The Prosperity Gospel

Pray and Get Rich.

To please a friend, I once attended a video showing promoting the “prosperity gospel.” It was like a corporate motivational speech.

The basic message I got is “God has chosen you for leadership.” So he’s going to grant you prosperity, presumably so you have the means to lead.

Is this a legitimate premise?

It seems to defy the Gospel of Luke, which actually seems to see the possession of significant wealth as itself sinful. Witness the story of the rich man and Lazarus: the rich man goes to Hell purely for not sharing his wealth.

And it defies the nature of God.

If giving away one’s wealth to the needy is a good deed, then anyone who has significant wealth is lacking in at least one good deed. Why then are they the leader? Why are they chosen by God above their moral betters?

The prosperity gospel therefore seems to require the Calvinist assumption of predestination: some of us are chosen before birth for salvation, and are given all good things. Nothing to do with our own merits.

I do not see how this can be reconciled with a morally good God: this is a God who plays favourites. This is as bad as we are if we discriminate against some, say, simply for the colour of their skin.

A Lutheran might counter that the distinguishing feature is faith: God rewards those who put their faith in him.

But no honest man can simply choose to believe. An honest man seeks truth. And a moral God does not reward dishonesty.

And surely, as a practical matter, all of us know people of deep religious faith, who are poor.

Actually, Jesus does not pay as well as Moses.

God does clearly choose some to lead. Moses is the perfect example; the prophets in general. The saints.

How many of the prophets were prosperous?

Moses died before reaching the promised land of milk and honey.

John the Baptist wore animal skins and ate locusts. He died in prison.

Isaiah risked starvation, had he not been fed by angels in a cave, a price on his head.

They apparently did not need personal wealth in order to lead. They experienced extreme poverty instead.

This is not a universal rule: David and Solomon achieved kingship, and there are a few crowned saints. Wealth is not proof of sinfulness. Yet both David and Solomon, good men as they began, fell into grave sin as a direct result of the temptations of wealth and secular power.

Jesus defines Christian leadership: “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever desires to be first among you shall be your bondservant, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

This surely defies the prosperity gospel.

Material wealth, the New Testament makes clear in many passages, is always at least a distraction from the divine. “One cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

Moreover, if doing good brought obvious material rewards, there would be no morality left in doing good. The worst of us would do good out of self-interest.

Accordingly, a just God must have ordered the universe so that morality will cost us wealth, not acquire it.

This also requires the existence of some kind of happy afterlife: a just God must ultimately favour the good. Yet for the good to be good, the favour must be shown in such a way that the rewards for goodness are not visible and obvious to all.

And so the reward must come in some invisible later state.

Jesus explains it: in this present field, God sows the evil with the good. He must allow the weeds to thrive amidst the wheat. All is separated at the harvest, on the final threshing floor.