Does Dave Ramsey Promote The Prosperity Gospel?

A recent series of articles, tweets and blogs claim that Dave Ramsey promotes the prosperity gospel. 

That has sparked a number of cyber tantrums, on both sides of the cultural divide.

One more tantrum won't hurt anything! So I want to weigh in.

First, Dave Ramsey does not promote the prosperity gospel. To claim he does demonstrates a lack of understanding of both the prosperity gospel and of Dave's message.

Secondly, as the son of missionaries, I have spent considerable time working among the very poor. I have fought the ills of poverty and ignorance with every fiber of my being and have tried to make the plight of the poor visible to those with more resources. Because of this background, I resonate with those who insist we take into account the systemic and intergenerational components of poverty. Also, I need to say I am not a wealthy person, at least by American standards.

Perhaps these personal features of my life will help establish a measure of credibility for my opinions about Dave Ramsey.

Thirdly, the prosperity gospel is a Christian heresy. It is rooted in Gnostic mysticism. It teaches that reality is spiritual rather than material; that one can create new realities through the purposeful brainwashing of one’s self. In the Christian version, one uses scripture verses as mantras to deny any visible and material evidence that might seem contrary to one’s desired outcome.

Christian Science practitioners are the most articulate presenters of this belief system. The Charismatic Christians who preach the prosperity gospel – which is not a small percentage of them unfortunately -- developed their ideas from a handful of early Pentecostals who had been highly influenced by Christian Science.  The Christian Scientists were, in turn, influenced by Sufis. 

I know. That’s more information that you need in a short blog. But there it is.

Fourthly, Dave Ramsey’s view of wealth accumulation and stewardship is more akin to early American Puritanism and Reformed Protestantism than to the Prosperity Gospel. In short, his views arise from a specific understanding about how Christians ought to interpret the principles of the Old Testament when it comes to managing one’s material resources.

Fifthly, Dave, along with the most passionate warriors against poverty, teaches that poverty is a curse. However, he believes the best way to fight that curse is by developing new character and by establishing new habits. He desires to teach people how to become responsible stewards of those resources under their influence, and, if possible, to multiply them.

In other words, Dave’s beliefs are consistent with Judaism and older Protestant theology when it comes to the acquisition and management of wealth.  We may disagree with his interpretation, and many Christians do, but what he says is most certainly not an endorsement of the prosperity gospel.

Does Jesus and other Biblical teachers say that wealth is spiritually dangerous?

Absolutely.

The Bible says the same thing about sexuality and power. 

It also warns about the dangers of alcohol.

The Bible is rarely black and white because it is a spiritual exercise program more than a rule book. It rebukes workaholism by commanding covenant people to rest one day a week. Then, it turns around and rebukes the sluggard and the slothful.  It is simply impossible to make the Bible into a tool that advances either political liberalism or political conservatism.

Christianity suffers when we mold our theology around secular ideologies. For that reason, we should not pretend that either Rush Limbaugh or Karl Marx are Christian prophets. Christianity has its own ideological grounding. We study what is says and then carefully construct any implications we may see for the fields and disciplines in which we work, including economics.

Victor Hugo’s Jean Val Jean may do a better job than any of our current political leaders as a symbol of Christian economic theory. Better still, I would suggest the teachings of John Wesley or Abraham Kyper. These people began with the gospel and then thought about the implications for economic life rather than use the gospel as a means to advance their presupposed economic theories. 

What Dave Ramsey has done superbly well is to enlighten hundreds of thousands of poor and middle class people about the tyranny of loan sharks, the hypnotic methods of Madison Avenue marketing gurus and the economic slavery that results from falling into credit card debt.

In her critique of Dave’s teaching, Rachel Evans rightly acknowledges that she personally knows many people who have benefited from following Dave’s economic advice. (http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/30/what-dave-ramsey-gets-wrong-about-poverty/). She overstates her case however when she seems to claim that Dave’s teachings helps the middle class but does not help the very poor.

The fact is, when poor people begin to view themselves differently, they often begin to discover resources they simply did not recognize before. Sometimes, it takes a person like Dave to turn those lights on for people dazed by dismal economic realities.

Evans is also correct about her claim that Dave has become wealthy from the work he does.

Dave, like every other Christian must give an account to God for his stewardship of his wealth. It would be inconsistent though to blame him for being wealthy while at the same time insisting that poverty harms people. I mean, where is the line that one crosses to step out of poverty and obtain an appropriate level of wealth? And, where is the line that separates an appropriate level of wealth from greedy acquisition of too much wealth?

Where are those lines? Who decides? The poor certainly don’t want to be poor and we don't wish them to remain poor. But what if they do so well they go on to become wealthy? Where did they go wrong? How were they to know when to stop building wealth? 

Of course, those are the wrong questions to ask. For a Christian, the right questions are about stewardship and ethical management rather than about one's levels of material resources. 

I abhor the prosperity gospel. However, we must acknowledge that it is more popular among poor people than among either the wealthy or the middle class. And why is that? Well, as a person from Appalachia who spent considerable time in Latin America, I will tell you.

The Prosperity Gospel tells poor people that God wants to deliver them from poverty – right now. Furthermore, God does not even see them as poor. Nor, does God or His people intend to treat them as poor. God sees the poor as already rich, already deserving and already equal to everyone else. All that is left for the poor person to do, says the prosperity preacher, is to accept God’s view and then learn to manifest that reality in the material world.

A lot of poor people find that message refreshing. Thats why they receive it joyfully. Rich people don't get that. Middle class people don't get it either, especially the educated ones.

But here's the deal. 

Some rich people treat poor people with contempt, as though poverty were their own fault. As a pastor, I have observed this attitude many times, although professing Christians usually expressed it subtly. Poor people don't like that.

Some intelligent people view the poor as the helpless victims of unmanageable forces who must therefore be herded (for their own good) into the solutions intelligent people propose. Poor people don't like that either. 

Some people  -- including some Christians – believe that no one is responsible, at any level, for anyone else. In that view, the poor, the ignorant, the handicapped and the addicted are all on their own, unless they happen to have families or churches who care enough to help them. Poor people certainly don't like that. 

In contrast to all these various shades of cruelty, the prosperity gospel promises poor people immediate dignity and prosperity, simply because they are made in God’s image and likeness. It claims that the poor can change their material situation simply by becoming aware that they are God’s children and by becoming generous as sign of their faith in their coming prosperity and as a means of accessing God’s unlimited abundance. Poor people like the sound of that. 

However, the Prosperity Gospel also ends up being cruel because it does not actually offer the kind of instruction that poor people need to rise out of poverty. It ends up being little more than a form of wishful thinking. Nonetheless, it often appears like a raft to drowning people, to people who have believed they were helpless victims of personal and societal forces beyond their control. That's why poor people embrace it. They need something more than a care package or charts and statistics. They need real change but the prosperity gospel can't deliver it.  

Dave Ramsey does offers real hope for poor people. He doesn’t mince words though when denouncing the cruel and empty promises of wishful thinking -- including the wishful thinking promoted by the property gospel. 

“You won’t win the lottery,” he says. "You must accept reality, however difficult."

“Your ship won’t come in if you didn’t send out a ship.” “

“The credit card company is not your friend.”

Unlike many Southern Evangelicals, I believe government plays a valuable and spiritually appropriate role in providing infrastructure to advance the common good. So I believe in government investment in things like education, mass transit and the like. That means I am not an Ayn Rand libertarian, which is incidentally a stance I find as incompatible with Christianity as any form of socialism. I believe that healthy cooperation between private, corporate and government structures produce the best results for the citizens of any given community.

I m quite sure that Dave probably disagrees with me about some that. Nonetheless, I promote Dave's teaching to everyone I can, including the people of the church where I am the pastor.

Why?  

Because I care for the poor.

The main reason I support Dave's work is because he understands one essential thing: poor people need more than help; they need deliverance from poverty. That only occurs when poor people experience a genuine spiritual shift that affects their perspective on life and lifestyle.

However, and this must also be noted, no one can pull themselves up by the bootstraps if they have no boots. That's where Christian stewardship comes in. Because bootless people have no boots to offer their neighbors. If someone like Dave doesn't teach us that, the ones who will be harmed the most are the poor. 

Something The Buddah Can Teach Christians

I wrote a book a few years ago called Faith to Faith. I wanted to call it How a Buddhist Taught Me To Be A Better Christian but my publishers resisted. They said Christian bookstores wouldn’t sell a book with that title. They were right. Unfortunately, they also failed to take into account that Christians who purchase books at Christian bookstores are usually not interested in other religions anyway. So they ended up publishing a book for people who were not interested in other religions while ignoring people who were.

In the meantime, I got paid to research other religions, meet tons of interesting people, and learn a lot.

I found Buddhism particularly intriguing. I had to keep asking myself, “Is this really a religion?” Oh, Buddhism eventually evolved to include statuary, temples, rites and such.  It proscribes a practice and a lifestyle. It presents clear belief structures and so forth. It’s just that the Buddha’s teaching reveals a profound interest in states of consciousness and inner life. That’s a territory modern Westerners tend to categorize as psychological rather than religious. Since my secular training is in psychology, I found that fascinating.

Perhaps the real issue is our definition of religion. It’s a word many modern Christians reject when describing their own faith. That irritates me to no end. However, perhaps the word religion is at fault. Perhaps religion is an artificial category we impose on thought systems that would have nothing in common otherwise. I mean, what exactly makes us define a particular system of belief as a religion rather than as a philosophy? Habit mostly.

The further back we go in time, the more problematic such categories become.

Ancient people did not have a separate vocabulary to express ideas about disciplines we now call cosmology, physics, philosophy and psychology. They used ‘religious’ words to talk about nearly everything abstract. That’s because religion is the foundation of disciplines like ethics, jurisprudence, cosmology and so forth in every culture. Nations do secularize over time, but their religious underpinnings remain. That’s just the way it is; there are no real exceptions to that principle.  Religions create culture, including modern ones. Nothing else is up to the task, at least not yet.

So Buddhism was a gift of ancient India. By the time the Buddha came along, Indian thinkers had already been thinking about the nature of consciousness, reason, personhood, and other inner states of awareness for a long time.  They used religious language to ask questions like, “since I sometimes dream I am a butterfly, how can I be certain that I am not now a butterfly dreaming I am a man?”

That’s funny. It is however, a deadly serious question.  What is dreaming anyway? Should we take it seriously?  Why not? Can we be certain that our day-to-day life is not really a dream? Why not? Modern thinkers in the West didn’t’ ask such questions for a long time, at least with such earnestness. The Buddha asked them during the days of Jeremiah.

I think the reason the Buddha’s ideas provoke me so much is they shock me into paying closer attention to the Bible. As it turns out, our scripture also addresses such subjects – howbeit in passages we don’t read very much.

For example, some people think Freud got his ideas about the id, ego and superego from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine, in turn, was reflecting on St. Paul’s teaching on temptation in Romans. Paul asks us to consider what is happening when a part of me wants sometime another part of me thinks I should not have – like an extra piece of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, for example. He says that when two parts of me get into an argument, there must be a third part of me that makes the final decision. So there are at least three kinds of consciousness inside me, sometimes arguing about which way I should go. But which one of these three kinds of consciousness is the real me? Freud found that so fascinating he developed the modern discipline of psychology while pondering it.

The apostle Paul says the real me is not the one that demands more pie. He claims that the whiner is a false self, an old self, that has been put to death.  Thats good to know, but if that piece of consciousness is still in there yelling for stuff, what is it? Who is it?

The Buddha solves the problem by claiming that all three kinds of these conscious states are illusions.  In that case, what we call “self” is actually a constantly shifting collage of perceptions, impressions and judgments without any real core.

In Faith to Faith, I suggested we might offer Buddhism the following hymn.

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily,

Life is but a dream.

Christian faith ends up in a very different place. For us, God’s call to personhood is central to our way of viewing and practicing life. Christians think of the self as something like Pinocchio in the children’s story. Christ has come to make us into real persons. So I can’t agree with the Buddha about my self being nothing but an illusion. On the other hand, what the Buddha says about not taking my constantly shifting moods and desires very seriously can be quite helpful. Spiritually speaking, neither my passing sins nor my passing virtues are very important. What is important is the destiny I can find through the redemptive work of Christ. My passing fancies can certainty mess me up if I take them too seriously, but if I keep my eyes on Christ I can trust him “who has begun a good work in me to complete it.”

So the Buddha is right about it not being spiritually helpful to keep focusing on me. I will become me only by getting the focus off of me and on to Christ. I become me by hearing Christ’s call to serve others. If I do that, Christ promises that he will take care of the formation of my self.

Just today I heard a good man, named Edsel Charles, say an astounding thing. He said that the words of Jesus as recorded by St. Matthew 28:19 are much more pivotal to the Christian faith than we often assume. Jesus said in that passage that becoming his disciple involves having someone teach us “all those things I have commanded you.”

What Edsel was getting at is that the teachings of Jesus may be the part of scripture modern believers ignore the most.  Some even claim that the Lord’s teachings are not a part of the gospel, but rather a part of the Old Covenant. If that is true, then the worlds of Jesus are not for anyone, seeing that Jewish people are not known to study them much. Perhaps such attitudes is how we get a modern form of Christianity with a lot of teaching about the blood of Christ but in which the living Christ has become mute.

Buddhists pray,

“I take refuge in the Buddha;

I take refuge in the Buddha’s teaching;

I take refuge in the Buddha’s community.”

Reading the Buddha, I can understand why they pray that. The Buddha is a good teacher. So good in fact that after hearing him, I always go back to listen once more to Jesus. Every time I do, I am in awe once more of the power of words I have been hearing since childhood:

“Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me -- learn of me -- learn of me. For my yoke is easy and my burdens are light.”

Ender's Game and the Book of Revelation

My last blog was a mediation on Ender’s Game and the thoughts I had while watching it. Science Fiction is a much more important literary gender than people tend to think and I wanted to acknowledge that. I also wanted to show how a preoccupation with envisioning the future derives from Jewish and Christian roots. I said that because although the Bible urges us to honor the past, it spends much more time urging us to prepare for the future. 

The central word of the Bible is covenant. It refers to a web of attitudes and responsibilities one adopts that makes it possible to link generations one to the other. That link allows covenant keepers to transmit knowledge from the past through the present, and on into the future. In this way, one’s decedents come to understand and become able to carry out the purposes of God. However, preparing them to do this requires one to envision the sort of future toward which they are headed. Since the Bible forbids soothsaying, necromancy, crystal ball reading and the like, the work of envisioning the future is actually an extension of wisdom. A godly person reflects on what he or she knows about the past and present. From this practice, one begins to have some idea about what seems likely to occur in the future. To be sure, the work of prognostication is an inexact science.

As St. Paul says, we “see through a glass darkly,” and only know “in part.” We prophesy according to our measure of faith, in the humble recognition of our mortality, finiteness, and limited understanding. Nonetheless, we attempt to understand where time is headed. 

One of the more mysterious types of literature in the Bible, which is there to help us prognosticate, is called apocalyptic. It has no real contemporary secular counterpart, except, perhaps the fantasy/science fiction genre. If we move beyond the world of literature, we can see that the aims of apocalyptic writing are similar to that of some modern visual artists. In that light, the Book of Revelation might make a lot more sense after reading the Lord of the Rings or, for that matter, after meditating on the paintings of Salvador Dali and Picasso.

It is helpful to know what apocalyptic literature does and does not do. Failure to distinguish between the various genres of Biblical literature can result in serious violations of the Bible’s repeated warnings against fortune telling.  Jesus repeated that warning after his resurrection “no man knows the day or the hour when the Son of Man comes.” Unfortunately, these warnings are often ignored. 

To say it clearly, the Book of Revelation is not primarily about predicting the future. It is mainly about worship, about recapitulating the history of redemption in a symbolic way, and about developing in the reader the kind of wisdom necessary for recognizing the spiritual significance of world events as they occur. The Book of Revelation tells us that there is another world beyond the one we normally see. It tells us that events in our world are deeply interconnected to events in that other world. Finally, it tells us the best news of all – that Good will win against evil and all will be well in the end.

I like the Book of Revelation. That is probably why I like Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card and Ursula LaQuin. Well-written science fiction pulls a person out of his own time and space and makes him envision life in a very different environment. The Book of Revelation does that too. 

Ready Player One, by Earnest Cline, tells the story of a boy who lives fifty years or so in the future. He lives in cyber space for hours at a time, playing games. Every morning, he puts on his helmet, which projects images through his eyes into his brain. He wears tactile-simulating gloves that make it feel as though he is grasping real objects. He keeps playing because if he wins, he will be a multibillionaire. An eccentric technology tycoon has left that provision in his will and thousands have been trying ever since. 

Ready Player One is a great read. For one thing, it helps one escapes for a few hours into another world. It is healthy to do that sometime – that what we call recreation. But there is another payoff for reading this sort of thing.  The reader begins to imagine a time not so far away, when the boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ may become very hazy. It makes him ponder, how does the ways of such a world connect with the Bible’s warnings about the dangers of idolatry, that is to say, of ‘image making?” And how do we prepare our decedents to live in such a world? 

In Ender’s Game, when the student warriors arrive in space and experience weightlessness for the first time, they are amused to see their commanding officer floating in front of them at a right angle. Only Ender realizes that the commanding officer believes it is he who is standing upright; that it is his students who are sitting at such a peculiar angle. They soon learn how to avoid motion sickness, caused by this kind of alteration of reality by fixing their eyes on a single object. If they do that, they can figure out how other things in the environment relate to that.

Whether or not children every make it into space, the concept here is important for everyone. Not long ago, people thought the earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus and Galileo taught us that the sun was the real center. The earth actually moves, every fast, in fact, around the sun. Then, Einstein taught us that there is no center. Everything moves around everything else. So, its is just as true to say that something we chose to be the center is the core of the universe as to say that the universe has no center.

I’m sure actually experiencing that reality up in space would make one sick to his stomach for a while. The implications certainly make me sick to my stomach down here! I am actually much more comfortable with Newton than with Einstein. I want my old world back, where up is up and down is down, and where saying “the sun sets” means precisely that and is not merely a figure of speech.

Alas, my old world is not coming back.  A flaming sword blocks the way to Eden. We are forbidden to return to our past. Time only moves in one direction. Not only are we forbidden to go back, we are forbidden to remain still. For us, time moves on a single direction – forward. What we have from the past are lessons that may help us figure out the present and the future – the inevitable and unavoidable future. The Ghost of Christmas Future beckons and at some point, I am no longer in the picture. So I prepare people to represent me (and all those who prepared me) for that coming moment.

I think the future is only scary because we are not in it.  So we terrify ourselves with images of horror and unimaginable evils, which will indeed arise according to our own apocalyptic witness. However, we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the unimaginable blessings and wonder that the future will also bring – when “they will beat their swords into plowshares and will not learn of war anymore,” or when the Jew will take the Egyptian by the hand and say ‘let us go to the house of the Lord together.” And we do not take enough notice of the final words from heaven “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.”

Knowing that is enough to move my out from my house and back into the mundane, ordinary work of mediating trivial disputes, comforting those who grieve, marrying another generation of delighted lovers, and walking one more step toward the reason that make sense of all of this.  

What Ender's Game Teaches Us About Orientation

The word orientation was originally a Christian architectural term. Christian churches were designed so that the altar would face east, that is to say, toward the orient. (That's why old churches often appear oddly angled when contrasted with the buildings around them. They seem out of step with their surroundings because they are aligned with Jerusalem -- oriented.)

We have come to apply the concept much more generally, and use the word orientation to describe the central interest of a given individual or community. Thus, an individual or community's orientation can be nearly anything. It doesn't have to be a geographical location.  It can even be an event or a period of time.

As I was watching Ender's Game, it came to me with some force that developing a future orientation is critical for any person or group expecting to survive into the future.

Recent studies suggest that children who enjoy science fiction often develop a passion for science, or at least become technologically creative. Having learned to find delight in an imagined future, they began moving themselves toward that future. We get things like iPads as a result. 

In contrast, an orientation toward the past produces a traditionalist, a person who feels ill at ease with the present and who dreads the future because future can only represent a further deterioration of his or her ideal past world.

Of course, everyone who honors tradition is not a traditionalist. Some people thinks of me as a traditionalist because I treasure tradition. Also, my first degree was in history. However. for me, history is not an ideal world. It merely gives me valuable information about how civilization emerged and developed. Its also teaches me valuable lessons about how society works.

Another important reason we study history is so each generation won't have to start over. 

Young mathematicians study Euclid and Leibniz so they can go on to develop their discipline. However brilliant, young mathematicians they won't get very far if they spend their lives discovering principles already discovered centuries ago. They honor the past by expanding on the lessons of those who lived in the past. They don't label Einstein as irreverent because he moved beyond the knowledge he learned from the likes of Euclid. Einstein knew he would not have made his discoveries without the contributions of people like Euclid. Einstein didn't suppose that living in Euclid's world was the right way to honor him. Young mathematicians study Einstein in the same spirit. 

The same holds true for any discipline, including theology, incidentally.  

The past provides a base, a foundation. However, it is the future that provides the inspiration, the motivating power that pulls individuals toward new understandings of the world. Setting up conflict between history and the future is thus a most foolish and destructive tendency.

That is what Americans have been doing politically, in my opinion. When conservatives grow hostile to the idea of progress and the notion of the common good, and progressives become hostile to tradition and the notion of the private good, we end up losing both history and the future. We become fools, wallowing in our self-righteous sense of ideological entitlement, without either sufficient wisdom from the past or an adequate vision of the future to keep making sense of the world.  

Fortunately, there is a way out of this impending cultural lobotomy. It is a third way, a way that honors tradition without making us into slaves of the past and honors the future without making us addicted to endless novelties unhinged from any context or meaning.

In The Beginning of Wisdom, Leon Kass describes this third way far better than I can. He tells us how the ancient Hebrews founded a culture around their confidence in a teleological universe. That simply means that they saw history as a continual movement toward some good and purposeful future. Like all ancient cultures (and unlike our own) the ancient Hebrews honored their past. However, they focused even more on their promised future and on the duty of parents and community leaders to prepare the next generations to walk into that future. Armed with their deep awareness (and acceptance) of individual mortality, Jews prepared and blessed their offspring to move forward in time toward ever greater understandings of the world. 

Christianity inherited this Hebrew belief. Ours is thus a prophetic faith. It assumes that time is not the result of some past event from which we have been moving into ever greater dysfunction; it is the result of a future event toward which providence has been pulling us into greater levels of understanding and blessing.

God is not in the past then, waving sorrowfully as we helplessly descend into ever greater kinds of evil. He is in the future, waiting for us to grow into full personhood and fulfill the completed creatures he envisioned as one day fully embodying His own image and likeness.

God is also in the present, giving us understanding of the revelations of about the past and hinting about what awaits us in the future. 

These are the implications of what is often called an ancient/future faith. It views Christian orthodoxy as a foundation upon which one builds and matures rather than as a prison from which one transcends at his own peril. Faith is thus a compass more than a map; a formation of character and intellect more than a rule book to hammer us into conformity with the past or uniformity with our peers. It is a prophetic call that assumes that moving into the future is the best way to honor the past.

To use biblical language, after the pillar of fire shifts and moves, it becomes a sin to remain in our old camping place. Canaan is before us, not behind us. Although we honor the dead, we are not obligated to remain with them so we can perpetually venerate their remains. We carry their bones with us as we proceed with them to Beulah. As  the writer of Hebrews puts it, "so they without us will not be made perfect."

We are an oriented people. However, that does not mean we are stationary. We were created to transcend all that we should continue to honor. We are called to love the earth as we keep heading for the stars.