue with the authors’ evangelicalism; they are worthy allies in a spiritual battle with the hucksters, con-men, and greed-mongers who dominate the prosperity gospel’s televised preying on susceptible victims.

Root Problem: Consumerism

            However, I fear the authors’ personal positions on social and economic policies, which they appear to mask as irrelevant to the discussion of the prosperity gospel, only hide a root problem; that is, that almost to a person, the evangelists of the prosperity gospel are steeped in consumerism and a capitalistic profit ethic that drives their ministries.

            Jones and Woodbridge, in their theological battle with the prosperity gospel, have given little attention that addresses what A. W. Tozer incisively recognized as the particular distortions of the gospel in a society that runs through marketing and sales profits.

            Theologian Lyle W. Dorset helps us see this.  He wrote of Tozer:

Tozer wrote and spoke against a growing trend of churches being run by business models rather than biblical principles, and he criticized the way Christ Jesus was being marketed and sold rather than lifted up to convict men of sin, righteousness, and judgment. In short, he railed against cheap grace that was producing an ugly and impotent church.* 

            This book, as good as it is, simply ignores that the television celebrities who pose  as prophets of the prosperity gospel are steeped in the culture of a profit-driven, spiritually impoverished society, and that their message is more crass advertising and marketing than it is gospel, more mammon loving than God worshipping.

            * Lyle W. Dorset. “Profiles in Faith: Aiden Wilson Tozer,” in Knowing and Doing: A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind, Springfield, Va.: C.S. Lewis Institute, summer, 2008), accessed April 20, 2011, at http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/files/webfm/knowing_doing/ProfileTozer.pdf

                To appreciate a more focused and, I believe, a stronger case against the consumerism and materialism that dominates the writing and preaching of prosperity-gospel advocates, examine the comments of several so-called "Red-Letter Christians." 

Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist (and Obama's Theologian)

There’s much chat these days about the late Reinhold Niebuhr being the theologian whose thinking most influences President Barack Obama’s ideas, a suggestion with which the president concurs (hear Krista Tippett’s discussion with journalists David Brooks and E. J. Dionne on the NPR program, “Speaking of Faith”).  In that light, I’ve resurrected a column I wrote 13 years ago.

Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist

By Allan R. Andrews

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First published June 23, 1996, in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan.  At that time, Andrews was Managing Editor of the newspaper and a weekly columnist.

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Although he started a magazine and wrote for several others, few remember Reinhold Niebuhr as a journalist.

Niebuhr certainly rates as one of the most renowned American theologians of the 20th century.

Because of his German heritage, and probably because of his close association with German thinkers such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr is often erroneously thought to have come out of the German theological academy.

He didn't. He was born June 21, 1892, in Wright City, Mo., and attended the graduate school at Yale University, though he never finished because of boredom and the press of family needs.

(Writer's note:  It has been called to my attention that Niebuhr did indeed complete BD and M.Div degrees at Yale but left before completing his doctoral program).

Nevertheless, more than any other philosopher or theologian writing in the first three quarters of the 20th century, Niebuhr is a politician's--and a journalist's--thinker.

One recent commentator claims Niebuhr is ``one of the very few theologians to whom secular and humanist thinkers pay attention.''

Niebuhr, who died in 1971, never thought of himself as a theologian and lacked the usual credentials associated with the ivory tower. He thought of himself as a pastor, and much of his thinking came from his 13-year tenure as minister at Detroit's Bethel Evangelical Church.

His incisive mind, however, put him on the faculty of New York's Union Theological Seminary, where he lectured and wrote for 32 years.

As a thinker, Niebuhr stated his goal was ``to establish the relevance of the Christian faith to contemporary problems.''

The magazine that Niebuhr founded to that end, Christianity and Crisis, folded in 1994. It was never a big seller, but it served as a philosophical editorial page, provoking many movers and shakers who read it.

Many think its collapse signaled a failure of liberal theology, but Niebuhr was admired and listened to by conservative thinkers as well. One of the most appreciative studies of Niebuhr was written by the late conservative evangelical philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary, Edward J. Carnell.

Niebuhr's major writings included two massive studies, one entitled The Nature and Destiny of Man, which is credited with dispelling the notion of the perfectibility of society, an idea that had persisted in liberal American thought through two world wars and continues to exert an influence on American social policy.

The other of his great works, Moral Man and Immoral Society, propounded Niebuhr's conviction that one gets a clearer picture of what drives a human being not by studying the individual but by studying the groups in which that individual behaves. Groups--including those of organized religion--he thought often were influences of egoism and evil.

I can't do justice to his thinking here, but several American politicians--knowingly or not-- have built their philosophy of society and humanity out of exposure to Niebuhr's thinking.

My appreciation of Niebuhr is more pedestrian and takes some extrapolation.

Just a year after Niebuhr left the church in Detroit, he published a little book of journal entries from his years in Michigan. The book was released in 1929 under the title Leaves From the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.

Journalists frequently are accused of cynicism. Rather than deny such a label, I find comfort in Niebuhr's notion of a ``tamed cynic.''

In this book, Niebuhr addressed the church, but as I reread it last year it struck me he could just as easily have been talking to journalism.

Was Niebuhr thinking of columnists when he wrote of his preaching task, ``I don't know whether I can ever accustom myself to the task of bringing light and inspiration in regular weekly installments''?

Aren't journalists as well as preachers taken to task with these words: ``all these momentary simplifications of the complexities of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life''?

If Niebuhr didn't intend it when he wrote, I certainly thought of Washington, D.C., and other centers of power when I read: ``I have to work in the twilight zone where superstition is inextricably mixed up with something that is--well, not superstition.''

``America worships success,'' he wrote. ``And the only kind of success the average man can understand is obvious success.''

We journalists major in reporting obvious success; it's the not-so-obvious ones we miss.

A 1994 book listed 25 stories that journalism underplayed in the past decade. It includes the issues of labor law violations and environmental pollution and several political issues that were never tracked during presidential campaigns.

The Centers for Disease Control consistently argues that journalists should stop playing up bizarre medical stories such as cannibalistic bacteria and devote more time and energy to the less sensational, more boring but more important stories of medical research related to cancer or AIDS. Had he been a journalist, Niebuhr would have followed and investigated those kinds of stories.

Also in 1994, in an article entitled ``Reinhold Niebuhr and the Evening News,'' a Wisconsin Presbyterian minister, Randall K. Bush, wrote: ``Given the changing complexities of the world, a voice like Niebuhr's would be most welcome today--one able to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us.''

What could be a better goal for journalists and commentators than this: to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us?

Bush is convinced that Niebuhr's relevance is related to his understanding of ``the religious dimension inherent in all history.''

Far from being a cynic, Niebuhr is a pragmatic idealist. He wrote: ``Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair.''

Amid any despair related to economic stagnation, racial or ethnic hatred and random violence in the streets, America would do well to attend still to this ``tamed cynic'' whose birth anniversary passed last week 

(ed. note:  Niebuhr was born June 21, 1892, and died on June 1, 1971).