PARSONS: I'm not entirely certain all that prosperity preachers teach about the imago Dei,
the image of God in man. What we simply need to emphasize of course is what the Bible emphasizes
on the image of God and to have a very high view of man. This is something that Dr. Sproul
throughout his ministry emphasized from the beginning in the way in which we honor others,
in a way in which we respect others because every individual is made in the image of God and one of
the things that we saw throughout his ministry is that fairness and kindness and respect to
all individuals no matter their background, no matter their socioeconomic background,
sociocultural background, no matter their race, there was that respect and honor and love and
fairness shown to all human beings, and too often we're seeing just the opposite of that
and among the prosperity preaching there seems to be a sort of a preying upon certain peoples
from certain backgrounds and certain socioeconomic classes when we are to have...we are to show the
honor and respect to all those upon whom God has given dignity, those made in His image.
NICHOLS: You know, I think one of the things that helps here if we think of human beings as having
both dignity and depravity and recognizing that it is a fallen world, and that's a huge problem for
prosperity gospel. It doesn't see this as a fallen...falling as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it,
a fallen falling world that we live in and there's a sort of naive view
of the impact of the fall. There's a naive view in prosperity gospel of the role of suffering in
lives and even being human and our frailty as part of the condition of being human,
but also as the fall. So the biblical portrayal of who we are is complex as both beings of dignity
and depravity and if we relax that tension either way, we're going to end up with a
problematic worldview, a problematic anthropology, and ultimately we will not have the right gospel,
we will have a false gospel and you see that in the prosperity gospel, it's a false gospel because
it has a false understanding of anthropology, well of everything, God, Christ and man.
THOMAS: You know, I've had something of an obsession with Job
pretty much all of my adult life, and I mean, Job's friends were prosperity gospel
preachers, that the reason why Job didn't have health and wealth was because he had sinned
in some way, he didn't have enough faith. And that's classic health and wealth preaching. And
in the context of the book of Job that teaching is wicked, it's wrong because God says it's wrong and
when I hear as I have within the last couple of weeks, folks who are suffering from cancer
and they're going through chemotherapy and radiation and possible surgery and so on
and then there are Christians who write to them and say they shouldn't do this, they should just
trust and believe and that is so unhelpful and that's not a strong enough word for what they're
suggesting here, and so there is an aspect of health and wealth that wants to come across
as helpful, but actually can often turn out to be something that is actually wicked.