Popular Christian Books With Unintended Consequences
More memories from those days when I was becoming Reformed and working in the Christian Bookstore industry
Previous posts in the series:
Billy Graham’s book on angels was a best seller—my guess is that we sold more of them than Graham’s popular How to Be Born Again. I knew it back in the day under the title, “Angels, Angels, Angels: God’s Secret Agents.” Graham’s book is light on biblical teaching, but is known for the anecdotal stories of angelic appearances and accounts of miraculous interventions. Nothing heretical here, but the unintended consequence is that when one focuses upon anecdotal stories about angels, that opens the door for folks to recount their own stories about angels. “Billy Graham may have some great stories about angels, but I’ve got a few of my own. If he can tell them, well, so can I.” And how many ministers felt the need or saw the opportunity to follow suit? Angels fascinate people.
The Reformed focus upon God’s providence in directing all things to their divinely appoint ends, and although willing to admit that angels may indeed be agents in accomplishing God’s purpose, Scripture does not say much about them nor reveal when and how they work. This is why we should be guarded when speaking about the angelic world. Ordinarily, angels do not appear to humans except in major turning points in redemptive history. Their work is mysterious. And when they do appear the reaction from human witnesses is fear and terror!
Whether Billy Graham launched the wave, or rode the wave, what a book like this does is raise unbiblical expectations that angels will inevitably appear in times of trouble, that they will act on our behalf, and that such angelic rescues can be expected. These things may be true, but angels remain invisible to us. By describing angels as God’s secret agents, we turn the unseen work of angels into sensationalized stories and superstitious speculation which is far removed from biblical parameters.
Hey, but books about angels sell. In Graham’s case, millions of them sold. Stories about angels are part and parcel of much of evangelical life.
By all accounts, Frank Peretti’s book This Present Darkness is a pretty good piece of fiction. I’m not into that genre, so when it came out in 1989, I read most of it, but just really wasn’t interested nor motivated to finish reading it. So, I am not in a position to speak about the book itself, but only the impact it had on evangelicals. To Peretti’s chagrin, many readers spoke of it as though it was a systematic theology of the unseen world. A struggle between angels and demons waging war over a small town with several spiritually attuned individuals aware of the conflict was intriguing enough. But this was a fictional plot—such a war is not something humans could actually witness nor participate in. And a novel is certainly not to be confused with biblical exegesis of what the Bible actually teaches about angels, demons, and the unseen. But Peretti is far more interesting to most than Louis Berkhof’s chapter on “The Creation of the Spiritual World” in his famed Systematic Theology.
God made us as creatures fit for the material world. The unseen world is not visible to us. It is walled off to creatures of sight, sound, taste, and touch. Yet, because the unseen world is real it fascinates us and generates all sorts of curiosity. This fascination has long been the hook used by occultists of every stripe, who offer all sorts of techniques to penetrate the wall between what is seen and what remains unseen. The Bible condemns such things in no uncertain terms. The unintended consequence from This Present Darkness and the volumes which followed it, was the increase of interest in “spiritual warfare,” and this at a time when the objective truth of Christianity was giving way to subjective experience and my “personal truth.” Peretti didn’t cause this shift, of course, but his book fueled interest in the unseen world and spiritual warfare, opening the door to a more speculative sort of Christianity which was overly concerned with matters about which it should not be concerned.
How many sermons and conferences on spiritual warfare did This Present Darkness generate? Not a few. But This Present Darkness is only a novel, for Pete’s sake, and ought to be treated as such.
Bruce Wilkinson’s Prayer of Jabez perhaps generated greater unintended consequences than either Graham’s or Perreti’s books—Wilkinson moved the prosperity gospel from the Pentecostal fringe into the very heart of mainstream evangelicalism. The Prayer of Jabez was first published in 2000, after we had closed our bookstore. Wilkinson has a solid academic vitae, organized Walk Thru the Bible Ministries, a well-respected Bible study teaching ministry, spent considerable time on the mission field, and taught at several Bible colleges. The Prayer of Jabez was published by Multnomah Press, well-known for quality devotionals and thoughtful books—very much unlike the usual mass market pulp paperback typical of usual prosperity gospel stuff. You could give the Prayer of Jabez as a gift to a friend and not be embarrassed. Wilkinson is hardly someone you’d think would embrace the prosperity gospel. Multnomah is hardly a publisher one would expect to release this little book. But the cynic in me says, “follow the money.”
The Prayer of Jabez focuses upon a short prayer found in 1 Chronicles 4:9–10. Wilkinson teaches that this particular prayer is a springboard to increasing spiritual blessing and abundance. Using Jabez’s prayer as a guide, Christians are to ask for God’s abundant blessing and favor, for God to enlarge one’s territory (that is, to increase one’s influence), and to depend upon God’s power. None of these things are problematic in themselves, but when presented as a formula with an implied guarantee of success when praying this particular prayer, Wilkinson opened the door for mainstream evangelicals to treat the Prayer of Jabez as another formulaic method of getting what one wants—exactly what the fringe prosperity gospel types were doing. Wilkinson spoke of spiritual blessing, but how many readers saw in it material blessing?
Bruce Wilkinson is not a prosperity gospel preacher. But as a well-trained Bible teacher, surely he knew (or should have known) that he was using the Prayer of Jabez as any prosperity gospel preacher would. His better written, slicker volume, and reputable publisher does not let him off the hook. In fact, it renders him all the more culpable for mainstreaming a fringe and materialistic method of praying—not that the Lord’s will be done and that Jesus be glorified—but that prayer is seeking prosperity as though it were promised to us, if only we pray this prayer using it as the formula Wilkinson lays out for us.
The unintended consequence of the mainstreaming of the prosperity gospel is seen in the fact that evangelicals have so thoroughly embraced the former fringe that Trump’s White House Faith Office (transactional payback for the support of evangelicals at the ballot box) is populated by a host of prosperity gospelers—from the fringe to the mainstream and no-sola evangelicals who see Trump as God’s man and their ally. In his two terms as president, such evangelicals believe that they have received abundant blessing and have increased their territory as a result of successfully twisting God’s arm through prosperity gospel prayers—much like what Wilkinson asks his readers to do in the Prayer of Jabez.
I suggest checking out Charles Spurgeon’s take on the Prayer of Jabez. He points us to true prosperity, unlike Wilkinson.