“I lay hands on you by direction of the Head of the church, Jesus Christ, and in obedience to the Law of Contact and Transmission. The contact of my hands transmits God’s healing power.… There it is! There it is!… It’ll heal you if you mix faith with it.…”
With these words Kenneth Hagin moved down the healing line that formed after each evening service during his Pittsburgh Faith Crusade earlier this year. Now in his fifty-third year of preaching, Hagin remains active as a traveling preacher, writer, and teacher (at his 1,500-student Rhema Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Okla.). He is generally regarded as the dean of the increasingly popular “faith movement.”
Hagin proclaims a message of health and prosperity through positive faith. His homespun humor, gentle demeanor, and strong emphasis on Christian unity give no hint of the controversy that has surrounded the faith movement. Neither do they tell of the crossroads the movement is approaching, as Christians—especially charismatics—assess whether to accept it or oppose it.
Healing For All?
Hagin and his colleagues in the movement—including Kenneth Copeland and Jerry Savelle in Fort Worth, and Fred Price in Los Angeles—have long faced criticism for teaching that physical healing is available to anyone who has enough faith. Though the faith teachers allow for the use of medicine, they consider divine healing and perfect health both preferable and attainable.
But critics accuse faith teachers of unbiblical dogmatism and a lack of compassion for the sick. Author and artist Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic, cited in a recent fund-raising letter for her ministry “the insensitive nature of health-wealth theology,” which leaves disabled persons “nearly shipwrecked.”
Charles Farah, theology professor at Oral Roberts University and a critic of the faith movement, is optimistic about its future. “The movement is buying into Oral’s contention that prayer and medicine must go together,” he said. “That’s a good sign, because it will save the lives of a lot of babies and adults who will get to the hospital on time.”
In an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Hagin allowed that “there’s always an element of mystery” in the area of healing. Recalling one instance when he wondered why a relative had to die, Hagin said the Lord directed him to Deuteronomy 29:29 (“The secret things belong to the Lord our God”) and told him, “If I’d wanted you to know why, I would have told you.”
Asked about his message’s potentially harmful effect on those not healed, Hagin replied, “We don’t ever want to put a guilt trip on anyone.” However, he stressed that his main purpose is to take the message of the availability of healing to as many people as possible.
Indications Of A Truce
One sign of a truce between the faith movement and other charismatics is Copeland’s selection as one of the plenary speakers at the giant North American Congress on the Holy Spirit and World Evangelization to be held in New Orleans this month. Vinson Synan, director of the conference, said no one on the planning committee objected to inviting Copeland.
Like Farah, Synan feels the controversy over the faith teachers is beginning to subside. He noted with approval Copeland’s vigorous support of world missions.
Farah said he sees the same focus emerging from Hagin’s ministry, although Farah blames prosperity preaching for the charismatic movement’s inability to produce long-term missionaries: “If [people are] concerned about upward mobility, missions isn’t a good field to choose.”
During his Pittsburgh crusade, Hagin described the work of his school’s graduates on six continents. One such graduate has built in just eight years a church of 8,000 members—5,000 of them white, and 3,000 black—in South Africa.
In North America, the faith movement appears to be institutionalizing, as signified by its participation in structures such as Oral Roberts’s Charismatic Bible Ministries organization. Sociologist Margaret Poloma of the University of Akron, author of a book on the charismatic movement, views this as a positive sign, observing, “There’s nothing like institutionalization to balance things out.”
New Battles
But even as some of the old battles are resolved, a new one has arisen over the faith teachers’ doctrine that Jesus underwent “spiritual death” along with physical death, that he suffered in hell for three days before being “born again” in the Resurrection.
Author Judith Matta of Fullerton, California, charges that some faith teachers use this doctrine heretically, to put redeemed humanity on a level with Jesus. “If Jesus is a born-again man and is now exalted at the right hand of God, then you and I who are also born-again are equal with this God,” Matta writes in the forthcoming second edition of her book, The Born-Again Jesus of the Word-Faith Teaching. According to Matta, the foundation of the movement’s teaching is “to make themselves equal with God and be in control of their circumstances and lives.”
Theologian Farah and Rob Bowman of the Christian Research Institute (CRI) in San Juan Capistrano, California, share this concern. Bowman said CRI classifies the faith movement as “aberrational,” a term the institute uses for groups that “affirm the basic essentials of the faith, then make statements that seriously compromise this position.”
Among the leading faith teachers, Bowman said, Copeland is in the most serious error. “He seems to regard God as finite,” Bowman asserted, quoting Copeland’s reference Bible, which at one point states that Adam’s body and God’s were “exactly the same size.”
Bowman is critical also of the unwillingness of some faith teachers to enter dialogue with other Christians. “They say they don’t want to come into controversy, but they are the controversy,” he said. “They are teaching false doctrine, and the church needs to hold them accountable for it.” Bowman praised faith teacher Fred Price, who, after meeting with CRI, agreed to stop saying humans are “gods.”
Hagin said he has never been asked to enter any dialogue. He said he would be open to the idea, though arrangements would have to be made a year in advance because of his full schedule.
In the meantime, this mild-mannered father of the faith movement pursues his own course, imparting the key truths for which he is known—confident faith, victorious living, and continual dependence on the Word of God—while seeking to avoid dissension. He quips, “You can disagree without being disagreeable.”
By Bruce Barron.
