Money raining from heaven?: an appraissal of the prosperity gospel in a missiological framework

Abstract

The constituent concepts of the gospel is not only vital for the correct understanding of the true meaning of Christ, but also for the appropriate meaning and practice of mission to enlarge the church of Christ in his service. The thesis researched the background of the Prosperity Gospel critically in addition to the use of it for missiological purposes to enlarge the church with the luring of poor people with the excessive promises of vast wealth after contributing to the Prosperity Churches generously and substantially from within their poverty. The heart of the research was the analysis of ten sermons by prosperity preachers according to the “open coding” of the “Grounded Theory”, drawing conclusions from the practical analysis of the sermons, instead of the usual research working with the material from a pre-conceived theory. This approach uncovered and displayed the distortion and falsification of the true gospel. The thesis constructed an appropriate benchmark of the authentic gospel against which to measure deviations from the traditional gospel and mission according to this gospel. The dissertation exposed courteously, but deliberately that the Prosperity Gospel was infiltrated with alienated concepts from unscriptural humanism, the “American materialistic dream” and the secular Rogerian psychology with its non-spiritual psychotherapeutic approach, as well as the “profane” preaching of Norman Vincent Peale, comprising “New Thought”, metaphysics, Christian Science, and medical and psychological practices. More serious was the specific “cultic” influences and teachings. Cultic here indicated a system of religious or spiritual beliefs, especially an informal and transient belief system regarded by the traditional churches as misguided, unorthodox, extremist, or even false, and directed by a charismatic, 2 authoritarian leader. Ultimately, the Prosperity Gospel was contaminated with Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism and Unitarianism. The thesis, however, is not negative about the overflowing blessings of God, also regarding temporal prosperity, but the research unearthed the true riches of the gospel of Christ in an exegetical scriptural manner and delineated it in an extensive way – money is indeed “raining from heaven”, but spiritually in a true gospel way, through prayer and in obedience to Christ, depending on faith in God. The norm was “abundance, but not accumulation of riches”. It is sad to have unmasked the fact that some prosperity preachers commanded the churches not to pray anymore, but to command the blessings of God “onto” the “true” believers towards accumulation of vast wealth (cf. “pastor” D O OYEDEPO). The 10 sermons were thoroughly scrutinised and the main problems with the “claiming” of vast wealth according to the gospel brought out in the open – the lack of Christ-centred preaching, the absence of the emphasis of the work of the Holy spirit, the misunderstanding of the “revelation” history, the deficiency of scriptural exegesis and the unscriptural obsession with vast material wealth as a “blessing”. Usually only the prosperity preacher and a few supporters became the “blessed” rich from all the compromised donations of the “masses”. This was followed by a development of the academic discipline of theology, indicating revelation as a historical process, where the gospel moved from survival to justice in the Old Testament, and finally to unconditional love and care according to the Messiah, Jesus Christ. This was situated vis-à-vis an evaluation of the theology of the Prosperity Gospel, portraying the false concept of “faith”. Towards the end of the thesis the perspective of the development of missiology was explained up to the contemporary point and an oversight of the concept of mission of the past century was outlined: It became clear that ecclesiology did not precede missiology, but rather, missiology precedes ecclesiology, because a community of Christians did not first create a church and then developed its mission; a community of Christians participated in God’s mission and thus constituted a church, according to the New Testament. This placed the preaching of the blessings of the gospel and the functioning of God’s mission in true perspective. As poverty is a vital concept regarding the preaching of the Prosperity Gospel the plight of the poor in all its shocking depths were exposed as a problem and a mission task for all the churches of Christ - approximately 15 million people in South Africa live in dire poverty without any hope of alleviation, and 1 billion people in the world live under the poverty datum line. This is a wake-up call for the church of Christ, existing for God’s mission, to face this challenge of mission to the poor. The research closed with a summary of the mission task to the poor. The dissertation concluded with a delineation of possible further topics in this field to be studied.