Here is a thought-provoking editorial on the theology of germs. What do you think? Is
this a good viewpoint to teach? Does it line up with the Holy Bible?
Soaring Golden Eagle
Forwarded Message follows:
--------------------------
Dear Friends
Here is the editorial from Dr. Winter from the latest issue of Mission
Frontiers.
For His glory
Rick Wood
MF2001.12.03-Winter
Editorial of Ralph D. Winter
The “Other” Terrorists
My wife’s final ordeal (see p. 37) right in the middle of all this
consternation about the new global war on terrorism has meant a double
upheaval for me. At times the panic on the TV screen (in the waiting room at
the Intensive Care Unit) could hardly distract me from another very different
kind of “distraction.” “Things would never again be the same.” Right: in my
case, for two reasons.
I found myself during the first 28 days of October, every day almost all day
in that Intensive Care Unit, thinking, praying, consternating, as my wife of
almost 50 years steadily passed out of this life. I could not avoid pondering
two different kinds of terrorists, big and very small, the latter being far
more dangerous.
The “big” terrorists, the human-sized terrorists, thanks to September 11,
are well-known by now. They are apparently sincere but aggrieved and
deadly-dangerous Muslims. Passions are now inflamed on both sides. You need
to be careful as you read the articles in this issue. Most of them
effectively try not to see only evil within Islam. Yet few bother to make
comparisons with similar historical evil on the Christian side of the fence.
The actual facts on both sides are not well-known to the average American..
But as with Pearl Harbor, Americans are in for a crash course, this time a
course on Islam (and maybe a parallel course on a comparably-mixed Christian
record).
But while the world is now shocked into consternation about the “big”
terrorists, I wish there could be as lurid an awareness of the far greater
danger of another kind of “terrorists” too small to see with the naked eye.
Yes, our Center in Pasadena, this bulletin, my life, the life of the new
Roberta Winter Institute will all be radically different, irretrievably.
In my case I am now in the early stages of a new and major activity I want to
tell you about, that is, what may now happen as a result of my wife’s
five-year ordeal—I am very sure she did not die in vain. First, it may be
helpful to the reader to note some of my earlier “major projects.”
Project One
I gave several years to developing, with others, the global movement called
Theological Education by Extension, which has been aimed at the plight of at
least two million “functional pastors” in mission lands being neglected
while 4000 mission schools train young, untried youth to replace them.
Project Two
I gave a hunk of time to developing, with others, a major center in Pasadena
(from which this bulletin derives) designed to focus on the frontiers of
missions, that is, to discover and to tackle major dimensions of need in the
mission movement. The most prominent need we recognized was to refocus
missions from working in countries to work specifically with “peoples.”
A second need was to reclaim in people’s minds the Old Testament as the
starting point of missions, the Abrahamic Covenant to be seen as the
beginning of the Great Commission. A spin-off of that idea has been the now
large network for the course called Perspectives on the World Christian
Movement. (See pp. 38, 39.)
Basic to this period was not only the establishment of the Center and the
acquisition of related property but the founding of a mission society which
would be the owner and operator of the entire project—now a highly dedicated
community of 56 families in some ways more important than the Center itself.
Project Three
However, once the Center in Pasadena was established, my next ten years were
mostly invested, with others, in the rewriting of the content of the entire
liberal arts and seminary curricula into a single, integrated 4,000- year
story. This novel new curriculum employs 100 textbooks and hundreds of
additional chapters and articles, but is essentially a single picture putting
together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of what is otherwise a long list of
“courses” which are unintegrated fragments of that picture. This new way of
being educated, designed to be a more efficient way forward for national
leaders around the world, is now already in use by various colleges and
universities in this country and abroad as an M.A. degree, an undergraduate
final two years, and in a reduced form as a first college year. Very exciting.
Final Project?
I’m getting old. My 50-year companion is gone. My perhaps “final” task is to
tackle the most difficult-to-explain problem of all, and to explain the
reasons for the Roberta Winter Institute.
This is where my wife’s long-drawn-out illness and suffering has played a
major role. Even before she was waylaid by a mysterious bone-marrow cancer, I
had puzzled over the artificial separation in our theological and missionary
heritage of the “natural” world from the “spiritual” world, and especially
our dulled senses to the truly horrifying amount of violence which is seen at
every point in nature. That violence comes home to human beings, and
particularly on the mission field, in the form of crime and terrorism, but
especially in the form of the tiny terrorists of rampant and dangerous
disease.
Sure, Christians along with others have been wonderfully active in curing or
treating disease, even in the prevention of disease. But our theological
heritage begins to stumble at the question of our declaring war, in the Name
of Christ, on all disease, and seeking the total eradication of all
disease-causing pathogens. Why? Yet, along with a widely acknowledged new
understanding (of DNA and all that) we have now inherited vast new
opportunity and unacknowledged new responsibility.
This has been long in coming. Certain scholars have recently pointed out that
Augustine, 1600 years ago, was the one who prominently failed to understand
disease and violence as something 1) not only within God’s sovereignity,
since “He has not ceased to rule from the galaxies to the atom,” but 2)
essentially the initiative of a superhuman, evil person.
Reacting against Manicheanism, Augustine went too far in theologizing that it
is good enough to think merely of a sovereign God who in some sense sends all
harm and suffering, and not also to fight against the works of a Biblical
Satan whose destructive intelligence differently explains violence and
suffering in nature.
It makes a difference. When the famous theologian, Jonathan Edwards, sought
to defeat smallpox, the pastors of Massachusetts warned him that in doing so
he would be “interfering with Divine Providence.” When he tragically killed
himself tinkering with the newly- developed vaccine, they assumed that he was
fighting against God, who thus had to kill him.
To condense a long story
I have come to believe that my wife might not have died of cancer, Robertson
McQuilkin’s wife might not have been knocked out by Alzheimer’s disease for
the last twenty years, John Wimber might not have died of heart disease, if
if if if!!!! Christian believers had properly and biblically taken seriously
a search-and-destroy mission for the pathogens producing these diseases.
God could have healed these dear people, but maybe He has expected us to draw
some conclusions and “declare a war” on tiny terrorists as well as big ones.
The small/invisible terrorists attack and kill more people every day of the
week than were put to death by the collapse of those New York city towers.. In
a year they torture and kill 365 times as many.
But Calvin and Luther were unaware of germs. We know things they did not
know. Yet, we Christians, we missionaries have not sought to engage this
enormous enemy with anything like the vigor with which we teach our young
people to throw balls through hoops and our retired people to bat little
balls across meadows.
Thus, the Roberta Winter Institute
Twenty thousand dollars has already come in to get it started. Roberta and I
pledged a $5,000 prize we received three years ago. Christy Wilson on his
death-bed urged a $5,000 gift in his memory be given to this project. A staff
member here wrote out a personal check for $1,000.
Well, of course, we do not yet spend sufficient time to know exactly what to
do with certain tiny global terrorists, like malaria. Missions spend at least
$500 million per year raising children up, only to see four die of malaria
every sixty seconds. Why not raise an extra $5 or $10 million for an all-out
war against the source of this pathogen which terrorizes 300 million new
people each year, and is lapping at our doorstep in the United States. Would
this not glorify God? Is our God properly described as unaware of these tiny
terrorists?
Many friendly people have implied to me and to my wife, before she died, that
Jesus could heal any disease and that it only takes faith to make it happen.
Okay. Why did Jesus heal? One missionary reminded me that healing people does
not get them into heaven. But what can attract people to heaven is preaching
a God who was, and still is, deeply concerned about physical deformities and
disease and suffering, and is not simply in the business—perish the
thought—of inflicting people with pain to deepen their spiritual lives. If
that is God’s initiative, why did His Son go around relieving people of pain?
The primary focus of this new institute will not be laboratory science but
public and mission awareness of the need for a new theological sensitivity
for destroying the works of the devil.
It is truly astonishing how much greater we can make the impact of our
missionary evangelism if the true spectrum of concern of our loving God is
made clear and is backed up by serious attention not only to treating illness
but to eradicating the evil causes, the works of the devil.
If it is true that “the works of God are to declare His glory”, then every
missionary needs to carry with him both a telescope and a microscope!
For example, missionaries in West Africa for a hundred years have merely
“lived with” an evil microbe called Guinea Worm. This pathogen starts out as
a tiny bundle in your drinking water, too small to see with the naked eye..
Within your body it grows destructively into a 32-inch snake, eventually
breaking the skin and winding out slowly over a period of weeks. You can’t
pull it out or it may break off and kill you. You must gradually “spool” it
out, winding it on a stick. Did God design this?
Honestly, has anyone ever identified this pathogen as a work of the devil to
be destroyed in the Name of Christ?
Apparently not. Our passivity declares that God doesn’t know or care or is
unable to do anything about such things! All we normally offer to our
followers around the world is 1) sympathy, 2) a suspension of criticism of a
good God for the evil in this world, 3) admonitions to be resigned to the
pain and suffering while awaiting God’s making some good out of the evil, and
4) a way out of this world into eternity.
However, in the case of Guinea Worm, 600,000 people were afflicted twenty
years ago. Yet the number now is almost down to zero. Why? Because one
Christian layman visiting in West Africa — not a missionary, not a pastor,
not a theologian — decided to return to the U.S. and muster efforts to
eradicate this pathogen, “to wipe it from the face of the earth.” That was
Jimmy Carter.
This new challenge for missions could lead to a drastic reduction in our
annual outlay to care for diseased people (it being the chief factor in
poverty). And it may radically add power and beauty to the very concept of
the God we preach, and thus become a new and vital means of glorifying God
among the nations.
Let’s be realistic
Many honest souls, both on the mission field and also in our secularized
world, are not dramatically impressed by a God that cannot be bothered to
conquer and exterminate the evil bugs that cause disease, but can mainly only
offer a ticket to heaven. Declaring war on disease may be the only way to
restore the full power of true evangelism.
Why? It may readily be that young people on the mission field (and here at
home) will grow up and ask the embarrassing questions, “Why don’t Christians
have a theology for attacking the very roots of disease?” Why merely give
intravenous liquids to babies dying from dysentery without dealing with a
contaminated water supply? Why deal with water contamination and not concern
ourselves with eradicating the pathogens that constitute the contamination?
Why, now that we know what to do, are we not doing it, in the Name of Christ?”
Oh God, when will we be as involved in glorifying Your Name as we are in
attracting people to eternal life? How can we go on believing that all the
pestilence and disease and suffering in the world “is exactly the way God
wants it to be,” as some have told me? Is Your reputation at risk as long as
Your people pay little attention to “destroying the works of the devil” (I
Jn 3:8)? Can we launch an even more powerful form of evangelism if we
actively identify with Your concern for banishing diabolic pathogens?
Satan triumphs in the presence of unawareness of his presence, of his deeds.
His greatest achievement, according to my pastor, “is to cover his tracks.”
He has apparently done that so successfully that, to my knowledge, no pastor,
no TV evangelist, no theologian has ever spoken of believers everywhere
declaring a global war against Satanically-devised disease pathogens.
No one is going to solve such problems overnight, or perhaps ever, before the
return of Christ. But what if in the meantime God’s reputation is at stake in
the absence of our publically declaring His concern and identifying with that
concern to conquer and eradicate evil parasites and bacteria and viruses in
His Name?
RDW
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