Prosperity Theology

I do my best to not judge how others worship God, or the type of Christian Church they attend because as Ravi Zacharias poignantly said "unity of faith doesn't mean uniformity of expression," and ultimately how one worships isn't results-oriented towards pleasing a humanly 3rd party, but rather towards praising God.

However, Prosperity Theology crosses me as distinctly American. Embracing the assumption that God always physically heals or protects trusting, praying believers from tragedies stands in bold contrast to the history of the Christian church marked by martyrdom and sacrifice of its believers.

Not to mention what the Bible teaches:

• [W]e rejoice that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, and proven character produces hope. This hope does not disappoint, because God's love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. (Rm 5:3-5)
  

• Consider it a great joy, my brothers, whenever you experience various trials, knowing that the testing of faith produces endurance. But endurance must do its complete work, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing. (Jm 1:2-4)
  

• The brother of humble circumstances should boast in his exaltation; but the one who is rich should boast in his humiliation, because he will pass away like a flower of the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and dries up the grass; its flower falls off, and its beautiful appearance is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will wither away while pursuing his activities. (Jm 1:9-11).

None of us want to suffer, and C.S. Lewis said along the lines that it is easier to talk about the problem of pain until you have a toothache, however to expect life to be magically easier when one accepts Christ is simply mistaken. True, we ought to be the most joyous people on Earth, but that doesn't mean that we are guaranteed a life of pain-free luxury. Rather, the biggest difference when one accepts Christ's eternal gift is the ability and the strength to view things from a Godly perspective.

The Divinity of Jesus Christ, part 5

This is Part 5 of the apologetic regarding the divinity of Jesus Christ as set forth by Peter Kreeft and Ron Tacelli which I am summarzing here part by part, and lifting large parts of the chapter directly onto here. If I'm inserting my own opinion, or using other sources I will make it clear.

Part 1 can be found here.
Part 2 can be found here.
Part 3 can be found here.
Part 4 can be found here.

The Main Argument

There are only five possible answers to the question: If Jesus is not God, what is he? The possible answers/alternatives to Christ's divinity are:

1. Jesus either Lord, liar, lunatic, guru, or myth.
2. He could not possibly be a liar, lunatic, guru, or myth.
3. Therefore "Jesus is Lord" (the earliest Christian creed) if he did not lie about who he was, or a bad man (if he did).

This can be and needs to be developed part-by-part.

The Dilemma: Lord or Liar? Aut deus aut homo malus ("Either God or a bad man.")

1. Jesus was either God (if he did not lie about who he was) or a bad man (if he did).
2. But Jesus was not a bad man. (Very few will challenge the premise that Jesus was not a bad man.)
3. Therefore jesus was (is) God.

But what justifies the first preimse, that Jesus was either God or a bad man? Why all or nothing? Answer: Common sense.

Someone who claims to be God and is not, is not a good man but a bad man. Merely a "good man" is one thing Jesus could not possible be.* By claiming to be God he eliminated that possibility. For a liar is not a good man, and one who lies about his essential identity is a liar, and a mere man who claims to be God lies about his essential identity.
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*I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but i don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

An Impartment of Truth: Excerpts from "The Screwtape Letters"

I have gotten a few laughs out of The Screwtape Letters, but it is also a particularly enlightening book. Here are some of the things that have stood out so far:

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."

"I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. . . . We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics." -Screwtape

"Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks rounds upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys." -Screwtape

"I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realize the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately." -Screwtape

An Impartment of Truth

“[I]f Truth is objective, if we live in a world we did not create and cannot change merely by thinking, if the world is not really a dream of our own, then the most destructive belief we could possibly believe would be the denial of this primary fact. It would be like closing your eyes while driving, or blissfully ignoring the doctor’s warnings.”

-C.S. Lewis

“You are free in our time to say that God doesn’t exist. You are free to say he exists and is evil. You are even free to say that God would like to exist if he could. You may talk of God as a mystification or a metaphor, you may boil him down with gallons of long words, or boil him to the rags of metaphysics; and, it is not that nobody punishes you but that nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a real thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one’s conduct, the modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer.”

-G.K. Chesterton

"If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone."

-Jean-Paul Sartre