God's Economy: Redefining the Health & Wealth Gospel

by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Book Overview

Are you dissatisfied with the gospel of health and wealth?Health and wealth proponents urge Christians to claim material blessings on earth. Others insist that God's best gifts can't be enjoyed until heaven. The truth of God's intentions, writes acclaimed author Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, is far greater than either perspective suggests.Packed with inspiring stories, God's Economy invites you to step into the good life God intends you to enjoy here...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0310293375
• ISBN13: 9780310293378
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Life Changing

This is a potentially life changing book. How do you relate to money? How does God intend for us to relate to money and to God and each other? Highly reccomended>

A Great Read!

The book God's Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove provides an interesting look at a controversial subject: How should Christians understand money? The first four chapters prepare us through a combination of autobiography on the part of the author, examination of biblical texts, and theological discussion on the issues of poverty, money, and power. The latter four chapters explain four "tactics" Jonathon suggests Christians use in the world to help us create a new understanding of abundance. Towards the beginning of the book Jonathon challenges many fundamental aspects of the "American dream." In speak of Joseph, for example, he says that his life was one "marked less by teh abundance of possessions than by abundant relationships." He takes the rest of the book to discuss how Christians might re-order their thinking around relationships instead of possessions. He says elsewhere that "what concerns Jesus about money isn't so much how we should use it...as how it affects our relationships with God." He also spends the first four chapters attempting to get rid of the popular ideas that problems in the world are either: (1) The fault of the rich having too much, or (2) The poor being lazy. He explores a kind of "third way" where the lines aren't so finely drawn, and where relationships are central. His main example for this kind of life is St. Francis of Assisi who valued the relationships in his life over his wealth and possessions (indeed even ripping his own clothes off his back to return them to his father). Money has away of "quietly colonizing" us in ways we least expect. He notes, as many authors have noted as of late, how the `protestant ethic' has separated 'spiritual' and `material' realities into separate spheres (to the point of excluding God in the `material' reality). Another preparation Jonathon makes before delving into his four tactics is understanding the importance of first century economies and the importance of the feast-table. The biggest problem that modern readers of the biblical text have is understanding first century economies. We have to understand that the household was also the primary means by which commercial ventures took place. There was no separation between the two in this time period, and thus to understand Jesus' teaching about family, we must understand that family household economics was all their was. There was not other way of doing things. The point of such household economies was to create as big and powerful a household as possible with as many servants as possible. From here, Jonathon goes into his first tactic: subversive service. We are called, not to be the great fathers of great households, but to be like children. To read the text as Jesus speaking of childlike faith is incoherent to a first century economy. Rather, the authors seem to be calling us to be `nothing' - or, at least, nothing as a child was considered nothing in a household economy structur

"The Abundant Goodness of God's Provision"

[ This review originally appeared in THE ENGLEWOOD REVIEW OF BOOKS Vol 2, #40 - 9 October 2009 ] The biblical writer of Ecclesiastes wrote: "Of the making of books there is no end," and if that is true, it is even truer that there is no end of the making of many books about money: books on how to get it, books on how to keep once you've got it, etc. etc. But, in all my years of reading, selling and reviewing books, I've never encountered a book about money that is anything like Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's newbook God's Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel. Ultimately, God's Economy is about the good news of the kingdom of God; indeed that is the "health and wealth gospel" of the book's sub-title. But before your mind turns from the words "health and wealth" to images of the myriad of televangelists who have made plush lives for themselves - e.g. Benny Hinn or Creflo Dollar - by preaching such a gospel to the masses, allow me to reassure that Jonathan's message bears little in common with these slick television preachers. God's Economy is about "abundant life" - which although Jonathan doesn't specifically mention it - is perhaps a better translation of the familiar New Testament Greek phrase that is usually rendered "eternal life." He describes this abundant life: "It's a celebration of God's economy, where the poor find bread and the rich find healing because we rediscover one another as friends ... and we are not alone anymore." As he demonstrated in his previous books (including two superb ones that awe reviewed in the ERB last year: New Monasticism and Free to Be Bound), Jonathan is a masterful storyteller weaving together stories from Scripture, from church history and from his own experience. God's Economy is a delight to read, humorous at times, but ultimately these stories - like those Jesus told - are disarming, shining the light into those dark places of our souls in which lie our assumptions about how the world works and our deeply rooted plans for preserving ourselves (and those closest to us) in a hostile world. Jonathan begins the book by calling us to submit our hopes and dreams to Gods' transformative "revolution of imagination." God calls us to a life of abundance, Jonathan observes, but we come to know this not in amazing possessions or wealth in our bank accounts or 401K's, but rather in the wealth of loving friendships we have in the family of God. Part of this transformation of our imaginations to which we are called is understanding the story that drives our lives no longer as a story about me as an isolated individual, but about us as a community of god's people. Readers who miss this point, might be to misunderstand statements that Jonathan makes like: "Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes are right about one thing: our God of abundance does want to give you your best life now. It's just that God's abundance is more radical that many of us have dared to dream." As the book goes on it becomes clear that the