Is ‘Name it & claim it’ teaching Biblical?

G’day everyone, Dave Deane here, and our question for the week is: Is ‘Name It And Claim It’ teaching biblical?

‘Name It And Claim It’ teaching, also known as the ‘Word of Faith’ movement or ‘Prosperity Gospel’, is a phrase used in reference to popular teachings by some televangelists, faith healers, and other various Charismatic and Pentecostal preachers.

The basic idea behind ‘Name It And Claim It’ is positive confession. Now, in the culture more broadly, the idea of ‘the power of positive thinking’ has been very influential, and that’s because, in part, there is some truth, some value, some real, real tangible benefits that have been shown in the psychology literature about how having a positive mindset can help personal self-esteem, productivity, lower stress, and improve overall wellbeing. Personal psychology does affect our thinking, and therefore our brain chemistry, and to some degree the thinking and brain chemistry of others in how they, in turn, perceive us.  But that’s about the extent of it how far positive thinking can reach out into reality. At the end of the day, thoughts cannot directly change facts about reality – you know, thinking about holding in your hand two fifty-dollar notes doesn’t make them appear in your hand – but unfortunately within the culture, like within the church, there has been an overreach here with this idea of positive thinking.

As one meme reads: “Believe you deserve it and the universe will serve it”. #positivevibetribe.

Of course, the negative flipside to this is, if anyone or anything brings negativity into your life, your desires, your sense of wellbeing, then cut ‘em out! Block ‘em, just like you would on Facebook. After all, who wants to be around a negative Nancy, right? A vibe killer? No one! People gravitate towards positivity like a moth to a flame, and if you can package that kind of pop-psychology up and hand it out with all the authority of God Himself well… friend… you’ll be a rich man or a rich woman. I mean, it’s far easier to sell the view that ‘God is your personal servant’ rather than ‘God is the sovereign master of your life.’

And to be blunt, that’s precisely what’s happening with the so-called ‘Name It And Claim It’ teaching or Word Of Faith Movement.

Now, I’m about to mention the names of some teachers of this movement, and I want to be clear that my intent is not to personally attack these people. I simply want to present their views in their own voices.

So, with that, listen to this from one well-known Name It And Claim It teacher, Kenneth Copeland. In his booklet “How You Call It Is How It Will Be”, Copeland writes: “You can have what you say! In fact, what you are saying is exactly what you are getting now. If you are living in poverty and lack and want, change what you are saying. It will change what you have… Discipline your vocabulary.”

Another example can be found in the teachings of a wildly popular Word Of Faith preacher, Joel Osteen. He has said, quote: “our words have creative power. Whenever we speak something, either good or bad, we give life to what we are saying.” And as an example, he goes on to say that if I say “flu season is coming. I’ll probably catch it.”

Can you hear what’s being said here? Within a Christian religious context, this cultural idea of positive confession gets connected to Christian faith in such a way that faith becomes more like the Star Wars force bending reality by immutable spiritual laws through the agency of thoughts and spoken words rather than the complete trust and confidence we have in Jesus that defines our marriage-like relationship with Him.

There’s clearly a lot wrong with this, and I have touched on it in another episode where I responded to the question ‘Will God heal me if I have enough faith?’. In this episode, I want to dive a little deeper on the movement itself. Is ‘Name It And Claim It’ teaching biblical? As this is a question about the origin of the teaching, I’ll briefly sketch the history of the movement, before considering a few Bible passages, specifically Mark 11:22-23, that Word Of Faith teachers have used to support their position.

So First, a brief history of the movement.

The roots of Name It And Claim It teaching or the Word Of Faith movement can be traced back through the faith-cure movement of the 19^th century and beyond, into the teachings of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, an American exponent of mental healing who is generally regarded as the founder of the New Thought movement which, itself, splintered into various mind, healing and science cults, such as Christian Science, Religious Science, and the Unity School of Christianity. That term “New Thought” was basically a way of describing the collective ideas that emerged from these groups, ideas which drew on various Christian, transcendental, Hindu and Buddhist traditions revolving around a core idea that god is some sort of ‘infinite intelligence’ that we can more or less tap into. Quimby taught that, you know, if you’re sick you need to just tap into the divine intelligence and affirm your health, and it will be so.

In the first half of the 20^th century, a man named Essek William Kenyon developed the teachings of Quimby, sanitising the concept of ‘power of mind’ to ‘force of faith’ emphasising, among other things, that:

• God created the universe by speaking words, we can speak the same kind of words
• And by this positive kind of confession, we can overcome sickness and poverty

Kenyon is responsible for much of the word-faith terminology we know today, and he is sometimes dubbed the grandfather of the movement as his influence can be seen in many of today’s popular teachers.

For example, listen to this, again, from Kenneth Copeland:

“Like it or not, this is a word-created word-controlled universe. God established it that way from the very beginning… He set this whole system in motion by speaking into the darkness and saying, “Light be!” and light was (Genesis 1:3)… We can operate God’s way. Instead of trying to change things with natural thought and energy, we have the right and the ability to change them the way He does—with supernatural thinking and supernatural energy. We can release His power in our own lives and in the world around us with the words of our mouths.”

So that’s a brief whistle stop tour of the historical roots of Name It And Claim It teaching. But is it biblical? I mean, there’s all sorts of religious and quasi-spiritual traditions mixed up in it, but, hey, Copeland and co. are citing the Bible to make their case.

Well, even the devil quoted scripture at Jesus in Matthew 4, so let’s not be too content too soon.

Having looked at the history, let’s consider the Scriptures.

Kenneth Copeland is correct when he says that in the beginning God spoke creation into existence. But that’s about all He is correct on. We read again and again in Genesis “And God said…” “And God said…” and later on in the NT, John 1:3 tells us, plainly, that “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” But when Copeland and his ilk say that God’s speaking creation into being is something you and I can do in faith, just like He does, they’re wrong on at least two accounts.

Consider this logic of: ‘God does it therefore we can do it.’

John 4:24 says “God is Spirit”. In Isaiah 55:8, the LORD says, “my ways are higher than your ways… my thoughts higher than your thoughts”. In other words, while we are made in the image of God, we are NOT God, and therefore this logic that we can do things as he does, simply does not follow. This idea of Christians being little ‘g’ Gods is another heretical teaching known as the ‘manifested sons of God’. God is god, we are not, and not only is there no reason to assume otherwise, but it also actually defies reason to assume otherwise. God is, by His very nature, uncreated, you and I did not choose to be born. It is both and actual and a logical impossibility for you and I to outgrow our creatureliness and become as God in this sense.

Or to come at it from the perspective of God, if we can speak as God speaks, do we mean that God spoke in the sense we speak? “And God said…” “And God said…” is that God speaking with a physical voice box?

There is no question that the word “said” means something real, but that something is real of God who speaks it, not us. This point was understood by an influential 4^th century theologian, Basil the Great, who wrote:

“When we speak of a voice and a word and a command with reference to God, we mean the divine word not a sound sent out through phonetic organs.”

And this is borne out in the NT references to creation, such as John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3, 11:3, and so on, where the emphasis of creation isn’t what we often debate about, you know, the days of creation, the emphasis is laid on the creative or organisational fiat of God’s spoken word. God, who is the word (John 1:1-3), is primary in creating and sustaining that creation. That is to say, God’s word is creative and constitutive of existence – which includes your existence and my existence.

So, contrary to Kenneth Copeland and other Word Of Faith preachers, this idea of God speaking creation into reality has nothing – NOTHING – to do with you and I speaking, and therefore nothing to do with our naming or claiming over reality.

To my mind, this is a rather obvious error, and it’s also a very significant one because it’s idolatrous: to believe you can speak as God is to assume you are God, which begs the question: who do you really worship? … … … …

You see? This is what Name It And Claim It promotes: faith in faith not faith in God. And that mistake is not a trivial one. The Early Church Father, Augustine, wrote:

“Idolatry is worshipping anything that was meant to be used, or using anything that was meant to be worshipped”.

And that’s precisely what Name It And Claim It teaching does – it takes the Biblical idea of faith in a trustworthy, holy and sovereign God and replaces it with faith in what we essentially want.

Little wonder why narcissism is a thing today, right? I mean, if we actually condition a culture to actually take this advice – that the entire universe revolves around them without guard rails – then not only do we get people who feel good about ignoring the hard truths they don’t like, we also get people who are increasingly self-centred and self-absorbed. And we see this today right across the religious, social, and political spectrum. Think about abortion: if a woman gets pregnant, it’s no longer the facts of who’s growing inside her, it’s how they feel about the baby that determines what it is, or isn’t, so they say. If the baby is killed by her choice, it’s called an abortion and there are laws protecting the right of the mother to end the life of that baby. But if the baby is killed by another person, it’s called manslaughter or murder, depending on the circumstances, and again we have laws this time to prosecute a crime instead of protecting the mother’s choice.

You see, this fallacious Name It And Claim It logic of ‘God does it therefore we can do it’ is not benign… it’s a destructive cancer.

And it’s completely unbiblical. That’s the second problem: there’s nothing in the Bible to suggest God’s speaking creation into being was or is an ‘act of faith.’

Here’s where it gets a little more interesting. ‘Name It And Claim It’ teachers or ‘Word Of Faith’ preachers have tried to justify this idea of harnessing God’s faith by appealing to passages such as Mark 11:22-24.

In this passage, Jesus is walking with his disciples and when they come to pass a withered fig tree he stops to teach them, saying: “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Word Of Faith preachers have tried to argue that the phrase “Have faith in God” means to ‘have God’s faith’. In other words, they interpret this as not having faith in God but having the faith of God. So, harness that faith and you can change reality, you can alter creation, you can say to this mountain ‘be taken up and thrown into the sea’ and ‘it will be done…’ This kind of God-faith, Kenneth Copeland has already told us, is that which said: ‘let there be light and there was light’ and it can be yours, so we are told… … …

Again, the problem is that is not what the Bible says. It is true that the words in the original Greek making up the phrase “Have faith in God” can be transliterated as something like “Have faith of God,” or “Have God’s faith.” But as any competent scholar of New Testament Greek will note, the grammatical construction of the phrase does not have God as the one subject possessing faith as though Jesus is saying we should harness the “faith that God has”. Mark 11:22 contains what’s called an “objective genitive”, meaning God is the object of faith. Hence, the reason our English translations read “have faith in God” not ‘have the faith of God.’

But not only do Word Of Faith preachers misinterpret the original Greek New Testament, they seem to miss the significance of this teaching within the context of Mark more broadly. I encourage anyone listening to read Mark 11 and its surrounding chapters and see for yourself – Jesus is teaching His disciples about what it is to have faith in God when they pray to Him. In fact, keep on reading and you’ll see a direct counterpoint to the Name It and Claim it slash Word Of Faith view in Jesus Himself. Hours before his arrest and crucifixion, we read how Jesus knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane and prayed, Mark 14:36, “Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” This prayer of Jesus strikes against Name It And Claim It teaching. The assumption of ‘getting our own way’ is the root assumption controlling the entire premise of Name It And Claim It teaching, and it is at complete odds with what prayer is all about. Prayer is not about making our early will known in heaven, it’s about God’s will becoming known here on earth as it is in heaven. That’s what we have modelled here in Gethsemane, and that’s what Jesus taught – “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” (Matt. 6:9-10).

Indeed, this idea dovetails back to the idea of God’s word. John 15:7, Jesus says “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” In other words, if Jesus words – His will – abides in you, then His word, His will, governs how you formulate your desires, thoughts, and speech, such that you live in alignment with His will which manifests in the reality of your life.

You see, the principal issue with Name It And Claim It theology isn’t with the first half of the phrase – name it – it’s with the hubris of the second half of the phrase, ‘claim it.’ Paul to the Philippians tells us to name our requests to God, but more than that He tells us how. Phil 4:6 “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God…”

So don’t name it and claim it… name it with supplication and thanksgiving – that is earnest humility postured by gratitude… And faith, your faith, comes in, not as a force, but as the trust and confidence you have in the person and work of Jesus and what He has secured for you and me in the forgiveness of sins regardless of our circumstances. Because the truth is, the God who wills to move the mountain does not always will to take away the cup. Those who belong to Jesus’ true family do the will of God whether it involves miracles or suffering because faith – true Biblical faith in the person and promises of Jesus – provides a peace unlike anything this world can offer, with an assurance of hope in the life to come.

No matter how much we dress up our words with spiritual garb, faith in God is not measured and evaluated from the standpoint of personal satisfaction. Christian faith consists of abiding in Christ as He affects His will in and through our lives. If we must name and claim anything, may it be the One who has named and claimed us, Jesus Christ.

1 John 5:14-15 “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.  And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”

So, to wrap up: ‘Is name it and claim it teaching biblical?’ History says no. The Bible says no. And so should you. While there is a place for a kind of positive confession, the Name It And Claim It teaching or Word Of Faith movement we’ve considered here, is a complete distortion of plain biblical teachings about God, humanity, and our relationship to Him and the world around us.

The best antidote to ‘the word of faith’ espoused by the likes of Kenneth Copeland, is the word of God. He is the holy one in whom we live and move and have our being. We are in his power, not he in ours and the whole world should respond: Amen.