Wikipedia:Peer review/Prosperity theology/archive1

Prosperity theology

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I'm working on this article with two other people; it recently achieved Good Article status and we hope to get it to FA status in the future. The GA reviewer left some feedback on FAC when passing it, which we've addressed. We'd like to know how the article could be improved before we nominate it as a featured article.

Thanks, ItsZippy ^{(talk • contributions)} 22:09, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Brianboulton comments: Wow, scary stuff! The article is commendably calm, presenting this strange theology without a whiff of sensationlism. Impressive work; my points are all fairly trivial:-

Lead

• Missing word: "the Bible as a contract God and humans"
• "some have criticized their advice as unsound". Be more precise about to whom "some" refers here
• Missing word: "It has been compared other movements" - and "compared" is probably not the most appropriate word. "Likened to" would probably be better.

Theology

• Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar require links, and you should say who David Van Biema and Jeff Chu are.
• You should state which version of the bible you are using for the biblical quotes
• "Prosperity churches may also allot time to pray for sick members of the congregation during services." I believe this is common practice in all mainstream Christian denominations; it is a standard unit in prayers of intercession. It should not be suggested that this is a practice peculiar to prosperity churches.

History

• There's a slight confusion in terminology, arising from the dual meaning of "bill": "God supernaturally changed one-dollar bills into twenty-dollar bills to allow Allen to pay a bill". Suggest change sentence end to "settle an account".
• "Allen taught the "word of faith" or the power to speak something into being." Requires a comma after "faith"; he wasn't teaching either–or.
• Link televangelism
• Oral Roberts "led" not "lead"

Word of faith

• "This Positive Confession or Word of Faith Movement..." Quote marks required around "Positive Confession" and "Word of Faith", and "movement" should be decapitalised

International growth

• Missing word: "as justified in light of..."
• I wonder if powerlessness can properly be described as "rampant"?

Reception

• You should not have a subsection title ("Theology") which is the same as an earlier main section title.
• Missing word: "...characterize the doctrine as a form poor theology." This could be: "as a form of poor theology", or "as a poor form of theology", or "as poor theology". Take your pick.
• I got confused by "The paper notes Biblical examples of negative confessions which resulted in positive results and argues that the Biblical Greek translation of the word is "to speak the same thing", as it was not clear to me what "the word" is referring to. A similar confusion occurs over "the words" later in the paragraph.
• "holistic" should be pipe-linked to "holism"

Socioeconomic analysis

• Coleman developed" → "Coleman has developed". And later, "he notes", not "he noted"

Citation formats

• Use dashes for page ranges, not hyphens.

I hope these points are helpful. As I cannot watch individual peer review pages, please contact my talk page if you wish to discuss anything arising from this review with me. Please let me know if you decide to submit it to FAC; I'd be curious to see how it is received there. Brianboulton (talk) 00:29, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks for the thorough review! I'll let you know if we run into any issues. Mark Arsten (talk) 00:59, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
  • I think I took care of most of the points. I think televangelism was linked higher up, and I'll have to take a read through the source to figure out the ambiguity of the two words. I actually was prompted to start working on this page when I saw how biased it was, so it means a lot to hear praise for the neutral tone here. Mark Arsten (talk) 01:22, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
• I echo Mark's thanks for the review - it's incredibly helpful. ItsZippy ^{(talk • contributions)} 12:13, 29 December 2011 (UTC)