How Oral Roberts Changed Religion

[trotsky]

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

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. “I ran away from it as a boy. Billy meets the needs of a lot of people…I reach other needs.”

It seems even liberal believers owe something to Oral and his reinterpretation of Christianity in the 20th century.

[mr blur]

1. Was he one of those "Progressive Theologians" you hear about here, then?

Isn't it amazing how these people can "randomly open" the bible and immediately believe someone's talking to them - and often telling them exactly what they want - or expect - to hear? It's uncanny, supernatural almost.

[trotsky]

2. Seems to be, since he rejected the guilt of traditional Christianity.

Since no one has any evidence that Oral *didn't* hear from god personally, we should take him at his word. Or so some think.

[safeinOhio]

3. Stumbled on one of those

loopholes.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. Well except that Prosperity Theology is rightwing republican reactionary crap.

Perhaps not what Oral intended, but it is what he re-ignited. It also isn't new.