Prosperity theology teaches that God wills material wealth and physical health for believers, that faith is the mechanism by which these are obtained, and that giving money to a ministry is the seed from which a financial return grows. It is associated with Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, though it is not confined to it and is not held by most Pentecostals, and it has spread very widely in West Africa, Latin America, the Philippines and South Korea.
Its two characteristic doctrines are seed faith, in which donations are described as sown seed yielding a multiplied return, and positive confession, in which a believer speaks a desired outcome and thereby claims it. The historical lineage runs through E. W. Kenyon, who brought New Thought mind-power ideas into early Pentecostal circles, and then through the healing revivalists of the 1950s, Oral Roberts, A. A. Allen, T. L. Osborn, and Kenneth Hagin's Word of Faith teaching.
The criticism from within Christianity is sustained, specific and comes from people who share most of the theology of those they are criticising.
- The General Council of the Assemblies of God, itself the largest classical Pentecostal denomination, adopted a position paper in 1980 rejecting positive confession, noting that biblical figures expressed doubt and were answered anyway, and holding that God's will must take precedence over the will of the believer.
- The Lausanne Theology Working Group, representing a global evangelical constituency, issued a statement on the prosperity gospel in 2009 that rejected its exegesis and its ethics and warned specifically about its effect on the poor.
- Evangelical figures including Rick Warren have described it as the idolatry of money; Ben Witherington III and others have called it heretical.
- The theologians David Jones and Russell Woodbridge have argued in detail that it inverts the centre of Christian teaching, placing human material need where the death and resurrection of Christ belong.
- The Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, in an article by Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa, criticised its fusion with a national ideal of success and the absence of any ascetic or compassionate element.
- The president of the Nigerian Baptist Convention has attacked it as a departure from the message of the crucified Christ, in one of the countries where it is strongest.
The most serious version of the criticism is not that prosperity preachers are personally enriched, though many demonstrably are. It is that the doctrine assigns a cause to poverty and sickness, insufficient faith, and therefore places the blame on the person suffering, in congregations largely composed of people with neither wealth nor health.
Defenders respond that the criticism caricatures a pastoral message of hope delivered to people whom other churches have written off, that it is often made by comfortable Western Christians about churches in the global South, and that an expectation of God's material provision is not obviously foreign to scripture. Both sets of arguments are made by Christians, in public, about each other.