The gospel and the prosperity gospel

Joel Osteen is a controversial figure in contemporary Christianity. On the one hand, he is the pastor of the largest megachurch in the United States. He has written five books that occupied the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list. His first book, Your Best Life Now, sold more than 4 million copies, and millions of people tune in from all over the world to hear his sermons online. Osteen is also one of the most hotly criticized pastors in America. His core message, repeated in each of his books, is that God is a loving father who wants to bestow good gifts – including wealth – on God’s children, provided they keep an expectant attitude. This message of financial prosperity, coupled with Osteen’s reluctance to discuss sin, the incarnation, the crucifixion and other core Christian teachings, has made him the target of severe criticism from pastors, theologians and commentators. They accuse him of peddling a saccharine self-help message lightly sprinkled with Christian language but ultimately hollow and deceptive, more focused on worldly success than divine salvation. In many seminaries and churches, Osteen is seen as at best a punchline and at worst a dangerous false teacher.

Which is why I was so surprised to hear his name mentioned through stifled tears last winter. At a Bible study, a recovering alcoholic shared with the room that he had not been to church since he was a kid, but hearing the sermons of Joel Osteen had given him hope and helped him rediscover God when he was in a dark place. This threw me for a loop. I had a hard time reconciling the Joel Osteen I had heard about, with his vacuous prosperity-driven theology, with the Joel Osteen that had spoken transforming truth into this man’s life. Is it possible to appreciate the contribution Osteen’s work made to this man’s life while still maintaining a strongly critical position toward the very real problems in his teaching? That is the question which will occupy me for the rest of this article, and through wrestling with this question I will draw a few conclusions about the nature of theological criticism. My argument here is not so much about Osteen per se, but rather that by considering how to respond to Osteen’s message, we can better understand dialectic as a mode of doing theology.

To begin with, let’s contrast Osteen’s writings with the work of two theologians, Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard. We would be hard-pressed to find theologians with less in common with Osteen. Osteen’s nickname is ‘The Smiling Preacher’, and his books have titles like Good, Better, Blessed and Every Day a Friday. Kierkegaard’s nickname is ‘The Melancholy Dane’, and his books have titles like Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. Similarly, the best secondary source on Pascal’s theology is aptly titled God Owes Us Nothing, and Part 2 of that book is called ‘Pascal’s Sad Religion’. ¹ The differences go deeper than temperament, though, and by reading Osteen in contrast with these authors, the lacunae in his works become immediately evident.

For Pascal, human existence is wretched, and our plight is one of weakness and triviality made all the more pitiful by our inescapable sinfulness. Our only options are diversion, distracting ourselves through becoming immersed in ultimately pointless activities, or conversion, submitting ourselves to the demanding grace of God. Either we continue on in our wretchedness, or we undergo the painful task of forsaking every false source of happiness. Pascal reiterates that the cost of accepting divine grace is steep, that we are called upon to see through and sacrifice those things we hold dear in order to take hold of God’s gift of salvation. To aid us in this process, Pascal’s aphorisms in the Pensées and the Treatise on Grace remind us that there is nothing special about us, nothing that could merit divine attention, let alone divine grace. He encourages his readers to look up at the vastness of the stars and contemplate their own insignificance. Only by fully reckoning with our unworthiness can we appreciate God’s inexplicable goodness and drastically alter our lives accordingly. In Pascal’s theology, God is a perfect judge who, for reasons we can never understand, has condescended to have mercy on weak and distracted humans.

For Kierkegaard, like Pascal, our main problem is that we suffer from an illusion – the illusion that we are already Christians, or at least generally good enough people. What we need is to be confronted with our sinfulness and the emptiness of our convictions. Kierkegaard wrote that his task was to be like the prophet Nathan telling a story about a lamb, luring King David into indignation before saying, ‘You are that man!’ and compelling David to face his own wickedness. Kierkegaard makes his target the established, the comfortable and the self-confident, and through intricate spider webs of rhetoric he entangles and confronts his readers. For Kierkegaard as for Pascal, the cross of Christ is what scandalizes our imagination, always resisting our attempts to reconcile it to our cosy, self-deceived lifestyles.

When placed in contrast to these thinkers, we can see the lack of depth in Joel Osteen’s work. Osteen’s message of a benevolent God is too sanguine to bear the full weight of our cosmic alienation. His emphasis on success in our careers is too preoccupied with worldly diversions to deal with our existential situation. His gospel of self-esteem relies too heavily on fallen humanity that it trivializes divine grace. His reading of the Bible as a source of uplifting stories misses the radical challenge that inspired the martyrs to stand firm against the powers of the world. And while his self-help guru Christ may lead us to overcome negative emotions, he does nothing to overcome the power of death.

It would be easy to stop right here, heaping even more criticism on Osteen. It is a well-worn academic trope to use the memory of the blessed dead to condemn the currently popular. Teachers love to tell their students ‘Don’t read Hunger Games, read Jane Austen!’ This is all well and good, but I remain haunted by the testimony of that recovering alcoholic, and I do not think it would be right to tell him, ‘Don’t read Joel Osteen, read Pascal.’ He found something in Osteen’s message that he was not finding anywhere else in his life, and millions of others have had a similar experience. How can I call Osteen’s theology ridiculous or poisonous when his words bring hope to people, bringing them into deeper communion with God and the Church?

With this question in mind, let us turn to Osteen’s bestselling book, 2004’s Your Best Life Now. The argument of the book is that we limit God’s ability to bless us by imagining ourselves as unlikely or unworthy to receive blessings. We need to change our understanding of ourselves and our world, and then we will be primed to receive the good gifts God wants to bestow on us. One illustration Osteen gives is of a man on a transatlantic voyage on an ocean liner. He had saved up all his money to get the ticket, so for the two weeks he was on board he only ate the cheese and crackers he had packed beforehand. Someone noticed this and told him, much to his delight and surprise, that the meals were included with the price of the ticket. He no longer needed to scrape by on cheese and crackers, but could indulge in the delicious food that was prepared on board every day. This story summarizes Osteen’s theology. Most people go through life like that man, not receiving God’s blessings because they think they have to get by just on what they have. Osteen is like the other passenger, who tells them they can have what they had only dreamed of, and helps them out of what Osteen calls a ‘barely-get-by mentality’. ²

To call this a ‘theology’ may at first blush seem like a stretch, but Osteen draws on several biblical stories that follow this pattern. ‘The Bible is replete,’ he writes, ‘with examples of people who were in great need, but then the favor of God came on them in a new way, and their situations turned around.’ ³ He cites Gideon, David, Joshua and Caleb, Moses, Mephibosheth, and Joseph as instances where people trusted God to bless them and were rewarded with success. In addition to these stories, he quotes Scripture frequently, verses like, ‘Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart’ (Ps. 37.4) and ‘According to your faith let it be done to you’ (Matt. 9.29). Though one can object to Osteen’s exegesis, this story of ‘confident expectancy’ and divine blessing is one thread among many that run through the whole of Scripture. ⁴

What we can conclude from this is that Osteen’s theology is not so much wrong as it is radically incomplete. Admittedly, those two – wrong and incomplete – are often difficult to distinguish, and in practice the distinction usually emerges not within text but in our reactions to that text. I argue that we can read Osteen best if we read him as telling only one part of the story. We can acknowledge that his account matches up with aspects of the Joseph story, the Hannah story and the Esther story while remembering that it does not as neatly fit the narratives of Hosea, Jeremiah and Jesus. His message is one-sided and incomplete, perhaps dangerous in its incompleteness, but Osteen undeniably gets part of the good news of Christianity right. If we are to critique Osteen, especially if we are to respond to the theology that millions of people find so inspiring, we need first to identify and celebrate the partial truth in what he’s saying. Instead of saying, ‘That is not the gospel,’ our response should be, ‘Yes, that’s true, but there is so much more to the gospel.’

This sort of response, in which one affirms what is true in Osteen’s message, identifies in which ways that message is inadequate and then communicates what needs to be communicated to make it more complete, we can call dialectic. Dialectic, in this sense, communicates the truth that people in their specific situation need to hear. It is distinguished on the one hand from sophistry, which tries to convince people irrespective of the truth, and on the other hand from systematics, which tries to meet the ever-elusive goal of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This method of dialectic response is rooted in the conviction that no one ever has a perfect understanding of God, the world and themselves, so everyone always stands in need of further illumination. But we also never start from scratch in our understanding, so we need to hear the truth in a way that in some way builds upon, intersects with or contrasts with what we already know to be the case. The task of dialectical theologizing, in the sense in which I am using the term, is a task of deepening others’ understandings of God, the world and themselves not by trying to say everything at once but by saying the next thing they need to hear, in a way that they can hear it. Our attitude, upon encountering an incomplete theology, should be like that of Paul in Acts 19 when he met Ephesians who knew only the baptism of John: ‘Yes, but there’s more.’

Pascal and Kierkegaard both articulate this dialectical approach in their philosophical works. Pascal theorizes that only by successively juxtaposing the conclusions of contrasting philosophies can one lead another person to the truth. To Sceptics who hold a pessimistic view of humanity, he offers the conclusions of Stoics, who hold a more elevated view of humanity, and vice versa. To those who hold one partial view of the world, he presents another partial view of the world, and another and so on. The point here is not to show people that they are wrong, but to show that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. This method of dialectically presenting contrasting positions broadens the horizons of the interlocutor and simultaneously humbles them and encourages them to seek deeper truth. Through the interaction of incomplete truths, we are led into the presence of the One who is absolute Truth. Kierkegaard also recognizes that we only ever have partial truth, and his various pseudonyms are attempts to represent various aspects of it. Through using this staircase of contrasting voices, Kierkegaard brings his readers not so much to a conclusion as to awareness, and hopefully, to repentance. But this is thoroughly dialectic, not systematic, and addressed to people in particular situations with the assumptions and concerns those people have. Kierkegaard writes, ‘If one is to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find where he is and start there.’ ⁵

One lesson we can take from Kierkegaard’s reflections on dialectic is that what he calls ‘direct attack’ is often ineffective as a rhetorical posture. The straightforward polemic tends ironically to reinforce people’s existing beliefs rather than inviting them to reconsider. For an example, let’s turn to Osteen and his innumerable critics. The core of Osteen’s message is rooted in an idea that negative thinking holds people back from accepting divine gifts. To respond to this message with more negative thinking is not to counteract this narrative, but to play directly into it. Osteen, talking about his father whose church and mission he inherited, writes, ‘He saw more clearly that God was a good God, a heavenly Father, rather than a demanding, impossible-to-please judge.’ ⁶ If I were to preach a gospel of judgement to someone who found Osteen’s theology compelling, I would simply be embodying a familiar voice they already know how to deal with. People are drawn to Osteen’s teachings because they are weary of voices telling them they are worthless and deserve nothing. If a critic re-presents this sort of hard-nosed realistic theology, it is liable to drive them further into the prosperity gospel. It will also tend to frustrate the critic, who will often reassert their message in even more forceful language. But this is like trying to open a lock, realizing one is using the wrong key, and then twisting it even harder. If Kierkegaard is right, an indirect, dialectic approach is more likely to bring the interlocutor out of their illusions and into a deeper understanding of the truth. This approach enables us to work with the grain of their concerns and presuppositions, even if we reject their conclusions.

Dialectic carries with it the idea that truth does not come to us as a monolith we have to accept, like swallowing a billiard ball, but comes to us through the ongoing revealing of parts of the truth, like unfolding a map – first this way, then that way, then this way and so on. This is a method that is not only applicable to theological criticism, but to all theological writing. To illustrate this, I will have to nuance the dichotomy with which I began this article. Pascal and Kierkegaard are not mere defenders of a pessimistic theological anthropology. They each try in their writings to present multiple partial versions of the truth, each building on and correcting the blind spots and pitfalls of the one before it. Thus, though they were on the whole melancholy, they each incorporated images of a benevolent God and a blessed humanity, images not too unlike those found in Osteen. In addition to The Concept of Dread, Kierkegaard also wrote what he called ‘upbuilding discourses’. And after a chapter titled ‘Wretchedness’, Pascal compiled a chapter titled ‘Greatness’. These are not instances of self-contradiction, but of antiphony, of telling people what they need to hear, then telling people what they need to hear next and so on. William Blake said, ‘Without contraries is no progression.’ ⁷ These authors write in such a way as to help people progress in their understanding of God, the world and themselves through a dialectical interplay of contrary, but not ultimately contradictory, themes.

Indeed, Osteen too has a subtle dialectic in his book. It is by no means the literary or theological achievement of Pascal or Kierkegaard, but there is more to the book than meets the eye. As you proceed through Your Best Life Now, an unfolding happens. The emphasis on prosperity so prevalent in the first half of the book starts to fade into the background in the second half of the book. As the book goes on, we hear fewer stories of people getting promotions and more exhortations to act compassionately, persevere through adversity and even love your enemies. Osteen reckons more fully with the reality of death and the need for patience in times of trial. Towards the end of the book, Osteen writes, ‘Friend, the closest thing to the heart of our God is helping hurting people.’ ⁸ This does not sound like the prosperity gospel we find in the first few chapters. Perhaps the note about wealth is only the first note in a longer tune that Osteen is playing, drawing people in to a theological mystery that they would not otherwise have been able to understand or appreciate.

That brings me to a bit of self-reflection. The dialectical method necessarily involves vulnerably seeking to understand what people hold to be true and why. It is a practice of speaking rooted in listening. It involves not simply a commitment to change what we say in our attempts to help the other person see new possibilities, but also an openness to change what we think in the process. Thus any pretensions to be more advanced, to have a more complete understanding, even the language of ‘us’ and ‘them’ I have used in this article, is ultimately open for revision in the dialectical progression of contrasting voices. I hope in some small way the thinking I have had to do to grapple with that man’s testimony last winter is my way of hearing his voice speak the next thing that I need to hear. My own incomplete theology is being confronted with Osteen’s partial account, inviting me into a deeper understanding of the truth.

Thus the dialectical method, in which what is already present is not effaced, but rather built upon and corrected, is not simply a rhetorical tool. It reflects the way we each come to a deeper understanding of the things of God. The spiritual life is a constant interplay of ongoing reorientations. Our prior understanding is not replaced by a completely new one, but is expanded and chastened in unpredicted ways, as we hear ‘the next thing’ and ‘the next thing after that’. The polyphony of Scripture testifies to this too – we become comfortable with Paul’s incomplete theology, and then James says the next thing; we become comfortable with Deuteronomy, and then Ecclesiastes says the next thing. If this is how we learn, then it should inform the way we teach – not solely through direct attack or wholesale rejection, but through a vulnerable, partial response that develops what people already believe and value. I cannot promise this mode of theologizing will always persuade people, but I can promise that if we take the time to discover the part of the gospel that people need to hear, we will ourselves be transformed by the process, encountering facets of God’s goodness we never knew about before.