The American "Gospel"

Whenever I see Pastor Joel Osteen's church on television, my mind goes back to a beautiful spring day in Houston during my graduate studies at Rice University. The enormous building in which Lakewood Church now meets on the Southwest Freeway was once a basketball arena used for many purposes. That day, my wife and I took our four-year-old daughter there to enjoy the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus.

I'm not suggesting that Osteen's church services are circus-like, but they do share something in common. In 1980, we went there to be entertained. If the ringmaster had faced the crowd and preached to us about animal rights, we probably would have left. Maybe we would have asked for a refund. Of course, no such thing happened. The sole purpose of the circus was to delight and entertain especially children.

Again, I'm not suggesting that Lakewood's services are sheer entertainment; maybe there's more to them than that. I hope so. But it looks like entertainment to me and to many others who attend or watch. The main focus, if not the sole focus, seems to be on getting attendees-whether physical or virtual via television-to feel good about themselves. And it works. The vast majority of them shown on television seem to be enjoying themselves.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying Christian worship. I think worship should be enjoyable. But there's joy and then there's joy. The folks at Lakewood appear to be highly entertained and brought to an almost ecstasy of happiness. I wonder what would happen if Pastor Joel stood up one Sunday morning and preached to the thousands gathered in his church, and to the millions who watch on television, a message about suffering for Jesus. Maybe he has, but I haven't heard of it.

Am I suggesting that Christianity is all doom and gloom? Certainly not. But there's a deeper joy than the happiness of being entertained. I grew up in the thick of the Pentecostal movement, which we called the "Full Gospel." Osteen's church is (or was) part of that movement when it was pastored by his father John Osteen. As far away as the upper Midwest, we knew about him and the phenomenal growth of his Houston church.

But then it didn't seem to be so much about feeling good about yourself or attaining health, wealth, and happiness by means of positive thinking. At one time, it was a classical Pentecostal church like ours. We knew a lot about suffering for Jesus; most of us experienced some level of persecution for being "religious fanatics." And part of our "fanaticism" was detachment from the material world and its entertaining allures.

The vast majority of Pentecostals were once poor or at least working class people. An insightful study of mid-twentieth-century Pentecostalism is Vision of the Disinherited by Robert Mapes Anderson (Oxford, 1979). This world was not our home; we were just passing through. Our treasures were laid up "somewhere beyond the blue." The accusation that we were so heavenly minded we were no earthly good didn't bother us; we reveled in our attachment to that future life of rewards-mainly the reward of seeing our Savior first of all.

Were we happy? Sometimes. Did we experience joy? Often. But we heard from our pulpits that happiness and joy are not the same; we could experience joy in the middle of great pain and sorrow. Our heroes were people who left everything behind to become missionaries. Self-absorption and seeking satisfaction in this life were condemned as sure signs of sagging spirituality.

One topic of many sermons among the Pentecostals of my youth was the sin of "conspicuous consumption." The phrase was coined in 1899 by Norwegian economist Thorstein Veblin, but our preachers (including my father) used it to label the sin of seeking financial prosperity and especially the sin of spending money on luxuries.

One Sunday morning, one of our church families pulled into the parking lot in a brand-new Cadillac. Instead of regarding them as "blessed by God," my father and elders of our church criticized them-especially the husband/ father-for spending on a luxury money that could have gone to world missions.

Things have changed for many Pentecostals and charismatics in America and around the world. A paradigm shift began in the 1970s and grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Its sure evidence appears today in the parking lots of many Pentecostal churches-they're populated by high-performance luxury cars. Its evidence also appears in the preaching from many Pentecostal pulpits.

Whereas the Pentecostal preaching of my youth in the 1950s frequently referenced Jesus' healing ministry and the contemporary reality of divine healing through prayer, it never suggested that healing or financial prosperity could be attained through positive thinking or speaking.

In the 1970s, when we began hearing that God wants us to live like a "king's kid," (1) we were shocked and horrified because that message was not coming from the local New Thought church or the pulpit of Norman Vincent Peale but from fellow Pentecostals and charismatics. The promise of a materialistic heaven on earth through speaking the "word of faith" swept like wildfire through Pentecostal congregations.

To many Pentecostals and charismatics, this new message was almost totally alien. The only thing recognizable about it was the emphasis on divine healing. But even, and perhaps especially, that emphasis was distorted so it seemed that health was guaranteed to those who "claimed God's promise by faith," which meant "speaking" health and then wealth into existence. Pentecostal opponents of this new message began to describe it as belief in a "vending machine God"-speak the "word of faith" to God and he must deliver the goods. Almost overnight, so it seemed, our churches were being populated by believers in "Word-Faith" theology and many Pentecostal churches divided over it.

After completing a year of studying theology in Germany and while writing my doctoral dissertation for Rice University, I was offered a position teaching theology at Oral Roberts University. I didn't have any viable alternative offers, so I hesitantly accepted it and we moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma-the hotbed of the Word-Faith and health-and-wealth teaching. That hotbed was not ORU itself; it was (and perhaps still is) the large and then-growing Rhema Bible Institute led by former Assemblies of God evangelist Kenneth Hagin.

I grew up occasionally fighting for the reputation of our "Pentecostal Billy Graham," Oral Roberts, in playground brawls. Every Sunday afternoon in the 1950s, Roberts was on television. He was one of our heroes and we believed God had raised him up to restore the Full Gospel in America. But by the time I taught there (1982-84), I was no longer enamored with him. I could write a book about the things I saw and heard there, but that book has already been written. (2)

Although Roberts himself did not preach the health-and-wealth (or "name it and claim it") gospel directly, his doctrine of "seed faith" and his choice of guest speakers in chapel revealed a certain affinity with it. According to him, if a person wants to be blessed by God in every way possible-including financially-he or she must give money called "seed" to a ministry like his. This practice of receiving blessings of health and wealth by giving is called "seed faith." I once heard Roberts's son Richard preach that it's okay for us to give with a selfish motive because God gave his Son selfishly-to receive us back from the grip of Satan.

A parade of Word-Faith preachers spoke in chapel. One declared that God cannot bless a person in a wheelchair because if that person had great faith he or she would be healed. A few students in wheelchairs sat in the aisles of the chapel as the Rolls-Royce-driving megachurch television evangelist insulted them. Many of my theology students transferred from Kenneth Hagin's Rhema Bible Institute to ORU and were indoctrinated in the most egregious teachings about faith, positive thinking and speaking, money and healing.

One of my colleagues at ORU was theologian Charles (Chuck) Farah-a Barthian Calvinist charismatic Presbyterian who wrote one of the first books exposing the flaws of the Word-Faith doctrine of Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and others: From the Pinnacle of the Temple (Bridge/Logos, 1979) forthrightly describes the difference between faith and presumption. According to Farah, the increasingly popular Word-Faith preachers and teachers were promoting not faith but presumption as expressed in the popular saying, "Confront God with his word."

While I was on the faculty of ORU, I heard rumors of some kind of vague connection between the Word-Faith teaching and Oral Roberts with the Unity School of Christianity headquartered in Lees Summit, Missouri. I was never able to pin down the exact nature of that connection, but an influence of the nineteenth-century New Thought movement on the Word-Faith movement became clear. New Thought was the broad and diverse mind-over-matter folk philosophy that found organized religious expression in Christian Science and Unity.

According to New Thought, the mind is capable of controlling matter; or, in the extreme version found in Christian Science, the mind is all that is real and matter is illusory. Perfect health and great financial prosperity could be experienced through positive thinking and speaking. In 1889, New Thought teachers Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded Unity; and today it exists as a fellowship of churches as well as a publisher and teaching center in Lees Summit. Although Unity is relatively small in numbers of members, its influence on American society has been incalculable.

One might even go so far as to say that New Thought, with Unity as one of its main channels, has become part and parcel of the American folk religion. And its positive thinking and speaking platform has filtered into all corners of American culture and even Christianity. One of its main promoters was writer Napoleon Hill who in 1937 wrote the popular book, Think and Grow Rich. Several later volumes by various New Thought-inspired authors bore the title, Pray and Grow Rich.

There is almost no doubt that New Thought influenced the tremendously popular ministry of Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993) who preached from the pulpit of New York's Marble Collegiate Church, published Guideposts magazine, and wrote numerous books about positive thinking. And, in turn, Peale influenced fellow Reformed pastor Robert Schuller who built the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California for his congregation and television audience.

Peale and Schuller were both ministers of the Reformed Church in America-the old Dutch Reformed denomination. Many Reformed theologians rejected their positive thinking messages as alien to that tradition. Not that positive thinking is bad in and of itself, but it should not sit at the center of any authentically Christian ministry. "Faith" and "positive thinking" are not the same, although some degree of confidence in God's desire and ability to answer faithful, fervent prayer is a good thing. The positive thinking "faith" of New Thought and its various Christian permutations is not prayer but a form of magic.

All important to this particular case study in discernment is the distinction between prayer and magic. Magic plays no role in authentic Christian theology or practice as it treats God (however conceived) as someone or some force to be manipulated and completely ignores God's unpredictable sovereignty. (I borrow the term from Pentecostal leader David DuPlessis who, in the 1960s, criticized fellow Pentecostals who treated the Holy Spirit like a slot machine.)

Magic is the use of spoken phrases and/or gestures to evoke the power of God (or the gods or demons). That's pagan, not Christian. And yet New Thought subtly introduced a form of magic into the mainstream of American Christianity. Nothing could be more ironic and alien. A basic tenet of biblical, orthodox Christianity is that God is sovereign (although biblical, orthodox Christians disagree about the details of how God practices his sovereignty) and cannot be forced to do anything. Even persistent, importune prayer does not force the hand of God; God is always free to respond to prayer as he sees best.

New Thought, with its magical teachings and practices, arose in the nineteenth century and gave rise to various religious expressions as mentioned above. Unity is perhaps its most influential organized expression. It then filtered into the fabric of American society, becoming part of its folkways including folk psychology ("Don't worry, be happy!") and folk religion. It then was taken up in various forms by Christian writers, speakers, and preachers who acknowledged no direct influence by New Thought, but who showed clear evidence of that anyway.

Word-Faith Pentecostalism (often labeled "charismatic" rather than Pentecostal) contains a strong element of New Thought mediated to it by turn-of-the-century (nineteenth/twentieth centuries) healing evangelist and author E. W. Kenyon (1867-1948). I first heard his name while teaching at ORU. A graduate theology student named Dan McConnell was writing his Master's thesis on the connection between Kenyon and Hagin, and he claimed to be able to show that Hagin, by far the most influential of the Word-Faith evangelists, borrowed not only ideas but entire sentences from Kenyon without attribution. In other words, McConnell was accusing Hagin of plagiarizing Kenyon's works.

Eventually, McConnell published a book based on his thesis titled, A Different Gospel? (Hendrickson Publishers, 1995). In it, he demonstrated the intimate connection between Kenyon's blend of New Thought and divine healing ministry and Hagin. According to McConnell, a spokesperson for Hagin responded to the demonstrations of apparent plagiarism by claiming that inspired men of God often have the same thoughts given them by the Holy Spirit.

Kenyon brought together New Thought and Pentecostal divine healing ministry. One of his mottos was, "What I confess, I possess." Kenyon believed and taught that divine healing is guaranteed by the atonement of Jesus Christ, and that the prayer of faith powerfully uttered in the form of a confession of possession (e.g., "I possess perfect health") automatically brings the sought-after answer.

A whole slew of positive-thinking and positive-speaking Pentecostal ministers drew on Kenyon's New Thought-inspired theology, adding to it Unity's emphasis on financial prosperity. The Fillmores taught Unity students how to receive financial abundance through positive utterances called "affirmations." For example: "Today I will live in the abundance of God who is my inner source." Kenyon's message was not entirely devoid of a similar emphasis: "Learn that your lips [i.e., words] can make you a millionaire or a pauper." (3)

Enter Joel Osteen and Lakewood Church of Houston. Joel's father, the founding pastor of Lakewood, was a classical Pentecostal preacher who turned in the direction of the broader charismatic movement (neo-Pentecostalism), and near the end of his life drank deeply at the wells of the Word-Faith, health-and-wealth, "name it and claim it," prosperity gospel. Joel succeeded his father as pastor and continued his positive emphasis with the now well-known message expressed in his best-selling book, Your Best Life Now (FaithWords, 2004). A quick perusal of the table of contents reveals the New Thought-inspired, Word-Faith theology of the book: "Developing a Prosperous Mindset" and "The Power in Your Words" are among the chapters.

By no means is everything wrong that Osteen or any other Word-Faith preacher communicates. Someone has said that a heresy is a truth taken to an extreme or pushed to the exclusion of something equally or more important. Osteen's message is, in a nutshell, that God wants you to feel good, be happy, experience financial prosperity, and be well. Little is said about self-sacrificial service to others, although that is not completely missing. What is missing, at least for the most part, is any emphasis on suffering as valuable. Some critics claim, with some justification, that the "gospel" Osteen and other Word-Faith preachers deliver is a version of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship called "cheap grace."

The problem with New Thought and its contemporary Pentecostal (and Reformed) permutations is that they have little to do with the biblical message of the cross. Jesus suffered and died for us; should the servant be greater than the master? Biblical prophecy warns of those who will come with messages that please the ears. When crowds of Americans eagerly press in to hear a religious message that affirms but does not challenge their cultural values of self-esteem and upward mobility, a hermeneutic of suspicion ought to warn that something is wrong with the message if not with the messenger.

So one-sided, if not heretical, is the Word-Faith "gospel" that the classical Pentecostal denominations denounced it and warned sternly against it. The Assemblies of God official position paper, "The Believer and Positive Confession," labels it a doctrinal aberration. It has divided many churches and led to extreme cases where people believed they were not even saved because they could not achieve health or prosperity through speaking positively. In other cases, people have simply denied they were ill and refused to take medicine or wear glasses, and so on. This was supposedly their way of expressing positive faith.

The Word-Faith/health, wealth, and prosperity "gospel" has sunk deeply into the fabric of American Christianity-as has New Thought in various forms. It has achieved the status of one of America's folk religions and has been exported with great success to developing countries. The basic problem is that it has little to do with authentic Christianity, which should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of discernment or a tad of theological knowledge. Its biblical support is thin to nonexistent and its appeal is to the crassly commercial and materialistic desires of America's upwardly mobile (or hopeful) middle class and working poor.

Evangelical Christians of all kinds should pull no punches: this folk religion of health and wealth through positive thinking and speaking does not belong to us. It isn't even on our fringe. It is beyond the pale.