How Oral Roberts Changed Religion

HOW ORAL ROBERTS CHANGED RELIGION [Excerpts]

Televangelist Oral Roberts is often remembered as the founding father of the “prosperity gospel,” the doctrine that prayers and affirmations can deliver wealth. He is also remembered as a religious pitchman and gung-ho fundamentalist, tainted with greed and ignorance…. Roberts’s transformation from small-town pastor to media eminence began in 1947, when he was a 29-year-old minister in Enid, Oklahoma. The young Pentecostal was torn between a “feeling of destiny” and the grim outer reality of living near the poverty line, a situation faced by many Southern preachers in the first half of the century.

During a period of personal depression, Roberts spent days and nights poring over Scripture—which he randomly opened one morning to 3 John 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” For the young Roberts, the verse cast Christianity in a fresh light, challenging the emphasis on guilt and repentance in which he and many of his ministerial contemporaries had been raised. “We have been wrong,” he told his wife. “I haven’t been preaching that God is good.”

Roberts’s new message of “positive faith,” in which religion could help with personal needs—from addictions to job searches—took him to a larger congregation in Tulsa and eventually around the world and on television. In 1963, he founded Oral Roberts University. He eschewed the sin-and-salvation sermonizing of Billy Graham, whose decades-long dominance of American evangelism was rivaled only by Roberts’s. “I don’t believe in the judgmental gospel that Billy preaches,” Roberts said in 1972.

Roberts also gained fame—and notoriety—for his healing crusades. In his heyday as a religious healer, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, thousands would wait in long lines at tent revivals to be prayed over by the minister....Indeed, Roberts’s notions about a collaborative relationship among religion, psychology, and medicine foreshadowed the rise of a later generation of mind-body health advocates, such as Norman Cousins and Andrew Weil. Speaking of his revivals in 1958 with a reporter, Roberts said: “I hope God lets me live another 30 years, for I think by then we’ll see an unbelievably close alliance between science and the kind of healing I encourage.”

One prominent evangelical supporter noted Roberts’s capacity to view religion “wholistically,” using a variant of holistic—a term rarely heard in evangelical circles. “Gradually the Spirit began to show me,” Roberts recalled in 1974, “that in the Bible healing is for the whole man. It’s for the body, it’s for the soul, it’s for the mind, for finances. It’s for any problem that needs to be healed.”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/oral-roberts-changed-religion-113886.html#ixzz3P0UEtuHp

[TBC: As we noted in the August 2014 issue of the newsletter, Oral Roberts, who died in 2009, was the most prominent of the so-called “faith” healers as well as a false prophet. His “seed faith” teaching, which perverts biblical faith, duped multitudes of Christians into giving millions of dollars to him in order to get more from God for themselves. Roberts claimed that God told him to build the City of Faith Hospital, and a vision of a 900-foot Jesus confirmed that the project would be a success. In another appearance of “Jesus,” Roberts declared that he was instructed to use the medical school to find a cure for cancer. In 1989 the bankrupt medical school and hospital shut down for good. Roberts was not only endorsed by his fellow Faith and Prosperity teachers, but conservative Christians such as Billy Graham and Bill Bright also supported his ministry.

As the writer of the article notes, Roberts' teaching has served as a bridge between evangelicals and mind science and positive confession, as taught by heretics such as Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Shuller. Joel Osteen's father John was an Oral Roberts University graduate and his son has been called the “most influential Christian in America.” Joel's teaching echoes the premise of Roberts, saying that people “usually get what they expect; they become what they believe” (Your Best Life Now, p. 73). Further, “Our words have tremendous power, and whether we want to or not, we will give life to what we’re saying, either good or bad” (ibid., p. 122). “Words are life seeds. They have creative power…” (Become A Better You, p. 109).]