Well.
Telescammer Gloria Copeland made headlines yesterday by telling her listeners that they don’t need flu shots. No. What they need is a megadose of Jesus, who will protect them from the virus.
An evangelical minister who advised President Donald Trump’s campaign sparked an uproar Tuesday by suggesting that Christian faith makes people immune from the flu.
Texas minister Gloria Copeland, who sat on the Trump campaign’s evangelical executive advisory board, denied the country is in the midst of a severe flu outbreak in a Facebook video that went viral because, “Jesus himself is our flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of the flu.”
This is painfully crazy, but at least has Biblical justification.
James 5:15 “And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.”
This is just one more thing that the Inerrant Bible is wildly, grossly, grotesquely wrong about.
Inexplicably — and to his credit — Albert the Pious gets it right and says you should pay no attention to Gloria Copeland.
The word faith movement is a particular perversion of biblical Christianity that appeared and became wildly popular in the middle decades of the 20th century. Kenneth and Gloria Copeland are now type A examples of the word faith movement and even as they and their ministry continue now well into the 21st century the arguments are virtually the same as those that emerged in the very beginnings of the movement. The argument is that power is given to believers in the Lord Jesus Christ to defy physical reality, to make things materialize by visualization and by claiming them by the power of faith alone, claiming even material wealth and health. And furthermore this then morphed into the kind of arguments that you see here. Arguments that relying upon God means that we do not turn to modern medicine. Arguments that actually defy biological realities such as the existence of viruses and how they operate.
Mohler, by the way, denies the biological reality of evolution, so his criticism of Copeland is constrained by his own problems with biological reality.
Wouldn’t you think that the Inerrant Bible, which in the words of the Southern Baptists “is totally true and trustworthy,” could get a simple thing like this right?
This is a serious question: If the Bible is inerrant, why can’t theologians agree on a simple matter like whether or not you should get a flu shot?