the last best word

The innocuous gospel of prosperity

jennaknee — Sat, 08 May 2010 08:54:05 +0000

I was on Facebook today, when one of my friends’ statuses popped up. Now, I’m not sure if it was because I already know his theological views or if the status would have been as offensive to me had I not known – but it really irked me. It read: 30 pairs of shoes n I still get upset when I can’t find 1. Must have lost my FCUK pair while moving back fr China. A taste of His love 4 us.

I had to read it a couple of times before I understood that he was linking the Gospel story of the shepherd who goes after one sheep even though he has 99, to his missing his French Connection shoes among his thirty other pairs. REALLY? It would seem he finds nothing incongruous at all in this statement, and that has become the danger of the prosperity gospel – that it innocuously mixes in parables and other select Gospel messages (God’s love) with blatant materialism. It all fits into a one mindset seemingly seamlessly, such that a statement like my friend’s can be made without a trace of irony.

Prosperity gospel aficionados have long been a pet peeve of mine, because not only do they believe things that are blatantly false, they justify their belief with a series of stock answers, none of which are based on actual Biblical scholarship. Additionally, when non-Christians criticize them (let’s leave aside the matter that they are embarrassing and terrible representatives of Christ’s followers for the moment), these non-Christians actually have very good points. I have seen non-Christians suggest to these prosperity gospel folks that the man Jesus was poor, and was content poor, while they themselves have their sights set on riches. Excellent point, my friends, I would rather hang out with you any day.

But the PG folks (prosperity gospel was getting a little long) counter these arguments with any number of the following:
- All the disciples had jobs and made money
- Paul was rich, he was a tent maker
- Jesus himself was a businessman (I’m not making this up, I have heard this many times)
- Jesus rode a colt, which was a very expensive form a transportation back in the day
- After Jesus’ crucifixion, the soldiers cast lots for his clothing, they wouldn’t have done that if his clothing weren’t expensive

In response, I would like to say: read the Bible. Not just the three random verses out of context that your pastor includes in his sermon every week, but actually read it, whole books. Also, think about this:
- How much time, would you say, from reading the Gospel accounts, that the disciples had for “jobs”? And if these “jobs” were not even mentioned in the Gospels (or minimally), how much do you think we are supposed to focus on this and use it as a guiding principle for our lives?
- Paul was not rich, he was dependent on support from various churches and Godly women. Check the Bible.
- Jesus was NOT a businessman. The end. In between healing, driving out demons, teaching at the synagogue, teaching his disciples, praying in solitude and traveling, I don’t think He had a lot of time to make business transactions. And besides, if He were, and this were important, it would have been mentioned. A couple of times.
- Jesus rode a colt the ONE time into Jerusalem, and the disciples FOUND this colt tied to a post as Jesus had instructed that it would be. This was Jesus showing He foreknew everything, and it was to fulfill prophecy. Please don’t dilute it by implying He paid for the use of the colt… for one ride into the holy city.
- If Jesus’ clothes were so expensive, wouldn’t the Roman guards have taken them OFF of Him pre-brutality and drawn lots for them much earlier? Also, the Bible says He was given a robe pre-crucifixion (scarlet in two Gospel accounts, purple in John’s). If that was the expensive garment… then He surely didn’t buy it.

This is the end of my rant against the gospel of wealth doctrine. I don’t want to be ungracious toward people who believe it. I just want them to see that what they believe necessarily closes them off to the true meaning of grace – not that God will give you riches you don’t deserve, but that He has already given you a salvation you don’t deserve. And it necessarily precludes compassion – if God is prospering the rich because they are faithful, then the poor must be that way because they haven’t yet embraced the “good news”. I heard a pastor from a PG church here say once that if you looked at the list of the top 20 richest countries in the world, you would find that they are all also predominantly Christian nations. Apparently, calling yourself a Christian nation is all that matters in this instance – it doesn’t matter that the United States has many pockets of crime and people who call themselves Christians only on Sundays, or that Spain and most of Europe have had falling church numbers for centuries – all that matters is that they are traditionally “christian” nations, and they are rich. This pastor obviously never took any kind of social science class – that correlation does not mean causation is one of the first lessons any first-year college student learns.

The church today is hurting! We are in trouble of not being love and light in the world! And we are in danger of losing an understanding of grace. The prosperity gospel may be called a “Christian theological position” – but therein lies the danger. They are not helping the cause, but impeding it, and the doctrine is a direct threat to the body of Christ worldwide.

struggling with grace

jennaknee — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:56:27 +0000

The trouble with starting a whole blog devoted to grace is not, as one might expect, that you soon run out of things to write about, but that you realize repeatedly how little you know of your subject matter.

This blog isn’t updated regularly for a variety of reasons, time being a big one, but my own inadequacy to speak of grace is just as important a factor.

What do I understand about it, anyway? I read previous posts, old journal entries, and I re-glimpse truths I once had a hold of, and I appreciate them for what they meant to me in the moment, but with each new experience, it feels like the grace I once appreciated is now suddenly elusive.

I wonder if I sometimes regard grace as being doled out carefully, instead of given abundantly. I wonder if since I have once grasped its beauty, its truth, the freedom it brings me – that that is my quota. That “grace” no longer applies to my situations, because I know the sacrifice it took, I have understood, I have grasped, and yet I sinned, and sinned knowingly, many times in my case. So grace may not apply.

I know it’s not true but it’s still something I’m figuring out. It is so much easier to “feel” forgiven when I haven’t done anything wrong. But when faced with the reality of my unwieldy flesh, I am pretty much at a loss as to what to do. I again don’t feel deserving, and am sure God is tired of my pleas for forgiveness, after blatantly spitting in His face.

I don’t know a lot.

But I heard this song sung once, with a line that went like this.

Grace’s amazing hands, they’re ugly,
They’re bruised by the blows that I have blown.
She knows well I don’t deserve her,
But she laughs and says, That’s the way love goes.

So maybe that’s how it is. That’s the way God’s love goes.

God’s math

jennaknee — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:30:57 +0000

Around five years ago, I received a text from one of my friends that had the word “grace” in it, and I believe the message was that God was full of it. I had no idea what it meant. I knew I had heard it somewhere in church, and I was wiling to believe God was full of this interesting quality, but the text message’s intent seemed to be hinged on this one word now, so I couldn’t just guess. So I did what any good high school student would do (besides ask my mother, because she was already asleep). I looked in the dictionary. I can’t remember exactly what it said, but I do remember that it did not ease my confusion. It said something like, usually associated with religious things, and is something like mercy. I figured I would just make them synonymous in my head, because mercy was a simple enough word. So, God was full of mercy. Got it. So I just have to keep begging for forgiveness everytime I screw up, which is multiple times a day, and I just have to make my prayers really good and penitent, and I will be forgiven because God is full of mercy.

Only, wrong. Really, really wrong. Mercy is wonderful. Mercy is a beautiful attribute of God that saves us from getting what we really should be getting for all the ways we have hurt God and other people around us. But grace is different. Grace is God giving us His love for free. Grace is God on a cross saying, I will do anything, literally anything, for you. Grace is God’s forgiveness not being dependent on the quality of your prayer, or your fasting, or your giving, or your being a good person, because, you know, you’re not. Only God is good, said Jesus, in effect saying, none of you are, or ever can be. Why then the commandments? Why then the law? Why the constant exhortation to holiness, Jesus? Why are you telling us that we murder when we are angry, and we are adulterers when we lust, if really, there is nothing we can do to be good, and you know that?

But those aren’t real questions, because we know the answers, when we are faced with grace. When faced with this Jesus on a cross, dying so I can be forgiven, so that my past, present and future can be covered with his blood and made clean, I realize then, more than ever, how high the commandment was. How maybe I could have gotten through life without murder, but never without getting angry, maybe without adultery, but never without lust, maybe without blaspheming God outrightly, but never without grieving Him, and denying Him like Peter in so many ways. I realize then that the pit I am in is a lot deeper than I thought it was, and I only see that because I have been pulled out.

I realize then, because of how far I am from perfection, how undeserved this forgiveness and reconciliation and love is. I should not get it. I am too wretched. My thoughts are bad, my feelings are bad, I don’t folllow Jesus all that well even after publicly proclaiming my allegiance, I hurt people, and I make messes out of beautiful things. If God were a rational human being, He would consider all this, be alarmed at my sinning rate, and see how much of Christ’s blood He was willing to spare me. Probably not a lot, because I’m kind of a hopeless case, and I have a hard time changing, I wouldn’t really be able to pay Him back with being good, so I’m probably a lost cause anyway.

But, thankfully, God doesn’t do cost-benefit analyses when it comes to salvation. His is another kind of math, a math in which as fast as all my sins are being added up, they are being subtracted by this invisible pen, with ink that looks suspiciously like the blood of the Lamb.

The last best word

jennaknee — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:00:16 +0000

Philip Yancey points out that the meanings of words change over time, and that a word like charity, which at one time meant the highest, purest form of love, could now mean something that people wouldn’t want, something that degrades the recipient. He then goes on to say that there is this one word, the last, best word, that has kept its prestige about it, even while it has had to thrive in a culture intent on diluting and bastardizing it. That word, of course, is grace. He points out expressions like “grace period”, “Your grace”, “grace note” etc that still retain vestiges of the word’s original hint of the undeserved.

I love words, and I love that idea, that this one word, grace, managed to escape the trap that all other words inevitably fall into, and maybe that suggests something about the idea the word is trying to capture. But here I have to disagree with Yancey. The “vestiges” of its true meaning are fast draining from the word, even in its idiomatic uses. Grace has become one of those words that has been used so much that no one knows precisely what it means. It doesn’t even have a colour, or a sound, or an image, or a feeling associated with it. It is just some abstract, nebulous fog of an idea. It is what ballerinas have when they stand on their toes. Why else would so many people who have no conception of the grace of God name their daughters in honour of it?

Grace has gone the way of love, used and abused and now doesn’t mean to us what it should, the full weight of its original glory left behind for the John Newtons of the world to discover, and not for us.

Thus we confront both the problem with and the power of words – only they can be used to capture ideas, but when used too much, they no longer express the same idea, and give us something different instead.

“It’s a name for a girl/it’s also a thought that/changed the world” sings Bono, and we’ve latched on to the name, all right, but forgotten where it came from. We’ve forgotten that this “thought”, this idea, changed the world. And it’s that and much more, it’s a reality we live in that we can’t afford to forget simply because of the vagaries of words and the natural consequences of over-usage. It is the hope of the world.

And it’s because of this that I believe grace is one word that cannot afford to fall by the linguistic wayside. And I want to use this strange love of mine, this inexplicable hunger for words, to help, in my own way, give voice to and return meaning to this last, best word. “In the beginning was the Word,” the apostle John wrote. And that Word brought this one, grace, that I would give all my words to be able to share with the world.