After the depressing series I've run on Bethel supremo Bill Johnson I thought I would end the series on a positive note: Well sort of....
Job and his "comforters"; Job's suffering didn't last but like all suffering,
when you are in it, it lasts too long!
As if to dispel any doubt that Premier Christianity Magazine eschews the prosperity gospel we find an article in the July edition by the editor Sam Hailes entitled "I was is in constant agony". At the very start of the article we read:
Eric Gaudion's story is an affront to the prosperity gospel. It contradicts the misguided belief that Christians don't get sick. It challenges those who guarantee your healing - if only you pray harder, obey more or have more faith.
Hailes then goes on to relate the story of Christian Eric Gaudion, a Pentecostal minister afflicted for 22 years with acute haemorrhaging pancreatitis. As a Pentecostal he had no a priori principles which impeded him seeking and believing in prayer for miraculous healing, but....
...nothing seemed to work. "I had so much oil poured on my head I wonder that my hair ever dried!"
Instead Guadion had years and years of terrible pain and once very nearly died in the intensive care unit. There was psychological trauma too, for himself and his family. He was also tormented by Job's comforters...
...telling him to "pray about it" asking "Where's your faith" or even suggesting he'd been cursed. [These] were all examples of how poor theology can magnify a person's suffering. "The very worst was claiming I'd been demonised" Gaudion says.
Tell me about it! I once met a Christian schizophrenic who was told that he was in bondage to the demonic and he should have an exorcism! I'm really ashamed of many evangelical Christians with their crackpot superstitions and that's before we get to the Trump supporting Christians with their Covid 19 denying, conspiracy theory pushing and gun toting anti-establishmentarianism. As with Bill Johnson, if something doesn't quite go the way they want or expect they witch hunt until they find someone to blame.
But then in 2017 the medical profession came up trumps. Gaudion had a risky operation that had only been done once before. In fact it was so experimental that the BBC filmed the 16hr operation. The procedure would....
... remove his pancreas and transplant the islets that produce insulin in the liver.
It worked:
"I'm completely free. I'm no longer on opiates. I have no pain. I thank God that my life has been transformed".
The article says that Gaudion has written a book about his journey, a book which grapples with the theology of suffering: It's titled: "Through Storms: A manual for when life hurts". The article in Christianity finishes with a final comment from Gaudion himself (alluding to Covid 19):
We're facing a massive loss and grief and I feel God's heart is with us in that grieving process; that he weeps over the losses and shares with us in the pain of all that's happening. We also know our God is a redeeming God. And he longs to work even in crises like this, to redeem, to restore, to rebuild and, ultimately to bring us through.
As a rule I don't comment on the question of suffering and evil (I've really only ever done one article on the subject) as so much ink has been spilt on the subject already and in any case I feel that people like Gaudion are far better qualified to speak about it. Gaudion's story is challenging and humbling: Could I go through with that kind of suffering and successfully come out the other end? I'm afraid to say that I really don't think I'm made of that kind of heroic stuff, but it's good to know that some people are.
As I have said more than once, credit must go to Premier Christianity for their honest, candid and courageous publishing, especially as so much evangelicalism is in the grip of triumphalism, superficiality, self-deceiving sophistry and a distinct lack of intellectual integrity. I have at times complained about some of Christianity's occasional writers but I think I can say that on the whole we are dealing with an honest editorial team that doesn't overlook tricky issues and faces them square on. But otherwise there is a large swathe of evangelicalism badly in need of a challenge to its spiritual complacency, cloud cuckoo land fundamentalism, irrational fideism, elitist gnosticism and above all its selective gullibility.
Gaudion's story is a fitting end to my series on the self-deceiving spiritual spin of Bill Johnson.
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For the previous parts see:
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