Prosperity Theology.
Disturbing, no?
TIME Magazine has a story (CNN summary for non-subscribers such as myself) on this aberrant Christian philosophy.
Known (or vilified) under a variety of names — Word of Faith,
Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It, Prosperity Theology — its
emphasis is on God’s promised generosity in this life. In a nutshell,
it suggests that a God who loves you does not want you to be broke.[…]
"Prosperity" first blazed to public attention
as the driveshaft in the moneymaking machine that was 1980s
televangelism and faded from mainstream view with the Jim Bakker and
Jimmy Swaggart scandals.But now, after some key modifications
(which have inspired some to redub it Prosperity Lite), it has not only
recovered but is booming.Of the four biggest megachurches in the
country, three — Joel Osteen’s Lakewood in Houston; T.D. Jakes’
Potter’s House in south Dallas; and Creflo Dollar’s World Changers in
Atlanta — are Prosperity or Prosperity Lite pulpits (although Jakes’
ministry has many more facets).While they don’t exclusively teach that God’s riches want to be in believers’ wallets, it is a key part of their doctrine.
And
propelled by Osteen’s 4 million-selling book, Your Best Life Now, the
belief has swept beyond its Pentecostal base into more buttoned-down
evangelical churches, and even into congregations in the more liberal
Mainline. It is taught in hundreds of non-Pentecostal Bible studies.
One Pennsylvania Lutheran pastor even made it the basis for a sermon
series for Lent, when Christians usually meditate on why Jesus was
having His Worst Life Then.The movement’s renaissance has
infuriated a number of prominent pastors, theologians and commentators.
Fellow megapastor Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life has
outsold Osteen’s by a ratio of 7 to 1, finds the very basis of
Prosperity laughable. "This idea that God wants everybody to be
wealthy?" he snorts. "There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating
a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I
can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in
poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?"The
brickbats — both theological and practical (who really gets rich from
this?) –come especially thick from Evangelicals like Warren.
Evangelicalism is more prominent and influential than ever before. Yet
the movement, which has never had a robust theology of money, finds an
aggressive philosophy advancing within its ranks that many of its
leaders regard as simplistic, possibly heretical and certainly
embarrassing.[…]
"Who would want to get in on
something where you’re miserable, poor, broke and ugly and you just
have to muddle through until you get to heaven?" asks Joyce Meyer, a
popular television preacher and author often lumped in the Prosperity
Lite camp. "I believe God wants to give us nice things."If
nothing else, Meyer and other new-breed preachers broach a neglected
topic that should really be a staple of Sunday messages: Does God want
you to be rich?
A religious theory which not only accepts but encourages morally bereft behavior? How appalling! If not, sadly, novel or surprising.
Accidental Blogger 
5 responses to “Blessed Are the Rich (Joe)”
You know that this post more than qualifies what I am about to say:
You are such a Joo.
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Hey Joe,
RE: “Does God want you to be rich?”
How about, does the Creator want some people to suffer and starve while others wallow in luxury? 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…
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…
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Justin: Hush. And with the qualification standards we adopted, yes.
Seven Star Hand: The clarity of your prose is not very high, it’s at times too verbose where it should instead be to-the-point. It makes it kind of hard to follow your argument, and I’m being lazy tonight. Is it a fair characterization to say that your argument is something like Money is evil, we should get rid of it?
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Leave it to Time magazine to suggest that prosperity first gained religious currency (sorry) in the 1980s. Good Lord. “Let a man pray with might and main, he can not get to Heaven unless he attends well to his personal calling, ‘some settled Business, wherein a Christian should for the most part spend most of his time and this so that he may glorify God by doing of Good for others, and getting of Good for himself.’”—A. Whitney Griswold, Three Puritans on Prosperity, The New England Quarterly, v.7, no.3 (Sept. 1934), pp.475-93, 479 (quoting Cotton Mather).
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One afternoon about six years ago, I was alone at the Houston Intercontinental Airport waiting for my daughter whose incoming flight had been delayed due to a thunderstorm. During the prolonged wait, I was engaged in a lively theological discussion by two men sitting across me whose departing flight had also been delayed. The men, who were returning from a three month long missionary trip to South America, began the conversation after confirming that I was born in India and that I was not a Christian.
The gist of their message to me was that India’s poverty and other problems were simply the result of its citizens’ failure to accept Christ as the saviour and the foolishness of the Hindus in persisting with “demon worship.” The USA on the other hand, was “blessed” with prosperity and plentitude precisely for choosing the righteous path, according to the two missionaries. After almost an hour of polite rejoinders, I let the men have a taste of my acerbic tongue and the harangue stopped.
The two men belonged to the ministry of the televangelist Joyce Meyer -one of them, the politer of the two, was her son.
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