Position · 1974

Prosperity Gospel

The teaching that God wills financial prosperity and physical health for believers, and that these are received through faith, spoken confession and giving.

History

Roots

The prosperity gospel grew from three American streams that met in the twentieth century. The first was the healing revivalism of the late 1800s and the Pentecostal movement that followed the Azusa Street Revival (1906): if Christ’s death secured healing for the body, it was a short step to ask what else it secured. The second was New Thought, the “mind cure” philosophy of Phineas Quimby and his heirs, which taught that right thinking shapes material reality. The third was a broad American optimism about self-improvement and upward mobility.

The link between them is E. W. Kenyon (1867–1948), a Baptist-trained evangelist who attended Emerson College of Oratory in Boston in the 1890s, where he met New Thought ideas (summary, secondary). In books such as The Two Kinds of Faith and Jesus the Healer he taught that believers should confess what God’s word says about them, not what their senses report, and that the confession brings the reality. Kenyon himself denied that New Thought shaped him, and later Word of Faith teachers deny it too. D. R. McConnell’s A Different Gospel (Hendrickson, 1988) made the case that Kenyon’s system is New Thought in Christian dress, and that much of Kenneth Hagin’s teaching reproduces Kenyon’s, at points word for word.

Causes

The post-war healing revivals of the late 1940s and 1950s carried these ideas to a mass audience. Oral Roberts began preaching that God wanted to bless believers materially in 1947 and in the 1970s packaged it as “seed faith”: give to God first and expect a multiplied return (overview, secondary). Roberts’s The Miracle of Seed-Faith (1970) spread the idea through his television ministry.

Kenneth Hagin (1917–2003) gave the movement its teaching system. A Texas Baptist turned Pentecostal preacher, he drew on Kenyon’s books and on his own account of healing as a teenager to teach that faith is spoken: the believer says what God has promised and receives it (Mark 11:23–24). His founding of Rhema Bible Training Center near Tulsa in 1974, the date this note uses, gave Word of Faith a school; within twenty years it had trained more than 10,000 students (secondary, overview). His booklet How to Write Your Own Ticket with God (1979) reduced the method to four steps: say it, do it, receive it, tell it.

Influence

From Tulsa the teaching moved through the Charismatic renewal and Christian television. Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Frederick Price, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn and Paula White built large ministries on it; Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now (2004) carried a softer version into the mainstream. A Time cover story asked “Does God Want You to Be Rich?” (Jeff Chu and David Van Biema, 10 September 2006).

Its larger growth came outside the United States. Pew’s ten-country survey of Pentecostals found that in nine of the ten countries most respondents believed God grants material prosperity to believers with enough faith, and in all ten most expected health and healing on the same terms (Spirit and Power, 2006). Prosperity preaching now shapes many megachurches in West Africa, Brazil, Korea and the Philippines, often mixed with local ideas of blessing and spiritual power.

The movement also drew public scrutiny. In 2007 US Senator Chuck Grassley opened an inquiry into the finances of six televangelist ministries (Copeland, Dollar, Hinn, Eddie Long, Joyce Meyer and White). It closed in January 2011 without penalties, with only the Meyer and Hinn ministries cooperating fully (secondary, overview).

Key ideas and contributors

Prosperity is part of the atonement. Word of Faith teachers read Christ’s work as securing healing and wealth along with forgiveness. Christ “became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9), and he redeemed believers from “the curse of the law” so that “the blessing of Abraham” might come to them (Galatians 3:13–14). The curse is taken to include the poverty and sickness listed in Deuteronomy 28, and “with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5) to promise physical healing now. Compare the main models of the cross in Atonement.

God wills health and wealth. A favourite text is 3 John 2, the elder’s wish that his friend may “prosper” and “be in health.” Teachers read this as a statement of God’s will for every believer, so that poverty and sickness are signs of something gone wrong, not a calling to be accepted.

Faith is a force released by words. Following Kenyon and Hagin, believers “confess” God’s promises aloud and refuse to speak doubt or symptoms, since “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). Copeland taught that the universe runs on spiritual laws that faith sets in motion, so that anyone who works the law gets the result (secondary, overview).

Giving is sowing. Roberts’s seed-faith idea, built on texts such as Malachi 3:10 and the “hundredfold” return of Mark 10:29–30, holds that offerings to God, often to the preacher’s ministry, are seeds that return multiplied.

Softer and harder forms. Historian Kate Bowler, in Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford University Press, 2013), distinguishes a “hard” prosperity of explicit formulas and miracle money from a “soft” prosperity of positive thinking and personal flourishing, Osteen’s register. She traces the movement to Pentecostal healing, New Thought and an American gospel of pragmatism and upward mobility.

Key controversies

Is it the gospel at all? The sharpest critics say no. Gordon Fee, a Pentecostal New Testament scholar, called it a disease in The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels (1985), arguing that it reads its own culture’s values into texts torn from context. Hank Hanegraaff’s Christianity in Crisis (1993) went further and treated Word of Faith as heresy. Most Evangelical critics place it outside the historic faith on at least some points.

Pentecostal self-criticism. The objection came early from inside the movement that spread the teaching. The Assemblies of God adopted The Believer and Positive Confession in 1980, warning that positive confession treats faith as a technique, misreads its proof texts, and wrongly blames the sick for weak faith (cited by title; no verified online copy). Hagin himself, late in life, criticised excesses among his own followers in The Midas Touch (2000), published a year after he rebuked colleagues at a Tulsa meeting for twisting his message to support greed (CBN (secondary)).

Misused texts. Critics argue that “prosper” in 3 John 2 is a standard letter greeting, that Galatians 3 concerns justification and the Spirit, and that Jesus’ hundredfold promise in Mark 10 ends “with persecutions.” They set against the prosperity reading Paul’s warning against those who imagine “godliness is a means of gain” (1 Timothy 6:5–10), his contentment in want (Philippians 4:11–13), and his unremoved “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).

Suffering and the poor. The Lausanne Theology Working Group met in Akropong, Ghana, in 2008 and 2009 and issued a statement on the prosperity gospel (posted January 2010). It granted that God cares about material life, but rejected the idea that wealth measures spiritual health or that poverty and sickness always signal a curse or weak faith. It charged that the teaching blames the poor for their poverty while ignoring injustice and exploitation. The Lausanne movement’s Cape Town Commitment (2010) followed: “The widespread preaching and teaching of ‘prosperity gospel’ around the world raises significant concerns” (IIE.5). Critics also point to ministers who live in luxury on offerings from poor congregations.

Catholic criticism. In “The Prosperity Gospel: Dangerous and Different” (La Civiltà Cattolica, 18 July 2018), Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa called it a “different gospel,” as their Italian title puts it, in a widely reported critique from a journal reviewed by the Vatican (cited by title; link and fuller summary not verified). Their concern overlaps with Liberation Theology, which reads Scripture’s promises to the poor as a call to justice, not a reward for faith.

Defenders’ reply. Supporters argue that critics spiritualise biblical promises that were concrete, that the Old Testament treats material blessing as a sign of God’s favour (Deuteronomy 8:18), and that for people in poverty a message of hope, discipline, saving and aspiration does real good. The sociologist Peter Berger, for one, has argued that the movement’s this-worldly emphasis on thrift, hard work and family stability can lift people out of poverty within a relatively short time, whatever one makes of its theology (Sightings, University of Chicago Divinity School (secondary)).

What remains unresolved

Almost every Christian tradition agrees that God cares about bodies and bread, and that the Wealth and Blessing question cannot be answered by spiritualising every promise. The argument is over mechanism and expectation: whether health and wealth are guaranteed to faith now, or are gifts God gives or withholds, with the full promise kept for the age to come. The softer forms that dominate today blur the line, which is why the debate has moved from heresy charges toward questions of pastoral harm and accountability.