Pseudo-gospels

In most of the world churches are liable to be swamped by the so-called prosperity gospel, and in the richer parts of the world churches struggle to guard the gospel against metamorphosing into what we might call the therapeutic gospel. These two closely-related pseudo-gospels threaten to displace the authentic Christian and Biblical gospel.

The prosperity gospel, in its crudest form, is the message that God wants you to be rich, and if you trust him and ask him, he will make you rich.

What happens to the prosperity gospel when I already enjoy prosperity? It metamorphoses into the therapeutic gospel. In its simplest form, this false gospel says that if I feel empty and I come to Jesus, Jesus will fill me. The promise of objective goods (money, wife, husband, children) metamorphoses into the claiming of subjective benefits. I feel depressed, and Jesus promises to lift my spirits. I feel aimless, and Jesus commits himself to giving me purpose in life. I feel empty inside, and Jesus will fill me.

The therapeutic gospel is the gospel of self-fulfillment. It makes me, already healthy and wealthy, feel good.

- Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross, 2014.

The Prosperity Heresy of Positive Faith

It has two main and very different manifestations: 

(1) a kind of “New Age” positive thinking religion rooted in the nineteenth-century quasireligious movement called “New Thought,” 

 (2) a neo-Pentecostal, charismatic religion touted by television evangelists that revels in miracles. 

On the surface these two manifestations seem radically different, but below the surface they share much in common. For both, God is a kind of cosmic vending machine who must provide health and wealth to all who have “positive faith” expressed in words of faith—spoken affirmations or declarations that create reality through divine power. Both treat prayer as magic without realizing it. Both deny God’s sovereignty and put God and his power at human disposal. Both elevate health and wealth to the status of ultimate goods. Both claim to be Christian while distorting biblical, historical, classical, orthodox Christianity to the point that it is unrecognizable.
 
The “New Age” manifestation of this heresy is promoted by various “positive thinking” spiritual gurus influenced by the nineteenth-century movement known as New Thought, which will be described later. It is not Pentecostal or charismatic and often includes belief in reincarnation. Its god is not personal, transcendent, or holy but an impersonal power resident in every-thing. The human mind is able to tap into it through positive thinking and speaking. The neo-Pentecostal manifestation of this heresy is also influenced by nineteenth-century New Thought, but it is blended with twentieth-century Pentecostalism and charismatic spirituality and heavily influenced by the “divine healing” movement of nineteenth and twentieth-century Christian revivalism. It is closer to orthodox Christianity but takes it in a very different direction through its emphasis on God as guarantor of health and wealth.

- Roger E. Olson, Counterfeit Christianity: The Persistence of Errors in the Church, 2015.

Emotion Does Not Produce Faith

Faith for Tillich does involve passionate emotions; “but emotion does not produce faith.” Faith cannot be confused with emotional outbursts or feelings of rapture, though it can involve such things.
 
Faith for Tillich also includes a cognitive component, but only “as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender.” If one reduces faith to a cognitive act, faith would be confused with mere belief. It would lose its quality as a living reality.
 
Similarly, faith involves the will, but “faith is not a creation of the will.” To reduce faith to an act of the will is to confuse it with a mere act of obedience to a moral imperative.
 

- Paul Tillich and Pentecostal Theology: Spiritual Presence and Spiritual Power, p90-91

Faith on Tillich's Theology

Faith for Tillich does involve passionate emotions; “but emotion does not produce faith.” Faith cannot be confused with emotional outbursts or feelings of rapture, though it can involve such things. Faith for Tillich also includes a cognitive component, but only “as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender.” If one reduces faith to a cognitive act, faith would be confused with mere belief. It would lose its quality as a living reality. Similarly, faith involves the will, but “faith is not a creation of the will.” To reduce faith to an act of the will is to confuse it with a mere act of obedience to a moral imperative.
 
In sum, faith assumes “being grasped and changed by Spiritual Presence,” without which faith is degraded “into a belief, an intellectual act produced by will and emotion”. Human capacities cannot ultimately account for the reality of faith.
 
Faith as an intellectual capacity is impossible in part because of the pneumatological nature of revelation. The Spiritual Presence grants not abstract meaning but rather “meaning-bearing power which grasps the human spirit in ecstatic experience”
 
“Faith is the state of being grasped by the transcendent unity of unambiguous life— it embodies love as the state of being taken into that transcendent unity”. The quality of our love, however, is not the basis of justification. In justification, “we surrender our goodness to God” and affirm unambiguous life in the midst of the ambiguity and estrangement of finite existence. Justifying faith as a transformative reality also locates justification within regeneration and healing as the more encompassing soteriological reality. Tillich is adamant in maintaining that “faith means being grasped by a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us.”

- Paul Tillich and Pentecostal Theology : Spiritual Presence and Spiritual Power, p90-92

Theology and Philosophy

The Task of Theology

The task of theology is to acquire not observational knowledge about God (as in naturalistic empiricism) or conceptual mastery of him (as in idealistic rationalism) but an understanding of his will and purpose disclosed in Jesus Christ, an understanding that eventuates in obedience. What characterizes theology is not the comprehension of divine mysteries nor the apprehension of human possibilities but fidelity to the Word of God, which involves acknowledging human limitations but also confessing the gift of divine illumination in the midst of these limitations.
 
Theology can never be definitive, for it is always a contemporary exposition of the definitive biblical word. It does not precede proclamation in the form of prediscussion but follows it in the form of reflection (Thielicke).
 
From the evangelical perspective, our knowledge of God is neither synthetic nor analytic in the purely philosophical sense. We do not take the way of idealism, seeking to analyze the individual parts of a comprehensive unified picture of reality. Nor do we take the way of empirical rationalism, striving for a unified vision of the various facets of experience. Instead, our task is simply to reiterate or reaffirm what is given in revelation, humbly listening to God’s Word and then endeavoring to translate this Word into human thoughts, words and actions. At the same time, we try as best we can to arrive at a coherent or comprehensive picture of reality by interpreting the whole of experience in the light of God’s Word. This picture will always be incomplete and open–ended, however, since the total vision of reality lies beyond the compass of human reason, even one informed by faith.
 
A Case for Theonomy
 
Theology’s criterion is the will and purpose of God as demonstrated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, attested in Holy Scripture. The focus of theology is neither on divine essence nor on human existence but on divine existence in humanity as we see this in Jesus Christ. Philosophy is inclined to champion autonomy, trusting in the self for direction and certainty, as opposed to heteronomy, submission to an external standard or power alien to the self (Kant). Theology presents a case for theonomy, in which the self submits to an authority beyond the self that is at the same time its ground and goal.
In philosophy reality signifies either mind or matter, or an underlying unity between them, such as force or energy. In theology the prime reality is the living God, who brings the world of temporality and materiality into being and creates the energy that vitalizes this world. Moreover, this living God is not reducible to mind or thought but instead constitutes a dynamic unity of will and intelligence, of being and action. He is the self–existing and self–sustaining One (Causa sui) whose knowledge encompasses all human perceptions and conceptions but at the same time infinitely transcends them.
 
Idol by Imagination v.s. True God
 
I agree with Pascal that the God of the philosophers is something other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is the difference between an idol created by the imagination and the experience of the true God. The relation between theology and philosophy is not one of synthesis or correlation but one of conflict and contradiction.
 
The passionate concern of theology is “God’s search for man,” not “man’s quest for God” (Barth). Our knowledge of God is based on God’s gracious initiative toward us, not on our perceptivity or striving. For Plato we reach the ultimate principle of unity by “pure intelligence.” For Plotinus we reach this principle by inward purification and ecstatic self–transcendence. For Kant we reach it by practical reason or moral will. For the theologian we receive it when we are confronted by the living Christ in the awakening to faith.

- Donald G. Bloesch, A Theology of Word and Spirit: 

Authority & Method in Theology, pp39-44.

 
 

 

The Supposed Warfare between Christianity and Science

Real science arose only once: in Europe. China, Islam, India, and ancient Greece and Rome each had a highly developed alchemy. But only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. By the same token, many societies developed elaborate systems of astrology, but only in Europe did astrology lead to astronomy. Why?

 
The answer lies in the Christian West’s view of God, creation and humanity. Unlike cultures elsewhere, “Christians developed science because they believed it could be done, and should be done.” 
 
Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead noted in Science and the Modern World that the medievalists insisted on “the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”
 
Lacking any doctrine of creation, these other cultures could only posit a universe that is, “a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and arbitrary. For those holding these religious premises, the path to wisdom is through meditation into mystical insights and there is no occasion to celebrate reason.” But Christianity, on the contrary, “depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.”

- Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: 

A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2011.