Prosperity and Abundance

As I keep my ear to the ground and listen to the chatter of global Christianity over the 'net, what continues to strike me is the deep and abiding success of the Prosperity Gospel.  These are the big boys and girls, whose huge sprawling campuses stretch to the horizon like the Disneyworld parking lot.  They're a festival of Jesus bling, selling books by the millions and powerfully defining the AmeriChrist, Inc. brand.  Heck, they're taking it global.

A range of things bug me about that approach to Christianity.  I'm not a fan of shine and sparkle and production value, for one thing.  I don't trust it.  Just because a thing is elegantly conceived, nattily dressed, inspires passions, and is perfectly choreographed doesn't mean it's good.  I prefer simple.

But primary among my beefs with Prosperity Christianity is that it totally misunderstands the teachings of Jesus.  Oh, you can shovel a verse or two out there, and make the claim.  But you can do that for anything.  Slavery?  Spanking?  Homophobia?  That the leader of your insane cult is herself God?  Flinging yourself from a tower to prove God loves you?

Individual scriptures can be bent and twisted together to do that.   But they're no more the real thing than a balloon dog.

If you honor the narrative of the Bible, and the whole thrust of what Jesus taught, it just doesn't ever translate into a pressing desire for material prosperity.  Not ever.

But wait, folks will say.  God doesn't want us to starve and struggle.  And God doesn't want us to hold back.  Live abundantly!  Aren't we supposed to live abundantly?

Sure, I'd say.  Absolutely.  I'm fine with our daily bread.  And I'm also down with abundance.

But it feels as if there's a fundamental difference between prosperity and abundance.

In the Gospels, the word "prosper" isn't used.  There's that.  It just isn't.  In the Epistles, or rather, in Acts, it's used once.  Just. Once.   And there, it's used to describe a former state of being.

Abundance does surface, but when it does, it is used one of two ways.  1) As a warning against having too many material possessions.   And 2) to indicate/evoke an overflowing cornucopia of...grace.

Because a hunger to do well materially...meaning, the desire to prosper, to have bucketloads of goodies for oneself...isn't abundant.  It's grasping.  It's self-oriented.  It's the yearning for power.  It is, in some ways, the very antithesis of the teachings of Jesus.

It is also not abundance.  Abundance is outwardly oriented.  It is radically giving.  It is interested in the joy, freedom, and well being of the other.  It pours out.

In that, the desire to be abundant arises from our connectedness to God, whose abundant, radiant work in creation is deeply giving, and radically generous.

Faith, Prosperity, and Probability

Before wandering into some reading of Rob Bell, I'm taking a detour.

My recent completion of statistician Nate Silver's book clued me in to the existence of Thomas Bayes, an 18th century Presbyterian pastor/theologian/ mathematician/ wakeboarder.  Well, the wakeboarding thing is admittedly speculative, but we know so little about Bayes.  He is largely lost to history, having left us only two written works.  Even this picture of him isn't certain.  It might be him.  It might not.   It is also possible that he looked like this.  We're just not sure.  That this image is possibly him is sort of ironic.  Why?

One of those works gave the world Bayes Theorem, the probabilistic equation that has become the touchstone for all modern predictive statistics.   Bayes Theorem helps us account for the inherent uncertainty in all prediction.  I'm not so much interested in that one, not because it's not cool, but because it's not what floats my boat.

What I've found fascinating in doing more research on Bayes is that his work on probability appears to have arisen from a monograph on the sovereignty of God.   Back when I was a lad, obscure 18th Century monographs used to be hard to find, but Lord Bless The Internet, this is now some seriously public domain stuff.  So I went out and found a free eBook version and downloaded it to my Kindle.

It's got a typically catchy 18th century title:  Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures.

Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?   Not quite sure that'd pass muster at Harper Collins these days.  "You know, Tom, we've been thinking about your title.  We need something that pops.  Our marketing guys have come up with this one, you'll love it, seriously, 'God is Cool: Seven Reasons He Wants You To be Happy.'  Oh, and that picture?  Do you have something better?"

The work itself is remarkably dense, a gleeful thicket of words piled one on top of the other.  We were wired differently in the 18th century.  With some adaptation, you can get into it.  As I've begun reading it, I can already feel how Bayes thought theologically.  Honestly?  I like the guy.

One of the questions he is clearly asking himself is data related.  Assuming we want to genuinely answer the question, what metrics would be reliable measures of Divine Benevolence?   Meaning, what would tell us that God is loving and good?

What's striking is the thing he immediately dismisses:  Material blessings.  As he reasons through it, he asks himself whether the giving of rewards is an inherent sign of goodness.

The answer: No.  No it isn't.

As Bayes sees it, rewards can be given by the manipulative to curry favor, or by a tyrant to cement their power.   They are not, in and of themselves, a reliable data point informing our assessment of another being's love or compassion.   So as he develops his argument for the probability that God is good, he rejects material blessings almost outright.

Fascinating.   Perhaps someone should tell Joel Osteen.

Rich Foolish Churches

The sermon "remnant" for this week came as I preached out of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is laying into the notion that material wealth means jack diddly squat to the essential core of his message about the Kingdom of God. Having stuff and desiring material success and seeking wealth is utterly alien to the purpose of the Gospel.

This was a bit of a tough message for my community, which is mostly comprised of youngish Asians whose spiritual upbringing was in churches that preached the Korean variant of the "health and wealth gospel." Jesus wants you in that test prep course! How else will you ever become a doctor and/or a lawyer?

It was tough for me, too. This was not because I buy into the magickal mystery tour of the thriving prosperity movement.

It was, instead, because in reading Luke 12, I encountered two verses that are commonly used by pastors in their stewardship sermons. The first is Luke 12:21, where the rich fool is berated for not being "rich towards God." This is commonly presented as a fundraising scripture. Be "rich" in your giving, or ooooooh are you like this idiot! The second is Luke 12:34, that favorite old chestnut of the stewardship sermon series, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." If you really really really loved the church the way you're supposed to, then you'd have upped your pledge for this year. Show me the treasure!

I may even have used that last one myself at some point.

But the purpose of Christ's teachings in Luke 12 has nothing to do with material wealth, other than to reject it as meaningless and the pursuit of it as irrelevant to the Gospel. As I prepared my sermon, which was much more focused on the individual and the personal implications of this, it struck me that Christ's rejection of material attainment applied just as pointedly to collectives.

Meaning, perhaps it shouldn't just define churchgoers. Perhaps it should apply to churches as well. The energies we pour into the growth of our buildings and our institutions seems really no more relevant to the Gospel than the profitable machinations of that wealthy Judean.

It's not an evil thing, necessarily. For every church whose spiritual life is all about new carpets and building additions, there's a church that is using its building wisely. It's just neither here nor there when it comes to what matters.

I have to remember to forget this come stewardship season.

Buicks Are Part of Chairman Christ's New Five Year Plan

This morning over coffee, I was reading a review of a new book entitled God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. The review was written by a good sort, the estimable Diana Butler Bass, and it articulated what she saw as the core theme of the book: the mesh between religious liberty and progress.

It's a valid connection, and a hopeful theme in human society, but one particular quote jumped out at me as a wee bit off. Maybe I'm just oversensitive, so let me share the quote in question:

The book opens with an American evangelical-style Bible study in Shanghai, where the pastor proclaims: "In Europe the church is old. Here it is modern. Religion is a sign of higher ideals and progress. Spiritual wealth and material wealth go together. That is why we will win." These words echo the American view that economic prosperity meshes with religious freedom. This vignette supports the book's main point: that religion and modernity are not at odds, that, in the American mode, they can function together to create prosperity and individual freedom.

While I may be projecting a bit, I don't think what the Chinese evangelist is saying and what the book is arguing are the same thing. When an evangelical says: "Spiritual wealth and material wealth go together," they generally don't mean "religious liberty and material wealth go together." In fact, they pretty much never mean that.

They mean that being spiritual gets you material blessings. Period. You should be spiritual, because the 2010 Buick Lacrosse is a really fine looking car and Jesus can get it for you if you ask real nice. And given the choice between a brand new Buick and religious freedom for Muslims, I'm not quite sure how many Chinese evangelicals would choose door number two.

I agree that religious liberty is absolutely necessary, and a sign of a culture in which progress is possible. But religious liberty and evangelical Christianity worldwide have a somewhat interesting relationship. On the one hand, Christians value the freedom to worship and to share the Gospel. But when you believe that every other faith is a one way ticket to eternal damnation, your motivation level to support the rights of other faiths has to be somewhat impacted.

As the global marketplace becomes a stronger force, the danger for the integrity of Christianity is that it will become increasingly co-opted into the values and norms of the marketplace. The Gospel of Prosperity and the Word Faith movement are powerful, powerful forces in the developing world. The spread of a consumerist "Christianity" in which individual material prosperity is the goal is a real, and I would argue spiritually dangerous, eventuality.