Does God want you to be rich?
That was the provocative title of Time Magazine’s September 18 cover story, which examined a movement within American Evangelicalism known as the “Prosperity Gospel.”
The article is disappointing, principally because it fails to find any major Evangelical minister who will strongly answer in the affirmative that yes, God wants you to be wealthy. The authors try hard to nail mega-pastor Joel Osteen as a leading proponent of prosperity theology, though he tells them, “I preach that anybody can improve their lives,” adding, “but I don’t think I’d say God wants us to be rich.” They are left with pointing out “the room’s warm lamplight reflects softly off his crocodile shoes,” even as they concede that Osteen’s congregation raised over $1 million for Hurricane Katrina relief.
While the article doesn’t uncover scandal and hypocrisy – after all, stubbornly literal Evangelicals are not likely to have missed the New Testament’s many, many, many condemnations of and warnings about wealth – they unwittingly touch on a larger theology: Christianity as Self-Help program.
Your Best Life Now, Osteen’s best-selling book, opens by informing the reader that to obtain your “best life,” see your “marriage restored,” or “your dreams come to pass,” just “start looking at life through the eyes of faith.”
Certainly, all Christians believe that through faith we find guidance, and that among the gifts of the Holy Spirit are numbered patience and persistence. But mainstream Christianity has never promised that God will make your problems go away.
Indeed, historically Christians have believed that through suffering we have an opportunity to put our beliefs into practice and grow spiritually. If you’re looking for a trouble-free life, Jesus is not the answer.
Still, some Christians maintain that it just takes faith to achieve the impossible. Pray your way to weight loss, a better job, or heterosexuality! Would anyone question the faith of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? Here are their fates, respectively: gored with a halberd, beaten to death, hanged, boiled in oil. Paul was beheaded and Peter, founder of the church, was crucified upside down.
The “better life” that Christianity promises follows this one; in the meantime, our faith offers us radical strategies for dealing with adversity. In this, some Evangelicals are perhaps profoundly mistaken about basic doctrine. Popular televangelist Joyce Meyer asked Time, “Who would want something where you’re miserable, broke and ugly and you have to muddle through until you get to heaven? I believe God wants to give us nice things.” But muddling through, quite frankly, is what God expects us to do.
Ben Phillips of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary cuts right to the heart of the heresy: “God becomes the means to an end, not the end in himself.” Publisher’s Weekly derided Osteen’s book, calling it “a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals.”
Ask not what God can do for you, but what you can do for God.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
One of the best and truest posts ever, Andy. People are looking for a way out of their problems and televangelists and everyone else who can is trying to sell them a piece of Jesus. I wonder how people can read about the people in the Bible and not understand that Jesus isn't the magic cure for all their ills. The wealthy young ruler was told to sell all he had before he could follow Jesus. As so many did, he turned away because the sacrifice that Christ was asking was simply too great. Just a single example, but I'd say that many deluded Christians don't know (and it certainly isn't being taught) that a life with Jesus involves sacrifice of self for others. God has always expected this of people, since the beginning of time. His expectations haven't changed, the world's expectations have.
I get so tired of the "health and wealth" crowd. If only you had more faith, you would be wealthy and healthy. I get SO tired of that stance.
Sure Osteen and his like aren't quite the snake oil salesman that seemed to inhabit Evangelicalism in past years but their actions seems to deceive them.
Scripture does allow us to look at a man through the fruits he bears. My fear is that Osteen is not bearing much fruit.
I often reflect on the scripture where Jesus talked about how nice tombs look but they are full of dead bones. We have too many representatives of evangelicalism looking good but full of deadness.
They don't seem to see the poor, the sick, the downtrodden. Those who are abandoned by society.
They build bigger buildings. They have the press fawn over them. They have a congregation reach the 10's of thousands but they don't see the widows and orphans.
What a sad commentary.
Hello Andy and all,
Be aware that what I say is intended to make people uncomfortable with the status quo so we can finally forge that long promised new path to the future.
RE: "Does God want you to be rich?"
How about, does the Creator want some people to suffer and starve while some wallow in luxury and ignore the plight of others? What about "serving mammon" (money and materialism) instead of truth, justice, and your fellow souls? How about the rich man and the eye of a needle? Talking about the blind leading the blind...
To take this a step further, what would the Creator say about forming organizations (corporations, religions, governments, political parties, etc.) that accumulate vast wealth and resources while living people and other lifeforms suffer as the direct result? What does this say about the complete hypocrisy of all religions?
Here's some pivotal knowledge (wisdom) so people can stop focusing on symptoms and obfuscatory details and home in like a laser on the root causes of and solutions to humanity's seemingly never-ending struggles.
Money is the lifeblood of the powerful and the chains and key to human enslavement
There is a radical and highly effective solution to all of our economic problems that will dramatically simplify, streamline, and revitalize human civilization. It will eliminate all poverty, debt, and the vast majority of crime, material inequality, deception, and injustice. It will also eliminate the underlying causes of most conflicts, while preventing evil scoundrels and their cabals from deceiving, deluding, and bedeviling humanity, ever again. It will likewise eliminate the primary barriers to solving global warming, pollution, and the many evils that result from corporate greed and their control of natural and societal resources. That solution is to simply eliminate money from the human equation, thereby replacing the current system of greed, exploitation, and institutionalized coercion with freewill cooperation, just laws based on verifiable wisdom, and societal goals targeted at benefiting all, not just a self-chosen and abominably greedy few.
We can now thank millennia of political, monetary, and religious leaders for proving, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that top-down, hierarchical governance is absolute folly and foolishness. Even representative democracy, that great promise of the past, was easily and readily subverted to enslave us all, thanks to money and those that secretly control and deceptively manipulate all currencies and economies. Is there any doubt anymore that entrusting politics and money to solve humanity's problems is delusion of the highest order? Is there any doubt that permitting political and corporate leaders to control the lives of billions has resulted in great evil?
Here's a real hot potato! Eat it up, digest it, and then feed it's bones to the hungry...
Most people have no idea that the common-denominator math of all the world's currencies forms an endless loop that generates debt faster than we can ever generate the value to pay for it. This obscured and purposeful math-logic trap at the center of all banking, currencies, and economies is the root cause of poverty. Those who rule this world through fear and deception strive constantly to hide this fact, while pretending to seek solutions to poverty and human struggle. Any who would scoff at this analysis have simply failed to do the math, even though it is based on a simple common-denominator ratio.
Here is Wisdom
Doctrine of Two Spirits...
Peace...
Good post.
Your last line, "ask not..." seems to underline a missing of a certain point, however.
Richness of all sorts, whether it be monetary or intellectual, etc. enables us to serve God. One who has no money cannot offer money to the poor. One who is of empty spirit has nothing to offer God spiritually. Without a mind, I cannot serve my God through my writings.
To be rich is to be better able to serve God.
This idea that God wants us to be rich does not mean that God will help us to be rich- it merely means that God prefers that we are rich rather than poor. He wants us to be better able to serve others and Himself.
Material wealth is just another form of wealth. If God wants us to have spiritual and intellectual wealth, why wouldn't he want us to have material wealth?
It's not the wealth He has a problem with- it's what we do with it!
Reading your post and the responses to it shows the difficulty people have communicating to other people the will of God. The truth of the matter is that the will of God is incomprehensible to man and impossible to communicate.
God gives us each the ability to know the right thing to do. We simply have to have the strength to do it. This is the basis of Christianity, simply to do the right thing.
If you have to agonize and argue over what the right thing to do is, it's not the right thing.
Wow, a post that I can somewhat agree with. I'm glad to see Christians today expanding the definition of their faith and reconsidering the accumulation of personal wealth as a "blessing." If only Christians realized this 514 years ago.... (sigh)
What happened 514 years ago?
And, I'm quite certain that 514 years ago there were Christians who felt exactly this way. Christianity has never been a religion where everyone believed exactly the same things. Not ever.
The Christians who did feel this way unfortunately were not the ones dictating the more influential policies of the time (or even now). The economic and territorial ambitions of churches in the middle ages superceded the self-less communal sharing preached by their patron deity. As for the 514 years ago, I speak of the Arawaks and their elimination by European explorers—simply one example among many. There was no admonishment from the more influential Christian churches at the time for this genocide. Many times, these predominantly economic enterprises were given mystical license by the investing churches. And I just marvel at the irony of that, given that Arawaks (along with many other aboriginal American cultures) had achieved a certain appreciation for communal property rather than personal gain--the exact sentiment that Jesus, thousands of miles away, had promoted.
I didn't intend my statement to be a criticism per se, but rather to point out a horrible tragedy--one that I believe Christians (even the good ones, if they wish to carry that name) must own up to, or at least, keep in mind. It may partially explain why some Christians encounter animosity from those calling them hypocritical—it’s easier to preach sharing as radical when those who shared first were eliminated.
Okay, I see your point. Rather like, the Pope is the LAST person who should be criticizing a religion that was spread by the sword, hello.
Religion has its problems, to be sure. Last Sunday, the rector at my church said some Christians seemed to love religion more than they loved God, and I thought that was an insightful comment.
Also, as I have often said, one of Darkness' most powerful and effective tools is the ability to deceive us into working tremendous evil in God's name.
Agreed. I'd use the word "villainy" or "malevolence" instead of "darkness" though. Darkness can be beautiful in certain cases and on certain people.
Post a Comment