Whose Gospel? Evangelical Orthodoxy and Heresy

Who is allowed in as a valued member of any community and who is kept out and marginalized is instructive.

The other night I saw an interview on ABC, it was with Barbara Walters and Joel Osteen. The conversation hung around the message that he is perhaps most famous for preaching, the "gospel of prosperity and wealth." He has a 35,000 member church and among many evangelical Christians he is a celebrated pastor. Although I am sure that he has many individual and associational critics, for the most part, he neatly fits into the evangelical community. Osteen is an Insider.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to NPR's "This American Life." One of the interviews was with Carlton Pearson. He went to Oral Roberts University and at one time he had a 14,000 member church. At one time, like Osteen, Pearson too was an Insider. Then he started preaching what he called the "gospel of inclusion." Two points about this gospel were troublesome to orthodox interpretation.

1. He said that through Jesus Christ all people are saved. The emphasis is on all, because orthodox evangelicals preach a more exclusivist message that focuses on being individually "born again," on "personal salvation" and on "Bible believing." Without this personal response to Jesus that divides the saved believer from the unsaved masses destined to burn in hell eternal, then your status as a Christian is questionable.

2. He began preaching that hell was not a transcendent place. Hell was here on earth--we make our own hell here on earth. This was a revelation Pearson had--while holding his grand-daughter one afternoon he saw a documentary on the Rwandan genocide and all the death and destruction that man waged against man. After prayer, he understood that hell was man made.

Needless to say, the gospel of inclusion did not fit into the mainstream evangelical community's ideas. Pearson soon became an Outsider. Pearson said that when he started preaching the gospel of inclusion he rather quickly fell from grace among his evangelical colleagues. He was now hanging out with those people normally marginalized by evangelical communities.

What does this mean about the evangelical community in the United States when the gospel of prosperity is valorized by many and the gospel of inclusion is demonized by many? How did the gospel of prosperity become mainstream? And how did the gospel of inclusion become marginalized?

These seem like terribly important questions. For, they get at the contemporary constitution of the evangelical community--what is accepted as Orthodox and what is thought of as heresy, who can be accepted as members and leaders of the church and who cannot, what interpretations of the Bible are acceptable and which are not, and so on.