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A hit out at prosperity doctrine

Christina takes aim at the prosperity doctrine and gets narky. For good reason too, I reckon.

Perhaps we should get more narky about this, more of the time.

“Now I know that prosperity doctrine is alive and well in west, and financial success appears to metered out by God’s grand ATM in the sky where your deposits and a good measure of faith increase your withdrawals, but since when did our physical attributes get lumped in this fantasy land of theology? Does this mean that as a Christian who does not espouse prosperity doctrine, I am destined to be miserable, poor, broke, and now ugly? Maybe because I can’t afford liposuction, a personal trainer / dietician and a nose job…. Sign up for Jesus, so you too can be beautiful, happy and rich? Whatever happened to taking up your cross and following Jesus? Metaphoric of course. The first is certainly a more appealing advertising slogan, but it just doesn’t match up the Jesus I read about in the gospels, the Jesus I have dedicated my life to following and serving as best I can.”

Read more here and make sure you bookmark the blog it is a good one.

P.S I have updated your link details Christina - sorry for being slack!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 3:39 pm by phil and is filed under challenges for the church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “A hit out at prosperity doctrine”

  1. 1
    stu Says:
    September 22nd, 2006 at 5:06 pm

    i really wanted to send this blog post from one of my favourite 2nd Testament Scholars, Ben Witherington III, to someone but didn’t know who or how. But here’s an opportunity for a nutshell refute of prosperity gospel by a serious scholar:

    http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2006/09/just-in-time-god-wants-you-wealthy.html

    ta.

  2. 2
    christina Says:
    September 22nd, 2006 at 5:30 pm

    Thanks for updating the link Phil! I must confess, I got the tipoff for the post (the link for Time magazine) from Hamo’s blog - there has been a bit of discussion there too….

  3. 3
    Greg the explorer Says:
    September 26th, 2006 at 10:18 am

    I posted te following over at SoulSojourn:

    Very thoughtful and inspired words - love the stuff from your comment posters as well.

    It was Social Justice Sunday this past Sunday (the only day of the year we Anglicans think about it!…joking); the theme was making indigineous poverty history.

    Jonothan Inkpin and Graemme Mundine (avaibale from the NCCA web site) produced a paper entitled The Lazarus Demand that explores the story of Lazarus and Jesus calling him out of the tomb and commanding his friends to unbind him in terms of indigineous poverty:

    ‘Unbind him, and let him go’ is a challenge made to all of us, and especially to those who have power and wealth: which, in the context of Indigenous Australia, means most non-Indigenous Australians. Use, and let go of your power, says God. It is not enough, says Jesus, for the Word of God to be proclaimed and for Lazarus to respond. The Lazarus Demand is not for an individual alone, but for the renewing of the whole community. It is not merely an initiative of divine compassion. It involves human action and human compassion. It calls for new relationships, involving rights, respect and reconciliation.

    A rethinking of our responsibilities as Christians with our money is definitiely in order. Ugliness is not what we look like to ourselves or to one another -but what we look like to God when in the words of St Ambrose: we who are rich come to church not to give to the poor, but to take from them