Yes, but his followers are alive and well.
from the article:
- In an early-1990s edition of his magazine, The Word of Faith, Hagin clearly delineated his heresy of "positive confession." The article was entitled, "You Can Have What You Say":
"Often you create your own negative situations yourself with wrong thinking, wrong believing, and wrong speaking. So start believing according to God's Word. Then begin making positive confessions of faith and victory over your life. ... You will never receive anything from God beyond the words you speak. ... If you don't like what you have in life, then begin to change the way you are thinking, believing, and speaking. Instead of speaking according to natural circumstances out of your head, learn to speak God's Word from your spirit. Begin to confess God's promises of life and health and victory into your situation. Then you can begin to enjoy God's abundant life as you have what you say!"
This was not a slip of the tongue or some new doctrine. This is at the heart of the Positive Confession (PC) movement today, also known as the "name-it-and-claim-it" gospel. The Positive Confession movement is a charismatic form of Christian Science. This can be substantiated by simply comparing the similarities in their common beliefs. Positive Confession is basically warmed-over New Thought dressed in evangelical/charismatic language. (Other well-known PC'ers besides Hagin's most successful protégé, Kenneth Copeland, are Charles Capps, Frederick K.C. Price, Robert Tilton, and David Yonggi Cho. Many of them are graduates of Hagin's RHEMA Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.)
- Hagin went a step further, from heresy to blasphemy, when he said, "The believer is as much an incarnation of God as Jesus Christ" (Hagin, "The Incarnation," The Word of Faith, 12/80, cited in Christianity in Crisis, p. 175,397). He has also said, "If we ever wake up and realize who we are, we'll start doing the work that we're supposed to do. Because the church hasn't realized yet that they are Christ. That's who they are. They are Christ." This is a gross heresy. The Lord Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh. He is the eternal Son of God. Nowhere is the believer said to be an incarnation of Almighty God. The Lord Jesus Christ performed miracles to demonstrate that He was the Son of God, the promised Messiah. No Christian can do the things that Christ did. Not one Pentecostal preacher has ever been able to perform the miracles that Christ performed. It is blasphemous confusion to claim that the believer is an incarnation of God like Christ was.
- Hagin obviously did not believe God is sovereign. Jesus, according to Word-Faith theology, has no authority on earth, having delegated it all to the church. He developed this point in his book The Authority of the Believer (Tulsa: Faith Library, 1979). And though most Word-Faith advocates would affirm the personality of the Holy Spirit, their teachings, in effect, depersonalize Him by consistently speaking of Him as a power to be drawn upon rather than it is we who are to be His instruments (Charismatic Chaos, p. 267).
- When one starts believing that he is Christ, with the power of Christ to create reality, the stories become ludicrous. Surely Hagin had the most unusual story of all. He said that when he was younger and still single, God led him to break off a relationship with a woman by revealing to him that she was morally unfit. Hagin claimed God miraculously transported him out of church one Sunday, right in the middle of the sermon. Worst of all, Hagin was the preacher delivering the sermon! (Charismatic Chaos, p. 49.)
