Sunday, October 4, 2009
Discussion Question on Gibbon
On page 153, Gibbon states that "Gay apparel, magnifacent houses, and elegant furniture were supposed to unite the double guilt of pride and of sentualilty" in the Christian. What, in your opinion, would Gibbon consider the emergent "health and wealth gospel" of popular evangelical ministers (Joel Osteen, TD Jakes, etc.) who preach only of prosperity and wealth? Would he view this as a breaking of the established "Christian tradition" that he mentions earlier in the passage?
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Gibbon, and I think most everyone else, would see this as a clear breach of Christian dogma. It's impossible to go from preaching austerity and asceticism to preaching the glorification of wealth without changing doctrinal precepts. However, I think Gibbon assumes a dialectic between religion and economics which presupposes such a shift is inevitable. That is, Christianity in its incipient stages was popular with the poor because it favored the impoverished condition as necessary for salvation, whereas the "pomp and pleasure" of the rich was treated as an iniquitous indulgence in the secular world (153). Once Christianity was appropriated by the wealthy it was necessary to shift doctrine. Thus the Christian tradition might not be seen as "broken", but rather redefined in a new context. Still, in our modern situation, it seems hard to reconcile the so-called "liberation theology" of Latin America with the capitalistic Christianity of American televangelists.
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