Your Worst Theology Now!

By jason | October 16, 2007

Just about everyone seems to know who Joel Osteen is, and there are far too many Christians who accept his teachings, a dangerously soft “Gospel” that leaves sin and judgment out of the picture. Michael Horton, of Westminster Seminary California, has a great series of articles dealing with the problems in Osteen’s teachings.

Joel Osteen and the Glory Story: A Case Study

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.
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.”
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.

What ever happened to sin?

Osteen’s outlook may resonate with Americans steeped in a sentimentalized version of the Pelagian heresy of self-salvation. But it is not Christianity.
When asked by Larry King if he uses the word “sinners,” Osteen replied, “I don’t use it. I never thought about it. But I probably don’t. But most people already know what [when] they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.” What’s remarkable is the he has not even thought about it.
However, the sins that the Bible mentions are less easily managed: gossip, envy, strife, coveting. For many of us, these vices actually mentioned in Scripture were often more evident in the church than they were among our neighbors. So the first thing to do in order to trivialize sin and make it look as though our righteousness can withstand God’s judgment is to come up with our own sin list rather than God’s.
The second move in this trivialization of sin is to reduce it to actions rather than a condition. If I can stop committing sin x, then it is at least logically possible that I can stop committing sin y, and so on, until I am at least avoiding all known sins. If, however, sin is first of all a condition and only secondarily actions, then no matter how many sins I “conquer,” I’m still sinful!
n the increasingly pervasive message of preachers like Osteen, however, sins become offenses I commit against myself that keep me from realizing my own expectations. It is therapeutic narcissism: I have failed to live up to my potential, or to secure God’s best for my life, or to follow the instructions that lead to the good life.
Again we meet the swinging pendulum: recoiling from the decidedly “un-fun” legalism of his youth, Osteen rebounds into the arms of antinomianism (no law). No wonder he does not speak of sins (much less the sinful condition that renders us all—even believers—“sinners”), since there is apparently no divinely given “set of rules” that might identify such an offense. The standard is not righteousness, but fun; not holiness before God, but happiness before oneself.
It is actually arrogant for ambassadors to create their own policies, especially when they directly counter the word of the one who sent them. Osteen seems to admit that Jesus Christ is in some way unique and important, but he presumes ignorance of a point that Christ made perfectly clear: namely, that he the only way of salvation from the coming judgment.
The ditch we had dug for ourselves was so deep that only God incarnate could pull us out of it by falling in and climbing back out of it himself as our substitute and victor. For him [Osteen], the good news is that on judgment day God will look at our heart. According to Scripture, that is actually the bad news. The good news is that for all who are in Christ, God looks on the heart, life, death, and resurrection of his Son and declares us righteous in him. It is not a cheap gift, but a free gift.
By contrast, the gospel is that God justifies the ungodly—even hypocritical Christians like me.

Are you in God’s story or is God in Yours?

Today, however, it is now evangelical TV preachers who purvey this cruder form of Epicurean nihilism in the guise of religion. Get your life together and establish a personal relationship with God by following certain principles, and you’ll be happy and successful. Even if God doesn’t exist and never raised his Son from the dead, it’s a useful lie.
For the things that Osteen and many other preachers today promise, you do not need Christ. You do not need the Bible, just Tony Robbins. You do not need the kind of redemption that is promised in the gospel. It is not even clear why you would need God simply to have a more positive outlook on life.

Suffering and a theology of glory

Jesus knew why he came. It was not to help people find a little more happiness and success in life. In fact, his life was filled with suffering, under the long shadow of Calvary. “For this purpose I have come,” he said, referring to the cross (Jn 12:27).
The “health-and-wealth” gospel that Osteen preaches cannot deal with suffering. It is a theology of glory: the offer of the kingdoms of the world here and now. For those who take this path, it may well be that they will have their best life now. But even now, there is no place for suffering in this quintessentially American religion.
So much for the more “positive” message of Joel Osteen. He has nothing to say to people who are at the end of their rope except, “It will get better.” But what if it will not, at least in this life? Can his message reach someone who is in the final throes of AIDS? Could his message provoke anything but cynicism for a mother holding her dead infant?
Thus, to those who are burned out on trying to merit God’s favor, Osteen’s only answer—though said with a smile, is, “Do more.” “Believe more for your miracle and God will turn it around.” Is this a kinder, gentler God or a more than slightly sinister tyrant who keeps raising the hoops for us to jump through before he gives us what we want?

Doesn’t God Want us to be Happy?

So the problem is not happiness, but that we do not even know real happiness when we see it. More than happiness, we crave power and control over our circumstances, fellow-humans, the whole creation, and even God. We will surrender happiness to being in charge because we mistakenly believe that the latter is the realization of the former.
It is neither that God wants us to be successful in our daily living or unsuccessful, but that he has a larger goal that is even sometimes served by temporal suffering. In all of these things, delightful and disappointing, God is working all circumstances together for a good that is beyond a mere absence of discomfort.
We do not know whether, in a given instance, God has planned for Bob to be healed of cancer or Sue to get that raise at work. But we do have God’s public, certified, and certain promise that all who die in Christ will be raised for a life that is far greater than even the most pleasant circumstances of our best life now.
Our ultimate enemy is not failing to get everything we want out of life, but something much more serious. Sin and death came by Adam. However, righteousness and life came by Jesus Christ, the Last Adam, so that through faith in Christ we too may be raised on the last day ([I Cor 15:]20-28).
C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series and Christian apologist, once observed, “I haven’t always been a Christian. I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
For anyone interested in the sociology of pampered American Boomers, Osteen is a valuable source. However, for anyone interested in knowing God in Jesus Christ as he is revealed in Holy Scripture, for anyone wanting to know how God saves sinners, for anyone who senses that there are more pressing issues in life than having their best life now, Osteen will surely disappoint.

Pretty interesting reads.