The inner life
Prosperity Gospel
Direct answer
Prosperity Gospel: The prosperity gospel is a strand of Christian preaching which teaches that God rewards faith, positive spoken confession and giving with health and material wealth.
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At a glance
- Also called
- prosperity theology, health and wealth gospel, word of faith, name it and claim it
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- New Thought, Law of Attraction, Positive Thinking, Affirmation
The prosperity gospel is a strand of Christian preaching which teaches that God rewards faith, positive spoken confession and giving with health and material wealth.
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What is the prosperity gospel?
The prosperity gospel, also called the health and wealth gospel or Word of Faith, holds that the atonement of Christ secured not only forgiveness but bodily healing and financial plenty, and that believers lay hold of these by faith. Faith is exercised chiefly by speaking: the believer confesses aloud what they hope for as already theirs. Giving money to a ministry is taught as sowing a seed that returns multiplied.
Historians trace much of this to New Thought. The resemblance to the law of attraction, in which words and belief draw their object, is close, though the preachers ground it in Scripture. Many Christian bodies reject it. Their objections are that it turns prayer into technique, has no place for suffering, and takes money from the poor on a promise.
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What sets Prosperity Gospel apart
What separates it from secular manifestation teaching is the theory of why words work. The law of attraction appeals to vibration; the Word of Faith preacher appeals to covenant, arguing that God has bound himself by promises which the believer may claim aloud, as a legal right. The second difference is the place of money. Giving is not a side matter but the mechanism, pictured as seed and harvest, and that is the point at which the criticism of other churches is sharpest.
- Also called: Word of Faith; health and wealth gospel; name it and claim it
- Key practice: positive confession: speaking the hoped-for thing as already given
- Early teacher: E. W. Kenyon, 1867 to 1948
- Populariser: Kenneth E. Hagin, 1917 to 2003
- Seed faith: associated with Oral Roberts, 1918 to 2009
- Standard history: Kate Bowler, Blessed, 2013
Often mistaken for something else: New Thought says mind or spirit is the one reality and that right thinking aligns a person with it; the prosperity gospel keeps a personal God and says faith claims what he has promised.
The story behind Prosperity Gospel
E. W. Kenyon (1867 to 1948), an American evangelist, taught that believers should make a positive confession of what Scripture promises; historians such as Kate Bowler find New Thought ideas in his work. Kenneth Hagin, later based in Tulsa, spread the teaching after the Second World War, and Oral Roberts taught seed faith. Television carried the message worldwide from the 1970s. Bowler's Blessed (2013) is the standard history, and theologians of the Lausanne movement issued a critical statement in 2010.
Why Prosperity Gospel matters
Prosperity Gospel shows the manifestation idea in church dress, and it is the form in which many people first meet it.
How to read Prosperity Gospel
The term is descriptive and usually critical: writers apply it to preaching that ties faith and donations to promised wealth or healing.
Prosperity Gospel in practice: an example
A reader hears a preacher say that a gift sown in faith returns a hundredfold: that is the seed-faith teaching of the prosperity gospel.
Where readings of Prosperity Gospel go wrong
No gift obliges God or anyone to repay it, and a promise of healing is never a reason to stop medical treatment.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- prosperity theology, health and wealth gospel, word of faith, name it and claim it, seed faith
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the prosperity gospel?
It is the teaching, found in parts of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, that God wills health and wealth for believers and grants them in answer to faith, spoken confession and generous giving.
Where did the prosperity gospel come from?
It grew in the United States in the twentieth century. Historians trace its idea of positive confession to E. W. Kenyon and, behind him, to New Thought; Kenneth Hagin and Oral Roberts made it widely known.
Why do many churches reject the prosperity gospel?
Critics say it treats faith as a means of getting, cannot account for the suffering of faithful people, and encourages preachers to ask the poor for money in exchange for promised blessing.
