Friday, February 11, 2022

The Prosperity Gospel's Heresy

There are Biblical examples of how wealth can be directly granted by God as an expression of favor, one of the best examples being Job.  The entire book is about his life of prosperity getting thoroughly disrupted after Satan claims that he would certainly curse God if he was no longer protected from misery and did not have such abundant possessions (Job 1:9-11).  After this, Job is tested severely with the loss of health, family members, and animals, yet he refuses to curse God or falsely think his tragedies are punishment for evil he has committed--God calls Job blameless when Satan questions his commitment to God.  Only after extreme suffering is Job restored and blessed by God even more than before.

Job's status at the beginning and end of the book is one of wealth, his wealth at the end surpassing his wealth at the start.  This material prosperity is specifically stated to be brought about by God in the final chapter.  Job 42:10 says that God, once Job had emerged from his hellacious trials, "made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before," and verse 12 in the same chapter adds that God "blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first."  Consistent with this description, this chapter of Job clarifies that he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, and two thousand other animals.  At both ends of the story, ownership of an enormous number of animals is used to convey the wealth Job was given.

It would be a serious mistake and an obvious non sequitur fallacy, however, to think that this is always how the rest of the Bible treats wealth, as if everyone who is not wealthy is forsaken by or an enemy of God and everyone who is wealthy is divinely blessed.  Like health or physical beauty, and other such characteristics of a person, financial standing is conceptually unrelated to someone's moral standing even though God occasionally rewards someone by granting them one of these things.  The idea that financial security and economic success reflect moral character and soteriological security is part of the heresy of the prosperity gospel, a contra-Biblical kind of glorification of money and the status it can bring.

The prosperity gospel's flaw is not holding that money (and in broader versions, physical or mental health as well) could be something God bestows in response to commitment to him and his commands of justice.  The error is in the notion that this is a universal or integral part of Biblical teachings about the relationship between salvation, moral character, and prosperity.  At that point, a possibility that might be the case in a handful of situations is twisted into a nonexistent promise from God that actually contradicts what the Bible does say.  The fools who actually think this theological stance has anything to do with the Bible are not just guilty of making assumptions and betraying reason and actual Biblical doctrines, but in danger of being crushed by disappointment when they do not receive what they hope for.

The easiest way to avoid this gratuitous disappointment based on mere assumptions and distortions is to realize that sometimes material prosperity is a sign of divine favor in Biblical stories and sometimes it is not.  It takes only a moment to realize that it does not logically follow from someone having any particular degree of wealth that this is because God is personally blessing them, but even the Bible itself illustrates this point through examples, all without necessarily saying that wealth could be but is not always a mark of God's approval.  The beliefs that wealth on its own is either sinful or the divine reward for righteousness are asinine and unbiblical.  As is so often the case, it is easy for the irrational to be swept aside by fallacies leading to one side of a truth or the other.

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