(The late) Bishop Eddie Long – on homosexuality
“It’s the most unattractive thing I have ever seen, when I see women wearing uniforms that men would wear, and women fighting to get in the military,” Long shouted to his congregation. “The woman gets perverted to turn towards woman … and everybody knows it’s dangerous to enter an exit. …
“God says you deserve death!”
Good article on Eddie Long and the problems of Prosperity Gospel – it doesn’t equip believers to deal with loss, especially death.
Who am I to say how anyone should face a terrifying illness? Sometimes hope is all people have; let them believe what they want if it helps them get through the night. But there was something undeniably sad about Long not being able to level with those at New Birth who’d stuck by him when everyone else had fled.
I suspect some of that inability comes from the prosperity theology he preached, which is pervasive in contemporary churches. I’ve heard scholars call it a heretical belief that distorted the life of Jesus. I think it fails on another level:
It doesn’t equip people to deal with loss.
If you preach that wealth and health are a sign of God’s favor, what do you do when you begin to lose both, as Long did? That’s the question one woman explored in a remarkable essay on death and the prosperity gospel.
Kate Bowler is a Duke Divinity School professor and author of “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.” She recently learned she had Stage 4 cancer. When people in the prosperity community heard of her diagnosis, she said, they didn’t know how to respond. They had been taught that if they follow certain rules and speak aloud positive thoughts, “God will reward you, heal you, restore you,” she wrote in a New York Times column last year entitled, “Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me.”
“The prosperity gospel holds to this illusion of control until the very end,” Bowler wrote. “If a believer gets sick and dies, shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that — those who have lost the test of faith. There is no graceful death in the prosperity gospel. There are only jarring disappointments after fevered attempts to deny its inevitability.” …
Yet it would be another failure on our part if we ignored the scars that Long inflicted on others. He wasn’t unique, and neither was New Birth. The religious landscape in America is filled with megachurches, prosperity theology and pastors who continually remind their cowed congregations to “touch not God’s anointed.”
What do I see when I look at the rise and fall of Bishop Eddie Long?
I see something that will happen again.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/03/us/bishop-eddie-long-i-knew/index.html