The Netflix Movie Every Christian Should Watch
I’m convinced every American Christian should watch this film: American Gospel: Christ Alone. Here’s why: the prosperity gospel (aka: “the name & claim it” movement) is spreading like wildfire in American Christianity.
Thirty years ago, prosperity gospel preachers represented a small fringe element on the outskirts of Christianity. Not so today.
A Times magazine article in 2006 surveyed Christians and found:
That 43% of all Christians agreed that the faithful receive health and wealth.
That 2/3 agreed that God wants people to prosper.
That 31% agreed that God increases the riches of those who give.
That 17% of all Christians surveyed identified themselves with the prosperity gospel or the name and claim it movement.
A Pew Survey found that 3 out of 4 latinos across all denominations agreed with the statement: “God will grant financial success and good health to all believers who have enough faith.” (Statistics from Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, Oxford University Press, 2013.)
Prosperity Gospel preachers like Joel Olsteen (“Your destiny is calling out to you; it’s time to start living large”), Kenneth Copeland (“I declare you debt free, saith the Lord”), Benny Hinn (“It’s as easy to get healed as it is to get forgiven”) and others pedal a substitute gospel that is really no gospel at all.
American Gospel: Christ Alone goes into greater detail, but let me briefly mention three serious errors with the Prosperity Gospel:
(1) A Faulty Notion of the Object of Faith
Whenever the object of faith does not squarely rest on Christ, we can begin to talk about a sub-biblical form of Christianity. For the prosperity gospel movement, faith becomes a sort of magic wand that is waved over our lives to secure our heart’s greatest desires in life (health, wealth, victory, feel good-ism, etc.).
Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen and their tribe will encourage you to say, “I am blessed. I am prosperous. I am healthy. I am victorious. I have the abundant life.” And they will tell you to claim it by faith.
In the Prosperity Gospel movement, faith is twisted into “faith in my faith”. Faith becomes weaponized to secure whatever you set your heart and mind upon. Yet biblical faith has one sure and solid object: Christ is always the object of our faith.
(2) A Faulty Understanding of the Cross
Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, TD Jakes, Joel Osteen are fond of scriptures like Isaiah 53:5 (“by his stripes you are healed”) and 1 Peter 2:24 (“by his wounds you have been healed”).
Joyce Meyer says this about the cross: “By his stripes I was healed. Healing belongs to me. I was healed two thousand years ago by the stripes that Jesus bore. By His stripes I was healed, I’m not trying to get healing; I’ve already got healing, because by His stripes I was healed.”
For Joyce Meyer, faith becomes a magic wand to appropriate this healing which is available through the cross of Christ: “My faith puts that power in active operation in my body…that power is flowing in me and I am whole. I am free. I am entirely free from sickness and disease…my faith has made me whole” (J. Meyer).
Yet this is a theology of the cross based upon two texts taken completely out of context. Read the larger context of Isaiah 53:4-5:
“Surely he has born our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed."
Is Isaiah the prophet talking about physical healing that you can claim by faith? The context makes it abundantly clear: Christ was pierced and crushed on the cross for our transgressions and for our iniquities. The healing that Christ enacts on the cross is a spiritual healing that grants us peace with God (Rom 5:1) and forgiveness of our sins (Eph. 1:7; cf Ps. 32:1).
Similarly, you only need to read the entire context of 1 Peter 2:24:
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”
Is the apostle Peter to be turned into a prosperity gospel preacher? Surely not! Peter is abundantly clear that Christ’s vicarious sacrifice was a sin-bearing substitute for the purpose of putting sin to death and living for righteousness. The healing is spiritual in nature. Peter is not imagining some accumulated “merit of physical healing” that we access by faith because of Jesus’ death. That is just plain putting novel, human-centered ideas into the text of scripture.
(3) A Faulty Understanding of the Mind and Human Words
Prosperity Gospel preachers will often tell you to make positive verbal and mental confessions to get the object of your personal desire.
The “name and claim it” teachers love to cite Proverbs 18:21, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Yet again, look at the full context:
“From the fruit of a man’s mouth his stomach is satisfied; he is satisfied by the yield of his lips. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” (Prov. 18:20-21).
Commenting on these verses, Old Testament scholar Duane Garrett writes, “The purpose of these verses is to warn against being too much in love with one’s own words. One should recognize the power of words and use them with restraint.”
In other words, believers must understand that there is a gigantic and qualitative difference between our words and God’s words. When God says, “Let there be light”, the universe is formed (Gen. 1:3)! Only God’s words do not return empty and accomplish precisely the creative purpose for which they were sent (Is. 55:11). There is a vast chasm of difference between the creative words uttered by the Creator and words uttered by creatures. In fact, the Scripture’s most common warnings about human words have to do with their destructiveness, not “speaking into existence” things that are not (see Mt. 12:35-37; Prov. 18:13, 21:23; James 3:5-10). Kate Bowler in her book Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel shows convincingly that prosperity gospel’s “mind over matter” rhetoric that brings peace, prosperity, and healing into your life is actually rooted not in scripture but in the “New Thought” movement of mind-power (which is an offshoot of Christian Science) which surged in popularity in America in the late nineteenth century (pp. 13ff).
Scripture never urges us to make “positive confessions” so that a general sense of well-being (therapeutic positivity) or health and wealth will be ours. Instead, Paul urges us to: “Set your minds on the things that are above, not on things that are on the earth” (Col. 3:2) and “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8). With so much emphasis on health, wealth, and victory, prosperity gospel teachers can scarcely hear these verses of the apostle Paul telling us what should truly be set before our lives as desirable.
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Alongside recommending American Gospel: Christ Alone, let me direct you to two other fascinating places to engage with the prosperity gospel:
(1) This video is an incredibly fascinating look at how America’s home-grown prosperity gospel is being exported around the world to places of poverty. I saw this hocus-pocus all the time in Central Africa and it made me sick to my stomach for the Cause of Christ. I encountered this intriguing video while attending the Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa in 2010.
(2) John Piper’s most viewed sermon clip of all time is a weighty and passion-filled attack on the Prosperity Gospel. This is the seriousness with which we need to take this substitute gospel which is really no gospel at all:
The Gospel Coalition has a fascinating “back story” of this inspired preaching rant entitled “The Story Behind John Piper’s Most Famous Attack on the Prosperity Gospel”.