CAPE TOWN, South Africa–In a world where about half the people live on less than $2.50 a day, a gospel that promises material wealth and health brings hope of relief from grinding poverty. But a prominent African evangelical leader disputes this prosperity message as grossly out of step with biblical teaching.

Daniel Bourdanné, the Chadian general secretary of IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students), addressed the worldwide deception of the attractive, but false prosperity theology in a Saturday afternoon Multiplex session at Cape Town 2010: The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

The “Prosperity Gospel,” which was originally popularized by the late American television evangelist pioneer Oral Roberts and further popularized by the late Pentecostal preacher Kenneth Hagin, is particularly attractive to those facing material lack, hardship and hopelessness. Bourdanné notes that while people trapped in poverty have found hope in the Prosperity Gospel, the ends do not justify the deceptive means of this false teaching.

According to prosperity theology, the spiritual nature of a human is like God’s but with a soul housed in a body. Hence, humans are little gods. Christians can order things to happen. Faith is optimism and idealism, a formula that operates automatically when we invoke it. “The practice of proclaiming the name of Jesus is like magic and divination that control people and things by their name,” Bourdanné says.

Prosperity theology presents God as a being of faith. Having faith boils down to positive thinking, “and positive thinking is first and foremost believing in oneself,” Bourdanné says. It makes no distinction between belief in self and belief in God.

Not only are these concepts subtly pantheistic and deist, “The attitude of humans that consists of demanding their rights, giving orders to God, trying to domesticate Him by so-called spiritual formulas and techniques is, in my opinion, contrary to Biblical thought,” Bourdanné says.

The Bible says humans are created in God’s image. This means their personality reflects God’s personality analogically and not in a directly equivalent way. “Being in his image does not mean that humans are deified,” Bourdanné says.

While God still heals people today, prosperity theology teaches that everyone can be healed if they use their faith. Bourdanné notes that the doctrine of divine healing misinterprets Psalm 103:3 (“who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases”) to mean that God must heal. In contrast, this doctrine ignores the faithful ones in the Bible – the Apostle Paul as a prime case in point – who were never healed.

And while the doctrine of divine revelation varies within the prosperity movement, some proponents place direct and private revelation received personally on par with the Bible itself. In its worst extreme, some teachers set “revelation knowledge” above the scriptures. According to this teaching, perfect knowledge of God is possible now.

“This doctrine leads to ranking Christians in a hierarchy,” Bourdanné says. It is easy to distinguish between ‘super Christians’ who have received this knowledge and others, who are considered less spiritual. Those who possess it are venerated as super-spiritual, sometimes called apostles, and are even deified as “man-gods,” attaining god status through their knowledge, he says.

In truth, Bourdanné says, Scripture says that faith, before being an action, is above all else a relationship of trust in a sovereign and personal God. Humans are the ones who must be subject to God, not the opposite. God grants whatever he wants to whomever he wants whenever he wants, he says, and promises to supply our needs, not fulfill our every desire.

“We are healed, but not yet,” Bourdanné says. “We are saved in hope, and we are waiting for the glorious manifestation of our salvation when the author of our healing returns.”