6

New Plastic Gospels: The “Happiologists”

The previous two signs of morbidity (chaps. 4–5) showcased the phenomenon of repidginization—the process by which a language (like that of the Old Testament) reverts to a pidginized form on its way to extinction. It cannot be doubted that in both of the preceding examples—as is true for all cases of repidginization—some (but very little) of the lexical stock from the original Scripture language remains in place; a bit is accurately preserved. Of course that is precisely what one expects from a pidgin language (see chap. 3). It is equally unsurprising that so much of even the little that is retained in the repidginized forms is, as it were, “mispronounced,” which is to say, either misunderstood altogether or (re)understood in fundamentally different ways. This too is part of the pidginization process and thus also part of repidginization.

Whatever the case, it is clear that the largest problem facing the linguistic systems offered by the New Atheists and by “Marcion and friends” is that each is inherently deficient because they are massive reductions of the original (substrate) language of Scripture, whether that deficiency is due to duplicity, ignorance, or (superstrate) influence from “logic” or “consistency.” The huge loss in terms of phonology, grammar, and lexicon (analogically understood) is the most important proof that the persons advocating these positions, as intelligent and eloquent as they may be (and oftentimes are), are actually nothing of the sort when it comes to the large, rich, and complex linguistic system that is the Old Testament at full stretch. In the face of that fulsome reality, these persons are babblers in the nursery, not Shakespeare and not Einstein.

Repidginization is a sign of imminent language death because it shows there are no fully fluent speakers left, or, just as likely (and consequently), that there is no one left who is interested or willing to learn the full language. It was mentioned in chapter 3 that once a pidgin exists, regardless of the details of its creation, different things can happen to it. Most pidgins are created for some specific and momentary purpose (e.g., trade between cultures), and thus die out quickly. But if a pidgin is spoken for a long enough time—long enough that there are second-generation individuals who grow up with the pidgin as their mother tongue—then it is possible for the pidgin to grow up as well, expanding and developing into a full-blown language, which linguists call a creole.1

The third and final sign of the Old Testament’s morbidity that will be treated in this chapter fits this latter linguistic phenomenon. It concerns preachers of the so-called prosperity gospel,2 whom I will also refer to as the “happiologists.”3 In what follows I focus on Joel Osteen, but he is just one representative—though a highly influential and successful one—of a much larger movement. To anticipate what follows, I will argue that when it comes to the Old Testament (and the Bible as a whole), the happiologists offer us the equivalent of a modern plastic invention: they do not speak a pidgin but a brand-new creole. That is, they speak a language that began as a pidgin but that has now become a full-blown language, replete with all the linguistic items a creole must create on its way to developing into a full language. These new items include linguistic rules not found in the pidgin or further development of rules already at work in the pidgin; above all other considerations, however, creoles are marked by full regularity in the creation of new grammar. So, while it is clear that the happiology creole is alive and kicking—which is to say, selling well—when assessed vis-à-vis the original language that is the Old Testament, the existence of a creole is a dire situation, indicating that the Old Testament is facing a death that is no less imminent than in the cases of the two repidginized signs of morbidity discussed previously. Indeed, insofar as creoles are even further removed from the languages that birthed their most immediate ancestor, the pidgin (see diagram 1 in chap. 3), the happiology creole is ultimately even more dangerous and troubling than the (re)pidginized Old Testament.

The Bible and Your Best Everything Right Now!

Early in the very first chapter of his book Every Day a Friday: How to Be Happier 7 Days a Week, Joel Osteen, the pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, America’s largest megachurch, writes the following:

We prepare for victory or defeat at the very start of each day. When you get up in the morning, you have to set your mind in the right direction. You may feel discouraged. You may feel the blahs, thinking, I don’t want to go to work today. Or I don’t want to deal with these children. Or I’ve got so many problems.

If you make the mistake of dwelling on those thoughts, you are preparing to have a lousy day. You’re using your faith in the wrong direction. Turn it around and say, “This will be a great day. Something good will happen to me. God has favor in my future, and I’m expecting new opportunities, divine connections, and supernatural breakthroughs.”

When you take that approach, you prepare for victory, increase, and restoration. God says to the angels, “Did you hear that? They’re expecting My goodness. They’re expecting to prosper in spite of the economy. They’re expecting to get well in spite of the medical report. They’re expecting to accomplish their dreams even though they don’t have the resources right now.”

When you begin each day in faith, anticipating something good, God tells the angels to go to work and to arrange things in your favor. He gives you breaks, lines up the right people, and opens the right doors.4

This passage is similar to others found in Every Day a Friday, not to mention the other books that compose Osteen’s lot of bestsellers, and so can serve as a representative example suitable for analysis. Several observations can be made about the passage, especially in light of the linguistic analogy I am employing here.

What is perhaps most obvious is the full regularity of Osteen’s description. There is no room for flexibility or freedom here, let alone anything surprising, whether that is from the divine or human side of the equation. People may feel one way, but they are entirely able to “turn it around and say” something else. It’s either all negative (the blahs) or all positive (This will be a great day)—one or the other, but nothing in-between and certainly nothing admixed. When people do “turn it around” and “anticipate something good,” God—or so it seems from Osteen’s language—has no option but to bless in response. God’s action is fully regularized: fully contingent, and directly so, on what a human being says or does or thinks. One way to put this is that God, in Osteen’s scenario, is decidedly unfree. Another, less flattering way to put it is that God is little more than a lapdog, subject to every human whim, as long as that is positive (“Come here, boy! Good dog!”). Either way you put it, the human is the master, not God—a complete reversal of the biblical witness to the power, freedom, and sovereignty of God. The possibility that such full regularity could ever be broken—upset as, for instance, in the biblical case of Job—is not imagined by Osteen, at least not here. Then again, Job is an ancient book, from an ancient collection, and ancient languages are full of irregularities that new languages like creoles simply will not tolerate.

Not only is there full regularity in the citation above, there are also new lexical items, new definitions, and new grammatical rules—all of which one expects in creoles, which are an instance of “language starting over” from scratch.5 In terms of new definitions, notice how Osteen’s “beginning each day in faith” is immediately defined (via apposition) as “anticipating something good.” Just a bit earlier “using your faith” in the right direction is defined as expecting goodness, prosperity, health, and the realization of one’s dreams (which go unspecified, though achieving them evidently has to do with sufficient “resources”), along with a smidgen of religiosity (“divine connections . . . supernatural breakthroughs,” which again go unspecified). As for new rules, Osteen’s full grammatical regularity—that faith leads directly to God’s telling the angels to get to work and favor the faithful individual—is a primary example. How Osteen knows that rule, how he knows what God says to the angels, and so on, is never indicated, only declared.

“Declare” is a most apt word, and an example of a new lexical item in the happiology creole. It is, in fact, the main verb (declined in first person, of course) used in the title of one of Osteen’s popular volumes: I Declare: 31 Promises to Speak over Your Life. There are thirty-one promises to correspond to each day of the month, so that each day, every month, and the entire year can be blessed. Day 1’s declaration is illustrative and, again, representative:

I DECLARE God’s incredible blessings over my life. I will see an explosion of God’s goodness, a sudden widespread increase. I’ll experience the surpassing greatness of God’s favor. It will elevate me to a level higher than I dreamed of. Explosive blessings are coming my way. This is my declaration.6

The use of all capital letters for the initial verb phrase is indicative, not simply typographical. Everything depends on the power of speech in Osteen’s work: positive speech, to be precise, and the positive thinking that lies behind it. Some remarks from the introduction to I Declare are instructive:

Our words have creative power. Whenever we speak something, either good or bad, we give life to what we are saying. Too many people say negative things about themselves, about their families, and about their futures. . . . They don’t realize they are prophesying their futures. The Scripture says, “We will eat the fruit of our words.” That means we will get exactly what we’ve been saying.

Here is the key; you’ve got to send your words out in the direction you want your life to go. You cannot talk defeat and expect to have victory. . . . You will produce what you say. If you want to know what you will be like five years from now, just listen to what you are saying about yourself. . . .

[Negative] thoughts may come to your mind, but don’t make the mistake of verbalizing them. The moment you speak them out, you allow them to take root. . . . When you [say something positive], you are blessing your future.7

Here again the new rules, especially that of full regularity, are on clear display with very little demonstration of how they operate or how Osteen knows they are true. “Scripture” is mentioned but without a reference provided. Presumably the text is Prov. 13:2, but Osteen underquotes it. The full verse reads as follow:

People eat well from the fruit of their words,

but the treacherous have an appetite only for violence. (CEB)

Osteen not only underquotes the verse; he also misquotes it. In addition, he does not explain how he knows that this verse “means we will get exactly what we’ve been saying.” Not all Proverbs commentators would put it that way.8

Further along, Osteen continues in his habit of misquoting and underquoting—or is this simply evidence of the broken substrate that lies behind the pidgin that lies behind his creole? In any event, he misrepresents two other “bits” (equally revealing) from the book of Proverbs:

Prov. 6:2	Osteen: “We are snared by the words of our mouth” (only v. 2a) CEB: “You will be trapped by your words; you will be caught by your words.”
Prov. 18:21	Osteen: “Life and death are in the power of our tongue” (only v. 21a) CEB: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue; those who love it will eat its fruit.”

Osteen takes these verse fragments—notice that he cites only the first half of both poetic couplets9—as proof of his metaphysical rule that “when you speak it out, you’re giving life to your faith.”10 But these snippets from Proverbs, especially in Osteen’s prose, are nothing more than that: quick, nonsubstantive, and unexplained appeals to, presumably, some sort of authoritative religious text—a text that is, furthermore, seriously misunderstood.11

The real support for Osteen’s argument, and the predominant part of his rhetoric, are the three illustrations he provides in fairly extensive detail (esp. vis-à-vis the ultra-brief biblical asides): First, the successful renovation of the Compaq Center in Houston for Lakewood Church, despite the fact that the projected cost was millions more than originally expected. Second, the story of a professional baseball player who went from being a winning pitcher to being a losing one when, after moving to a new field, he “prophesied his future” by making “the mistake of speaking out” negative thoughts about the fence in left field being too close.12 Third and most troubling of all, a maintenance man who “always had a negative report,” “was prophesying defeat, . . . cursing his future,” and “didn’t realize he was being snared by the words of his mouth.”13 Despite Osteen’s protestations that he is “not making light of his situation,” his version of the story ends with the man getting sick at fifty-five years of age, and dying a “very sad and lonely death”: “I couldn’t help but think that he had been predicting this sad end his entire life because he was always talking about how he would never make it to his retirement years. He got what he was calling in.”14

By Osteen’s own account, this maintenance man isn’t the only one with negative thoughts. Osteen’s surmise about the man’s untimely and unfortunate death is a negative thought as well, one which, now verbalized, “prophesies”—not only about this man, but also about any and all similarly “negative reports.” This is no longer, then, just “a thought” Osteen had in passing as he recalled this man. It is now a metaphysical rule: that is the way Osteen’s language works—or rather, the way language itself works according to Osteen. You get what you call in. The implication is clear: the man’s death is his own fault.

In light of this new linguistic rule—that verbal articulation makes reality happen—there is nothing to do but to “Declare health. Declare favor. Declare abundance,” because “you give life to your faith by what you say.”15 Hence,

You should send your words out in the direction you want your life to go. . . . Your declaration should be, “I know when one door closes, God will open up another door. What was meant for my harm, God will use to my advantage. I’m not only coming out, I will come out better than I was before.”

Have a report of victory. . . .

On a regular basis we should say, “I’m blessed. I’m healthy. I’m strong. I’m valuable. I’m talented. I have a bright future.” Those words go out of your mouth and come right back into your own ears. Over time they will create the same image on the inside.16

Osteen illustrates this principle by “a doctor in Europe who had some very sick patients” that he read about (unfortunately, he provides no documentation); this doctor (Émile Coué perhaps?) had his patients recite three or four times an hour the mantra, “I am getting better and better, every day, in every way.”17 Despite lack of improvement through the use of traditional medical methods, this new prescription “all of the sudden” produced better feelings in the patients: “What happened? As they heard themselves saying over and over, ‘I’m getting better. I’m improving. My health is coming back,’ those words began to create a new image on the inside. . . . Once you get a picture of it on the inside, then God can bring it to pass on the outside.”18 “Don’t talk about the problem,” Osteen concludes, “Talk about the solution.”19 His scriptural “proof” here is taken from Joel 3:10 (though, again, he does not provide the reference, nor does he quote the verse in full):

The Scripture says, “Let the weak say, ‘I am strong.’” Notice it doesn’t say, “Let the weak talk about their weakness. Let the weak call five friends and discuss their weakness.” “Let the weak complain about their weakness.” No, it says in effect, “Let the weak say exactly the opposite of how they feel.”

In other words, don’t talk about the way you are. Talk about the way you want to be.20

The result of this positive self-talk is, not surprisingly, axiomatic. Osteen avers,

It will not only change how you feel, it also will change your attitude. You won’t go out with a weak, defeated, victim mentality. You will go out with a victor mentality. . . . You are one of a kind. You are a masterpiece. You are a prized possession. When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, instead of getting depressed, instead of saying, “Oh, man. Look how old I look. Look at this gray hair. Look at these wrinkles,” you need to smile and say, “Good morning, you beautiful thing. Good morning, you handsome thing. Good morning, you blessed, prosperous, successful, strong, talented, creative, confident, secure, disciplined, focused, highly favored child of the Most High God.” Get it on the inside. Speak faith over your future!21

Assessing Osteen “and Company”

It is hard to know where to begin when assessing the problems besetting so much of Osteen’s linguistic system, but one shouldn’t overlook the fact that many of the thoughts he encourages us to have are downright sugary sweet, not merely “positive.”22 At root, these thoughts (analogically, words and/or sentences) come across as fundamentally narcissistic: individualistic to the core and consistently about the personal betterment of one’s own (!) immediate life circumstances, especially in the realms of finance, health, even beauty. Throughout his corpus, from the first breakout volume, Your Best Life Now, Osteen’s examples are regularly taken from these areas, and seem to center around fiscal matters: the selling of real estate, the purchase of a business, getting out of debt, and so on and so forth.23

Not all of that is necessarily bad. Nor is all of it completely wrong. Language does have constitutive power, after all, and there is something known as cognitive-behavioral psychology. It is also the nature of pidgins and creoles to retain a bit of their underlying linguistic ancestors (one can’t deny the presence of texts like Matt. 18:18–19 in Scripture). Those points granted, all of Osteen’s linguistic system is necessarily bad and completely wrong as a (linguistic) system, all by itself, to the extent that he and other happiologists claim to be speaking the language of Scripture (note, at the very least, that they are not psychologists). Their language is all bad and completely wrong at this point because it is exactly the full language of Scripture that is so obviously missing from Osteen and other prosperity gospel preachers. So, to return to an earlier example, Osteen’s linguistic system cannot account for someone like Job. Then again, Job’s friends couldn’t account for Job! But at the end of the book, it is they, not Job, who are put in their place by none other than God. Job, the man and the book, apparently breaks the regularity—if not the act-consequence retribution theology of the ancient Near East itself, then certainly the creole-like regularity of the new plastic gospels peddled by the happiologists. Throughout the book that bears his name, Job “speaks out” a whole lot of what Osteen would no doubt label “negative prophecy,” but, in the end, God twice indicates that “my servant Job” has “spoken of me what is right” (Job 42:7–8 NRSV). It is Job’s friends who have not spoken rightly—his friends, who, among other things, commanded him to shut his mouth about these matters (see, e.g., Job 8:2; 33:31–33). They sound like Osteen: “Don’t speak the negative, Job! Tune in to the positive, Job!” But Job knows better:

But I won’t keep quiet;

I will speak in the adversity of my spirit,

groan in the bitterness of my life. (Job 7:11 CEB)

And again, it is that kind of speech—Job’s painful speech, not that of his friends—which is commended by God as being right speech, firm and true (Hebrew נכונה/nəkônâ).

In my judgment the book of Job all by itself is enough to put the lie to Osteen’s entire system, but perhaps using Job as a counterexample is too easy. While Osteen posits a hypersimplistic and superregular system of “If x, then y,” Job seems to posit the exact opposite: “If x, then, at least at times, -y.” But perhaps Osteen might counter that this is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. What, then, of Ecclesiastes? That book seems to posit an equation like “If x, then ???” A few examples suffice to counter happiology definitively:

It is better to go to a house in mourning

than to a house party,

because that is everyone’s destiny;

and the living should take it to heart.

Aggravation is better than merriment

because a sad face may lead to a glad heart.

The wise heart is in the house that mourns,

but the foolish heart is in the house that rejoices. (Eccles. 7:2–4 CEB)

Consider God’s work! Who can straighten what God has made crooked? When times are good, enjoy the good; when times are bad, consider: God has made the former as well as the latter so that people can’t discover anything that will come to be after them. (Eccles. 7:13–14 CEB)

I observed all the work of God—that no one can grasp what happens under the sun. Those who strive to know can’t grasp it. Even the wise who are set on knowing are unable to grasp it. (Eccles. 8:17 CEB)

I also observed under the sun that the race doesn’t always go to the swift, nor the battle to the mighty, nor food to the wise, nor wealth to the intelligent, nor favor to the knowledgeable, because accidents can happen to anyone. (Eccles. 9:11 CEB)

And perhaps the most stunning piece of advice in all of Scripture for all would-be theologians and preachers:

Don’t be quick with your mouth or say anything hastily before God, because God is in heaven, but you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few. (Eccles. 5:2 CEB)

Via the linguistic analogy, Ecclesiastes might be viewed as an irregular verb form. A highly irregular verb form—far too irregular to fit into Osteen’s system, which is entirely regular . . . to a fault. There is not space here to unpack these verses from Ecclesiastes—and it must be admitted that this book poses problems for many preachers and theologians, not just those of the prosperity stripe—but the very existence of the book, its inclusion in the canon of Holy Scripture, and its strong countertestimony to happiology suffice to make the point that the linguistic system of Osteen and others is in no way identical to the linguistic system that is the whole Old Testament. The language of happiology does not include all of the language that is the Old Testament; happiology is a massive reduction.

Not just Ecclesiastes or Job makes this point. It is also made in the book of Psalms, with the backbone provided to that book by the individual laments,24 and it is in every other piece of Scripture that reckons with the dark and down sides of life. For Osteen and company, those parts of life—and also, evidently, of Scripture—are “the blahs,” which must be “tuned out.” Instead, one should “tune in” to positivity, changing one’s mind, so as to think and declare something else.25 At that point all will be well, and all must be well, because the linguistic system is entirely regular. If you do not change your thoughts or declare something else, . . . well, it is likely that you will end up unsuccessful in professional sports, failing in business, old-looking and wrinkly, and/or dead at an early age. The exact opposite scenario is found in Scripture. If there is a linguistic rule in the language of the Old Testament, it is one that does not exclude lament: “Praise can retain its authenticity and naturalness only in polarity with lamentation.”26

More should be said contra happiology. In his exhortation to positive self-talk, Osteen sometimes advocates replacement language: instead of saying “I have to do this or I have to do that” (go to work, drive in traffic, etc.), one should say “I get to do this.”27 The shift in language signals a shift from necessity to opportunity, from negativity to positivity. What’s so wrong about that?

Again: only everything. It is dead wrong by ignoring all evidence to the contrary, in the world and in the Word. The shift from “have to” to “get to” is clever, but it simply doesn’t work in every situation in the real world (e.g., terminal illness, clinical depression, natural disasters). It also doesn’t reflect the language of Scripture. It is a new grammatical rule that bears no recognizable relationship to the dynamic of the lament psalms. The psalmists do not reach a place of new life by means of denying their very real, very difficult, and often very unjust circumstances, but precisely by voicing them. To operate in denial of these real, often volatile emotions—which is what Osteen recommends (“Don’t talk about the way you are”; “say the opposite of how [you] feel”)—is not only untrue to the Psalms; it is downright duplicitous, if not pathological. It may even be evil since, according to the Psalms, the only people to enjoy a life free of pain are the wicked (see Ps. 73:3–5, 12).28 Or, in the words of Tal Ben-Shahar, a prominent voice in Positive Psychology, “the only people who don’t experience . . . normal unpleasant feelings are psychopaths. And the dead.”29 Finally, in terms of actual empirical research—not just the one unnamed European doctor that Osteen once read about—there is a large amount of data that shows it is precisely the articulation of painful emotions that facilitates healing and health, whereas inhibition of those emotions leads to disease and dysfunction.30 This insight is well attested in, if not anticipated by, the dynamic of lament in the Psalms, but not only there: “Any survey will show that laments pervade the entire Old Testament and that they are an essential part of what the Old Testament says happened between God and [hu]man[ity].”31

Let us shift to the New Testament for a moment since happiology does just as much damage to the New Testament as it does to the Old. Osteen’s “have to–get to” switch ultimately makes a mockery of Jesus at Gethsemane. “I don’t have to drink this cup, I get to!” is what Jesus should have prayed in the garden, according to Osteen’s logic. One thinks immediately of Monty Python’s motion-picture parody of the New Testament, The Life of Brian, which ends with a song-and-dance routine during the crucifixion with everyone singing, “Always look on the bright side of life.” As ridiculous as that number is, it is actually an instantiation of Osteen’s linguistic rule when placed in the mouth of Jesus at Gethsemane, let alone Golgotha. If the rule in question doesn’t apply to Jesus, if even Jesus can’t get out of life without “sweating blood” (Luke 22:44) and worse, who is Osteen to say or think (positively no doubt!) that we can?

Or we might consider Matt. 16, where Peter makes “the great confession” identifying Jesus as “Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). Jesus blesses him for it, but, Matthew writes,

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and legal experts, and that he had to be killed and raised on the third day. Then Peter took hold of Jesus and, scolding him, began to correct him: “God forbid, Lord! This won’t happen to you.” But he turned to Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stone that could make me stumble, for you are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.” (Matt. 16:21–23 CEB)

According to Osteen’s language, Peter is doing the right thing: telling Jesus to get over the “blahs.” Jesus shouldn’t verbalize such negativity since it could come true! Instead, Jesus should talk positive: “This won’t happen to you.” But it is Jesus who sets Peter straight: human thoughts aren’t God’s thoughts, certainly not always. God’s thoughts sometimes include suffering and death. Not according to happiology, however, which is all shine and no sweat, a theology of glory without a theology of the cross, all Easter Sunday but without Good Friday. Hence the new plastic gospels are, in the end, not the gospel of God. Jesus recognizes what is at stake: “Get behind me, Satan.”

These comments on the New Testament are not because I have forgotten the purpose of this book and its focus on the Old Testament. They are intended as further proof of what was asserted in chapter 1 and was equally on display in the two previous signs of morbidity: if the Old Testament dies, the New Testament is not far behind. The language of happiology faces just as much resistance from the New Testament as it does from the Old. It is the full language of Scripture, in its parts and as a whole, that reveals the problems of the prosperity gospel; it is also only the full language that can redress those problems.

Another way to put matters is that the full language of Scripture can account for the happiology creole, at least broken fragments of it, but the reverse is not true. Little bits and pieces of the Bible are found scattered throughout the lexicon of prosperity theology, to a greater or lesser degree, but they are nothing more than that: mere traces surviving from a substrate language that was at some point combined with a superstrate to create a pidgin, which subsequently developed into a creole. The original, full language of Scripture is now far back in the linguistic ancestry and was never the dominant language in the linguistic contact anyway. Can pieces of the “good news” of the prosperity gospel be found here and there, now and then, in bits and pieces of the Bible, whether Old Testament or New? Of course! There is no doubt about that. But the full complexity of the language that is Scripture is not captured by happiology: Job, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, and even Jesus and his cross simply don’t fit. In brief, the happiologists do not speak the language of Scripture, but a fully regular creole that emerged from a pidgin, produced after the Bible came into contact with some other language. That other language must be considered the superstrate, given the damage Scripture has suffered in the construction of the pidgin-turned-creole. Simply put, little of the Bible is left.

It is worth delving deeper into the nature of the language contact that produced this creole in order to pinpoint the original superstrate that has prevailed over the language of Scripture. To begin with, it may be best to posit more than one superstrate, since “the roots of the modern prosperity gospel,” according to Kate Bowler, “are long and tangled.”32 In her insightful and sensitive history of the movement, Bowler traces it back to “certain ways of thinking about spiritual power that emerged and competed for attention early in the twentieth century,” the core of which was the conviction that

adherents, acting in accordance with divine principles, relied on their minds to transform thought and speech into heaven-sent blessings. It focused on the individual rather than groups and emphasized the power of the individual’s mind. . . . We might envision the prosperity gospel as composed of three distinct though intersecting streams: pentecostalism; New Thought (an amalgam of metaphysics and Protestantism . . .); and an American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility.33

Bowler carefully unpacks each of these streams in her study. For my purposes it is enough to recognize that each of these streams are, in my linguistic analogy, languages that have now come into contact with the language of Scripture. A contact language is the result: a pidgin that facilitates communication between the different systems but which is, in the process, a reduction of the superstrate and substrate. While pidginization reduces both languages, the language of the more powerful group predominates, meaning that more of that group’s language (the superstrate) survives than does that of the other (the substrate).34 If the linguistic analogy holds water, we should be able to determine not only which language is the superstrate and what is the substrate (by the comparative analysis of what survives in this pidgin-turned-happiology-creole) but even, if we are lucky, the identity of the superstrate itself.

On the basis of what has already been said above, it seems abundantly clear that it is the Bible that has been most severely reduced—far more than the “mind-power” that was a hallmark of the late nineteenth-century New Thought movement.35 It is the Bible, then, that is the substrate, with the superstrate being New Thought mind-power. This explains why Job doesn’t fit within Osteen’s language system and why Job ultimately doesn’t have any part in it, but it also explains why Osteen’s system couldn’t survive without positive thinking.

Bowler highlights three crucial presuppositions of New Thought: “a high anthropology, the priority of spiritual reality, and the generative power of positive thought.”36 In happiology, it is especially the last-mentioned item that proves to be the superstrate, surviving—in this case—virtually intact vis-à-vis the language of Scripture, which takes a beating. It is the Bible, after all, that highlights the necessity and benefits of both “negative” and “positive” thought and speech.

One should not imagine too direct of a line from New Thought to the prosperity gospel of the happiologists. Indeed, an early twentieth-century prosperity preacher, E. W. Kenyon, “flatly rejected the ‘religion of healthy-mindedness’ as counterfeit,” arguing that it was “a substitution of gospel truth with abstract ‘principles.’”37 And yet, working when and where Kenyon did—“in areas of New Thought’s greatest influence”—he ended up producing a pidgin of his own, combining his understanding of “divine principles” to unlock “God’s treasury of blessings” through what he called “dominating faith.”38 According to Bowler, Kenyon’s “foundational works on spiritual power articulated a set of universal laws that electrified late-nineteenth-century evangelicalism and its offspring, pentecostalism, with confidence in human capabilities.”39

What one can see in Kenyon, then, is a contact language produced by New Thought encountering Scripture (though the situation is probably more complex still), with one adding more to the mix than the other. So, for example, “though the priority of spirit,” one of New Thought’s key presuppositions, “seemed a peripheral theological detail, Kenyon drew it into every beginners’ course on the gospel.”40 Once this new lexical item is in place, and leveled through the system, the pidgin has become expanded: the high anthropology of New Thought now trumps all counterevidence in Scripture (linguistic antonyms, as it were) so that union with God became, for Kenyon, the starting point, not the eschatological goal.41 It is a short step from expanded pidgin to full creolization, replete with new and fully regularized rules. So, for example, “faith,” as defined by Kenyon, “was the ‘confident assurance based on absolute knowledge that everything is already provided through the operation of certain immutable laws.’ . . . ‘Faith-filled words’ not only brought the universe into being but also governed the world as an invisible force.”42

Bowler summarizes Kenyon’s thinking: “New Thought employed the right process with the wrong theology.”43 Assessed linguistically, this is nothing other than saying that in the contact between Scripture and New Thought, it is New Thought that proves dominant. Not only is that so, but the little that survives of the substrate is fundamentally qualified and altered by the superstrate.44 Kenyon’s theology in the pidgin and, even more so, in the theology of the pidgin-turned-creole that he helped to create is made up of Scripture dominated by something else that isn’t Scripture—or at least not fully Scripture, not the full warp and woof of Scripture. As troubling as that might be, especially to Kenyon’s theological heirs (assuming they care about Scripture), it is the normal situation (exactly what we expect) with contact languages like pidgins and with the creoles that can result. The process at work here, then, is exactly the same as what was observed with the morbid signs provided by the New Atheism or the Marcionites Old and New, the only variable being the different superstrates involved.

While more might be said, the most important point is obvious: the prosperity gospel of happiology is a contact language, at the very least one step removed (as a pidgin) from the language of Scripture. That’s why so much of Scripture doesn’t “fit” in the prosperity gospel and why the gospels of the happiologists are new plastic ones, not identical to the “old-time religion,” which in addition to being ancient, has a lot of twists and turns that cannot be stomached by those who prefer a different language—one that is simpler, cleaner, and more regular, whether they be atheists, anti-Jewish preachers and theologians, or contemporary mind-power spiritualists.

The result of this language contact is, first, massive reductionism via pidginization. Just one example among a cast of thousands, if not millions, is the pastor described by Kate Bowler, who referred to “Jesus’ resurrection as the moment when ‘He couldn’t stand being [financially] broke any longer!’ . . . Jesus rose from the grave as the redeemer of poverty’s curse.”45

But again, pidginization is just the first step. Insofar as the prosperity pidgin has been around for some time now, it seems better to describe it as an expanded pidgin. Given the existence of so many new grammatical rules—“absolute knowledge,” for example, and the “immutable laws” (so Kenyon) of faith, speech, power, health, and so forth—it is more accurate to say that what current happiologists speak is not a pidgin nor even an expanded pidgin, but a fully regularized creole. If this is accurate, it would indicate that someone like Osteen—or similar second-generation happiologists (and those following them)—acquired the (expanded) prosperity pidgin natively, from their forebears, and developed it further into a full-blown creole: an entirely new language. In truth, the creolization may have taken place before Osteen and the current crop of prosperity preachers; regardless, the speakers of the happiology pidgin or pidgin-turned-creole are many and several, with perhaps the most notable being Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993). Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking was a New York Times bestseller for what was at that time a record-breaking three years, selling over a million copies.46 When Osteen’s language is compared with earlier versions, there is little that is new. Peale, too, advocated a way “by which we can control and even determine” life’s circumstances.47 “Declaring a blessing” is Osteen’s slightly updated version.

Four final observations should be made on this last sign of the Old Testament’s morbidity, which may be the most troubling of all. First, it is not hard to see the influence of American civil religion in the prosperity gospel movement.48 Bowler speaks of that religion as prosperity theology’s “nationalistic alter ego,” and argues that the prosperity gospel “was constituted by the deification and ritualization of the American Dream: upward mobility, accumulation, hard work, and moral fiber.”49 While Bowler speaks of American civil religion and prosperity gospel theology as sharing various elements such as high anthropology and the like, the linguistic analogy suggests that it is just as likely that the prosperity gospel is derived from American civil religion, not a completely independent development. That is to say, linguistically, that it is American civil religion that constitutes (a large part of) the superstrate.

Bowler also makes a good case for seeing the prosperity gospel as “an account of globalization.”50 In both perspectives—the global world and the more localized, American slice of it—one can trace the important role of individualistic consumeristic capitalism. Bowler makes the point succinctly: “A marketplace ethos prevails” in prosperity gospel thinking.51 A memorable example is the preacher chronicled by Bowler who argued that “God’s laws and the laws of business were one and same, as sowing and reaping yielded financial as well as spiritual harvests.”52 Ecclesiastes 11:6 and Mark 4:26–27 would seem to nuance this “immutable law(s),” however.

Once the marketplace in question—whether fiscal or spiritual or both if these are “one and the same”—is of any size, there is increased pressure toward upward mobility, fitting in, urbanizing, and leaving old-fashioned and antiquated habits of the past behind, past habits such as ancient and native tongues. So, as I pointed out in chapter 3, one of the main reasons for language death is precisely the kinds of pressures brought on by globalization, urbanization, and economic considerations.53

The desire for economic success is patently a major cog in the machinery of Osteen and company. Indeed, the “and company” is especially appropriate at this point because the prosperity gospel is big business. Osteen’s best-selling books (is there one that hasn’t been a hit?) are quickly followed up with an entire apparatus of accessories: journals, daily reading books, and so forth, which, if nothing else, increase the profit margin. Consider, for example, the small-sized library that was published to support the success of Your Best Life Now:

1. Your Best Life Now Journal: A Guide to Reaching Your Full Potential

2. Your Best Life Now Study Guide: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

3. Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now: 90 Devotions for Living at Your Full Potential

4. Scriptures and Meditations for Your Best Life Now

5. Your Best Life Begins Each Morning: Devotions to Start Every New Day of the Year

6. Your Best Life Now for Moms

There’s even a board game,

7. “Your Best Life Now: The Game!”54

As if all that wasn’t proof enough of the economic engine driving happiology, one might consider the fact that the specific day of the week celebrated in Osteen’s Every Day a Friday is not Sunday, the day of Christian worship. Neither is it the Jewish Sabbath. It is Friday, but not Good Friday, the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. Instead of these religiously important days, the day Osteen writes about is the day that marks the end of the workweek. The good feeling that one has when one ends work and starts the weekend is the feeling that can, and should, mark every day (note the regularity!). An instructive comparison is offered by the prayer for Fridays in the Book of Common Prayer: “Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.”55

The contrast could hardly be more pronounced. In The Book of Common Prayer, Fridays are marked by a remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion and the fact that one doesn’t go up to joy without first suffering pain, or enter into glory before experiencing death. The Book of Common Prayer has the advantage of being far more scriptural than Osteen’s end of the workweek, “Thank God It’s Friday” feeling. The Book of Common Prayer is also superior insofar as it acknowledges that it is God—not us and our mind-power, positive thinking, or faith words—who has the power to transform the way of the cross to a way of life and peace. And note these key details: that acknowledgment is made in the midst of prayer, not in a command to a lapdog; it is predicated on divine mercy, not on the efficacy of the pray-er’s own speech power; and it is performed in the subjunctive mood, “Mercifully grant that we may.” Those small, but altogether crucial, linguistic details demonstrate that what is happening in the prayer is not automatic, not universal, not invariable. But these subjunctive expressions are rare these days and altogether absent from happiology’s immutable laws of positive thinking and prosperity theology.56 It is, after all, only a very thick definition of “happiness” that could call the Friday of Jesus’s death “good,” and the “good” of “Good Friday” is certainly not the kind of “good” feeling one has when five o’clock rolls around at the end of the workweek. Neither is it the kind of “good,” let alone “great,” that goes with “Have a good day” or “I’m feeling great!”57

A second observation: it is the omnipresence of optimism, victory, and triumphalism in happiology—a syrupy sweet and thin definition of the good life—that led Eric G. Wilson to call Christian denominations in North America “basically happiness companies.”58 He did not intend it as a compliment. At this point, so much of the New Atheism’s critique of contemporary Christianity finds an appropriate target. Consider Terry Eagleton, who earlier defended Christianity against the New Atheism’s unfair and foul (in the linguistic analogy, pidginized) presentation, who nevertheless believes that much of contemporary Christianity has “betrayed the revolution.”59

In the case of the prosperity gospel, no less than with the New Atheism or the Marcionites Old and New, the problem is not simply theoretical, limited to some arcane or obsessive concern to be absolutely thorough with regard to the language of Scripture. It is equally and every bit a pragmatic problem—one of practice, ethics. There are very real, very deleterious downsides to happiology. To “speak only positively and believe for the best”—what Bowler calls “the message of cultivated cheerfulness”—is the prosperity gospel’s “greatest gift and heaviest burden.”60 It is a heavy burden in light of so many counterfactuals: death, sickness, failure—yes, even among the faithful, and yes, in the flesh, not just in the pages of Scripture, but also there! For some prosperity preachers observed by Bowler, “death meant failure, the failure of the believer to win the spiritual battle against illness,” a notion that forced believers to choose “a once-and-for-all Savior and silence in illness rather than face public shame.”61 D. R. McConnell, whom Bowler cites at this point, puts it even more strongly: “The time when a dying believer needs his faith the most is when he is told that he has it the least. . . . Perhaps the most inhuman fact revealed about the Faith movement is this: when its members die, they die alone.”62

The full language of Scripture highlights the theoretical and theological problems with all happiology creoles and also redresses their practical problems. Note, at this point, how Bowler chronicles the existence of some believers amid prosperity churches who “quietly concluded that illness could portend righteous suffering” and who did so, frequently, with reference to Job!63 Vignettes like that demonstrate that, while the prosperity gospel may sell, it can’t save.

But, for now, the new plastic gospels are selling very well indeed. The success of happiology in the prosperity gospel mode is undeniable. The bottom line of “Brand Osteen” includes 38,000 people in attendance every Sunday, with seven million television viewers weekly, and millions of books sold.64 While Osteen’s Lakewood Church may be the largest of its kind, the average congregational size in a prosperity gospel church is 8,577 members.65 In point of fact, the phenomenal success of the prosperity gospel, when viewed through the linguistic analogy, may suggest a process of decreolization—the process by which a creole is made more and more similar to the standard, dominant language.66 I have already indicated my belief that the superstrate in the pidgin-turned-happiology-creole is exactly the dominant language already “spoken here”—both in North America and worldwide. If correct, the happiology creole is now coming full circle, back home where it started.

A third observation is that however happiology is analyzed, which depends somewhat on the speakers and their placement in the history of the movement—whether, that is, prosperity theology is deemed an expanded pidgin, a pidgin-turned-creole, or a creole in the midst of decreolization—the language of Scripture within the prosperity gospel is well on its way to extinction, if it isn’t dead already. In chapter 7 I will have occasion to say something slightly more positive about preachers like Osteen, but I do not want to soften too much the severity of my judgment here: a substrate in a pidgin-turned-creole is at least two significant steps removed from the original language (see chap. 3 and diagram 1 there). The new, regularized creole may survive—it might even thrive—but it is not the original language. Far from it. The original has been reduced, then subsumed, then transformed, and then eventually and entirely forgotten. The prosperity gospel, no less than the New Atheism, is a deathly serious sign of the Old Testament’s morbidity.

The reason for this severe judgment is that creoles are, by definition, new languages. Creoles are not dialects of a language, but entirely new ones.67 Analogically, the prosperity gospel is not simply a new language: it is a new gospel. That is a cause for real concern, if, that is, Gal. 1:8 is still in our lexicon. There Paul says that “even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!” (NRSV). Admittedly Paul elsewhere writes that “the important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached” (Phil. 1:18 NIV). But, in light of my analysis above, the very real question facing happiology—quite apart from the question of motives—is whether it is “Christ” that is being preached (linguistically considered) or if the admonition of Galatians 1 is in effect.

A fourth and final point is worth making: historically creolization is largely associated with colonization. According to McWhorter,

Most creoles formed during the so-called “exploration” of the world by a few European powers from the 1400s through the 1800s, in which cultivation of food and material goods to enrich the coffers of the “exploring” country required large crews of manual laborers to do work that whites back home were only fitfully willing to do. Namely, the slave trade and its contractual aftermath under a different name in the 1800s gave birth to several dozen creoles.68

“The tragic truth,” he continues, “is that most creoles have arisen amid conditions of unthinkably stark and ineradicable social injustice.”69 The majority of creoles, that is, began in contexts of slavery. It was the native languages of the slaves that suffered most in the construction of the contact languages (pidgins) that eventually became creoles.70 When seen through the linguistic analogy, this indicates that the language of Scripture now subsumed in the prosperity gospel creole has been enslaved to a more dominant master—the master of individualistic, narcissistic, consumeristic, zero-sum economics. If that analysis is correct, what the prosperity gospel offers us is no good news at all, but only a new form of slavery. A slavery, furthermore, that is inescapable since prosperity theology depends on a high anthropology wherein everything depends on us, where God’s agency is altogether lacking or entirely dependent on our “faith words” and positive thoughts, and where faith is commodified such that you have to have enough of it to buy what you need. In Scripture, however, it is God who delivers Israel from Egypt, without them even asking, let alone doing anything (Exod. 2:23–25).71 In Scripture, it is Christ who died for us, even while we were still sinners (Rom. 5:8).

Conclusion to Part 2

Despite the length of the three chapters that compose part 2, more could be said about each of the three signs of the Old Testament’s morbidity, but much would be simple variation on the themes already identified. For example, one could note the extreme reductionism (pidginization) that turns into regularized grammar (creolization) in Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking through to the Blessed Life, in which an entire system of prosperity is built on a rather obscure snippet in 1 Chron. 4:10. The stunning success of the Jabez volume (over 8 million copies sold) was not lost on the author and publisher, who quickly capitalized (!) on that by accessorizing (!) the initial book with a host of companion volumes, including devotionals, journals, Bible studies (inspired by one verse?), and versions of Jabez’s prayer (or rather the book by that name) for women, teens, kids—even babies!72 Here again, no less than in Osteen’s Best Life library, the driving force (the superstrate) in the Jabez-language juggernaut is big business, with any and every possibility to turn a buck fully engaged. Meanwhile, the substrate, the Old Testament itself, has dwindled to almost nothing: Jabez’s prayer is only thirteen words in Hebrew, and all that the Old Testament says against prosperity understood solely via individualistic, narcissistic, consumeristic business seems completely neglected, forgotten, lost. The word on the street is that Multnomah Books, the press that published The Prayer of Jabez, evidently “enlarged its borders” a bit too much in the wake of the phenomenon, and when the wind left the Jabez sails, the publisher, too, had to cut back. That seems ironic, in terms of the biblical content, but insofar as the happiology creole is more dependent on the economy than on Scripture, it just seems like the ups and downs of the market. You win some, you lose some. Where’s the next moneymaker?

The Prayer of Jabez is not alone. The “capitalization” of theological phenomena is now everywhere, thoroughly widespread. Creflo Dollar’s The Holy Spirit, Your Financial Advisor, comes to mind, as does Laurie Beth Jones’s several publications, Jesus, CEO; Jesus, Inc.; Jesus, Entrepreneur; Jesus, Life Coach; and Jesus, Career Counselor. These are but a few examples. Once again, the prosperity gospel is big business. Its language, too, is (that of) big business. How could it be otherwise? Business is the superstrate, business drives the creolization, business is leading to decreolization so that the happiology creole, in the end, won’t be a creole at all but just the same language that everybody else is already speaking.

And it’s not just the prosperity gospel that knows how to turn a profit. Bible publishing is stronger than ever but, as Timothy Beal argues, is in its own way contributing to Scripture’s rapid demise with the never-ending repackaging of biblical content to suit the consumer’s felt needs.73 The end result, according to Beal, is a profound simplification (read: pidginization) of the Bible that ultimately leads to “a different cookie” altogether74—or in my terms, an entirely different language. Beal goes so far as to describe the incredible rate of Bible publishing (in 2005 alone, no less than 6,134 different Bibles were published) as like unto a distress crop: when a plant puts out all its seeds right before it dies.75

These and the other examples that could be added to the mix only underscore the points made about the three signs investigated here in part 2, offering additional and definitive evidence that the Old Testament is dying, dying fast, and that the results of this death are devastating on many different levels. And yet, close analysis of each of the three signs also revealed that recourse to the full language of Scripture can redress their problems—remedy their pathologies, as it were. The full language is a way to counter the disease, prevent its spread, perhaps even cure the patient altogether. This means that there may yet be some hope despite what seems to be the imminent if not already realized death of the Old Testament. There may yet be hope that the Old Testament is still alive, even if only barely, and that something might be done to impede its demise, undo its sickness-unto-death, and return it to a state of health and vibrancy. That is the work of the three chapters in part 3.

Before doing so, one final remark: the three arenas of discourse that were examined here in part 2 are, like the initial tests run on the Old Testament in chapter 2, not just signs of the disease but also contributing factors to the patient’s demise. They reflect the spread of the disease but are also causing the same, even accelerating it. The New Atheists along with the Marcionites Old and New are up front about that: they advocate for linguistic euthanasia—the quicker the Old Testament can be put out of its (and our) misery, the better. The happiologists’ contribution is far more insidious insofar as they pretend or actually think (it matters little either way) that they are actually speaking the original language. So, too, then, do their willing adherents, babbling away in their new tongue, without the foggiest idea that the language they speak can no longer crossbreed with the original.76