It is very likely that you have heard several people who profess to be Christians say “I declare”, a very common expression in certain Pentecostal circles. Joel Osteen published a book titled in this way, and in the next few lines we will review “I declare: 31 promises to proclaim over your life.” This book is made up of 31 chapters, where each one is the development of one of the 31 promises that the author invites the reader to declare about his life, in order to fulfill his dreams and be successful. In the introduction, Osteen says that “our words have creative power. When we declare something, whether good or bad, we give life to what we are saying” (v). He says that people don’t realize that when they talk about themselves they are prophesying their future. “
If I prophesy my future, I want to prophesy something good” (vii). The author wants people to use “this book as his guide to declare his victory every day. Declare health. Declare favor. Declare abundance” (ix). An example of such a declaration exercise is to stand in front of the mirror and say: “Good morning, beautiful. Good morning, blessed, prosperous, successful, strong, talented, creative, confident, confident, disciplined, focused and highly favored child of the Most High God” (xii). The 31 chapters are the development of these adjectives and dreams.
Any curious reader would wonder where God gives those 31 promises, which Osteen does not mention. My intention in what remains is to analyze some important points that I was able to notice while reading the book, and the teachings that are behind it.
I Declare: 31 Promises to Proclaim Over Your Life
joel osteen
I Declare: 31 Promises to Proclaim Over Your Life
joel osteen
FaithWords. 192pp.
FaithWords. 192pp.
The origin of “I declare”
I do not believe that the expression “I declare” is original to Osteen, since the book has not been published for a year, and we have heard this expression for years. What is clear to me that is not original to Osteen is the idea that “our words create realities.” In the United States and Latin America it is common to hear religious leaders, regularly associated with the so-called “prosperity gospel”, affirm that our minds and our words have the power to create material things and make events happen. That is the thesis of this book. This concept has its origin in a philosophical current called “New Thought” (“New Thought”, in English). New Thought began in the 19th century, and gained wide popularity in the United States in the early 1900s.
It was also known as “Healing Mind” or “Harmonialism”. Although the movement was born in the 19th century, its origins lie in the ideas of the Swedish inventor Emanuel Swedenborg, who in his search for the human soul said that God revealed himself to him and declared him “God’s Revealer.” Swedenborg claimed to speak with the Apostle Paul, Martin Luther, and on occasion with Moses. He denied the truths of Christianity and taught that the physical world was an extension of the mind, and therefore the mind could shape and dictate material things. These ideas were developed in the United States by Phineas Quimby, who is known as the father of New Thought. Quimby said that what someone believes is reality, including diseases. The proponents of this movement took ideas from different religions, especially Christianity.
These ideas were popularized by guru Ralph Waldo Trine, who published a book in 1897 that sold millions of copies. Trine said that what one affirmed with the mind and with words happened; that the reasons for diseases in people were because they talked or thought about them. But the teachings did not reach the churches from Trine, who denied the Bible and the deity of Christ, but through the pastor EW Kenyon. Kenyon was a study partner of Trine’s at Emerson College School of Public Speaking in Massachusetts. The preacher Kenyon is known for his idea of ”positive thinking.” He taught that positive confessions were the key to a prosperous life. He is also known as the father of the prosperity gospel. Kenyon influenced people like Oral Roberts, founder of the university that bears his name, where he studied Joel Osteen.
In summary, the idea of ”I declare” is nothing more than the representation of the pagan ideas originally known as “New Thought”, which were later popularized by some pastors with the term “positive and prosperous thinking”.
The “Iism” of “I declare”
Biblical Christianity is Christocentric. The Bible teaches that Christ is the center of the Bible, and that the Old Testament bears witness to Him (Luke 24:44). God’s Word teaches us that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, the obedient Son, the last Adam, the true Israel, and the heir to David’s throne (cf. Jn. 1:14; Mt. 1:1; 2:15; Rom 5:12-21, 1 Cor 15:20-28, Phil 2:6-11); and that at the same time is Yahweh, the Lord (Jn. 8:58; Acts 2:36). Christ came to live the life that we could not live, to receive the death that we deserve, and rose on the third day declaring victory over death, so that everyone who repents of their sins and puts their faith in Him as Lord and Savior be saved and have eternal life.
The Lamb of God died as a substitute for all who believe in Him. For its part, this “I declare” book is strictly anthropocentric, man-centered. It’s all about me, and nothing about Christ and what He did on the cross. Expressions like these are common: “I declare that people will be good to me” (59), “this is my time to shine” (141). And he reaches the point of saying that man is in control: “I am in control” (166).
The hermeneutics of “I declare”
It is evident in the pages of “I declare” the author’s poor hermeneutics. Osteen treats the Bible as if it were a magical book from the Harry Potter novel, and, at best, moralizes it in a sad way. For example, he cites Psalm 2:8, where God says, “ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.” Osteen applies this verse to his reader, telling her: ask God and he will give you your dreams (148). Anyone who has read his Bible carefully knows that Psalm 2 is a messianic text. The book of Acts applies this Psalm to Jesus (Acts 4:23-27).
The verse that Osteen uses is actually talking about the sovereignty of Christ over the nations. God the Father gave his Son the nations as an inheritance. This speaks of the reach of the gospel to the Gentiles. It is a verse that missionaries have used for years. Osteen does something similar with Job 3:25 (139), using that verse to say that Job’s calamities came to him because he called them out with his mind, totally ignoring the context and all that chapter 1 teaches. He does the same with other New Testament verses, where he only quotes half a verse to say something different from what the text teaches. For example, after telling the story of the miracle where Jesus turned water into wine in John 2, Osteen concludes: This wine was excellent. A good wine takes between twenty and thirty years. Jesus sped up the process of the wine. And then he adds: “It might normally take twenty years to pay off his house, but the good news is that God likes to speed things up (56-57).” Finally, the use of the Bible in this book is a reminder of the popular expression that “every text used out of context is a pretext.”
Putting words in God’s mouth
The Bible is quite clear in its prohibition of adding or subtracting words (Deut. 4:2; Rev. 22:19). God gives us that as a commandment; disobeying him is damning. Sadly, that is what Osteen does in his book, when he puts words into God’s mouth when the Bible does not express them (cf. 10, 52, 68, 84, 148, 156), bringing damnation upon the soul. of the. And it’s not that he uses words by way of illustration, but that he quotes using quotation marks. For example, on page 148, immediately after quoting Psalm 2:8, Osteen adds: “God says: Ask me for great things, ask me about those hidden dreams that I have placed in your heart, and ask me for those promises that natural seem impossible to fulfill. Nowhere does the Bible say that. This is heresy.
The panentheism of “I declare”
Panentheism teaches that creation is an extension of the divine. The term means “all in God.” This is tied to the idea that everything is changing, including “god” and human beings, which is totally opposite to what the Bible teaches. Unfortunately, among the teachers of the prosperity gospel it is common to find panentheistic and pantheistic (everything is god) ideas. For example, Paul Crouch has publicly said: “I am a little god. Critics stay away!” Another prosperity preacher, Kenneth Copeland, has said, “You don’t have God in you, you are one.”
Osteen is a bit more sophisticated and subtle. He uses the language of DNA. He says that humans have the DNA of God, that our blood is royal because we are children of the King (118-120). And, of course!, if we have the blood of divine royalty, we must walk, dress and talk like kings, concludes Osteen (120). I wonder if the supposed fact that humans have God’s DNA is what allows Osteen to equate the Word of God to the human word. This is what he does when he encourages his reader to believe in the power of his own word and tells the cancer “I will defeat you.” To illustrate this, he makes an analogy with the power of God’s Word in creation when he said “let there be light” and there was light (170-171).
conclusion
Let me be clear on one thing, this book is not Christian. These “promises” are things that any spiritualist, mystical, and self-help book would tell you. This is a motivational religious book, but not a Christian book. The motivation for this review is the number of people who have believed these distortions. I worry that some people understand that they are saved by agreeing or liking what they read in this book, when they may not be. “I declare” is a book with a universal character, which any religious or pagan can affirm.
Here there is no gospel, there is no cross, there is no sin, much less there is forgiveness and reconciliation with the triune and true God. The “god” that is presented in this book is more like the image of a loving grandfather who is in the stands of the stadium cheering and yelling at his granddaughter to keep running, that everything is going well in the race. It is not the holy, omnipresent, omniscient, true, just and merciful God who revealed himself in the Bible, the one who “so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life.”