The prosperity gospel is, in many ways, at the center of the young reformed movement’s bullseye. And for good reason; it’s deceitful and deadly. At the heart of the message is the notion that God provides material prosperity for those He favors – those who have true faith and exhibit authentic holiness will be granted physical health and financial abundance. This erroneous teaching magnifies the idols of self-indulgence, consumerism and materialism and turns Jesus into an idol-giver, not a life-giver. The aim of prosperity theology, in the end, is not God’s glory magnified but man’s greed pacified. It’s a self-righteous brokering of goods and services with God – claiming our goodness before God obligates Him to serve us well. It’s saying to God, “Look what I’ve done for you, now you have to do x, y and z for me.”
For obvious reasons the young, reformed evangelical movement sees prosperity theology as its arch nemesis. Clearly, God did not send Jesus to die a brutal death on our behalf so that we could have our Lamborghini, private jet and trust fund. Any teaching that claims otherwise is contrary to the true Gospel and therefore dangerously evil.
But is our abhorrence of the prosperity gospel distracting us from what really is the most pressing and imminent threat?
Does your average church-going, Bible-believing, middle-class, suburbia-bred Christian really believe God wants to give them a million dollars for being good? In my opinion, no. For the most part we see the crazies on late night “christian” TV stations teaching prosperity theology and are quick to write them off as borderline entertaining, but inherently wrong.
We don’t want yachts and 401ks from God. That’s flagrantly self-righteous and dangerous and quite frankly, most of us don’t operate there. We don’t live in this type of overt, obligatory relationship with God, believing “I’ve done for Him so He now has to do for me.” That’s simply not where most of us are.
Most of us operate in a much more subtle, secretive, hidden and in the end dangerous realm. It’s not the belief that if we play our cards right with God then He will prosper us materially, but rather the hope that if we play our cards right then He’ll simply leave us alone. It’s the hidden hope that He’ll never call us to do that which requires much of us, He’ll never stretch us outside of our safe, comfortable and relatively struggle-free existence and He’ll always allows us to skim by with being good people with good marriages who regularly attend good churches and try to raise good kids.
We might praise ourselves for seeing the prosperity gospel for the self-righteous, God-obligating trickery that it is. What we fail to see, however, is that our play-our-cards-right-so-that-God-will-leave-us-alone theology is just as much, if not more self-righteous, and operates under the same presumptions that full blown prosperity theology does.
This thinking ultimately says to God, “I’m doing the church thing, the bible study thing and the good marriage thing, and all is going well, so please don’t burst my bubble. Don’t call me to come alongside of orphans and widows, don’t call me to rally around the global clean water crisis, don’t call me to start a non-profit that serves the needs of young pregnant girls in East Africa, don’t call me to start giving sacrificially to the ministries of my church and don’t call me to walk next door and meet my neighbor. That’s too much, God. It’s outside the jurisdiction of my bubble, so get someone else to do it.”
This is where most of us operate. It’s more secret, more subtle and much more hidden, but just as much dangerous, if not more.
While the baseline evil of prosperity theology is dangerously overt, I sense it is not mainstream evangelicalism’s most pressing threat. Rather, it is the hidden hope that God will leave us alone that causes most of us to perpetually exist in an imprisoning bubble of fear and insecurity – that maybe one day God will radically intervene, and the bubble we’ve worked so hard to create will be no more.
Young, reformed evangelicals, let’s shoot some arrows at that bullseye.
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