True Discernment

from The Vossed World:

Chris Lehmann, on Joel Osteen and his new book, writes the following in Slate: “if you bracket all the scary, irresponsible health-and-wealth cheerleading that jolts through “Become a Better You”, this exurban image of God the indulgent dad is among the more troubling features of the gospel according to Osteen. For it turns out that the divine hand turns up everywhere, at least in Joel Osteen’s life. God upgrades his reservations to first class on a long international flight; God spares his car in a water-planing wipeout on the Houston interstate; God allows Osteen and his wife/co-pastor, Victoria, to flip a property “for twice as much as we paid for it” in a once-sketchy Houston neighborhood; God swings a critical vote on the Houston zoning board to permit Lakewood to move to its mammoth Compaq Center digs—and God even saw fit 35 years earlier to ensure the engineer who designed the ramps leading to the Compaq Center provided easy parking access for Lakewood. This is a long, long way down the road from the inscrutable, infant-damning theology of this country’s Calvinist forebears—it is, rather, a just-in-time economy’s vision of salvation, an eerily collapsible spiritual narcissism that downgrades the divine image into the job description for a lifestyle concierge. Lakewood and Osteen seem to keep God so preoccupied it’s a wonder He can ever find the time to stock his fridge or whip out His wallet.”

Lehmann points out that Osteen’s health, wealth, and prosperity gospel is vaccuous of substance: “Joel, who succeeded to the Lakewood pulpit on his father’s death, has pointedly refrained from pronouncing visions, performing wonders of the spirit such as speaking in tongues, or really doing much biblical preaching at all. He has the wardrobe and tirelessly dapper mien of an oil industry lobbyist; it’s as a walking advertisement of the success creed, and not as any manner of prophet, that he’s made his name. “I’m not called to explain every minute facet of Scripture or to expound on deep theological doctrines or disputes that don’t touch where people live,” he writes dismissively in Become a Better You. “My gift is to encourage, to challenge, and to inspire.” Hence, it seems, the erect-posture pointers, the counsel to “get in the habit of smiling on purpose,” and Osteen’s monotonous hymning of the health and wealth gospel of Word-Faith. “It doesn’t please God for us to drag through life like miserable failures,” he scolds. The Creator “wants you to succeed; He created you to live abundantly.”

Apparently the faith once for all delivered to the saints that clearly excludes Mormons such as Mitt Romney just doesn’t “touch where people live”.