Some months ago, my wife and I were spontaneously offered free tickets to go hear Joel Osteen in Norfolk, VA.  Being a scholar of American religion, and having already lined up babysitting, we decided to go for it.  Joel was on in about 30 minutes.  We were nowhere near the venue, but all we had to do was follow the crowd.  In David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge's Health, Wealth & Happiness: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ? (Kregel, 2011) state that Olsteen's message reaches roughly 200,000,000 households, 40,000 actual congregants in Houston, TX and "can be seen in 100 countries worldwide (72)."

Full disclosure:
1. I harbor a prejudice against wealthy and ostentatious churches.
2. Being somewhat prone to cynicism on the few and brief occasions that I have listened to Joel Osteen, I have found him to be a helpful corrective, but I am distracted by his similarity in appearance to Martin Short.
3. I crassly define "prosperity gospel" as the message that "if you have enough faith, you can obligate God to fulfill his 'promises' to you and give you financial and physical prosperity, 'cause he wants to do it anyway." I regard this as a false gospel, though many of its adherents are admirable Christian people.

The prosperity gospel is now a full blown global phenomena affecting millions of people ("46% of self-identifying Christians" including 96% of Nigerian Christians according to Jones and Woodbridge) and it often travels hand-in-hand with global Pentecostalism (with the latter I have no general dispute whatsoever).

Jones and Woodbridge pull together a great array of resources to discuss and critique the prosperity gospel (without becoming uncivil).  They name names and attempt to treat it thoroughly in its historical context, contemporary iterations and relation to biblical teachings.  One fairly obvious complaint I had with their introduction was their claim that prosperity gospel promises much and demands little.  I think this video by the Lausanne Conference demonstrates that this is not the case.

In Chapter 1, they situate the prosperity gospel in the New Thought movement from the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), to Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993).  They then identify 5 Pillars of New Thought:
1) Distorted view of God.
2) Elevation of mind over matter
3) An exalted view of humanity
4) A focus on health and wealth
                                            5) An unorthodox view of salvation

In Chapter 2, they identify the pillars of New Thought in the teachings of prosperity gospel preachers, including Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen.  Somewhere between chapters 1 & 2, they miss the influence of Russell Conwell (1843-1925, founder of Temple Baptist Church and Temple University in Philadelphia), and I suspect that they do so because Conwell was a mainstream Baptist preacher and not a charismatic. He does not fit the mold exceptionally well (though he shares a Philadelphia connection with Swedenborgians) but he preached his Acres of Diamonds sermon over 6,000 times, from which the following is taken:

"I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich....  Let me say here clearly .. . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them... I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathised with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins ... is to do wrong.... let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. ..."

This chapter also has a helpful critique of Joel Osteen.  My limited experience with his teaching led me to conclude that he had developed a well proof-texted theology of positive thinking. I have heard him speak in a manner that had him sprinting madly (rhetorically speaking) toward the line where relatively benign pop-theopsychology meets full blown prosperity gospel. He always seemed to stop just short (in my mind) with his toes on teh line and his arms flailing to prevent seemingly inevitable transgression.  But he always stopped, even if those that he shared the platform with did not.  This chapter amply demonstrates both his lowest-common-denominator Christian theology and his adherence to a full-blown prosperity gospel.

Chapter 3 critiques the prosperity gospel and deals especially well with the tendency of some preachers to extend Christ's atonement into a universal doctrine of physical healing for those who have faith to believe it.  Joyce Meyers takes a lot of heat in this chapter.  They deal specifically with a variety of theological and interpretive fallacies that are common among prosperity preachers.

Tomorrow, I will post an overview of Part Two: Correction

The conversation above, for all of its flaws (it is an unedited part of a longer documentary by Tony Jones based on his 2009 book The New Christians) is a good demonstration of how I think "Reformed" or "traditional" Christians and more "postmodern," "progressive" or "Emergent" Christians (PPECs below) are missing each other. I planned to write these posts weeks ago, before the Bell's Hell controversy broke (here), but never got to it.  Now it seems urgent.

As I teach theology at an ecumenical Christian college with a thorough but hospitable faith statement, I make it clear that we aren't a church and aren't in the indoctrination business.  I most frequently drive my students back to the Bible with their theological questions while explaining how various groups in church history raised "big issues" and made sense of them.  In the last post in this series I noted that many of the young (often nondenominational) Christians I teach want to opt for a "lowest common denominator theology." However, at around the same age, many young Christians discover the joys of tradition, as well as critical thinking and the like. Some have sunk their teeth into church and theological traditions ranging from Eastern Orthodoxy to Reformed while PPECs(now for about 14 years) have essentially been asking for (demanding? taking?) the same freedom that new churches of the global "south" have taken in their post-colonial contexts (see especially the writings of Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako). 

The PPECs are essentially saying, "We have history with various traditions of Christianity that were imposed upon us, but we now claim the right to take the best from what we received and to develop theology for today that fits our context."  Like most of the young Christians I meet, PPECs seemed to have minimal (initial) connection to the enculturated dispositions and intellectual frameworks of any traditional denomination, though some have church/family loyalties and their beliefs packed for them. Nearly the same could be said for the church culture of Anabaptists; radical reformers who hit "reset" on the church in the 16th century much harder than Luther or Calvin and took it in a different direction  Perhaps it is no surprise then that many PPECs have read Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder and Western-culture missiologists like Lesslie Newbigin and his descendants.

In 1659, Rome’s Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith had the sense to ask 3 French missionaries to China:  "What would be more absurd than to import France, Spain or Italy, or any other country of Europe into China?  Don’t import these, but the faith." Granted, they assumed the "venerable antiquity" of Chinese tradition (and the controversy went on) but they had the right question and imperative. The overwhelming density and pervasiveness of current Western cultural influences (popcompared to anything that might be called "venerable" amounts to the accrual of culture for young Westerners today that is arguably as removed from the major theological traditions of "old World" Christianity as Chinese culture may have been in 1659. 

Jewish legend states that 70 isolated Jewish elders each made exactly the same Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures for Ptolemy. Sometimes Christians who have embraced a traditional systematic theology act as if all other Christians should arrive separately at the same systematic theology from their readings of the Bible.  Or, barring this, that they should skip the theological process and just buy the systematic theology they are offered. Neither of these options is likely. If this has NOT been the case missiologically on other continents, should it be the case in Europe or North America as the church seeks to re-evangelize its old territory? Some may embrace a traditional theology expressed in new or old ways.  Others need the freedom to engage in theological process for themselves, in community, from the scriptures; finding different points of connection, priorities and emphases than their Christian ancestors.

"Every single thing I prepared to teach them had to be revised or discarded once I presented it to them.  Just what was the essential message of Christianity?"  Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered (1978)---

“So… do you think I’m going to hell?” (there was a Seinfeld episode about this, )
“It doesn’t matter what I think.  I’m not the judge.  God is.”
“Well… do you think you are going to hell?”
“Of course not!  I’ve accepted Jesus as my…”
“Well… I haven’t.  So, you must think I’m going to hell!”
“Listen.  It’s not about hell.  It’s about finding eternal fulfillment in a personal relationship with Jesus.”
“If you have this personal relationship, then you can at least tell me if Jesus is the kind of guy that would send someone to hell for feeling fulfilled without him!  How personal is this relationship!?”
---
Someday, I will write a book called Simple, Easy, Religionless Christianity Made Understandable.  I’ll write whatever I want, but that will be the title because there seems to be a market for these books.  I own at least two.* Many Christian college students in my classes lump all of life into three piles (Sometimes its just Piles 1 & 3).

Pile 1: Everything I need to believe or do to get into heaven when I die.
Pile 2: Everything obligatory or forbidden that will incur guilt and shame if denied.
Pile 3: Everything else, including the explanations for the things in Piles 1 & 2.

Given their theological convictions and the fact that most of them haven't read the Bible much, there is a fair amount of sense here; regardless of my protests.  Thankfully (I guess), something in Pile 2 complicates things.  Evangelistic obligation.  In class, I will put students in trios.  Student 1 must “share the gospel” with Student 2.  Student 2 pretends naivete, listens and asks questions for further clarification.  Student 3 listens and throws “flags” or “bleeps out” Christian jargon that would require explanation for someone with minimal background in Christianity.  They take turns and most of them experience massive frustration.  They realize all of the hard work that Christians have done to pack dense theological content into relatively few words.  They realize that Pile 1 & 2 items with no explanations have no “street value."  We enter a cycle of opposing movements.

Movement 1: Consolidate and Assimilate - They want to know "the essentials."  What constitutes "mere" Christianity, the things all true Christians should agree about?  We talk about this as a class and come up with a list.  Then people add things that not everyone in class agrees on.  We argue down to a basic list.
Movement 2: Proliferate and Differentiate - I begin to ask them to explain these things.  We quickly develop explanations that don't make much sense and about which very few people can agree.  The street utility of some things in Pile 1 becomes fragile. The neccesity of working on Pile 3 becomes apparent, but when things get too complicated... we're back to Movement 1.

For a slightly clearer version of this, go HERE.  Thanks to Len Swidler of the Dialogue Institute (who first introduced me to interfaith dialogue when I was his TA at Temple 8 years ago) for sending this out.