yikes, "Roman Catholic Bishops Galore Sign on to Pro-LGBT Statement!"

Thanks to you and ZachT for that explanation, because I had not made the connection.

That is a very good and interesting observation.

How can you be sure of this? Have you secretly been lurking in some place where the prosperity gospel is taught?
Actually, I'm pretty sure they hit this truth pretty thoroughly. The place I once attended talked very much about generosity and giving. They did, however, strongly advocate coupling one's giving with evangelism wherever practical; for example, including Gospel tracts in the boxes of food being handed out, or saying "God loves you" or offering to pray with a beggar when handing him money. I still think that's a good idea.

Ignorance went to seed and sprouted a crop. US data has shown that higher taxes coupled with more programs for the poor does little to alleviate poverty, partly because the tax increases simultaneously harm the economy and partly because those who are incentivized to sit at home (not work) and collect benefits are more apt to find sinful ways to alleviate ennui (take drugs, sell drugs, etc) and to increase benefits (more out-of-wedlock children = fatter monthly check). Since the rollout of LBJ's Great Society initiative in the 1960s we have seen tremendous increases in promiscuity, single-parent homes, children growing up without a father figure who wind up committing crimes and doing time, and other social ills.

By the way, there is nothing horrible about being at or below the so-called 'poverty level.' It's an arbitrary line in the sand. People with low earnings can still be happy, well-adjusted, and (most importantly) solid Christians. They can be content, just as Paul said he had learned to be content in whatever situation he found himself in. Homelessness is much more serious than 'poverty' per se. Homelessness, however, can be caused by many factors besides mere lack of money: chronic drug use, alcoholism, and mental illness bear more heavily on the homeless situation than mere lack of money (if you give these people money they will blow it on all the wrong things and be no better off). This is where the local Christian mission for the homeless must step in, and we would do well to support our local missions. Raising taxes to fund more bureaucracy is not the answer.

Now let's talk about the "prosperity gospel." The root concept behind the so-called "prosperity gospel" is that God loves His children and, having been called 'the Lord our provider' in the Bible, He will provide for them. "Give and it shall be given unto you," and "ask and it shall be given unto you," with the caveat that one should not "ask amiss" to spend on one's own pleasures. It goes deeper into the word of God than that, but there's an overview for you. Does that teaching sound evil somehow?

John's wish to Gaius was that he would prosper and be in health (3 John 1:2 KJV). If anyone believes that it is God's will for us to not prosper, then that person is in disobedience to God if he has not sold every bit of his property and given the proceeds away to the poor. Oh wait, giving them money prospers them, and that would be evil! Hmmm!

The "prosperity gospel" is not so much a problem as is the "power of faith" gospel. Some of the same groups teach both, and the latter makes the former look worse by association. "Power of faith gospel" (my name for it) teaches that, since God responds favorably to a person's faith (sincere belief and trust) in Him as provider, healer, etc., a person may stir up his faith (grow his faith) by his own efforts to a point where his faith is strong enough to, essentially, make what he's "believing for" come to pass. This teaching is quite a deep rabbit hole, and one that all Christians should avoid scurrying into. Those folks adamantly say it's not "name it and claim it," but in effect it might as well be. Although genuine faith does grow with the hearing of Bible truth (that much is correct), God is the one who gives this increase of faith. Man can't 'talk himself into' having stronger faith. We should always be listening to the Holy Spirit to discern what He wants for our lives, and not trying to 'believe' in our own strength for something that may or (more likely) may not be God's will for us.

To sum this up, we should always strive to have a society in which God, not government, is perceived as the ultimate provider.

 

A well thought through and balancing reply. Yes of course God wants us to prosper, just not at other's expense.
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I think for me the problem with the Prosperity Gospel is the assertion that the accumulation of great wealth is evidence of divine approval and God's blessing. I recall being shown around a town by a Deacon in his Lotus Elan and being shown the houses he had bought. I asked how he had managed this as a Deacon did not get a significant stipend. He assured me that 'God blesses his own'. Months later I saw a newspaper report that suggested he had been blessing himself and was off for a long holiday in less blessed surroundings.

I think the evidence of scripture is that God does not forget the poor and neither should we.

There is the story told (and I can't find it at the moment) of Thomas (apostle to India) being given a great deal of money to build an impressive temple for God, however Thomas distributed the money to the poor, and when asked about the temple was told that it had been built in the next world where moth and rust did not corrode. I am sure the story is entirely apocryphal, however it does have a grain of resonance with the Gospel as I would understand it.

 

I'll synthesise this with the earlier comments that God may want us all to prosper, but not necessarily financially. Certainly some of the time, but there are many other ways to prosper. If God wants us all to prosper financially then those that are destitute for decades must be denying God's gifts. But the opposite could be true. A Franciscan would argue that by living a life of poverty you can better receive God's gifts.

As Jesus said, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." - Matt 19.24. God has no overpopulation problem in His kingdom, and so has no incentive to bless us all with lucrative wealth. He chooses many ways to help us prosper, it's no dishonour to be poor.

 

I've often thought that the New Testament hostility towards "the rich" isn't so much a function of wealth as it is of idolatry. I think the clear implication of Christ's admonition to the rich young man in Matt 19 is that the young man is not, in fact, keeping all of God's commandments -- he has created an idol of his wealth and worships that in place of God.* The so-called "prosperity Gospel" of the type preached by Joel Osteen and Benny Hinn has almost nothing to do with the actual Gospel as preached (and lived!) by Jesus Christ.

Blessed are those who are poor in spirit, Christ says in the Beatitudes. Christ is making the point that we should adopt a character of humility and giving; of casting off pridefulness. "Poor", in this sense, is used as the opposite of "proud" or "arrogant". The Bible generally, and the New Testament specifically, is not against the notion of personal property or accruing wealth (in fact God rewards the faithful in many instances with material abundance). But the point is that wealth is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We must be good stewards of the earth we are given dominion over, and we must put forth our best effort in our work so that our wage is earned honestly. An honest man may prosper by the grace of God, but only may; many are the devout men who don't have two coins to clink together in their pockets.

Where rich people run into trouble is when the lifestyle afforded by wealth becomes the reason for wealth. Christ teaches that we should store up treasures in Heaven, not on earth. We give alms to the poor not solely because Christ says we have to, but because we understand that all physical things are transitory -- we cannot hold onto anything forever. Metal rusts, wood rots, even stone wears away and crumbles. No work made by man will last. It will all fall to dust, as will man himself in due time. I don't think that men like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates really understand this; all their wealth won't buy them a single minute of extra life. All the mansions, yachts, cars, private planes, expensive clothes, and tropical island hideaways are millstones in the final tally (the chain we forged in life, as Marley's ghost famously groans).

Christ preaches abundance, but abundance through the love and fellowship Christians have for each other. Christ's teaching in Luke 12:15-31 is an extended discourse on exactly this point. God wants us to have enough, but "enough" doesn't mean the same thing to God as it does to fallen human beings. Covetousness is one of the very worst sins because it anchors us to the (temporary and corrupted) world rather than the eternal life through Jesus Christ. God may grant us material wealth, but if he does so, he does so according to his own purposes and to his own plan, not due to any merit of our own.

One of the worst mistakes the American Evangelical churches made was allowing this "prosperity follows faith" nonsense to take root in their theology. It's also one of our very worst exports to other Christian churches in the world.

*Tim Keller often gets on my nerves, but he wrote a decent treatment of this idea in his book Counterfeit Gods.

 

I concur that a significant issue with the wealthy is the idolatry of money, especially when we're talking about things like prosperity theology. They replace God with money. Wealth and being faithful to the pursuit of wealth becomes their mission in life, not God and being faithful to God's commandments. This is true even for regular church goers. I also concur that there is a consistent warning against idolatry in the New Testament.

However, I think the specific passage in Matthew (Matt 19.16-30) is not really about idolatry, I think if there was a commandment the rich man was breaching Jesus would say so. I haven't read Tim Keller's view, but I read it as a tale about our attachment to the material, and a hardness and selfishness that comes with the addiction to the comforts of wealth. I read it as a warning about how hard it is to be good when you have money tempting you to be selfish. It's not clear that the rich man idolises his money, and in fact I think his response of grief indicates the rich man does not idolise wealth. He doesn't dismiss Jesus, or belittle his teaching as one who worships money might - someone whose God is gold is probably more resistant to such a teaching. Rather, he appears to understand and recognise what Jesus has said is true, but he can't bring himself to follow the command. He has become addicted and dependant on the benefits his wealth entitles him to. He can't bring himself to give everything he owns to the poor because he owns too much.

When Jesus says it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven he is not saying it's impossible (as it is for an idolator). When your wealth entitles you to only a small increase in your quality of living it's easier to give an appropriate amount to charity. When your wealth entitles you to extravagant luxury, and you come to the realisation it is your Christian duty to give your extreme surplus to the less fortunate that is much, much harder because the fall is relatively so much greater. A middle class person can more easily give 10% of their income per year to charity, than a billionaire can give 95% of their wealth away and enter into a middle class lifestyle without mega-yachts and multiple holiday homes and a private jet and gold flakes on your food. But that is your duty - it is obscene to hoard so much when you could be doing so much good. To acknowledge that by itself is extremely difficult, to act on it is even harder.

Not to get too meta, but I also don't think this would have been the best parable to caution against the idolatry of money, because it might mislead us into only being cautious when we're rich. The poor might be less likely to worship money, but it's still entirely possible for someone with nothing to also idolise wealth as much as a billionaire might - an example being salespeople living out of their cars worshipping conmen like Jordan Belfort, blindly pursuing money and remaining miserable their entire lives no matter how successful they become, while God sleeps out in the back of the car suffering with them.

 

But which of us would give everything we own to the poor? I suspect not one of us. Does this mean that ever one of us owns too much?

I treasure and thank God for the roof over my head that doesn't leak, the HVAC, the hot showers, the appliances for cooking and storing food, and the full pantry. I am very addicted to these luxuries. Is it too much? I know there are many who lack these things. Yet I am not willing to give them up for the sake of others.

I think the rich man in the Gospel was in a special situation. He was trying to self-justify and make himself feel good about how wonderful and generous he was, and Jesus popped his balloon. The rich man had weaknesses like everyone else.

I spent some years in one of those megachurches, of the type that's being referred to. They taught that being rich was "having enough, and some left over." Yes, some congregants could be greedy and therefore interpret the teachings on "give and it shall be given unto you" as meaning, "give to get more," but that wasn't the message being preached. They also taught, "you receive not because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures," but some folks obviously could tune out the parts they didn't want to hear.

There are some preachers who are worse, who don't teach a balanced message on this subject. I think I've seen a couple of them on TV at times, pushing for big donations and promising a big return from God (as if that preacher had custody of God's checkbook). That type certainly gives Christianity a bad name. If you ever hear one of them cite Malachi 3 and say that if you give, God must give back to you, keep the wallet in the pocket and stop listening to that guy.

 

I don't know the precise answer to that question. I think if you do give it all up, including the hot showers and the fridge, so you can live a life exclusively for others I think that is good, but surely cannot be necessary. I certainly don't do that, although I admire those who do. We need to determine ourselves at what point our wealth becomes too much. And I think for each specific person that number is different - some people have reasons for concentrating their possessions, others have no need and so are just greedy. I think it is most easily determined by people on the outside by looking at the amount where our obscene surplus wealth is visibly harming others.

To loop back to your hot showers, I can't easily see how you giving up heated water is going to make a meaningful difference to the plight of the genuinely impoverished, so it's probably okay to keep that luxury. And I imagine if it was eminently visible that you could save thousands of people a year from disease or starvation by doing so, you would not find it a challenge to give it up - so your addiction is probably not particularly severe. Warm showers are nice, but I can't imagine you find them so intoxicating that you'd accept several people dying every day so you can have one. The reason why I would find it hard to give up hot showers if asked is because the couple of AU cents I spend on two hot showers a day cannot have a significant impact - even if everyone in my church gave up their hot water and we all pooled our resources together, we still wouldn't be able to achieve much with it, perhaps buying a single box of tea bags for a shelter, in exchange for a year of parish-wide sacrifice.

But, that being said, although it's hard to determine where the line is there's plenty of visible examples of well beyond the line. In my country our wealthiest billionaire took home $2.17Bn last year. If she was to give just 10% of that to charitable endeavours she could save lives. $217 million can do a whole lot. Her challenge is not giving up the shower, it's giving up the new private jet when she already owns 2 others. But she gives away almost nothing - and all of her tax deductions for charity are for self-interested purposes, such as donations to political parties (and she donates to all of them, so there's not even the redeeming quality of a commitment to a grander political agenda) or the neo-liberal think-tank that opposes a mining tax, the "Institute of Public Affairs". She makes public statements that giving to the homeless is keeping useless people alive. What she does spend her money on is ads arguing Australians should accept a pay cut to $2 an hour to compete with workers in Africa, and suing her children so she can seize their trust fund money (left to them by her father, which is where she got all of her wealth from). I have no doubt her concentration of wealth is immoral, that she owns too much, and her bank account is corrupting her into a worse person - she sees people starving she could feed, but decides to buy another supercar, or just sits on it so she can inflate her ego by being number one on the Forbes list. That's a genuine addiction, very much harder to escape than your attachment to your cooking appliances.

To tie this back in with Matthew, I can on some level sympathise with her plight. If she was self-aware like the rich man, and for the record I don't think she is, I can appreciate how challenging it would be to donate so much of her wealth to return to an ethical level. For me to be satisfied, she would have to give away almost all of it, dropping her down to at least millionaire status, which would still leave her far better off than almost everyone else on the planet, but would be a monumental drop in her current levels of influence and entitlement. It's easy for me to give what people expect me to give, because it's not everything I have. It's much harder for a rich person to do so, and therefore much harder for them to enter the kingdom of God.