WHAT GOD NEVER PROMISED: THE TOXIC TEACHING OF THE “PROSPERITY GOSPEL”

Over the course of the past several decades, a movement throughout the evangelical Christian community has become increasingly popular and in-demand. It is not surprisingly so. This movement, often called the “Prosperity Gospel” (PG), caters to the desire of every God-believing Christian…the desire to see a kick-back in their wallet, lifestyle, or profession because of their faith. I mean, come on…who doesn’t want to mix the American Dream into their Christian ideals? You can get two birds with one stone! (…joke)

This movement has marched under the banner of many names, such as “Name it and claim it”, “Health and wealth”, “Positive confession theology”, but as David Brunette aptly states, “The good news of Jesus Christ is not a magic spell that secures for us a healthy and prosperous future.”^[1] Actually, the good news of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with our homes, cars, bank accounts, job promotions, peer popularity, college scholarships, athletic competitions, and every other superfluous category of our lives.

What is so destructive about PG is that it takes biblical truths and draws un-biblical conclusions from them. Incredibly enticing Bible verses are often proclaimed in PG sermons like “you have not because you ask not” (Jas 4:2) and that it is God’s will that you “prosper and be in health” (3 Jn 2), as if those two Scriptures (and others) are beckoning us to name it and claim it because apparently God promised it and that means we can have it (whatever “it” is). Third John 2 has been referred to as “the basic Scripture text of the cult of prosperity” because of the popular misinterpretation of the verse, erroneously applying it to financial and material prosperity of the believer.^[2] This is faulty on both grammatical and contextual grounds, but such exegesis and rebuttal against PG is easily found in the Christian literature and so will not be explored here.

PG preachers advocate that believers are to utilize prayer as a tool for coercing God into granting their petitions. Take for example PG preacher Creflo Dollar who says, “When we pray, believing that we have already received what we are praying, God has no choice but to make our prayers come to pass…[thus] Every failure in life is a prayer failure.”^[3] The danger in this proposition is that it takes the words of Jesus (cf. Mk 11:24) and spins them on their head into a false premise that he never intended. The logical syllogism that PG preachers draw upon is that if you believe God for what you pray for, then God has to grant it. Prayer then becomes something like redeeming food stamps in the local grocery store, you just grab what you want off the shelf and then hand the paper stamp to the cashier all the while maintaining full expectancy that you should then be able to proceed immediately out the door with the items. But you can’t just grab what you want off the shelf in prayer. God doesn’t work like that.

At the core of PG is the idea that we are meant to receive exactly what we believe for because PG claims that “believing equals receiving.” David Jones describes this false presumption by saying, “According to prosperity theology, faith is not a theocentric act of the will, or simply trust in God; rather it is an anthropocentric spiritual force, directed at God. Indeed, any theology that views faith solely as a means to material gain rather than the acceptance of heavenly justification must be judged as faulty and inadequate.”^[4]

Furthermore, James Goff sums up in a word the attitude toward God in PG, “[God is] reduced to a kind of ‘cosmic bellhop’ attending to the needs and desires of his creation.”^[5] Whatever particular nuance PG takes on, it is still at its core an ego-centered gospel where Christ died so that you could have what you want. Jones boils it down by saying, “Prosperity teachers turn the relationship between God and man into a quid pro quo transaction [Lat. ‘something for something’].”^[6]

What PG rarely discusses is what it means “if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 Jn 5:14). The problem with PG theology is that God is supposed to answer your prayer for health, wealth, and happiness. Therefore, if he doesn’t, what does that then mean for the believer? Are they not doing enough “believing pull-ups” to get God’s attention or to warrant his answering their prayer? What PG does is point the finger at the Christian like they are the bottleneck preventing God’s goodness from shining down upon them. In essence, PG makes answers to prayer a believer-centered result rather than God-centered and this erases God’s grace from the equation. You could say that PG treats prayer as if the money is in the bank and all you have to do is cash the check, without a single thought as to whether God wants you to cash it, or whether God will even cash it at that time (or ever). The fallacy of PG is that God has not given his people a blank check upon which they can write whatever they want and redeem whenever they want (even if it is something you read in the Bible). A crucial component that PG followers often fail to realize is that God’s will is not something that can be manipulated in order to make Christianity more palatable and appealing to mid-lower class citizens of the world.

What PG side-steps is that the New Testament writers convey it is God’s aim to guide his people to be like Christ and to preserve them through the trials of this life, not to prevent them from experiencing such trials. God did not promise his people that they would live a painless, care-free life after they put their faith in Jesus (cf. Rom 8:17; 2 Tim 3:12; 1 Pet 2:21).

However, is the PG total bunk? Not exactly. We must be careful not to pull out all the good plants in the garden when weeding. It is true that we cannot “believe” our way to a successful and wealthy life. But trusting God in our lives is something we are called to do. It is part of the very fabric of God’s plan of redemption. Faith isn’t about getting a step-up in our lifestyle and living situations or having everything go the way we want; it is about developing a personal relationship with our Creator; it is about intimate communion and fellowship; it is about pouring our hearts out to him knowing he loves us still; it is about learning that we need him….for EVERYTHING.

Also, God never promises that we will not suffer or that our lives will be completely comfortable and leisurely. God has called us into his kingdom by his grace and all good things we have received in this life are a result of his grace. God will certainly bless his people and will deliver his people, but the way he blesses them and the way he delivers them is not something the believer can dictate to God. Prayer is not designed to be a room-service call with our custom made order exactly as we specified but rather a supplication for God to provide what we need in order to endure and/or overcome adversity. Sometimes God might supernaturally remove adversity from our lives, other times he will respond by allowing us to experience pain and sorrow and give us strength or understanding in order to persevere through the trial (as undesirable as that might sound). Believers cannot control or force God to act in favorable ways that they want. God will do what he wills.

As Jones rightly concludes, “If the prosperity gospel is correct, grace becomes obsolete, God becomes irrelevant, and man is the measure of all things.”^[7] PG proclaims a perversion of God’s design for his creation and his intended relationship with them. Humankind is not the composer of the music or the conductor of the orchestra; they are its musicians, but the musician that plays its own melody disrupts the symphony. We humans have always wanted to re-write the music the way it sounds best to us, but the ironic aspect about that notion is that the music could never sound any better than it has already been composed.

In the end, we must remember that God is good and his wisdom is infinite, and thus, the gospel of Jesus Christ is not something that was meant to give us a hand-out so that we can have all the health, wealth, and happiness we want. God has called us to trust him in this life and he will provide what we need to make it through, even if it means going through hard times. One main purpose for prayer is for us to develop a confident reliance upon him that whatever comes our way he will be with us through it all and we can let him carry all our worries and burdens.

Seek God for who he is….not because of his blessings!

~JW

^{1. David Brunette, “5 Ways Not to Argue Against the Prosperity Gospel,” May 28, 2013 from http://www.radical.net/blog/2013/05/what-the-prosperity-gospel-has-right.}

^{2. Gordon Fee, “The ‘Gospel’ of Prosperity – Alien Gospel,” Reformation Today 82 (1984): 39-43.}

^{3. Creflo Dollar, “Prayer: Your Path to Success,” March 2, 2009 from www.creflodollarministries.org/BibleStudy/Articles.aspx?id=329.}

^{4. David W. Jones, “The Bankruptcy of the Prosperity Gospel: An Exercise in Biblical and Theological Ethics,” October 6, 2006 from https://bible.org/article/bankruptcy-prosperity-gospel-exercise-biblical-and-theological-ethics#P50_13698.}

^{5. James R. Goff, Jr., “The Faith That Claims,” Christianity Today 34 (Feb. 1990), 21.}

^{6. David W. Jones, “Errors of the Prosperity Gospel,” December 5, 2013 from http://www.9marks.org/blog/errors-prosperity-gospel.}

^{7. David Jones, “The Bankruptcy of the Prosperity Gospel.”}