Christianity in Crisis: 21st Century
Posted on 14. Mar, 2009 by dwight in Blog
by Hank Hanegraaff
I am a participant in Thomas Nelson’s Book Review Blogger program.
Mr. Hanegraaff systematically exposes and breaks apart the popular alternative “prosperity gospel” that is being preached by such well known people as Joel Osteen, Todd Bentley, TD Jakes, and Joyce Meyer.
I was not surprised to see Osteen included, because I’d heard some of his teachings. I was surprised to hear more in-depth what he teaches.
T.D. Jakes and Joyce Meyer were more surprising to me. I had not ever heard any of their teachings, but based on the evidence Hanegraaff cites, those two are just as much “name it, claim it” preachers as Osteen.
The author does a good job at the beginning pointing out that there is a difference between disagreeing about secondary matters and disagreeing with the core of historical Christian faith. Before reading this book I was not aware that the prosperity gospel veers so far off the path in so many areas (e.g. denying the trinity and having an entirely different account of atonement).
Mr. Hanegraaff tends to rely on repetition, alliteration, and acronyms more than I think is best, but it is not distracting to the point of making the book unreadable. It does seem like the book would be more effective if instead of repeating the same quotations as evidence against certain prosperity teachers (which he does a few times) he presented other quotations.
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