Kenneth Copeland—False Christian and Dangerous Wolf

The following quotations are from Hank Hanegraaff’s book, Christianity in Crisis 21st Century. These aren’t all the quotations of Copeland in the book but are enough to demonstrate the abject heretical nature of Kenneth Copeland’s teachings. 

Heaven, God, and the similarity to Mormonism 

“Heaven has a north and a south and an east and a west. Consequently, it must be a planet.”

“Now God is not some creature that stands twenty-eight feet tall, and He’s got hands, you know, as big as basketballs.  That’s not the kind of creature He is . . . He’s very much like you and me.  Can you conceive that? Not hardly in the mind, but your heart can. Your heart can. A Being, a Being that stands somewhere around six-two to six-three, that weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple hundred pounds, little better, [and] has a [hand] span nine inches across.”

“You don’t think earth was first, do you? Huh? Well, you don’t think God made man in His image, and then made earth in some other image? There is not anything under this whole sun that’s new. Are you hearing what I’m saying? This is all a copy. It’s a copy of home. It’s a copy of the Mother Planet. Where God lives, He made a little one just like His and put us on it.” 

“God’s reason for creating Adam was his desire to reproduce himself. I mean a reproduction of himself, and in the garden of Eden he did just that. He was not a little like God. He was not almost like God. He was not subordinate to God, even . . . Adam is as much like Go as you could get, just the same as Jesus . . . Adam, in the garden of Eden, was God manifested in the flesh.”

“God spoke Adam into existence in authority with words (Gen. 1:26-28). These words struck Adam’s body in the face. His body and God were exactly the same size.”

“Adam was made in the image of God. He was as much female as he was male. He was exactly like God. Then God separated him and removed the female part. Woman means ‘man with the womb.’ Eve had as much authority as Adam did as long as they stayed together.”

The powerlessness of God and the control of Satan

God had no avenue of lasting faith or moving in the earth. He had to have covenant with somebody . . . He had to be invited in, in other words, or He couldn’t come . . . God is on the outside looking in. In order to have any say so in the earth, He’s gonna have to be in agreement with a man here.”

“Adam committed high treason; and at that point, all the dominion and authority God had given to him was handed over to Satan. Suddenly, God was on the outside looking in . . .  After Adam’s fall, God found Himself in a peculiar position . . . God needed an avenue back into the earth . . . God laid out His proposition and Abram accepted it. It gave God access to the earth and gave man access to God . . . Technically, if God ever broke the Covenant, He would have to destroy Himself."

“I was shocked when I found out who the biggest failure in the Bible actually is . . .  The biggest one is God . . . I mean, He lost His top-ranking, most anointed angel; the first man He ever created; the first woman He ever created; the whole earth and all the fullness therein; a third of the angels, at least—that’s a big loss, man . . .  Now, the reason you don’t think of God as a failure is He never said He’s a failure. And you’re not a failure till you say you’re one.”

“The Bible says that God gave this earth to the sons of men . . . and when [Adam] turned and gave that dominion to Satan, look where it left God. It left Him on the outside looking in . . . He had no legal right todo anything about it, did He? . . . He had injected Himself illegally onto the earth—what Satan had intended for Him to do was to fall for it—put off an illegal act and turn the light of in God and subordinate God to himself . . . He intended to get God into such a trap that He couldn’t get out.”

“God’s on the outside looking in. He doesn’t have any legal entree into the earth. The thing don’t belong to Him. You see how sassy the devil was in the presence of God in the book of Job? God said, ‘Where have you been?’ Wasn’t any of God’s business. He [Satan] didn’t even have to answer if he didn’t want to . . .  God didn’t argue with him a bit! You see, this is the position that God’s been in . . . Might say, ‘Well, if God’s running things, He’s doing a lousy job of it.’ He hadn’t been running ‘em, except when He’s just got, you know, a little bit of a chance.”

Words are power that even God needs, and turn into whatever is proclaimed by them

“Faith is a power force. It is a tangible force. It is a conductive force.”

“Once that [Abrahamic] covenant was established, God began to release His Word into the earth. He began to paint a picture of a Redeemer, a man who would be the manifestation of His Word in the earth.”

“So before Jesus came to the earth, God spoke His Word and then spoke His Word again. How many times did He say the Messiah was coming? It was prophesied over hundreds, even thousands, of years. He kept saying, ‘He is coming. He is coming.’ The circumstances in the earth made it look as if there was no way He could accomplish it; but He just kept saying it. He would not be moved by what He saw . . .  God would not relent.”

“The angels spoke the words of the covenant to her [Mary]. She pondered them in her heart, and those words became the seed. And the Spirit of God hovered over her and generated that seed, which was the Word that the angel spoke to her. And there was conceived in her, the Bible says, a holy thing. The Word literally became flesh.”

Lies about Jesus’ teachings

[claiming this “prophecy” was given to him by Jesus] “They crucified Me for claiming that I was God. But I didn’t claim I was God; I just claimed I walked with Him [the Father] and that He was in Me.’

“As a believer, you have a right to make commands in the name of Jesus. Each time you stand on the Word, you are commanding God to a certain extent because of His Word.”

Jesus couldn’t be God, because it wouldn’t have been legal for God to be a redeemer: 

“It’s got to be a man. He’s got to be all man. He cannot be a God and come storming in here with attributes and dignities that are not common to man. He can’t do that. It’s not legal.”

“Now you see, God is injecting His Word into the earth to produce this Jesus—these faith-filled words that framed the image that’s in Him . . . He can’t just walk onto the earth and say, ‘Let it be!’ because He doesn’t have the right.  He had to sneak it in here around the god of this world that was blockin’ every way that he possibly could.”

Jesus went to Hell and was then born again

“Satan didn’t realize he [Jesus] is in there [hell] illegally . . .  This man had not sinned. This man has not fallen out of the covenant of God, and he had the promise of God for deliverance. And Satan fell into the trap. He took Him into hell illegally. He carried Him in there [when] He did not sin.”

“He [Jesus] is suffering all that there is to suffer. There is no suffering left apart from Him. His emaciated, poured out, little wormy spirit is down in the bottom of that thing [hell]. And the devil thinks he’s got Him destroyed.”

“The Word of the living God went down into that pit of destruction and charged the spirit of Jesus with resurrection power! Suddenly His twisted, death-wracked spirit began to fill out and come back to life. He began to look like something the devil had never seen before.”

“He [Jesus] was literally being reborn before the devil’s very eyes. He began to flex His spiritual muscles . . . Jesus was born again—the firstborn from the dead the Word calls Him—and he whipped the devil in his own backyard. He took everything he had away from him. He took his keys and his authority away from him.”

Even worse blasphemy—Copeland could have died in place of Jesus

“The Spirit of God spoke to me. And He said, ‘Son, realize this’—now follow me in this; don’t let your tradition trip you up—He said, ‘Think this way; a twice-born man whipped Satan in his own domain.’ And I threw my Bible down . . . I said, ‘What?!’ He said, ‘A born-again man defeated Satan. The firstborn many brethren defeated him.’ He said, ‘You are the very image and the very copy of that one.’ I said, ‘Goodness gracious sakes alive.’ I began to see what had gone on in there [hell], and I said, ‘Well, now, You don’t mean, You couldn’t dare mean that I could have done the same thing?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah. If you’d known . . . had the knowledge of the Word of God that He did, you could have done the same thing because you’re a reborn man too!’”

There is no defense for such horridly false teaching — no defense whatsoever.