Those who have faith and who properly demonstrate it expect to live lives marked by victory or favor. “The drama of healing and health is a defining feature” of the movement “as believers use their bodies, and not just their finances, as the testing ground for their faith.” Along with money, health is a clear demonstration of the presence and strength of an adherent’s faith.

According to the tenets of the prosperity gospel, physical health demonstrates a robust faith and physical weakness or illness demonstrates a weak faith. This means that faith can be quantified by a person’s possessions so that “material reality is the measure of the success of immaterial faith.” The pursuit of wealth varies across the prosperity gospel from a subtle theme to an all-out obsession. If faith is the means through which we gain our desires, wealth and health are the clearest demonstrations of it. In other words, faith is the means through which human beings can persuade God to grant their desires. These forces have the ability to transform the spoken word into reality. According to the prosperity gospel, faith is a kind of power that activates or unleashes spiritual forces.

It is these themes that receive the bulk of her attention, and she hones in on four of them: faith, wealth, health, and victory. Then she shows how the prosperity gospel represents not merely a theological movement but a “transformation of popular religious imagination that has not yet ended.” Finally, she attempts to point out the major themes of the prosperity gospel movement. First, she introduces many of the major figures and features from the movement’s slow but sure development in the twentieth century. Bowler’s purpose in writing about it is to “show how millions of American Christians came to see money, health, and good fortune as divine.” To do this she follows three lines of argumentation. To many of its adherents, it is Christianity. Though it is hard to describe, it is easy to find.” This movement that began in America-and could only have begun in America-rapidly spread across the world so that today it is the dominant expression of Christianity in nations stretching across the globe. “The movement goes by different names,” says Kate Bowler, “ranging from the slightly pejorative (Health and Wealth or Name It and Claim It) to the vaguely descriptive (Faith or Word of Faith) to the blunt shorthand, the prosperity gospel. Sponsor Show Your Support Become a Patron

Blessed by kate bowler