Word of Faith / Prosperity Gospel

Positive confession — 'name it and claim it.' Faith is a tangible spiritual force, and words spoken in faith create reality; to confess sickness, lack, or doubt is to 'frame' a negative world, while confessing the desired outcome calls it into being.

Their basis
Mark 11:23-24 ('say to this mountain... and does not doubt... it will be done for him'); Rom 4:17 (God 'calls into existence the things that do not exist'); Prov 18:21 ('death and life are in the power of the tongue'); Gen 1 (God created by speaking). They reason that as image-bearers we exercise the same faith-force by our spoken word.

Scripture answers
Faith in Scripture is trust in a sovereign Person, not a force we wield to bind God. Jesus' own model of mountain-moving prayer was Gethsemane — 'not as I will, but as you will' — and true prayer is explicitly conditioned on God's will: 'if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.' God's thoughts are higher than ours; He is not obligated by our formula. Rom 4:17 describes what GOD does in creating and raising the dead, not a creative word-power delegated to us to speak worlds into being.

1 John 5:14James 4:13-15Matthew 26:39Matthew 6:10Isaiah 55:8-9Romans 9:20-21

In fairness: They are right that words matter enormously (James 3:5-10), that faith is real and God genuinely answers prayer (Matt 21:22), and that a grumbling, faithless heart hinders prayer. The error is not valuing faith or speech — it is turning them into a mechanism that controls God rather than trust that submits to Him.

Health and wealth as guaranteed covenant rights. It is always God's will to heal every believer and to make every believer materially prosperous; sickness and poverty are not from God and signal a lack of faith, unconfessed sin, or failure to claim one's rights.

Their basis
3 John 2 ('that you may prosper and be in health'); Isaiah 53:5 ('by his stripes we are healed'); Galatians 3:13-14 (redeemed from the curse — which Deut 28 lists as sickness and poverty); 2 Corinthians 8:9 ('though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you... might become rich'); Deuteronomy 28 covenant blessings.

Scripture answers
Scripture promises the opposite pattern for the faithful: suffering, not exemption. Paul asked three times for his 'thorn' to be removed and God said no, leaving it for Paul's good; Jesus had nowhere to lay His head; Paul learned contentment in hunger and want; godliness with contentment — not gain — is the great profit, and the love of money is a snare. 2 Cor 8:9's 'riches' are plainly the spiritual riches of salvation, since the same Paul who wrote it was poor and beaten. Believers are promised persecution and share in Christ's sufferings now, glory later.

2 Corinthians 12:7-101 Timothy 6:6-10Philippians 4:11-132 Timothy 3:12John 16:33Matthew 8:20Romans 8:17-18Matthew 6:19-21

In fairness: They rightly recover that God is a generous Father who does heal, does provide, and delights to give good gifts (Matt 7:11; Phil 4:19; James 1:17) — a needed corrective to a joyless, ascetic religion that treats poverty as holy. God's kindness is real; the error is making material abundance a universal guarantee and reading every affliction as failure, which crushes the suffering saint the Bible actually blesses (Job; the Beatitudes, Matt 5:3-4).

Seed-faith giving and the hundredfold return. Giving money — especially to the ministry — is a 'seed' sown in faith that God is obligated to multiply back to the giver, often with specific multipliers (thirtyfold, hundredfold); giving is framed as an investment technique for personal financial increase.

Their basis
Luke 6:38 ('give, and it will be given to you... pressed down, shaken together, running over'); Mark 10:29-30 (leaving all receives 'a hundredfold now in this time'); Malachi 3:10 ('bring the full tithe... and see if I will not open the windows of heaven'); 2 Corinthians 9:6 ('whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully'); Galatians 6:7.

Scripture answers
God loves a cheerful giver, but not one who gives to get; He is no man's debtor to be leveraged. Jesus warns you cannot serve both God and money, and Paul brands as corrupt those who imagine godliness is a means of financial gain. Peter's rebuke to Simon — who tried to trade money for spiritual return — is the sharpest word against monetizing God's gifts: 'May your silver perish with you.' What we freely received we are to freely give. Mark 10:30's 'hundredfold' is explicitly listed as houses and family and lands 'with persecutions,' the shared life of the church, not a personal wealth scheme.

2 Corinthians 9:7Matthew 6:241 Timothy 6:5Acts 8:18-20Matthew 10:8Luke 12:15Mark 10:29-30

In fairness: The underlying principle is genuinely biblical: God blesses generosity, sowing and reaping is real, and open-handed givers are enriched (2 Cor 9:8-11; Prov 11:24-25). The distortion is the transaction — giving as a lever to compel wealth, and channeling that impulse chiefly toward the teacher's own ministry, which can prey on the poor and desperate.

The believer as a 'little god.' In its stronger forms (Kenyon, Copeland, Hagin), the born-again person is said to be a god in the same class as God, an incarnation of the Word, so that man is not merely a creature but a divine being who can speak and create as God does.

Their basis
Psalm 82:6 / John 10:34 ('You are gods'); Genesis 1:26-27 (made in God's image and likeness); 2 Peter 1:4 ('partakers of the divine nature'); the reasoning that redemption restores man to the divine status Adam lost.

Scripture answers
There is one God, and the eternal, unbridgeable line between Creator and creature is never crossed — to worship or exalt the creature as the Creator is the root of idolatry. Psalm 82's 'gods' are corrupt human judges God is condemning, and the very next verse says 'you shall die like men' — hardly deity. The promise 'you will be like God' is the serpent's lie in Eden. 2 Peter 1:4 means we share Christ's holiness and life by grace, becoming adopted sons — never that we become gods; we are made children by adoption, not deities by nature.

Isaiah 43:10Isaiah 44:6Romans 1:25Psalm 82:6-7Genesis 3:4-5John 1:12Romans 8:15-17

In fairness: There is a real and glorious truth being overreached: we truly are image-bearers, adopted sons and daughters, indwelt by the Spirit, united to Christ, and destined to be glorified with Him (1 John 3:2; 2 Cor 3:18) — a dignity far higher than most Christians live in. The error is confusing this Christ-given sonship with divinity itself, which repeats Eden's temptation and, where held firmly, endangers the gospel it claims.

The 'Jesus Died Spiritually' (JDS) doctrine. In some Word of Faith teaching, Jesus's physical death on the cross did not by itself accomplish redemption; He also took on Satan's very nature, 'died spiritually,' descended to suffer torment in hell at the hands of demons, and was then 'born again' there before the resurrection.

Their basis
2 Corinthians 5:21 ('he made him to be sin who knew no sin'); Colossians 2:15 (disarming the powers); Acts 2:27 / Psalm 16:10 (His soul not left in Hades); Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 (the depth of His suffering and God-forsakenness). They argue the atonement required a spiritual, not merely physical, death.

Scripture answers
Redemption was finished ON THE CROSS — 'It is finished' — by His physical death and shed blood, not by any later suffering in hell. From the cross Jesus told the thief 'today you will be with me in Paradise,' and He committed His spirit to the FATHER, not to Satan or torment. He secured eternal redemption by His own blood in a single, once-for-all sacrifice that needs no supplement; the blood of the cross — not a demonic ordeal — makes peace. To make Jesus take on Satan's nature contradicts the sinless Lamb who bore sin without becoming a sinner.

John 19:30Luke 23:43Luke 23:46Hebrews 9:12Hebrews 10:10-14Colossians 1:19-221 Peter 2:24

In fairness: They are wrestling with something profoundly real — the staggering depth of the atonement, that the sinless One was 'made sin' and bore the full weight of God-forsaken judgment for us (2 Cor 5:21; Mark 15:34). That awe is right and precious. The error is inventing a post-cross, in-hell redemption that undermines the finished, sufficient work of the cross, which the New Testament insists was completed when He died.