re: Is "Prosperity Gospel" incompatible with the teachings of Christ?

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You left out the Gloria Patri, Doxology and Apostles Creed. And communion on First Sundays. And hot hiding from others when gathering football booze at 12:03.

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Well I did mention the Catholic trappings.

But honestly ours is all contemporary now, so we pretty much have none of it

My father taught me to tithe. That man sacrificed and gave away so much. He used to tell me that if you want to be rich, follow the teachings of the Bible. Two passages he would affirm on a daily basis.

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Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your path.

Proverbs 3:5-6

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and

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"Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much" 

Luke 16:10

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In spite of his efforts to give his earnings away, he was rewarded with wealth as his business prospered under his direct goal of preferring friendship and helping others over getting someone's business. When he passed away, over 350 people attended his service. Five Minister's presided, several flying in on short notice from missions. Unknown to me, until I was in my 40's, my dad had started a scholarship fund to pay for seminary college for someone to follow the ministry. Dad put ten people into the ministry through his scholarship. In the end, although many of his friends passed before him, the crowd of people proved he was a very rich man.

So, he never sought riches, and I think that's the lesson to be learned. He trusted the Lord and the Lord trusted him. He gave away his riches, but was richly rewarded, with wealth, friends and respect. What more could a man want?

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Doesn't sound vague at all to me...


Because you believe that it refers to Jesus appointing Peter as the first pontiff, something that’s been told to you since you were little.

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No cause it clearly says on this rock my church will be built. What other church was he referring to?

Here's my (very long) take as someone who was raised a strict Bible-only Protestant, but who converted to Catholicism later in life:

-In the verses quoted in which Jesus tells Peter that He is the rock on which He will found His church, and that whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever he looses on earth will be loosed in heaven, it is pretty clear when you read it objectively that Jesus is giving Peter almost carte blanche to write whatever rules he wants for the church.

-The Old Law was very clearly a law based around a book. The Law did not exist until it was written down. The book of the Law contained all the answers and instructions for how to be a Jew. If you had any questions, you were to refer back to the book. Jesus, on the other hand, never said that He was going to leave a book behind. Instead, He said that would be leaving His church. All future revelation would come through that vessel. Indeed, there was no such thing as the New Testament until the Catholic Church (which was simply the church at the time; there was no alternative) codified it in the 5th century. Prior to that, the individual writings had existed, but they were not universally accepted, nor were they universally possessed. It would have been impossible for early Christians to be "Bible-only" since they would not have had access to any such thing, or even agreed upon what such a term might mean.

-The New Testament is woefully incomplete if you attempt to use it to govern any kind of organization. It talks a lot about what it means to be a Christian individually, but it barely touches on the structure and activities of the church as a collective, and when it does, it usually treats them as things that both the writer and reader already know about, so it does not establish any ground rules. For instance: the New Testament makes it clear that the early church had offices called "Deacons" and "Elders" (or "Bishops," depending on your translation), and it talks about what some of the qualifications should be for men being considered for those offices, but at no point does it explicitly say what the responsibilities and functions of those offices were. Elders were supposed to "shepherd their flocks," and all we get for Deacons is a report that when a group collection was made by several different congregations, it was the Deacons who were responsible for divvying the communal stock out to those who had need. That's it. And that is only one example. The New Law of Christ was never intended to be given through a book - it was intended to be given through His Church. That's why, once we depart from the Holy Church as the sole means of modern-day revelation and try to use a book to replace it, we end up with a zillion different denominations that cannot agree how the church should be governed and structured.

-Although the New Testament is obviously a good source for what early Christian practices were like, there are other Christian writers from that time whose work still survives, who were (for whatever reason) not chosen by the church to be included in the canon. If you go and read those writings, you find that those practices accord pretty closely to what we consider modern Catholic practices: communion presided over by a priest (or "president" in some translations), confession of sins by the laity to that same priest or president, apostolic succession, etc. Also keep in mind that, despite the various offices of the Church having been held by some pretty despicable people through the centuries, the core teachings of the Church have not changed. In fact, it is an organization so reticent to change anything about its central message that it has kept alive a dead language for centuries just to avoid missing anything in translation. Yes, there have been some pretty odious Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops through the years. Yes, the monolithic Church has done some questionable things at some points in the past. And yes, those responsible for those things will presumably have to answer for them in the final judgment. But, the Church as a powerful force for good in the world still stands. Just as the Incarnation was a projection of the Divine into the mortal, so the Church, as intended by Christ, is a projection of the mortal into the Divine.

As for the original question of this thread, it would be hard to be "poor in spirit" and be a follower of any kind of prosperity gospel.

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Christianity and Catholicism were the same thing for 1400 years. Jesus started Catholicism.

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Wrong

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This author may be onto something...do you think Christians like Creflo Dollar are doing more harm than good?

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I couldn't get that far into the article since the fist two paragraphs were nothing but straight white male bashing. You and the author can go frick off.

It has been translated into English from Latin which it was translated into Latin from another language. It isn't even as clear as the English translation would suggest. Vocab and language structure in other languages is a lot different than English.

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. Jesus started Catholicism.

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no

it was Peter

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LINK

The prosperity gospel is directly incompatible with the teachings and bible.

God isn’t a genie inside a bottle that you hit up whenever you need money/good fortune.

The bad thing is that those people are usually trotted out as the “leaders” of Christianity.