Christian Theology

"Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?"

"The prosperity gospel tended to ebb and flow in accordance with wider cultural trends — it flourished in the postwar boom of the 1950s, and then again (unsurprisingly) in the no less ostentatious ‘80s, when big hair and big money alike were in. Yet despite the catastrophic fall of some of the most prominent proponents of the gospel — Jim Bakker, for example, spent years in prison for fraud — the movement has persisted well into the present day. Perhaps no less unsurprisingly, two of its major proponents — Paula White and Wayne T. Jackson — were among the six faith leaders invited to pray with Donald Trump at his inauguration."

"Central to the prosperity gospel was the idea of tithing, or giving money to the church, ideally one's “first fruits” — or initial earnings. This money, many prosperity gospel preachers promised, was an investment. By showing faith, parishioners could have a “hundredfold” return on their investment, a reference to a verse in the Gospel of Mark about those who suffer for Christ receiving a hundredfold what they have lost. Thus could Ken Copeland write in his Laws of Prosperity, "Do you want a hundredfold return on your money? Give and let God multiply it back to you. No bank in the world offers this kind of return! Praise the Lord!” In this mentality, tithing is a financially responsible thing to do. It’s a show of faith and a shrewd investment alike, a wager on the idea that God acts in the here and now to reward those with both faith and a sufficiently developed work ethic."

"Throughout the twentieth century, proponents of this particularly American blend of theology envisaged God as a kind of banker, dispensing money to the deserving, with Jesus as a model business executive. Both of these characterizations were, at times, literal: In 1936, New Thought mystic and founder of the Unity Church Charles Fillmore rewrote Psalm 23 to read, “The Lord is my banker/my credit is good”; in 1925, advertising executive Bruce Bowler wrote The Man Nobody Knows to argue that Jesus was the first great capitalist. The literal money quote reads, “Some day ... someone will write a book about Jesus. Every businessman will read it and send it to his partners and his salesmen. For it will tell the story of the founder of modern business.”"

"It is true that the prosperity gospel encourages people — especially its leaders — to revel in private jets and multimillion-dollar homes as evidence of God’s love. But among the less well-heeled believers, I sensed a different kind of yearning, one that wasn’t entirely materialistic. Believers wanted an escape: from poverty, failing health, and the feeling that their lives were leaky buckets. Some people wanted Bentleys, but more wanted relief from the wounds of their past and the pain of their present. People wanted salvation from bleak medical diagnoses; they wanted to see God rescue their broken teenagers or their misfiring marriages. They wanted talismans to ward off the things that go bump in the night. They wanted an iota of power over the things that ripped their lives apart at the seams."

"During my years of research, I talked to televangelists who offered spiritual guarantees that viewers would receive money from God’s own hands, I held hands with people in wheelchairs praying at the altar to be cured. They, too, thought faith contained an implicit promise of earthly reward. I thought I was trying to understand how millions of North Americans had started asking God for more than subsistence. How they seemed to want permission to experience the luxuries of life as a reward for good behavior."

"There’s a branch of Christianity that promises a direct path to the good life. It is called by many names, but most often it is nicknamed the “prosperity gospel” for its bold central claim that God will give you your heart’s desires: money in the bank, a healthy body, a thriving family, and boundless happiness. This was not the faith I grew up with on the prairies of Manitoba, Canada, surrounded by communities of Mennonites. I learned at my Anabaptist Bible camp about a poor carpenter from Galilee who taught that a good life was a simple one."

"The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, "What shall it profit a man?" carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well."

"To countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy: "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the love of money is the root of all evil." Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limit less increase and expansion, became the goal of the Christian's efforts."

"Rev. Otis: He gave you all his love, gave you all his divine grace, gave you all his salvation. And he deserves all your money."

"Kevin Kruse in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America details how industrialists in the 1930s and 1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals, socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and funded a brand of Christianity—which is today dominant—that conflates faith with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith, this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don’t need to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that out."

"Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet of Punch, has shown that he is the world's greatest salesman of salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head."

"A man may beat down the bitter fruit from an evil tree until he is weary; whilst the root abides in strength and vigor, the beating down the present fruit will not hinder it from bringing forth more."

"Do you think that a man is renewed by God's Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?"

"Regeneration is, we know, instantaneous; but the steps that lead to it are often very gradual; and none of them, so far as we can see, can be spared."

"Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel."

"One has said that Christ excelled all other moralists in this, that He puts the padlock not upon the hand, but upon the heart. But He does not use the padlock at all, He renders such a thing unnecessary. He takes the tiger from the heart, and replaces it with the lamb."

"Regeneration is the beginning of holiness in the soul, and admits of no progression; sanctification is carried on progressively in the heart of the renewed, and will be continued until it is completed in the concluding moment of life."

"The regeneration of a sinner is an evidence of power in the highest sphere — moral nature; with the highest prerogative — to change nature; and operating to the highest result — not to create originally, which is great; but to create anew, which is greater."

"While the agent of renovation is the Divine Spirit, and the condition of renovation is our cleaving to Christ, the medium of renovation and the weapon which the transforming grace employs is " the word of the truth of the gospel," whereby we are sanctified."

"Embrace in one act the two truths — thine own sin, and God's infinite mercy in Jesus Christ."

"Creed, or the belief in a certain amount of doctrine, has made Christendom, but never made a Christian. "Ye must be born again.""

"Regeneration is God's disposing the heart to Himself; conversion is the actual turning of the heart to God."

"And this is the mission of the church — not civilization, but salvation — not better laws, purer legislation, social elevation, human equality, and liberty, but FIRST, the " kingdom of God and His righteousness;" regenerated hearts, and all other things will follow."

"Unter dieser Beleuchtung entsteht mir der Gott, der der Beistand des Armen ist und sein Rächer in der Weltgeschichte. Diesen Rächer der Armen liebe ich."

"The order of authority derives from God, as the Apostle says [in Romans 13:1-7]. For this reason, the duty of obedience is, for the Christian, a consequence of this derivation of authority from God, and ceases when that ceases. But, as we have already said, authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it."

"At its beginnings there was very powerful meditation on the presence of Christ in the oppressed Indians, which objectively pointed toward a christology of the "body of Christ." Guamán Poma, for example, said, "By faith we know clearly that where there is a poor person there is Jesus Christ himself," and Bartolomé de las Casas declared, "In the Indies I leave Jesus Christ, our God, being whipped and afflicted, and buffeted and crucified, not once but thousands of times, as often as the Spaniards assault and destroy those people." But this original christological insight did not thrive, and what became the tradition was a christology based on the dogmatic formulas, in which—however well they were known and understood—what was stressed was the divinity of Christ rather than his real and lived humanity."

"As we see it, a perhaps faulty presentation of the Christian message may have given the impression that religion is indeed the opiate of the people. And we would be guilty of betraying the cause of Peru's development, if we did not stress the fact that the doctrinal riches of the Gospel contain a revolutionary thrust."

"When a system ceases to promote the common good and favors special interests, the Church must not only denounce injustice but also break with the evil system."

"The God whom we know in the Bible is a liberating God, a God who destroys myths and alienations, a God who intervenes in history in order to break down the structures of injustice and who raises up prophets in order to point out the way of justice and mercy. He is the God who liberates slaves (Exodus), who causes empires to fall and raises up the oppressed (Magnificat, Luke 1:52)."

"Not only are there dehumanizing tendencies within people, there are dehumanizing forces encrusted in society. Sin also has a social and objective dimension. The social, political, cultural or economic structures become dehumanizing when they aren't at the service of "all persons and the whole person," in one word, when they become structures which perpetuate injustice. Structures are a product of persons but they assume an impersonal and even demonic character by going beyond the possibilities of individual action. Collective and concerted action to change said structures is necessary, for there is no structure which is sacred or unchangeable."

"Another form of rationalizing Christianity was the so-called 'liberation theology', ultimately derived from Germany, which sought to transform Catholic activism into a radical political force, operating from 'basic communities' organized on the Communist cell principle, and even advocating violence for the overthrow of oppressive governments of the Right. During the 1970s and 1980s it attracted much attention in the media and was said to be flourishing in Brazil and Central America. In Castro's Communist satellite, Nicaragua, four Catholic priests professing this radicalized form of Christianity held ministerial office in 1979, and two years later refused to obey orders from their bishops to return to their pastoral duties. A section of the Latin American clergy, which hitherto had usually underwritten established authority, had become strongly antinomian during the years 1965-80. Yet this politicization of Catholicism, though a source of fascination to the media, was confined to a small portion of the élites. Most priests and bishops remained strongly traditionalist; the laity still more so. When liberation theology was put to any kind of popular test, it failed to make much impact. Nicaragua's Sandinista government, led by the Marxist Daniel Ortega and including the supporters of liberation theology who backed and worked with him, was decisively defeated the first time it was subjected to free elections in 1990."

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed."

"“Does it make you a king"

"They shall build houses and inhabit them;"

"The liberation of our continent means more than overcoming economic, social, and political dependence. It means, in a deeper sense, to see the becoming of mankind as a process of the emancipation of man in history. It is to see man in search of a qualitatively different society in which he will be free from all servitude, in which he will be the artisan of his own destiny."

"If the church ... does not make God's liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message?"

"As ambassadors of Jesus Christ, Christians have no choice but to join the movement of liberation on the side of the poor, fighting against the structures of injustice. Faith in Jesus Christ, therefore, is not only an affirmation that we utter in Sunday worship and at other church gatherings. Faith is a commitment, a deeply felt experience of being called by the Spirit of Christ to bear witness to God's coming liberation by fighting for the freedom of the poor now."

"Liberating the Church from temporal ties and from the image projected by its bonds with the powerful ... will free the Church from compromising commitments and make it more able to speak out. It will show that in order to fulfill its mission, the Church relies more on the strength of the Lord than on the strength of Power. And the Church will be able to establish ... the only earthly ties which it should have: communion with the disinherited of our country, with their concerns and struggles."

"Work is more important than property. ... Thus every system of property ought to be evaluated according to its ability to humanize life and the labor of the working man."

"Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn’t have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points. The universe is all concerned with me. Is that not the arrogance that passeth all understanding?"

"42 Q. How is it possible for original sin to be transmitted to all men?"

"Human nature is evil; its goodness derives from conscious activity. Now it is human nature to be born with a fondness for profit. Indulging this leads to contention and strife, and the sense of modesty and yielding with which one was born disappears. One is born with feelings of envy and hate, and, by indulging these, one is led into banditry and theft, so that the sense of loyalty and good faith with which he was born disappears. One is born with the desires of the ears and eyes and with a fondness for beautiful sights and sounds, and, by indulging these, one is led to licentiousness and chaos, so that the sense of ritual, rightness, refinement, and principle with which one was born is lost. Hence, following human nature and indulging human emotions will inevitably lead to contention and strife, causing one to rebel against one’s proper duty, reduce principle to chaos, and revert to violence. Therefore one must be transformed by the example of a teacher and guided by the way of ritual and rightness before one will attain modesty and yielding, accord with refinement and ritual, and return to order."

"It is a question here not of ethical guilt (how could the child acquire it?) but rather of the natural kind, which befalls human beings not by decision and action but by negligence and celebration. When they turn their attention away from the human and succumb to the power of nature, then natural life, which in man preserves its innocence only so long as natural life binds itself to something higher, drags the human down. With the disappearance of supernatural life in man, his natural life turns into guilt, even without his committing an act contrary to ethics."

"A person of an honourable mind, Religiously devout, faithful and kind, Is doom'd to pay the lamentable score Of guilt accumulated long before— Some wicked ancestor's unholy deed. — I wish that it were otherwise decreed! For now we witness wealth and power enjoy'd By wicked doers ; and the good destroyed Quite undeservedly ; doom'd to atone, In other times, for actions not their own."

"In the time that is hastening towards judgment, vigilance of faith is required, because evil does not sleep, and this requires us to be constantly skilled in discernment. Here we see how the time of the world is marked by original sin: it has poisoned time, but not to such an extent that the time following original sin is not still the time of the Lord."

"We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression."

"Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins Of desolate society. The child, Ere he can lisp his mother’s sacred name, Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and lifts His baby-sword even in a hero’s mood. This infant arm becomes the bloodiest scourge Of devastated earth; whilst specious names, Learnt in soft childhood’s unsuspecting hour, Serve as the sophisms with which manhood dims Bright reason’s ray and sanctifies the sword Upraised to shed a brother’s innocent blood. Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man Inherits vice and misery, when force And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe, Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good."

"Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I." … It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able … to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God."

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil — he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor — he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire — he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was — that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not man."