There’s a well-known Anglican “divine” (to use the old term) in this country who’s engaged in a Facebook campaign/rant (take your pick) about African faith declarations and the popularity of prosperity teaching. It’s gone on for some time, and the fact that he’s Reformed only adds to the persistence. (Maybe he’s also trying to prove that doctrine, but that’s another post…)
Readers of this blog know that an family heritage snob like me doesn’t have much use for prosperity teaching as it is currently propagated by the arrivistes on this side of the Atlantic. And that may be a big part of our Anglican divine’s problem: Episcopal churches in this Republic have traditionally been the church home of people who really don’t need “name it and claim it” or “blab it and grab it” because they already have it and know how to get it by other means. I suspect that Anglican churches have inherited many of these people and have attracted more to their ranks, which is why it’s easy for Anglican and Episcopal divines to sniff at others not so well endowed.
But to turn sniffing into heresy hunting is a game-changer. It’s easy if you’re a hammer to see everything else as a nail; it’s easy if you’re a minister of the Gospel to see everything that doesn’t square with what you know to be true as heresy, especially when you’ve been pummeled by the stuff from the Episcopal left. It’s also easy to miss the forest for the trees, and I think objectors to prosperity teaching have done just that. The real problem with prosperity teaching isn’t theological, but it’s wrapped up with the whole theodicy issue.
I’ve discussed this before, but the core problem is that Americans in particular have been drilled in the idea that life is supposed to be a “bowl of cherries” and that they’re not supposed to experience adversity or pain. That’s an interesting idea in a country where interpersonal relationships (like marriage and parenting) are so unstable and thus cause pain by themselves. That’s had a great deal of fallout, I’ll mentioned two examples.
The first is the opioid crisis. Boomers act like this is something new, but face it: the generation committed to “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll” put drugs front and center in life. But why? Why are Americans so prone to taking drugs, and have been for the last 50+ years? Some of that blame must be put squarely on the drug companies themselves. Leaving out the scourge of prescription drugs such as Oxycontin, so many over-the-counter drugs were sold on the idea of “take a pill, you don’t have to feel pain, everything will be fine.” That’s a powerful concept for drugs both legal, illegal and those in transition. But it’s left a wreckage.
The second is prosperity teaching itself. You never learn to appreciate the “positive confession” movement until you’ve been subjected to the “negative confession” one. But prosperity teaching here pushes very strongly the idea of the pain-free, adversity-free life, especially for people who have been primed for that idea by their culture.
And that’s where the Africans come in. Prosperity teaching has an obvious appeal in a place as poor as Africa. But my exposure to the Africans tells me that for the most part they haven’t bought into the pain-free, adversity-free mentality that we have here in the U.S. Their daily life and bad actors such as Boko Haram only reinforce reality in a way that most Americans find incomprehensible.
So what’s a Christian to do? The first thing is to define the extremes, and see what’s in the middle. We’ve seen one extreme, the adversity-free idea. The other is that we should just tough everything out in life and do it ourselves. The problem with that is that it basically leaves God out as our ultimate source and strength. A good example of that is the “Contract on the Episcopalians, ” where the promises of God were replaced by what we promised to do.
Somewhere between these two extremes is reality, that we live in a fallen world, that our God as given us the promise of eternity, that bad things happen but ultimately that the life that God has given us is good.
Finding a middle ground on anything these days isn’t easy. In this case, however, it is both Biblical and necessary.
Positive Infinity 