VERITAS
"Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise?"
By Craig Branch
Nov-Dec 2003

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but [wanting] to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” (2 Tim. 4:3-4)

Our previous issue of Areopagus Journal (“Wolves Among the Sheep”) was part one of a two part focus on a segment within the broad Christian community known under various names—the Word-Faith Movement (WOF), the Health & Wealth Gospel, Prosperity teaching, Name-it and Claim-it, and Positive Confession. This movement is led by a close-knit band of teachers who are growing in influence due especially to their frequent presence on Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), a network on the air throughout the U.S. and expanding rapidly abroad. For example, we have discovered a considerable influence had by them in Africa resulting in many African Christians coming to the U. S. already infected with WOF teaching.

This issue of Areopagus Journal focuses on the faulty and sometimes tragic teaching of positive confession and the health and wealth dimensions of the WOF theology. Our prior journal exposed the historical evolution of the movement as well as their perverted and heretical views on the nature of God, Jesus, and redeemed humanity (biblical anthropology). Those doctrines are actually the most serious as they are heresies that can be eternally fatal. However, their emphasis on health and prosperity can be spiritually and physically damaging as well.

The Healing Heresy
An eight-year-old child with autism died during a healing service at Faith Temple in Milwaukee. The pastor, two church women, the boy’s mother and the pastor’s brother, laid hands on him and tried to cast out evil spirits from him. After all, doesn’t the Bible say this is the way to do it in Luke 4:40-41?1

Ten-year-old Jessica died in her home from cardio-respiratory failure due to inflammation in her lungs and a bacterial infection. Doctors could have saved her, but they were never consulted. Jessica’s parents are members of the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn in Fresno California, a church that believes in faith healing, not doctors. Jessica is the third child of her family to die young of illnesses without medical treatment. Tyler, 11, died from chronic diabetes, flu, and dehydration. Bradley, 12, died of pneumonia. Another member of the church died several years ago, which led to felony child abuse charges against the parents. Felony charges have been filed against Jessica’s parents who, if convicted, could serve 2-6 years in prison.2

Such needless deaths occur frequently and are only the tip of the iceberg. It is not just Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists who are needlessly dying because of false teaching on medical treatment. Besides children, many adults are led into the same fate or continue in untreated illnesses because they have bought into the false teachings of WOF movement. In fact, no one group endangers the health of more people than those Word-Faith teachers featured so prominently on Trinity Broadcasting Network. Moreover, many others have had their faith “shipwrecked” or have walked away from the Christian faith; either from too much guilt, or from believing that God doesn’t love them or care about them, or doesn’t even exist.

Research conducted by the Department of Pediatrics of the University of California that focused on the deaths of children due to religiously motivated neglect found that between 1975-1995 there were at least 172 children who died under exclusive “faith” healing. 140, or 81%, had a survival rate of 90% with proper medical care, and 18 more would have had a 50% survival rate.3

Religious exemption laws sometimes serve as a shield for those false teachers who abuse or lead adults to their deaths in this way. But it gets more complicated when it comes to the rights of children. The religious exemption laws that prohibit the states’ interference with peoples’ religious beliefs and practices, do not necessarily exempt parents from the responsibility of obtaining medical care if a child is seriously ill. The law can address and even prosecute those responsible for the abuse and harm of children who may not have a choice. But who is going to shine the light of truth on those heretical teachers who harmfully manipulate Scripture and people and dishonor Christ and His Church?

In this issue of Areopagus Journal, I address the healing heresy in the article, “Are Christians Promised Perfect Health?” I explain the WOF doctrine of healing, demonstrating the heretical nature of it, and offer a biblical perspective on healing. I also attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff regarding the claim that there is healing in the atonement. To misunderstand this doctrine can have serious implications. Also, our colleague, pastor and apologist Keith Gibson, examines the claims of modern faith-healers with a special focus on one of the most popular, Benny Hinn, in his article, “Faith Healers or Fake Healers?”

The Prosperity Heresy
Jesus said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures in earth. . . .But lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven. . .for where your treasure is there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:19-21). Yet WOF teachers seem to ignore Jesus’ command. They claim that there are immutable universal principles of material prosperity that God has set up that will work for both Christians and non-Christians alike. WOF leader Kenneth Hagin, referring to a non-Christian, wrote, “He received God’s blessing because he honored God. God has a certain law of prosperity and when you get into contact with that law and those rules, it just works—whoever you are.”4 They claim if you don’t have what you say (positive confession) regarding material wealth and “blessing,” then your faith is weak and you are living under the curse rather than in accordance with what is your true inheritance now.

ARC’s Clete Hux exposes the false teachings of these leaders on the issue of wealth and prosperity. In his article, “You Say, ‘I Am Rich. . .’”, he writes a corrective which honors God and His word, and protects the believer from deception.

Is It a Cult?
Whether the Word-Faith movement is a cult and whether its leaders are cult leaders is difficult to say. There are thorough and thoughtful critics who do not entirely agree. For example, Rob Bowman, a contributor in our previous issue, concluded in his excellent book, The Word-Faith Controversy, that, “[t]he Word-Faith movement should not be described as cultic.”5 Bowman points out that many or most people within the movement “do not believe the heretical or near heretical ideas espoused by the leaders.” He assesses some of the theology taught by its leaders to be “clearly teaching heresy” but that those teachings are “aberrant” and “suborthodox” in ways that are “difficult to easily classify.”6 Bowman points out that one can find (although not consistently) teachings from these leaders that are basically orthodox.7

But Tom Smail, Andrew Walker, and Nigel Wright, in their excellent book, The Love of Power or the Power of Love, arrive at a different position. They rhetorically ask, “Does it [their normative doctrine] deviate from the dogmatic core of the apostolic faith?” They conclude, “Regretfully we feel constrained to say it probably does.”8 They agree with Bowman that the majority of followers and even some of its teachers are “unwitting heretics,” but are nevertheless “functioning as heretics.”9 The authors offer another caveat by stating that they “have no idea whether acknowledged leaders like Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and Fred Price consciously deviate from orthodox Christianity.”10 But even so, they conclude that the teachings themselves are heretical.

We at the Apologetics Resource Center, after years of study and interaction with these people have come to agree with Smail, Walker and Wright. Whereas the health and wealth/positive confession teachings are at best half-truths and very harmful, their ventures into Christology, Anthropology, Theology (the study of the nature of God), and Pneumatology, are much more in line with the Gnostic strains of the mind-science cults like Christian Science, Unity, Science of the Mind, and even Mormonism, than historic, orthodox, biblical Christianity.

As for the leaders, it is our position that they do consciously and deliberately reject the truth on these issues since they have been repeatedly confronted and challenged on them. Yet they continue to defend their heretical positions and accuse their opponents (the orthodox) of teaching false doctrine. Speaking of the their orthodox opponents, they encourage their followers to “reject the factious [treat as outsiders, false teachers who divide] man after two warnings. . .” (Titus 3:9-11). For example, Gloria Copeland writes what we find in many of the materials of Word-Faith leaders and hear on TBN:

Seeds of doubt and unbelief have been sown by the traditions of men, by men who try to teach the Word with head knowledge instead of by His Spirit. God’s word does not make sense to the carnal mind. . . .Men in pulpits across our nation have preached things that simply are not true because they have no revelation knowledge of the Word .... I will not sit under any teacher or preacher who puts doubt and unbelief in my spirit.11

Not only are their teachings cultic, but their methodology also embraces cultic methods. For example, they claim a special authority which allows them to bring better and novel understanding. They divide Christians, they twist Scripture. They bring a mystical interpretation of the Bible—rhema or special spiritual illumination that is separate from ordinary logos knowledge derived from sound hermeneutics. This means that rhema or direct knowledge from God needs no Scriptural mediation or legitimation. Rhema is the governing principle for interpreting Scripture in their minds (or should I say “spirit”). And finally, they manipulate people through their stage histrionics and through the use of guilt and fear. In fact, they use intimidation against anyone who challenges their teaching: “Do not touch the Lord’s anointed one,” they say (1 Chron. 16:22). Yes, this verse too is taken out of context.

A Receptive Audience
An important point not to be lost in the discussion of this phenomenon is how the Word-Faith movement reaches so many receptive “itching ears.” There is a carnal mindset which creates receptive hearts for the health and prosperity message. Smail, Walker, and Wright concur stating, “Part of the success of the Faith Movement is due to the fact that it feeds off the material longings of the American dream.”12 Endemic to the American dream are the values of materialism (I am what I have or own), hedonism (I need what gives me pleasure), individualism (I need to depend on no one but myself—a little god), narcissism (fitness and physical appearance are the highest values).

Mankind’s pursuit of prosperity and its amenities has inflicted a sort of illness. Americans’ incessant pursuit of affluence has incubated a number of national ills. “Affluenza” has become an all-consuming epidemic. Dr. Donald McCullough has written a challenging book which drives this point home. He writes, “The church is more often influenced by cultural trends than theological commitments. . . .Our obsession with self has led us astray into the temple of idols: in particular the god-of-my-comfort, and the god-of-my-success.”13

McCullough observes that as we are being conformed to the world rather than being transformed by God’s Word and sacrificial obedience (Rom. 12:1-2), we have rationalized and justified our carnal instincts by baptizing them with a Christian façade—specifically with the writings of Hagin, Copeland, Savelle, and company. But, the Scripture directs us to “reprove severely that they may be sound in the faith,” those “rebellious men, empty talkers who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain” (Titus 1:10-13). Speaking of the deceivers and the deceived, Peter writes, “many will follow their sensuality and because of them, the way of truth will be maligned, and in their greed they will exploit you with false words” (2 Pet. 2:2-3).

We are compelled by God’s Word, His Spirit, and our love for truth and His Church to carry out the charge given in Ephesians: “Let no one deceive you with empty words. . .and do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them” (Eph. 1:6-11). AJ

Craig Branch is the Director of the Apologetics Resource Center in Birmingham, Alabama.

NOTES

1 See CNN News article at cnn.com (August 25, 2003).

2 See the Fresno Bee (Oct. 3, 2003).

3 “Child Fatalities from Religious Motivated Medical Neglect,” Pediatrics 101:4 (April 1998): 625-629.

4 Kenneth Hagin, The Law of Faith, Word of Faith (Nov. 1974), 2-3.

5 Robert M. Bowman, The Word-Faith Controversy (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 228.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 226.

8 Tom Smail, Andrew Walker, and Nigel Wright, The Love of Power or the Power of Love (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1994), 74.

9 Ibid., 75.

10 Ibid.

11 Gloria Copeland, And Jesus Healed Them All (Ft. Worth, TX: Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1992), 3, 29.

12 Smail, Walker, and Wright, The Love of Power or the Power of Love, 77.

13 Donald McCullough, The Trivialization of God: The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity (Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress, 1995), 40-41.

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