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In this episode, Trent reveals the heresies and dangers contained in 4 best-selling Christian books.
Transcription:
4 Awful Bestselling Christian Books
Just because something’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good for you. That’s true of fast food and it’s also true of the following Christian books that have sold millions of copies in spite of the bad messages they contain. So, in today’s episode we’re going to talk about four awful Christian books that have managed to become bestsellers.
#1 – Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential by Joel Osteen
Osteen is the pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, a mega church that holds 16,000 people and used to be a stadium called the Compaq Center. And how did he become so popular? He’s got a 1.21gigawatt smile and he knows how to make people feel good with folksy sayings that kind of sound Christian but are more focused on making you happy right now.
In 2004, Osteen wrote Your Best Life Now which has become one of the most successful books defending the prosperity Gospel, which is the idea that if you are faithful to God you will be rewarded with health and wealth and if you are poor and sick, that’s just because you don’t have enough faith or you didn’t tithe enough to Joel er um I mean God.
Here’s Osteen’s seven steps to living your full potential: enlarge your vision, develop a healthy self-image, discover the power of thoughts and words, let go of the past, find strength through adversity, live to give, and choose to be happy.
At the end of the book Osteen asks the readers to say the sinner’s prayer and become born again, but most of the book is just a bunch of self-help advice wrapped up in Christian language. Some of it is just naïve or wrongheaded like “God wants this to be the best time of your life”. Maybe. Or he could be allowing you to suffer to draw closer to him, especially since the best time in our lives won’t be in this mortal life.
But the worst parts of the book preach the prosperity Gospel, which claims that if you are faithful to God, God will be faithful to you and bless you with health and wealth. Osteen writes:
“God wants us to constantly be increasing, to be rising to new heights. He wants to increase you in his wisdom and help you make better decisions. God wants to increase you financially, by giving you promotions, fresh ideas, and creativity” (Page 5)
But why hasn’t God done this yet. Well, because you just didn’t have enough faith you small-minded person. Osteen writes on the next page:
To experience this immeasurable favor, you must rid yourself of that small-minded thinking and start expecting God’s blessings, start anticipating promotion and supernatural increase. You must conceive it in your heart and mind before you can receive it. In other words, you must make room for increase in your own thinking, then God will bring those things to pass. Until you learn how to enlarge your vision, seeing the future through your eyes of faith, your own wrong thinking will prevent good things from happening in your life..
Osteen also pushes the idea that tithing is mandatory, which was part of the old covenant, not the new covenant. One of the precepts of the faith is providing for the needs of the Church, but Catholicism does not teach we must give a certain percentage of income to the church. That’s not part of the deposit of Faith. But Osteen preaches a different Gospel that has certainly enriched him. He writes:
You may be thinking, Joel, I just can’t afford to tithe. No, the truth is, you can’t afford to not tithe. First, it would be foolish to try to rob God; and second, you need to get some seed in the ground. If you will dare to take a step of faith and start honoring God in your finances, He’ll start increasing your supply in supernatural ways. God will take that 90 percent you have left over, and He’ll cause it to go further than the 100 percent with which you started.
If you want to learn more about what’s wrong with the prosperity Gospel see my episode on this heresy in the description below.
#2 – I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris
Published in 1997, I Kissed Dating Goodbye was a huge topic of discussion among my Protestant friends in high school and college. I remember having debates about the book with the Protestant friends I did pro-life missionary work with. The book rightly points out how dating can be a bad idea if you treat it as an end in itself. Immature dating can lead to sexual sin, but it can also lead to dysfunctional dating practices like presenting up a fake version of yourself to the other person or treating a dating relationships like mini marriages.
But I Kissed Datin Goodbye proposed unrealistic solutions to these problems, which isn’t surprising since Harris was an unmarried 21-year-old when he wrote the book. Harris said Christians should stop dating and practice courtship instead. Here’s his four step plan to replace dating:
Step 1. Casual friendship. Step 2. Deeper friendship. Step 3. Courtship: purposeful intimacy with integrity. Step 4. Engagement.
During steps one and two you aren’t supposed to hang out one on one because that’s basically dating. Instead, you hang out in groups and Harris specifically says not to flirt or drop hints about your romantic feelings. Then the man should eventually say something like this to the girl:
“We’re growing closer in friendship, and I need to be up front about my motives. With your parents permission, I want to explore the possibility of marriage. I’m not interested in playing the game of being boyfriend and girlfriend. I’m ready to be tested by you, your family, and those who are responsible for you. My desire is to win your heart.”
Imagine you are a girl and a guy in your friend group, who you’ve only seen as a friend, because remember Harris says you should pursue friendship first, said something like this to you. And technically you are supposed to ask this of the girl’s parents first.
And keep in mind, Harris gave all this advice without ever having used it in his own life since he wasn’t married or even courting anyone at this time. What ended up happening is that Christians would read this book and not only try to save sex for marriage, but any emotional connection so that all of it could be given to their future spouse. Harris drives this point home by telling a story about a girls dream about her wedding day. She sees the groom at the altar who is trailed by all of his ex-girlfriends each of whom he says has a piece of his heart. Here’s the end of the scene:
I thought your heart was mine, she said.
It is, it is, he pleaded. Everything that’s left is yours.
A tear rolled down Anna’s cheek. Then she woke up.
A lot of young Christians who read I Kissed Dating Goodbye felt that they had to save not just their virginity for marriage but also their hearts, so they had to make sure if that if they ever courted someone they were courting the person they were definitely going to marry because they didn’t want to marry someone in the future if they already gave away their heart away in a previous dating/courtship relationship.
Some people didn’t even kiss until they were married. Harris says he planned to not kiss before marriage and held that up as a model to others but not a legalistic rule. But making it a heroic model probably encouraged more people to do it because they heard Harris say, “I’ve come to realize how sinful and meaningless physical intimacy can be apart from the commitment and purity of marriage.
Today, there are countless examples of couples whose say the book set them up for failures in marriage and romantic relationships. Even Harris recognized the book wasn’t a good idea. In 2018 he was featured in the documentary I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye: what if your views on sex and relationships as a 21-year-old influenced millions. In the documentary he hears stories from couples who were harmed by the book’s advice and in the end he apologizes to them. That same year Harris pulled I kissed Dating Goodbye from publication. Sadly in the following year Harris and his wife divorced and Harris announced he no longer considered himself a Christian.
#3 – The Shack by William P. Young
The Shack was a 2007 novel later adapted in a 2017 film by the same name. The plot follows a father named Mack whose youngest daughter is murdered by a serial killer in a remote shack. He is then supernaturally invited by God to meet him at the Shack where God appears as an African American woman representing the Father, a middle eastern man representing Jesus, and an Asian woman who represents the Holy Spirit to help him come to terms with his daughter’s death.
While the book does have helpful points when it comes to the problem of evil, it’s theology can easily lead people astray. The Shack emphasizes our personal feelings about what we think God would say over what God has actually revealed in things like scripture. It also flirts with heresies like God the Father having a physical body, God the Father suffered on the cross along with Jesus, and the persons of the Trinity being three separate persons united by a common social life instead of three distinct persons who share the same divine nature.
The Shack also has heresies related to the Incarnation, like this line: “When we three spoke ourselves into human existence as the Son of God, we became fully human”. This implies that the entire Trinity became incarnate rather than just God the Son.
The Protestant theologian Randal Rauser has written a sympathetic treatment of the book called Finding God in the Shack, but even he says passages like this one are, in his words, “unfortunate.”
Rauser provides positive interpretations of scandalous passages like when Jesus says “I’m not a Christian” and “Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims”. This can mean they were Buddhists and Mormons and have been saved in spite of their errors by a God who loves everyone, but many regular people will take from the book that it doesn’t matter what you believe and that everyone is a Christian in some way or another.
But of course it does matter, which is why this channel is dedicated to defending the unique salvation found in the Christian faith.
#4 – Left Behind by Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins.
Oh man, back in the 90’s and early 2000’s people were getting rapture fever and the source of the pandemic was Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. For those of you who don’t know, the rapture is the belief that before Jesus returns in his second coming, an event will happen called the rapture where true Christians will be taken up to heaven, leaving their clothes and their sinful non-Christian spouses, friends, and children behind to face the tribulation, a period of persecution and suffering under the anti-Christ.
Now, the Catholic church does teach that at the end of time the Church will “pass through a final trial” that will test believers when the anti-Christ emerges. Then, once Christ returns, he will bring an end to history those alive at that moment will be taken up to be with him. 1 Thess. 4:16-17 says, “the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”
But the belief that the rapture will save the Church from suffering, followed by a tribulation for non-Christians and then Christ’s return is fairly new idea and comes from the 17th century Protestant author John Nelson Darby.
However, the Left Behind series became wildly popular, partly due to the book coming out right before the year 2000 when people had the end of the world on their minds more than usual. The book spawned 16 entries and was adapted into several films starring Kirk Cameron and Nicholas Cage, so at least some good came out of it.
But the book was really harmful because many people who bought into rapture theology thought that in order to be a true Christian who doesn’t get left behind they had to leave the Catholic faith and become Protestant. This led to multiple Catholic authors like Paul Thigpen and Carl Olson writing full-length books criticizing the rapture doctrine. I also have a whole episode about this on my channel if you want to check it out as well in the link in the description.
Well, that’s four awful Christian bestsellers and there were many others that could have made this life Leave a comment below suggesting other terrible Christian books we should include in a future episode. Thank you guys so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.