Joel Osteen and the Glory Story: A Case Study
Michael S. Horton, Ph.D.
This article
is a part of a collection of essays written recently by Dr.
Horton after his interview on
60 Minutes which aired on October 14, 2007.
"Name it, claim it"; the "health-and-wealth" or "prosperity
gospel" : these are nicknames for a heresy that in many respects
is only an extreme version of perhaps the most typical focus of
American Christianity today more generally. Basically, God is
there for you and your happiness. He has some rules and
principles for getting what you want out of life and if you
follow them, you can have what you want. Just “declare it” and
prosperity will come to you. (1) God as Personal Shopper.
Although explicit proponents of the so-called “prosperity
gospel” may be fewer than their influence suggests, its big
names and best-selling authors (T. D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joel
Osteen, and Joyce Meyer) are purveyors of a pagan worldview with
a peculiarly American flavor. It’s basically what the sixteenth
century German monk turned church reformer Martin Luther called
the “theology of glory”: How can I climb the ladder and attain
the glory here and now that God has actually promised for us
after a life of suffering? The contrast is the “theology of the
cross”: the story of God’s merciful descent to us, at great
personal cost, a message that the Apostle Paul acknowledged was
offensive and “foolish to Greeks.”
Joel Osteen: Another Verse of a Really Long Song The attraction of Americans to this version of the “glory story”
is evident in the astonishing success of Joel Osteen’s runaway
best-seller, Your Best Life Now: Seven Steps to Living at Your
Full Potential. Beyond his charming personality and folksy
style, Osteen’s phenomenal attraction is no doubt related to his
simple and soothing sampler of the American gospel: a blend of
Christian and cultural elements that he picked up not through
any formal training, but as the son of a
Baptist-turned-prosperity evangelist who was a favorite on the
Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). However, gone are the
eccentric caricatures of “prosperity” televangelism, with its
flamboyant style and over-the-top rhetoric.
In the Wal-Mart era of religion and spirituality, every
particular creed and any denominational distinctives get watered
down. We don’t hear (at least explicitly) about our being
“little gods,” “part and parcel of God,” or the blood of Christ
as a talisman for healing and prosperity. The strange teachings
of his father’s generation, still regularly heard on TBN, are
not explored in any depth. In fact, nothing is explored in any
depth. Osteen still uses the telltale lingo of the
health-and-wealth evangelists: “Declare it,” “speak it,” “claim
it,” and so forth, but there are no dramatic, made-for-TV
healing lines. The pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, TX,
which now owns the Compaq Center, does not come across as a flashy
evangelist with jets and yachts, but as a charming
next-door-neighbor who always has something nice to say.
Although remarkably gifted at the social psychology of
television, Joel Osteen is hardly unique. In fact, his explicit
drumbeat of prosperity (word-faith) teaching is communicated in
the terms and the ambiance that might be difficult to
distinguish from most megachurches. Joel Osteen is the next
generation of the health-and-wealth gospel. This time, it’s
mainstream.
As community philosopher Karl Marx said of a consumer-driven
culture, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Religion, too,
becomes a commodity—a product or therapy that we can buy and use
for our personal well-being. Exemplifying the moralistic and
therapeutic approach to religion, Osteen’s message is also a
good example of the inability of Boomers to mourn in the face of
God’s judgment or dance under the liberating news of God’s
saving mercy. In other words, all gravity is lost—both the
gravity of our problem and of God’s amazing grace. According to
this message, we are not helpless sinners—the ungodly—who need a
one-sided divine rescue. (Americans, but especially we Boomers,
don’t take bad news well.) Rather, we are good people who just
need a little instruction and motivation.
“Law-Lite”: Salvation From Unhappiness By Doing Your Best There is no condemnation in Osteen’s message for failing to
fulfill God’s righteous law. On the other hand, there is no
justification. Instead of either message, there is an upbeat
moralism that is somewhere in the middle: Do your best, follow
the instructions I give you, and God will make your life
successful. “Don’t sit back passively,” he warns, but with a
gentle pleading suggests that the only reason we need to follow
his advice is because it’s useful for getting what we want. God
is a buddy or partner who exists primarily to make sure we are
happy. “You do your part, and God will do his part.”
(2) “Sure we
have our faults,” he says, but “the good news is, God loves us
anyway.” (3) Instead of accepting God’s just verdict on our own
righteousness and fleeing to Christ for justification, Osteen
counsels readers simply to reject guilt and condemnation.(4) Yet it
is hard to do that successfully when God’s favor and blessing on
my life depend entirely on how well I can put his commands to
work. “If you will simply obey his commands, He will change
things in your favor.”(5) That’s all: “…simply obey his commands.”
Everything depends on us, but it’s easy. One wonders if he has
ever had a crisis of doubt or moral failure that stripped him
naked in God’s presence. Osteen seems to think that we are
basically good people and God has a very easy way for us to save
ourselves—not from his judgment, but from our lack of success in
life—with his help. “God is keeping a record of every good deed
you’ve ever done,” he says—as if this is good news. “In your
time of need, because of your generosity, God will move heaven
and earth to make sure you are taken care of.”
(6)
It may be “Law Lite,” but make no mistake about it: behind a
smiling Boomer Evangelicalism that eschews any talk of God’s
wrath, there is a determination to assimilate the gospel to law,
an announcement of victory to a call to be victorious,
indicatives to imperatives, good news to good advice. The bad
news may not be as bad as it used to be, but the good news is
just a softer version of the bad news: Do more. But this time,
it’s easy! And if you fail, don’t worry. God just wants you to
do your best. He’ll take care of the rest.
So who needs Christ? At least, who needs Christ as “the Lamb of
God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29)? The sting of
the law may be taken out of the message, but that only means
that the gospel has become a less demanding, more encouraging
law whose exhortations are only meant to make us happy, not to
measure us against God’s holiness.
So while many supporters offer testimonials to his kinder,
gentler version of Christianity than the legalistic scolding of
their youth, the only real difference is that God’s rules or
principles are easier and it’s all about happiness here and now,
not being reconciled to a holy God who saves us from ourselves.
In its therapeutic milieu, sin is failing to live up to our
potential, not falling short of God’s glory. We need to believe
in ourselves and the wages of such “sins” is missing out on our
best life now. But it’s still a constant stream of exhortation,
demands, and burdens: follow my steps and I guarantee your life
will be blessed.
A TIME story in 2006 observed that Osteen’s success has reached
even more traditional Protestant circles, citing the example of
a Lutheran church that followed Your Best Life Now during Lent,
of all times, “when,” as the writer notes, “Jesus was having his
worst life then.” Even churches formally steeped in a theology
of the cross succumb to theologies of glory in the environment
of popular American spirituality. We are swimming in a sea of
narcissistic moralism: an “easy-listening” version of salvation
by self-help.
This is what we might call the false gospel of
“God-Loves-You-Anyway.” There’s no need for Christ as our
mediator, since God is never quite as holy and we are never
quite as morally perverse as to require nothing short of
Christ’s death in our place. God is our buddy. He just wants us
to be happy, and the Bible gives us the roadmap.
I have no reason to doubt the sincere motivation to reach
non-Christians with a relevant message. My concern, however, is
that the way this message comes out actually trivializes the
faith at its best and contradicts it at its worst. In a way, it
sounds like atheism: Imagine there is no heaven above us or hell
below us, no necessary expectation that Christ “will come again
with glory to judge the living and the dead” and establish
perfect peace in the world. In fact, one would be hard-pressed
to find anything in this message that would be offensive to a
Unitarian, Buddhist, or cultural Christians who are used to a
diet of gospel-as-American-Dream. Disney’s Jiminy Cricket
expresses this sentiment: “If you wish upon a star, all your
dreams will come true.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that it
is atheism, but that it
sounds oddly like it in this sense: that it is so bound to a
this-worldly focus that we really do not hear anything about God
himself—his character and works in creation, redemption, or the
resurrection of the body and the age to come. Nothing in the
past (namely, Christ’s work) nor in the future (namely, Christ’s
return in judgment, raising our bodies in everlasting life)
really matters. Maybe I haven’t heard enough of his talks on TV,
but I have never heard anything that approached a proclamation
of any article mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed. Despite the
cut-aways of an enthralled audience with Bibles opened, I have
yet to hear a single biblical passage actually preached. Is it
possible to have evangelism without the evangel? Christian
outreach without a Christian message?
If God matters, it is for the most trivial concerns—or at least
those quite secondary to the real crisis that the gospel
addresses. One could easily come away from this type of message
concluding that we are not saved by Christ’s objective work for
us, but by our subjective “personal relationship with Jesus”
through a series of works that we perform to secure his favor
and blessing. God has set up all of these laws and now it’s up
to us to follow them so that we can be blessed. I can think of
no better illustration of what sociologist Christian Smith has
identified as “moralistic, therapeutic deism”: the gospel of
American Religion.
As the New Testament repeatedly affirms, those who want to be
saved by their own obedience need to know that God doesn’t grade
on a curve. His record-keeping is bad news, not good news,
unless Christ’s obedient record has been credited to us
through
faith alone. God’s law says, “If you want to be saved by your
own effort, here are the terms: Do all these things and you’ll
go to heaven; fail to do them and you’ll go to hell.” The
revivalists of yesteryear came up with their own list, but it
was basically the same threat: “Do or die.” The kinder, gentler
version is, “Try harder and you’ll be happier; fail to do them
and you’ll lose out on God’s best for your life here and now.”
No heaven, no hell; no condemnation or salvation; no perfect
obedience of Christ credited to us: Just do your best. Remember,
God is keeping score! Christ becomes totally unnecessary in this
message.
Osteen reflects the broader assumption among evangelicals that
we are saved by making a decision to have a personal
relationship with God. If one’s greatest problem is loneliness,
the good news is that Jesus is a reliable friend. If the big
problem is anxiety, Jesus will calm us down. Jesus is the glue
that holds our marriages and families together, gives us purpose
for us to strive toward, wisdom for daily life. And there are
half-truths in all of these pleas, but they never really bring
hearers face to face with their real problem: that they stand
naked and ashamed before a holy God and can only be acceptably
clothed in his presence by being clothed, head to toe, in
Christ’s righteousness.
This gospel of “submission,” “commitment,” “decision,” and
“having a personal relationship with God” fails to realize,
first of all, that everyone has a personal relationship with God
already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a
righteous judge or as a justified co-heir with Christ and
adopted child of the Father. “How can I be right with God?” is
no longer a question when my happiness rather than God’s
holiness is the main issue. My concern is that Joel Osteen is
simply the latest in a long line of self-help evangelists who
appeal to the native American obsession with pulling ourselves
up by our own bootstraps. Salvation is not a matter of divine
rescue from the judgment that is coming on the world, but a
matter of self-improvement in order to have your best life now.
Footnotes
1 This position is extensively documented in Michael Horton, ed.,
The Agony of Deceit (Chicago: Moody Press, 1990)
[back to text]
2 Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now:
Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (NY: Warner
Books, 2004),41-42
[back to text]
3 Ibid., 57 [back to text]
4 Ibid., 66 [back to text]
5 Ibid., 119 [back to text]
6 Ibid., 262 [back to text]
Read other essays in this collection:
For additional resources on this subject visit Dr. Horton's national radio broadcast website: The White Horse Inn >>
Ó 2007
Westminster Seminary California All rights reserved
|
|
|