What is the prosperity gospel and why is it dangerous?

Question 60048.

The prosperity gospel is the teaching that God wills every believer to be materially wealthy and physically well, and that faith is the mechanism by which those benefits are released. It goes by several names. Word of Faith. Health and wealth. Name it and claim it. Positive confession. The labels differ and the engine is the same.

I have watched what this teaching does to people, and that is why I write about it with some heat. I have sat with a widow who had given money she could not spare to a ministry that promised a hundredfold return, and who then concluded that her husband died because she had not believed hard enough. That is not a doctrinal disagreement. That is a woman crushed by a lie told in the name of Jesus.

Defining the prosperity gospel

At its centre lies a particular understanding of faith. In orthodox Christianity faith is trust in a person, and its value lies entirely in the trustworthiness of its object. In the prosperity gospel faith is a substance or a force, something the believer possesses and deploys, and its value lies in its quantity and its correct application. Faith stops being a hand that receives and becomes a lever that moves.

Attached to that is the doctrine of positive confession. Words are held to carry creative power, so that what you say aloud calls things into existence or prevents them. Believers are therefore warned against admitting that they are ill, poor or afraid, because the admission is thought to establish the condition. Honest lament becomes a spiritual danger.

Third comes the covenant of exchange, usually expressed through giving. Money sown into a ministry is presented as seed which God is bound to multiply, often with a specified ratio. The transaction is dressed in biblical language, but the underlying logic is that God has entered an arrangement in which He owes a return.

And fourth, atonement is expanded to guarantee present physical and financial benefit. The stripes of Isaiah 53 are read as promising healing on demand, and the poverty of Jesus in 2 Corinthians 8 is read as securing material riches for the believer now. Everything the prosperity gospel teaches flows from these four commitments.

Where the prosperity gospel came from

This teaching did not fall out of the sky. Its deepest root is the nineteenth century New Thought movement, an American metaphysical system holding that the mind shapes material reality and that sickness and poverty originate in wrong thinking. Phineas Quimby and his successors were not Christians in any orthodox sense, and their categories are still recognisable in the vocabulary of the prosperity gospel today.

Those ideas entered the church through E. W. Kenyon, whose writings blended New Thought metaphysics with revivalist Christian language. Kenneth Hagin then took Kenyon’s material, in places almost word for word, and built the modern Word of Faith movement around it in the middle of the twentieth century. From there it spread through television, through Bible schools, and eventually across Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The historical point is not a debating trick. It matters because the prosperity gospel is often defended as a recovery of neglected biblical truth, when its actual pedigree runs through a nineteenth century metaphysical cult. I have traced this in more detail in where the Word of Faith movement came from.

Examining the proof texts

Take 3 John 2 first, since it is the single most quoted verse in this movement. John writes that he prays his friend Gaius may prosper in all things and be in health, even as his soul prospers. That is the standard greeting formula of a first century letter, the equivalent of hoping somebody is keeping well, and it is a personal wish to one named individual rather than a promise to the church.

Then 2 Corinthians 8:9, that though He was rich yet for our sakes He became poor, so that by His poverty we might become rich. Read the surrounding chapter and Paul is appealing for a collection for the impoverished believers in Jerusalem. If the verse guaranteed material wealth, the appeal it sits inside would make no sense at all. The riches in view are the riches of grace.

Then Malachi 3:10, the tithe passage with the windows of heaven, addressed to a nation under the Mosaic covenant that had been robbing God of what the Law required. Lifting it out as a personal investment formula ignores both the covenant setting and the corporate address. You can read the context at Malachi 3:8 to 12.

And Isaiah 53:5, by His wounds we are healed. Peter quotes that verse and applies it explicitly to our dying to sin and living to righteousness, at 1 Peter 2:24. The apostle who was present at the crucifixion tells us what the healing chiefly refers to, and the prosperity gospel overrules him.

What Scripture actually says about wealth

The Bible is not embarrassed about money and does not treat poverty as holy in itself. Abraham was wealthy. Job was wealthy before and after his suffering. Proverbs commends diligence and warns against sloth, and there is nothing pious about being careless with resources God has entrusted to you.

But Scripture is relentlessly sober about the dangers. Jesus said it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom, and told the parable of the man whose barns were full on the night his soul was required of him. Paul warns Timothy that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils and that some, by craving it, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

More decisive still is the shape of apostolic life. Paul learned the secret of contentment in plenty and in hunger, and wrote from prison. He listed his hardships to the Corinthians: beatings, shipwreck, hunger, cold, exposure. If the prosperity gospel were true, the apostle to the Gentiles was the most conspicuous failure in the New Testament.

The Greek word for contentment Paul uses in Philippians 4 is autarkes, self sufficient in the sense of needing nothing further. He says he has learned it, which tells us it was neither automatic nor instant, and it is the opposite of the restless acquisition the prosperity gospel produces.

Why the prosperity gospel is dangerous

The first danger is that it distorts the character of God. He becomes a mechanism rather than a Father, obliged to respond when the correct procedure is followed. Prayer stops being the approach of a child and becomes the operation of a machine, and the God who says His thoughts are not our thoughts is reduced to something predictable and manageable.

The second danger is that it wounds the suffering. Every believer who is not healed, not enriched, not delivered, must be told that the fault lies in their faith. This teaching has no category for Job, for Paul’s thorn, for Trophimus left ill at Miletus, or for the believers in Hebrews 11 who were sawn in two and did not receive what was promised. It therefore has nothing to say to most Christians in most of history.

The third danger is that it exploits the poor. The prosperity gospel spreads fastest where people are most desperate, and takes money from those who have least, on a promise that cannot be kept. The apostle Peter warned of teachers who in their greed would exploit the flock with false words. That verse could have been written for a television studio.

The fourth danger, and the gravest, is that it substitutes a different gospel. If the good news is that Jesus makes you rich and well, then the cross becomes a means to an end, and the end is your comfort. The New Testament says the good news is that Jesus reconciles sinners to God, and that everything else follows or does not follow according to His purpose.

The dispensational perspective

There is a further error underneath the prosperity gospel that dispensational readers will spot quickly. It takes covenant promises given to national Israel, chiefly the material blessings of Deuteronomy 28 tied to obedience to the Mosaic Law in the land, and transfers them wholesale to the church.

Israel and the church are distinct in God’s programme, and the promises made to Israel under that covenant were land, harvest, offspring and national security, contingent on covenant obedience. The church has been promised something different: forgiveness, adoption, the indwelling Spirit, a heavenly inheritance and, repeatedly and explicitly, tribulation in this world.

Collapse that distinction and you will inevitably import material guarantees that were never made to us. Get the distinction right and the New Testament reads with startling consistency, promising suffering now and glory later, in that order. Ariel Ministries has helpful material on the covenants made with Israel and their proper scope.

Responding to prosperity teaching

If someone you love is caught up in this, argument alone will rarely be enough, because the prosperity gospel meets real needs in a distorted way. A person in poverty who is told that God wants them to flourish is hearing something they desperately want to be true, and the answer must include the better thing that is actually true.

So start with the character of God as Father rather than vending machine. Move to the whole counsel of Scripture, reading a book straight through rather than trading proof texts, since this teaching cannot survive continuous exposure to Philippians or 2 Corinthians. And be honest about the church’s own failures on money, because indifference to the poor helped create the market for this in the first place.

If you are assessing a ministry, ask plain questions. Where does the money go? Who holds the leader accountable, and can they remove him? Does the preaching address sin, repentance and the cross, or only breakthrough and increase? I have written more on the general skill in how we recognise false teachers, and on a related case in whether televised faith healers are genuine.

A word to those it has hurt

Perhaps you gave, and the promised return never arrived. Perhaps you were told your child was not healed because you doubted. Perhaps you have quietly stopped praying because the last time you did you were blamed for the result. If so, hear this clearly. What was done to you was a wicked thing, and God is not the author of it.

The real gospel makes no promise that your circumstances will improve this year. It promises something far better and far more secure: that your sins are forgiven, that God is for you, that nothing can separate you from His love, and that a day is coming when every tear will be wiped away. That promise has never once failed anybody who trusted it.

And it comes free. The prosperity gospel always has a price attached, which is one of the simplest tests you can apply to it.

What about testimonies of blessing?

Defenders of the prosperity gospel will point to genuine stories: a business that recovered after a season of giving, a tumour that disappeared, a debt cleared unexpectedly. I have no wish to deny such accounts, and I have prayed for some of them myself. God is generous, He answers prayer, and He does at times give material relief in ways that look like nothing but kindness.

The question is what those stories prove. A doctrine is not established by anecdote, or every superstition on earth would be true, since every one of them has satisfied customers. The test is whether the teaching matches Scripture, and whether it also accounts for the cases where the blessing did not arrive. The prosperity gospel collects the successes and quietly discards the failures, which is a method no serious enquiry would accept in any other field.

Ask any prosperity ministry for the names of the faithful givers who died poor and ill, and you will not receive a list. Yet the New Testament gives us that list without embarrassment. Hebrews 11 names heroes of faith who were destitute, afflicted and mistreated, and says the world was not worthy of them.

Money, ministry and honest handling

None of this makes it wrong for a church to talk about money, and I want to guard against an overreaction. Jesus spoke about possessions constantly, Paul organised a substantial international relief collection, and a congregation that never mentions giving is not being spiritual, it is being evasive. The problem with the prosperity gospel is not that it discusses money but that it lies about it.

The apostolic model is worth copying. When Paul handled the Jerusalem collection he arranged for representatives from the contributing churches to travel with the gift, explaining that he wanted to do what is honourable not only in the Lord’s sight but also in the sight of man. You can read that at 2 Corinthians 8:20 and 21. He built accountability into the process deliberately, and he did it because he knew what money does to reputations.

So let your church publish its accounts. Let no one person control the funds. Let giving be taught as worship and as generosity rather than as investment, and let the appeal be to gratitude rather than to appetite. The study notes on 2 Corinthians 9 are useful on how the apostle motivates giving without ever promising a financial return.

The global picture

It would be parochial to treat this as an American problem exported elsewhere. The prosperity gospel has taken deepest root in parts of West Africa, Brazil and South East Asia, and in many places it now shapes what ordinary people assume Christianity to be. Where the state provides little and life is precarious, a message promising breakthrough has enormous force.

That should make us sympathetic to the hearers and severe about the teachers. It should also make us humble, because Western churches have often exported the material that did the damage, and have sometimes been slow to support the African and Latin American pastors who are resisting it at real personal cost.

Those men deserve our prayers and our platforms. They are frequently accused of being colonised by Western theology when in fact they are the ones defending their congregations against a Western import.

So, now what?

Examine what you actually expect from God, rather than what you would say if asked in a Bible study. Do you feel He owes you something for your service? Does a season of loss make you suspect He has broken a contract? Those reflexes are the prosperity gospel operating quietly in people who would never listen to its preachers.

Then set your expectations by Scripture. Contentment in plenty and in want, generosity that expects nothing back, and treasure stored somewhere no thief can reach. If everything you own were taken from you tomorrow, what would you still have? Answer that honestly and you will know how much of this teaching has got into you.

But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.

1 Timothy 6:6 and 7, ESV

For Further Study

For the historical background, D. R. McConnell’s A Different Gospel traces the dependence of Kenneth Hagin on E. W. Kenyon in detail, while Ken Sarles and Bruce Barron provide careful earlier assessments. Among the scholars I keep returning to, Charles Ryrie is indispensable on the distinction between Israel and the church in Dispensationalism, and J. Dwight Pentecost handles the covenants and their proper recipients in Things to Come. John Walvoord is worth consulting on the promises attached to the millennial kingdom rather than to the present age. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology sets out the believer’s present possessions in Jesus with a thoroughness that quietly answers most of this teaching, and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology gives a solid treatment of the atonement against which the health and wealth reading can be measured. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is useful on Deuteronomy 28 and its covenant setting.