Abstract:
The Truman Doctrine, which backed up the beginning of the Cold War and the Marshall Plan, allied to the ideological apparatus of the “American dream” which generated the “American way of life”, a syllogism which alludes to the North American way of life, which incorporates the valorization of capitalism, depreciating socialism, under the auspices of the Keynesian theory, sustains the revival of American industry, generating the consumerist frenzy of the Golden Years, seducing even the frugality of the Puritan Protestantism of the USA. In this context Kenneth Erwin Hagin (McKinney, 20/ 08/1917 - Tulsa, 19/ 09/ 2003), propagates the Prosperity Theology which has in the consumption of durable goods the substantiation of the affirmations of the Positive Confession: I want, I can, I determine. The Christian Theology: systematic, scientific, Biblical, paying attention to the signs of the times and of the tradition occupies itself with the Trinitarian God, his attributes and his relation with the human being and nature and reveals his son as the merciful face of the Father (Lk 6: 36). In it the “Ebed Iahweh” suffers the confrontation of his messianic conscience with the Sadducee theology, the Pharisaic legalism and the Roman forces. In Mark 6:1-6 and Matthew 13: 53-58 Jesus is rejected by the multitude for being simply a local poor person “isn’t this the (son of the) carpenter” with the pretension of being the Messiah. The apophthegm of the Luke variation presents him as the Messiah of the poor: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to […] ‘today’ he said, ‘in your very hearing this text has come true.’(Lk 4:18-21). The Luke narrative is the basis for the refutation of prosperity theology, when this one substitutes the sacrifice of Jesus with the quest for health and material goods as the fruit of the redeeming act on the cross. In the global voracity of a capitalism which thinks itself as being the only one, prosperity reveals itself as a theological fallacy which has the market as its only and true god. The theology of Jesus, present in the authentic Christian tradition, negates this negation, affirms itself in the doxa aletheiá that being the Son of the carpenter he is mercy itself of the Father: Misericordiae Vultus, of which the generous act of the cross is the gratuity of the Redemption for all human beings and the whole humanity. The Prosperity Theology was born in the US as a fruit of the adaptation of Protestant Puritanism to the capitalist consumerism of the post war world.
