Someone in my Bible study asked me to do a lesson on Joel Osteen, so I chose to read Your Best Life Now. Although the book came out in 2005, it is still readily available in bookstores (and WalMart!), and provides the underpinnings for his second book, Become a Better You.
Osteen is a fascinating character: a polite, charismatic, relentlessly positive man who is adored by thousands. Even in cyberspace he is apparently winsome. For instance, in response to this post, a man claiming to be Osteen responded in a mature and gracious way to a fairly scathing critique of his ministry. Of course, it might not have been Osteen, but it's hardly impossible.
Osteen is a likeable guy, and for this reason, many people find it hard to separate the man from the message. But as likeable as Osteen is, his message is just close enough to the truth to be dangerous. What follows is a short critique of Your Best Life Now. I am indebted to Daryl Wingerd for some of the material here. While his critique is excellent, I felt it somewhat long and involved for the Bible study I lead, so I tried to condense his arguments, while adding a few of my own. I hope that this critique will be read in the charitable spirit in which it is intended.
Who is Joel Osteen?
Joel is the pastor of the largest church in the United States: Lakewood Church in Houston, with 30,000 members and a national and international television broadcast.
What is Your Best Life Now about?
On page five of the book, Osteen writes: The Scripture says that God wants to pour out “His far and beyond favor.” God wants this to be the best time of your life.
Osteen believes, in other words, that God wants to bless everyone, not merely Christians, in not only spiritual but material and physical ways, in this life and not only in the next one.
How should we respond to Osteen’s book?
First, we should acknowledge that Joel Osteen is a human being, made in the image of God, and therefore deserving respect and kindness (Genesis 1:26-27). He is not a punching bag, and should not be ridiculed.
However, respect for Joel as a human being does not have to entail acceptance of his ideas. We should “test the spirits” of the world (1 John 4:1-6). Also, it is possible to be correct in some respects, while being in grave error in others. Things are seldom all good or all bad.
Finally, Osteen claims to be a Christian, and in the name of charity, we should accept him as such. We should be careful in applying labels like “heretic” or “false teacher” to people who claim Christ.
What are the problems with Osteen’s teachings?
Your Best Life Now is a man-centered, exegetically flawed effort to reconcile self-help psychology and theology:
Man-Centered
Your Best Life Now is a good title for this book, because it is focused mainly on self (Your Best Life) and urges discontentment with the way things are (Now). To Osteen, material and physical blessings (health and wealth) are to be expected by everyone in this life. What holds us back are mistakes and bad thinking.
In scripture, however, we are taught that what holds us back from our true potential is not mistakes (as though they were morally-neutral errors in logic) or bad thinking, but sin. The Bible tells us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and “none is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). As far as God is concerned, we are all hopeless rebels, dead in our sin and damned.
Jesus, the Son of God, lived a perfect life and died on the cross in atonement for sinners so that we could have fellowship with the Father, and those who follow Christ are promised eternal life (John 3:16). However, nowhere in scripture are we promised material and physical benefit. In fact, consider 1st Timothy 6:3-21.
We are taught that contentment with godliness is great gain (6) , and that we should not seek to be rich (7-11). However, Paul the pragmatist recognizes that God chooses to bless some with wealth, and in the same passage instructs them in how to deal with it (17-19).
Additionally, notice in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 that Paul himself apparently has a physical ailment, and God chooses not to heal him. Does Paul lack faith? It seems far more likely that God occasionally chooses to heal His children, and occasionally chooses not to.
To Osteen, physical healing is about our faith, which makes it into a human work to which God responds. He especially likes Eugene Peterson’s translation of Matthew 9:29: “become what you believe.” Instead of settling for poverty, sickness, and mediocrity, we should all “become what we believe” and rise above them. We are what we think we are.
Contrast this with 1 Corinthians 15:9-10. Paul is not who he thinks he is; he is who God thinks he is. Our faith and subsequent healing (if God wills it) is a response to God’s sovereign initiative. Consider Lazarus (John 11). Obviously, his faith had nothing to do with it!
It is also worth mentioning that all of Jesus’ close friends suffered persecution after his resurrection, and most of them were violently martyred. Does Osteen suggest that they just didn’t have enough faith, or that their thinking was bad? Because they clearly weren’t living their best life now.
Exegetically Flawed
While it is commendable that Osteen uses scripture in his book, many of his verses are inaccurately quoted, poorly translated, chopped off, or taken out of context.
Consider, for instance, his main “scripture”: the “far and beyond favor” of Ephesians 2:7. This seems to be Osteen’s own translation, since it isn’t found in any major version of scripture. It is also misinterpreted. The sense of the passages is that God has already done something for believers (not everyone) that they might be blessed spiritually in the ages to come.
Finally, Osteen misunderstands contextual things in scripture. He uses David’s attitude of boldness toward Goliath (1 Samuel 17:43-47) to urge a bold and not complaining spirit. Yet that same David wrote psalms with elements of complaint and lament to God, and God called him “a man after God’s own heart.” Osteen’s use of scripture is selective and often careless.
Effort to Reconcile Self-Help Psychology and Theology
For Osteen, the goal of godliness is earthly gain. This is exactly backwards. The Bible tells us that material and physical blessings are aids to godliness, and those who have them are held to a higher standard (Luke 12:48).
Scripture does not address every human endeavor directly, so there may be some value in psychology as a medical discipline. We should remember, though, that self-help is just that—an attempt to aid ourselves—and theology is just that, the study of the attributes of God. We are creatures, and any knowledge of self must begin with knowledge of the Creator. If we desire wealth, we should ask God for it, but be careful to remember that the answer may be “no”—or it may be a kind of wealth we did not have in mind, like a wealth of patience in adversity. There is no harm in asking for bodily healing, but God is sovereign, and the answer might be “not now.”
But aren’t there some good things in Osteen’s book?
Yes. Some of his ideas are fine. He encourages us to let go of the past in chapter 4, to find strength in adversity in chapter 5, to give generously in chapter 6, and to choose to be happy in chapter 7. While there may be some minor problems in his approach to these things, there is nothing wrong with urging them, as long as they are done in Christ and not in our own strength.
He has a congregation of 30,000 people! How could he be this wrong?
There is an article about Osteen in Good magazine. A Jewish agnostic named Jennifer Lee is interviewed, and she says this:
“I look at him like a motivational speaker. I don’t think people get that until they see him [on television]. Yes, he’s a pastor and does it in a church, but the underlying [message] is just to live a good life, love yourself, and be happy. He pretty much doesn’t preach religion.”
Sound like the gospel? And this is an advocate of Osteen, not a critic. The problem with Osteen’s relentlessly positive message, which substitutes the bad news of sin for the pop-psychology of “bad thinking,” and the great news of salvation for the lukewarm message of “health and wealth,” is that what emerges isn’t Christianity at all, the afterthought of a half-page altar call notwithstanding. The world loves him because his message (if not Osteen himself) is of the world.
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