A New Serpent in the Garden of Africa

ABSTRACT: Just as the serpent led Adam and Eve into idolatry by reinterpreting God’s good word, so prosperity and word-of-faith preachers are today proclaiming a false and idolatrous gospel. But unlike Adam, African preachers are refusing to stay mute. Recognizing the need for faithful interpretation of Scripture, they have drawn up a statement to help pastors stand against the idolatrous assumptions and teachings of the prosperity gospel and word-of-faith theology.

Christian leadership is war. When God calls a man to shepherd his flock, he calls him to war against wolves. Satan, the father of lies, and his minions hate the spiritual health of God’s people, wanting nothing more than to lead the people of God from truth to idolatry. The spiritual leaders of God’s flock are called to fight against Satan’s counterfeit gospels by proclaiming the word of God (Ephesians 6:17). When those leaders fall silent, when they fail to preach the sufficiency of Christ alone, they make space for Satan to lead the people of God into idolatry. As John Calvin rightly said, “Those in authority in the church turned over to idols the office of teaching for no other reason than that they themselves were mute.”¹ The muteness of faithful leaders gives voices to idols.

Since Genesis 3, the devil has been in the business of poisoning the minds of God’s people with lies. In God’s good garden, the enemy came preaching lies: If God truly loves you, he will give you the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden. Eve paid close attention while Adam idly stood by, mute. Thus he, his wife, and all his descendants died of the poison of Satan. The world is under the curse of sin because of a failure of leadership.²

One of Satan’s most deceptive counterfeits plaguing both American and African churches is the prosperity gospel, a false teaching that elevates the idols of health, wealth, and power. David Oyedepo, a strong proponent of the prosperity gospel and word-of-faith theology, says, “Healing is the covenant right of every child of God . . . sickness has no right to feast on your life.” He goes on to proclaim healing over his congregation: “In the name of Jesus, I decree an end to every toil with sickness and disease.” He assures them that faith in Jesus means the end of sickness.³

As I’ve written elsewhere, this “idolatrous perversion of the gospel” turns Jesus into “a means to God’s full blessings, primarily of health, wealth, and might” in the present life.⁴ Its widespread success indicates a failure on the part of so-called shepherds to engage in spiritual warfare by speaking the whole testimony of God’s word.

Today, many church leaders in Africa are boldly refusing to remain mute while the “new serpent,” the prosperity gospel and word-of-faith theology, reinterpret God’s goodness as mere material blessings. These bold leaders are now advancing the centrality of the true gospel by the recent publication of the Africa Statement on the Prosperity Gospel and Word of Faith Theology. The present essay introduces the statement, first explaining why it is necessary, then summarizing its main points, and concluding with a warning against the syncretism of prosperity teaching.

Hermeneutical Battlefield

Our hermeneutics determine whom we hallow, and whom we hallow reinforces our hermeneutics. As it was in the garden, the fight for the people of God is the battle for faithful interpretation of God’s word. Biblical interpretation can either create idols or cultivate love and worship for the one true God. If our interpretation skills create idols, those idols will engrave the faulty interpretation skills in our minds and shape how we read. As Calvin rightly said, “Man’s nature [particularly his mind] is a perpetual factory of idols.”⁵ As he thinks, so he worships; as he worships, so he thinks. Failure to read rightly and think appropriately about what God has revealed concerning himself and his work leads to the mental creation of idols. We never leave our Bibles without either accepting God as he reveals himself or creating our own god. Faulty hermeneutics leads to false gods; and when we have settled for false gods, the gods inevitably intensify faulty hermeneutics.

‘Another Jesus’

We see this clearly in the church of Corinth, where false teachers created a new Jesus by their hermeneutics. Paul warns the Corinthian believers against the deceptive teaching of the “super-apostles” who proclaimed “another Jesus,” “a different spirit,” and, therefore, “a different gospel” (2 Corinthians 11:4).⁶ Their teaching differed from the apostolic gospel. They were agents of Satan disguising themselves as apostles of Christ (2 Corinthians 11:13–15).

“When God calls a man to shepherd his flock, he calls him to war against wolves.”

Underneath their proclamation of “another Jesus” was a hermeneutical problem. Paul calls the false apostles “peddlers of God’s word” (2 Corinthians 2:17).⁷ They used God’s word for personal gain, shaping their message to impress their listeners and make a profit for themselves. Refusing to receive the Bible on its own terms, they twisted it to generate messages that would sell. Thus they produced a different Jesus, a different spirit, and a different gospel.

Since they made themselves the measure of the text, they saw only a reflection of themselves. As Calvin warns, the “flesh is always uneasy until it has obtained some figment like itself in which it may fondly find solace as in an image of God.”⁸ For the super-apostles in Corinth, Scripture was not a window to God’s glory but a mirror reflecting their own greatness. This led to competition and comparisons among themselves. Instead of commending God, they commended themselves and thus were without understanding (2 Corinthians 10:12; cf. Psalm 49:20). With minds veiled from the glory of Christ, their hermeneutic led them to idolatry.

Prosperity preachers and followers of a word-of-faith theology do the same. By their hermeneutic, they hew for themselves, and their followers, a new god whom they claim gives them their best life now. Because they lack a biblical understanding of “already but not yet,” the “new serpent” forces the “not yet” of the new heaven and new earth into the “already” of the sin-accursed world and uses the cross as the justification for such a forced overlap of the ages.⁹ Like the so-called super-apostles, prosperity preachers today turn the good news of the gospel into a matter of idolatrous self-aggrandizement.

War for the Sheep

Every leader of God’s people since Adam stands before two choices: either passively give in to idolatry or actively protect God’s people so that they faithfully worship the one true covenant God of the Scriptures.

Paul grounds the call for faithful leadership in the church on the intrusion of false teachers who lead people astray with false teaching. Church leaders must be morally qualified (Titus 1:5–8) and theologically sound, holding to and protecting the flock with sound doctrine, while also protecting them from those who contradict the truth. “For there are many who are insubordinate. . . . They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works” (Titus 1:10, 16). Claiming to know God, they have turned many from the truth to lies (Titus 1:14). In such a context, leaders must rise to the task of spiritual warfare to protect and provide for the sheep (see Titus 2:1).

In similar fashion, Paul warns the Ephesian elders,

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. (Acts 20:28–32)

Paul’s urgent call for the elders to protect and provide concerns both the elders’ lives and those of the flock. Made overseers by God the Holy Spirit, they are called to protect and care for God the Father’s church, which he obtained with the blood of Christ, his only Son. The burden of leadership is to protect and provide for the blood-bought people of God with blood earnestness as they wage war against wolves who speak lies to draw men into idolatry.

It is this same burden that drove several African Christian leaders to issue the Africa Statement on the Prosperity Gospel and Word of Faith Theology. Our desire is to wage war for the worship of the one true God, rather than remain mute as false teachers proclaim the new deity of the prosperity gospel.

Drawing Battle Lines: The Africa Statement

The Africa Statement is a tactical response in the war against the serpent that spans from Adam to Africa, the war against the idols created through wrong readings of God’s word. African leaders are reclaiming true theology for Africa (and the world), combatting idolatry with the sword of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 6:17). The leaders believe that they “are not waging war according to the flesh”; they employ the weapons with divine power to destroy the false teaching that produces idolatry — “arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” — and seek to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3–5).

Without attempting to exhaustively address all the distortions of the prosperity theology, the African statement is structured as fourteen articles, each affirming what Scripture teaches and denying what is taught in the prosperity gospel and word-of-faith theology. This structure draws a clear boundary between falsehood and truth, exposing possible counterfeit views and plausible alternatives that might sound Christian but are not of the faith, thus helping pastors fulfill the dual tasks Paul describes in Titus 1:9: “He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.”¹⁰

While the Africa Statement, with its Scripture proofs, is worth reading in full, the following presents a brief summary of all fourteen articles.

Article 1: Affirms that God is a good Father who gives good gifts but denies that God has guaranteed material blessings, health, and wealth in the present age.

Article 2: Affirms that Christ’s atonement is for the forgiveness of sins and denies that the cross guarantees health and wealth in the present age.

Article 3: Affirms sound hermeneutics (context, grammar, and so on) and denies subjective impressions and “hidden revelations” as legitimate methods of hearing God’s voice.

Article 4: Affirms the promises to Israel in the old covenant but denies that Christians stand in the same covenantal position or can claim those material promises directly.

Article 5: Affirms that sin and foolish living can bring serious consequences but denies that believers are necessarily bound by “generational curses.”

Article 6: Affirms that in the Old Testament God met people in places (such as the tabernacle and temple) but denies that today certain places or objects (“points of contact”) have special access to heaven or blessings.

Article 7: Affirms that suffering is a normal part of the Christian life but denies that suffering necessarily results from weak faith.

Article 8: Affirms generous giving but denies that tithes and offerings are the mechanism to unlock guaranteed material blessings.

Article 9: Affirms the blessing of wise, truthful, and edifying speech but denies that humans have the power to “speak things into existence.”

Article 10: Affirms that humans are made in God’s image but denies that Christians are “little gods.”

Article 11: Affirms that faith is God’s gift by which we trust Christ for salvation but denies that faith is a creative force or power that obligates God to work.

Article 12: Affirms clear biblical thinking but denies that conjuring mental images and making positive declarations can result in those things materializing in the life of a believer.

Article 13: Affirms that God has appointed leaders for the church and denies the “man-of-God” culture that demands unquestioned loyalty to a particular pastor.

Article 14: Affirms that God created us to glorify and enjoy him forever and denies that God can be used for other ends.

In many ways, the prosperity gospel and the word-of-faith theology pose an even greater danger to the church than worldviews that directly oppose Christianity, because they maintain a Christian appearance while distorting the gospel of Christ and its benefits.

A Warning: Syncretism and the Golden Calf

The false teaching that prompted leaders to craft the Africa Statement leads to idolatry. Prosperity and word-of-faith teachers promote idolatry and lead worshipers astray who consider themselves to be worshiping the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But their god is a god of their making. It is idolatry. It is demonic. It is destructive. Calvin rightly said,

Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God. To these evils a new wickedness joins itself, that man tries to express in his work the sort of God he has inwardly conceived. Therefore the mind begets an idol; the hand gives it birth. The example of the Israelites shows the origin of idolatry to be that men do not believe God is with them unless he shows himself physically present.¹¹

False teaching is idolatry because it introduces a different God, a different Christ, and a different way of worshiping him. Thus, what is at stake in the false teaching of the prosperity gospel and the word-of-faith teaching is that men and women are being led to worship idols while they think they are worshiping the God of the Bible.

In the wilderness, Israel once bowed before a golden calf in worship of Yahweh. After Aaron formed the image with the gold collected from the people, the people proclaimed, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4, 8). Aaron built an altar and proclaimed, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD” (Exodus 32:5), and the next day Israel rose and offered sacrifices to the golden calf; then they ate, drank, and played, falsely thinking they were worshiping Yahweh. Commenting on these verses, Allan Harman notes,

The people were purportedly worshipping the LORD, but in reality they were worshipping an idol. Instead of exclusive worship of their Saviour, Israel under Aaron’s leadership was engaging in religious syncretism. They sat down to eat and drink and “got up to indulge in revelry.” Their actions in this regard were more typical of Near Eastern idol worship than true worship of their God.¹²

Aaron erroneously led Israel to identify God with Baal and claim to worship Yahweh while bowing before Baal. And so do prosperity preachers today.

“Without clearly drawing the lines between truth and falsehood, we easily slip into the factory of idol manufacturing.”

The god of these movements speaks through “men of God,” not through the Scriptures. Although prosperity and word-of-faith preachers carry the Bible, they worship a god of their own imagination, either the god of the “man of God” or the “man of God” himself. The tragedy of the prosperity gospel and word-of-faith theology is not just that it ignores the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but that it rebrands him. This movement calls the god who feeds their worldliness “Jesus” and defines greed as “faith.”

‘Keep Yourselves from Idols’

The hope of the leaders who crafted and signed the Africa Statement is that, with the sword of the Spirit, we might bleed and drain the lifeblood of the idols of false teaching and guard the truth for coming generations.

Our hope is that the statement will help teach and preserve the truth about God the Father, Christ and his sufficient sacrifice for sins, the Holy Spirit, and the sufficiency of God’s word for the coming generations. We want to preserve the gospel for the coming generations so that when our children ask, “What do these statements mean?” we might let them know, “Your fathers passed over from death to life. For the Lord satisfied his anger on Jesus, drying up the waters of his judgment until we passed over to life and safety in Christ, as the Lord once did at the Red Sea and the Jordan, which he dried up for Israel until they passed over. He himself is the gospel, not any earthly prosperity, and him alone should you serve as your greatest delight” (cf. Joshua 4:21–23).

Without clearly drawing the lines between truth and falsehood, we easily slip into the factory of idol manufacturing. We must depend on the Holy Spirit, develop good and faithful reading skills, seek to see in all of Scripture our crucified and risen Lord, and make him known to the glory of God. Let us read to find God, not to fashion gods.

“Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).