Did Christianity cause the Crash?

The December 2009 issue of the Atlantic magazine highlights an article by Hanna Rosin titled, “Did Christianity cause the Crash?” Rosin’s subtitle answers her rhetorical title question saying, “How preachers are spreading a Gospel of debt.” She defines the problematic, “Prosperity Gospel,” as a, “Somewhat stitched together homegrown theology.”

She analyses it as not within a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches with varying degrees of intensity. Rosen dates the roots and the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers back to Oral Roberts.

His famous concept of, “seed faith,” is still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a seed offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundred fold. After a career of raising hundreds of millions of dollars, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.

Jesus gave the true interpretation of the parable of the sower and the “seed,” saying that He is the sower and the seed is the word of God as that seed takes root in the hearts and lives of His followers, it will manifest itself in exponential spiritual results, some thirty fold, some sixty fold, some one hundred fold. The disgraced Jim Baker was a friend of Oral Roberts and an ardent follower of his teaching. He titled his own autobiography, “I Was Wrong.” Baker said, “For years I had embraced and espoused the Gospel that some skeptics had branded a prosperity Gospel.”

Baker said that, “while in prison, the true impact of Jesus’ words regarding money impacted my heart and mind and I became physically nauseated; I was wrong, I was teaching the opposite that Jesus had said.” However, the prosperity Gospel did not die with the fall of Jim Baker. Rosen makes reference to three of America’s largest churches that are now proponents of the prosperity Gospel; including Tommy Barnet in Phoenix, T. D. Jakes in Dallas, and Joel Osteen in Houston.

Osteen in his best selling book, “Your best life now” says that, “You have to program your mind for success.” The advice he offers is exactly like that found in, “The Secret,” a new age book highly promoted by Oprah Winfrey. In his book, “Something for Nothing,” Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American Dream, both intertwined with religious faith.

The traditional hero is a self made man. He is disciplined and hard working and believes success comes through, “careful culmination of (implicitly protestant) ventures in cooperation with a providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man, “a speculative confidence man.” Lears calls him, who prefers risky ventures in real estate and a, “more fluid mobile democracy.”

The first self made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance with, “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” It is the proliferation of this second model that Rosin believes helped cause the crash. We can agree in part with Rosin that this fallacious teaching combined with the publics acceptance of Keynesian economic paradigm of borrow and spend for prosperity that ultimately led to the economic crash.

However, it was not Christianity that caused the crash, but false teaching. Even the self made man concept is fallacious in that it puts confidence in man rather than God. The true teaching in Christianity is represented in the model of righteous stewardship. The righteous steward is one who knows he really does not own anything. He’s simply a steward of what belongs to God.

Unlike the so called self made man, his greatest goal is not self adulation, but servitude using gifts and abilities to serve others in a way that gives glory to God. He seeks daily to align his life with the word of God and in fellowship with Christ. Rather than being a part of a financial crash, the fruit of the righteous steward brings forth a combination of financial, emotional, and spiritual stability.

 

 

Baker, Jim, “I Was Wrong,” Thomas Nelson, 1996

Lears, Jackson, “Something For Nothing,” Penguin Putnum, New York, NY. 2003