The “Prosperity Gospel”

THE “PROSPERITY GOSPEL”

One of the slogans of the disciples of this new cult is “Name it and claim it.” (Some wags have it as “Blab it/Grab it.) We’ve been hearing for decades that God’s will is that everyone should be healthy and prosperous, so that anyone who isn’t is simply lacking in faith. In fact, I remember a healing specialist from Saratoga Springs, New York who went so far as to say, “If we have enough faith, God has no choice but to heal.” I honestly don’t know what she did with the Apostle Paul’s statement that he had prayed fervently three times to be delivered of his “thorn in the flesh” (possible the best guess: malaria), but that all God did was tell him, “My grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in weakness.” It’s a little hard to imagine Paul as a man lacking in faith.

The healer to whom I’m referring did some significant damage. When my ten-year-old brother-in-law ultimately died of leukemia (this being in 1959, when kids generally didn’t recover from it), my mother-in-law blamed herself and the family for not having generated sufficient faith to keep him alive.

The so-called prosperity gospel, sometimes known as the health and wealth gospel, is probably strongest among the general run of televangelists and in the megachurches. It goes without saying that anything resembling responsible interpretation of the Bible, as opposed to proof-texting, is not permissible in this context. Children and teenagers are urged to memorize Scripture verses containing God’s promises, and steered away from any discussion of Jesus’ statement that anyone desiring to follow him must take up his cross and do so. The cross, of course, has become an innocuous symbol of the Christian faith, having lost the impact that it must have made when Jesus first mentioned it in this context, some time before he died on one. It was simply the epitome of cruel and unusual punishment, an unspeakable horror for anyone facing execution by that means. What Jesus was saying was that his followers must be ready to give their lives for him by the cruelest means of torture available to his enemies.

By the same token, the Greek behind our word “martyr” originally meant “witness.” In those first centuries of evangelism, being a witness for Christ meant exposing oneself to the very real possibility of dying for him, and in time the word took on the meaning we still give it. I have read in a responsible publication that no fewer than a half-billion Christians are currently living under persecution, out of a total of two billion worldwide who claim to be Christians. Try telling THEM their problem is a lack of faith.

But then, the prosperity gospel is nothing new. At one juncture Jesus felt constrained to get rid of the many hangers-on who expected him to keep them healthy and well-fed. He did so by telling them, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53, NIV). It seems obvious to most of us that he meant a total involvement in faith with him that would come to be symbolized in the Eucharist, but many didn’t stay around long enough to find out.

The texts plucked out of the Bible by the purveyors of this ideology may sound very convincing, but a wise Bible scholar once pointed out that a text without a context is nothing but a pretext. And the Apostle Paul, speaking of some early perversions of the simple faith, stated, “Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned.” Pretty harsh words, but a lot was at stake, both then and now.