Posted on 03/10/2015 8:09:33 AM PDT by Gamecock
Live at your full potential. Become a better you. Be happier. It’s your time. Live an extraordinary life. Achieve your dreams. Go beyond your barriers. You can, you will.
This is the therapeutic message of Joel Osteen, lifted right from his dust jackets. In contrast with the more classical and philosophically grounded evangelicalism of a Billy Graham or a C.S. Lewis, Ross Douthat termed Osteen’s brand of TV preaching “the gospel of self-help.” But notice it’s not the self-help of the Gospel; self-help is the gospel. The Gospel is the cask to deliver it, shucked and cast out as soon as the intoxicating wine of self-improvement is imbibed.
Contrast this with Pope Francis who, quoting St. Basil of Caesarea of the fourth century, recently referred to money as the “devil’s dung.” We can follow this line of thinking right back to the New Testament. St. Paul used an even stronger word: skubula. Some translations of the Bible use “filth” or “refuse” in its place in the third chapter of the letter to the Philippians. But that’s not what he said. The nearest English equivalent of the vulgar Greek word is…well, you can Google it. Paul, I suspect, wanted to make an unambiguous point: all of his worldly respect, progress, and prosperity – in short, all of his “self-help” – was all skubala compared to the Cross and Resurrection.
If only Walker Percy lived as long as Billy Graham. Percy, a Southerner, had a special dislike of TV preachers that emerges in both his fiction and philosophical essays, many of which are concerned with semiotics and the importance of language. In an essay titled “Why Are You a Catholic?” Percy writes:
“Language is a living organism and, as such, is subject to certain organic ailments. In this case it is the exhaustion and decrepitude of words themselves, an infirmity that has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the sentences they form. The words of religion tend to wear out and get stored in the attic…and it doesn't help that when religious words are used publicly, at least Christian words, they are often expropriated by some of the worst rogues around, the TV preachers.”
Percy also skewered self-help books – in fact, he wrote an entire book devoted to satirizing the genre: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book… “or, How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians.”
If only he’d lived to see Joel Osteen: a self-help writer, psychotherapist, and fundamentalist all rolled up into one, one who spares words like “sin” and “grace” from further devaluation, but – in a master stroke – only by eliminating them from the conversation altogether. I think Percy would have had a field day.
“When we obey God,” Victoria Osteen declares in one show, a smile plastered across her face, “We're not doing it for God. I mean, that's one way to look at it. We're doing it for ourselves, because God takes pleasure when we're happy. That's the thing that gives Him the greatest joy. So, I want you to know this morning: Just do good for your own self.”
This isn’t new territory for a culture teeming with individualism; even the added tincture of spiritualism to self-help isn’t novel. But whatever it is, it’s about as far away from the Lenten words of Jesus as words get:
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
“An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.”
G.K. Chesterton
Osteen is not really a preacher. He is a motivational speaker doing it under the guise of being the pastor of a church.
He’s more like Anthony Robbins, Dennis Waitley or Zig Zigler in his message. The evil part is doing it under the umbrella of “Christianity”.
I dont’ see how he can be called a fundamentalist, when he ignores all the fundamentals of the Christian faith and the Bible.
Maybe the author was trying to be nice?
I’ve seen Zig Zigler. It pains me to see Osteen put in the same category. Zigler was a good man, good at his job.
I’ve seen Zig Zigler. It pains me to see Osteen put in the same category. Zigler was a good man, good at his job.
If it were in an auditorium rather than in a church, and he was billed as a motivational entertainer, he would get no flack from me.
There happen to be many fine “self help” books out there. For example, A Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis, in which there’s not a trace of self-indulgence or anything resembling psychobabble. However, religion shouldn’t be about self-actualization; it should be about God and what God expects of us.
Agreed. Zigler was a committed evangelical Christian, O$teen is to religion as Al Gore is to “global warming”.
zactly.
You could tell, toward the end of his seminar blocks, where he points out that ‘You are fearfully and wonderfully made’ that he wants to bust out and start witnessing and baptizing people.
He couldn’t hide It.
With Osteen, It’s always on his lips, and yet you keep looking for It.
And yet the uninformed go nuts over this guy. I don’t get it.
Thanks, Joel.
How is Osteen a "fundamentalist?"
March 1931 Bishop Fulton J Sheen said, "Since a week ago last Saturday, we can no longer expect them to defend the law of God. These sects will work out the logic of their ways and in fifty or a hundred years there will be only the Church and paganism. We'll be left to fight the battle alone and we will."
Osteen just reached the logical endpoint of all Protestant doctrine ahead of the herd.
In another five or ten years (depending on how quickly the consequences of King Barry kick in) what he's preaching now will be the norm just like openly queer ministers of various sorts being prominent in whatever the top mega churches are at that time will be the norm.
But it's ok to invoke Mary as the advocate of our salvation, to pray to her for salvation and all of the other stuff catholicism teaches??
Nope. This are ordained Papists. Your brethren.
We don’t want them. they are all yours.
Enjoy the fellowship of those you have converted rather than trying to hide from the fruits of your labors.
Enjoy your clown priests.
For over two hundred years Protestants have bragged about what a solidly Protestant coutry this is and now that the harvest from the seeds of Self and Self Alone Protestantism have ripened and borne fruit destroying what remains of anything Christian in society while at the same time converting many a former Catholic to the clown dance of Self and Self Alone Protestantism the poor little advocates of that Protestant heresy are all so sour.
Revel in your victories, embrace those clowns who have embraced your heresy !!!
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