Involved or Evolved?

By Ralph D. Winter

Editor's Note: In this very provocative essay originally published in May of 2004, Ralph D. Winter explains why he disliked the term "evolution," but grants that with a certain nuance, it can be helpful. He then proposes that Satanic destruction of God’s good creation is so pervasive that it may extend to what are often called “genetic defects.” Then he recounts a troubling anecdote of a pastor friend of his who instructed him to thank God for the cancer that killed Roberta and the same cancer that was killing him. He also includes an analogy about why eating right and exercising is good but not enough, and a disgusting story about rats. This essay is chock full of some of his most interesting ideas about prehistory and the Creation story in Genesis, including the question, "What would Jesus have said to his hearers if they had known what we know about germs?" We think it represents Dr. Winter at his best. Enjoy

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How to Live a Positive, Helpful, Fulfilling Life

By Brian Lowther

I’ve been reflecting lately on the different perspectives I’ve held throughout my adult life about the world and my place in it. Like everyone I’ve been seeking a happy life. Seeking such a thing naturally involves developing a strategy on how to attain it.

Chasing Wealth

In my early twenties I thought wealth was the answer. My philosophy was: They say that money doesn’t buy happiness, but I’d like to find out for myself.

It’s almost too obvious to point out why this perspective wasn’t the best approach. After all, our culture is saturated with stories about the pitfalls of greed. The only thing worth mentioning is that I discovered how misguided I was one fine fall day as I sat under an elm tree reading The Master, a novel-like retelling of the life of Jesus by John C. Pollack. As the elm leaves fluttered around me, I read Pollack’s treatment of the famous Matthew 6 passage, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth...” This passage was so compelling that I immediately starting looking for ways to “store up treasures in heaven.”  

An Eternal Element

By my mid-twenties this experience had evolved into a full-fledged distaste for the indulgent pretense of consumerism and a cynical disillusionment with the American dream. There are certain advantages to this perspective, namely you don’t feel the constant need to keep up with the Joneses. You have a graceful excuse to avoid what many people call life: “work[ing] long, hard hours at jobs they hate, to earn money to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like.” — Nigel Marsh

My wife and I prayed non-stop during this time for a grand idea, something we could devote our full-time energy to that would utilize our skills and serve the kingdom of God. I had firmly resolved to work in ministry because I couldn’t bear to use the best days and years of my life succeeding at something that didn’t matter. Whatever we did needed to contain an eternal element.

Eventually we found ourselves serving at the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, CA (now known as Frontier Ventures - the RWI's parent ministry). It was a good match. We believed in the U.S. Center’s vision—still do—and they needed people with our skills to work behind the scenes. We certainly weren’t going to get rich working in missions, but living up to our highest ideals was far better.

My new philosophy became: Be content with what you have. Bloom where you’re planted. Find a need and fill it.

Chase Significance

However, there were side effects. I didn’t notice them for the first few years; but gradually they became unbearable. Working behind the scenes far away from the frontlines made it difficult to escape nagging feelings of meaninglessness. I was often able to counteract this restless angst by reminding myself that for every soldier on the frontlines, seven people are necessary back home to pack rations, build ships, heal wounds, etc. But a relentless malaise and a pestering desire to fill a more prominent role lurked just below the surface. Not that I wanted to leave the U.S. Center, I just knew I needed to do something more, or more difficult, something that echoed a little louder in eternity.

I realized this for certain in my early 30’s while standing amidst rows and rows of tombstones after a memorial service. (Why do our most profound epiphanies always occur at funerals? I guess it’s obvious.) Some tombstones are ornate or impressive in size, but most are quite modest. No matter the size or the grandiosity, each passed life always seems so utterly insignificant, lost in the endless rows of tombstones. All of a person’s hopes, fears, relationships, talents, accomplishments, idiosyncrasies and pet peeves are summed up with just a few words on a humble slab of stone in a vast and lonely cemetery.

While I no longer had any interest in amassing a large fortune, becoming a famous celebrity, or inventing the next Facebook, I very much wanted to— excuse the clichés—make a difference, change the world, leave my mark. I was willing to sacrificially serve others, but I wanted to see and feel how my deeds positively influenced their lives.

I was haunted by the Horace Mann quote, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” My philosophy became, don’t chase wealth, success or status. Chase significance.

Being a Nobody

Around this time is when I began to seriously grapple with what we in the Roberta Winter Institute call the “Warfare Worldview.” I can sum up this concept with this statement: God is at work reestablishing shalom in a corrupted creation and defeating the enemy who is responsible for that corruption, and he has called us, commissioned us, and empowered us to participate with him in this process. This concept helped me understand history and the problem of evil with bright, new clarity, and fortuitously it gave me a tremendous new awareness about my place in the world.

Unfortunately, I got these very important ideas mixed up with my ego. I felt like I had Biblical permission to pursue my delusions of grandeur and egotistical idealism. Not only was I going to change the world, but I was going to help God defeat evil. While this new way of looking at the world gave me a deeper sense of how to make my mark, one day I wondered, what if after ten, or twenty, or thirty years of sacrifice and hard work I realize that I haven’t made a difference, that I haven’t changed the world? Then what?

That’s when I came across this J.D. Salinger quote:

“All I know is I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting! …We’re all so conditioned to accept everybody else’s values. Just because it feels good to be applauded and to have people to rave about you, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody...”[1]

That last phrase really troubled me. I couldn't figure out why he would write that it takes courage to be a nobody. It doesn’t take courage to be a nobody, it takes nothing to be a nobody, right?

Then, just recently it dawned on me. It takes courage to be a nobody, because being a nobody—being lost amidst the tombstones, insignificant and forgotten—is extremely terrifying.

I realized that even if I do change the world, what if that’s still not enough? Name the last three people to win either the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer Prize. These are rare and gifted people, and yet, they are mostly unknown. On the flip side, most of us can name three teachers who helped us realize our potential in school, or three friends who helped us through a rough patch.

So then what's the right perspective?

I’m sorry to say, I don’t exactly know. I’ve been wrestling with these perspectives for the better part of the past two decades, swinging with the pendulum from one extreme to the other, hoping that a new perspective will suddenly present itself and trump all the others with its elegance. But as of this moment, I only have a hunch.

And that hunch is this: the right perspective is to do something difficult and perhaps scary, something that requires our full attention and great sacrifice, some crucial cog in God’s global machinery of reestablishing shalom and defeating his enemy, BUT—and here’s the really hard part—we probably won’t get any credit for it at all, especially if it succeeds. Such is the life of those who are called to take up their cross daily and follow Jesus. 

Which reminds me of something my mentor, Ralph D. Winter used to say, a quote he got from either Ronald Reagan or Harry Truman, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.”

Endnote

[1] J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Little, Brown, 1961)

Photo Credit: Lev Glick/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of
the Roberta Winter Institute

Links for Today (September 20, 2016)

By Beth Snodderly

Malaria and Genetic Engineering

“New gene-editing technology gives scientists the ability to wipe out the carriers of malaria and the Zika virus. But should they use it?” Ralph Winter used to talk about gene splicing and changing tigers to be non-carnivorous, but I don't think he thought through the implications of genetic engineering the way this article does.

The New Testament and the Warfare Worldview

Greg Boyd talks about the theme of “God striving to establish his sovereign will (his Kingdom) on earth over and against forces that oppose him. … Contrary to any view that suggests disease somehow serves a divine purpose, Jesus never treated such phenomenon as anything other than the work of the enemy.”

Cruelty in the Name of Jesus?

Roger Olson reports on a new book, Is Modern Unbelief Rooted in Christianity? that claims “modern unbelief was brought about not by modern science or irreligious philosophy [‘the Enlightenment’] but by the cruel depictions of God, and resulting cruel treatments of sincere people who simply disagreed with them, by Luther, Calvin, and other magisterial reformers and their followers. And it was brought about, at least in its beginnings, by Christian shaped (or at least Jesus-shaped) consciences reacting against those cruelties.” Read more about the crucial difference it makes to faithfully or unfaithfully represent God’s character to the world.

Beth Snodderly is the RWI's Theologian in Residence and Chair of the Board.

A New Interpretation of Genesis 1 and a More Complex Mission

Interpreting Genesis 1 so that it doesn't conflict with the latest scientific views about the age of the earth, while also making sense of the problem of evil, and what that means for Christian mission.

By Ralph D. Winter (compiled and edited by Beth Snodderly)

Editor’s Note: Today Beth Snodderly finishes her four-part series exploring Ralph Winter’s Four Seeds of Destruction by compiling and condensing material from a number of Winter’s essays. You can read the previous installments here: Are We Building an Enduring Christianity or Not?, Emotionalism vs. Intellectualism, and Violence, Suffering, and Evil Are Not God’s Will.

As mentioned in the previous blog entry, two significant barriers to Christian belief are the rampant suffering, violence, and evil in this world as if there is no Satan behind it, and a Bible that is thought to have feet of clay, beginning with Genesis 1. Both of these obstacles to belief can be dealt with in an unusual way: a brief scenario that attempts conjecturally to interpret Genesis 1 in such a way as not to conflict with the latest scientific views. It may be helpful in dealing with either non-Christians or Christians about to lose their faith, people who believe current science is mainly correct in regard to 1) how old the earth is, and 2) how long ago humans first appeared, but for whom these two things are difficult to square with the Bible. This story will also be helpful to anyone who is confused about why and how radical evil appeared in our world. This scenario differs from the view of many scientists in that it explains the development of life by a means quite different from a Darwinian style random process. Furthermore, it allows for much of both the so-called “Young Earth” and the “Old Earth” perspectives. Most of all, it highlights a strikingly new dimension in the definition of Christian mission.

I am thinking more and more of the possibility (which I think should at least be considered!) that the lengthy “geologic ages” occurred before Genesis 1:1, and that no matter what you think about all those vicious animal fossils that have been dug up, you can’t interpret the non-carnivorous life described in Genesis 1 to be the same thing. Most people unthinkingly assume that way back when Genesis was written there was knowledge of a planet, solar system, galaxy, and indeed an entire universe and that precisely the beginning of all that is what is being referred to in Genesis 1:1. Certainly it is easy for us unthinkingly to read our knowledge today into something that was put together several thousand years ago when Genesis came into oral tradition and was later written down.

Now, I would not be giving this example if I had not discovered that Dr. Merrill Unger, who for nineteen years was chair of the Old Testament department at Dallas seminary, clearly espoused this view way back in 1958 in the pages of the Bibliotheca Sacra, and then, later described it in his Unger’s Bible Handbook. Please understand that the idea that the long geologic ages occurred before the Genesis account of a “new creation” is as an idea, not something I “believe” in the same way I believe some other things. This idea, however, does commend itself to me as the interpretation which is most fair to the Bible. I feel we must be very cautious that we do not find ourselves demanding that the Bible say what we would like it to say, or saying what we expect it to say, or even saying what many people think it says.

This “new creation” concept allows for both young earth and old earth views to be true. But there is something else that is the thing most important for me. If the thousands of forms of life that are now extinct lived before Genesis 1, their pervasively violent, perverted, distorted, carnivorous, predatory character could then be conceived to be the evil work of Satan and his rebel angels after his “fall.” This more concrete idea of a first fall would suggest that the second “fall,” that of Adam, resulted in the rejection of the newly created, undistorted life forms of Genesis chapter one, forcing them out of the Garden of Eden, into the larger planet where they would interbreed and intermarry with the long-perverted other forms of life. Result? A gradual reversion to the pre-Genesis perversity and viciousness that were the result of Satan’s earlier fall. This then provides a rationale for the need for God’s new beginning described in Genesis.

A More Complex Mission

For me, then, this would define a much more complex mission for redeemed man: to destroy the works of Satan. Since God is extensively blamed and his glory stained by common assumptions that there is no Satan, and all evil is God’s “mysterious will,” our mission is to “re-glorify” God. We can do this by seeking, in his name, to restore to God’s original intention, where possible, Satan’s perversions in all forms of life. This includes participating in serious efforts to eradicate diseases caused by viruses, many bacteria, and most parasites. This kind of activity would seem to be highly crucial in restoring the reputation of God, who is now being blamed for all sorts of evil. This basic type of amplification of mission can uniquely empower evangelism. As a Caltech scientist once implied to me, who wants to be in heaven forever with a God with a stained and gruesome reputation?

Insight into the Real Nature of Salvation

A major reason people are leaving the church, losing their faith, and staying away in the first place, is because the church has not adequately stepped up to bat along with civil forces to beat down the corruption, disease, and poverty of at least a billion hopeless people. Evangelicals have misread the Bible. Salvation is not just a “ticket to heaven.” In my opinion a basic problem is our blindness to the essentially wartime calling of those who follow Christ. The church has largely gone AWOL, distracted or preoccupied with programs that serve our own ends. But the Bible does not call us to save ourselves, to solidify our security, or just to talk about world problems. God is asking humans to choose to join him in the battle to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) and restore shalom to creation.

Historically, in hundreds of foreign fields, schools and hospitals have portrayed God’s love, just as did the practical dimension of Jesus’ ministry. Missionaries in the past have transformed whole countries in many practical ways. Today we know far more about the problems and far more about the solutions than ever before. Yet the world still sees us as merely religious fanatics propagating a salvation that is not here but only in the hereafter.

Self-Serving Church or Challenging World Problems?

Building the Church in both number and depth is self-defeating if the larger purpose of God’s calling is ignored. It is like recruiting soldiers for a non-existent war. Why self-defeating? The self-serving church may expand by attracting people interested in their own salvation, but if it only serves itself it also crumbles and self-destructs. Isn’t this what happened to Italy, France, England? Is France the end product, where 80% are “Christian” but only 20% believe in God? The church is now crumbling globally (as well as expanding), like salt losing its savor. This is true even on the “mission field,” even where high percentages are believers. For example, Nagaland in India, or the Central African Republic, 97% and 70% “Christian” respectively, yet are also known to be exceedingly corrupt.

We often rejoice over the global gains of the Church, but there is another side! If people are being won into the front door and eventually move out the back door, what could be the answer? We are to be salt and light in this world. That means not just adding members to the Church but glorifying God by our good deeds (Matt 5:16). We are saved by the infusion of God’s power (grace) into our lives precisely so that we can do those good deeds (Eph 2:8-10).

Conclusion

We have greater opportunities and greater obligations than ever in history. Yet the chasm between our unemployed resources and an effective challenge to big world problems is very great. It is apparent that organized believers are largely missing in the conduct of the Kingdom of God, in bringing His will into the dark and suffering places in our world. [A notable exception is the 2008 announcement that billionaire Ted Turner was partnering with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and the United Methodist Church to raise funds to stop deaths from global malaria. In January, 2016, the ELCA announced it had reached its $15 million goal of funds raised to combat malaria through its relief and development arm. “Thank you for naming suffering as contrary to God’s will and working to correct injustice,” an ELCA blog stated in announcing the successful conclusion of the ELCA Malaria Campaign (http://blogs.elca.org/malaria/2667-2/).]

The cure for a church that is in many ways staggering, stalling, and sitting down, the cure for our malaise and evaporating faith, is clear-cut definitive obedience. We must face and define the need to get organized answers to this world’s problems as well as getting individuals reconciled to God. In fact, getting people reconciled to God and to his Kingdom business must go together. Otherwise our absence at the frontlines of major global problems means we are misrepresenting God’s will and misusing the wisdom and resources he has given us to act out and speak out his love and glorify his name among all peoples. What kind of a Christ are we to follow? “The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8, NASB). If we “declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples” (Psalm 96:3, NIV), we will then build the Church on a solid foundation that will not crumble.

References

Unger, Merrill F. 1958. “Rethinking the Genesis Account of Creation.” Bibliotheca Sacra 115 (January-March): 27-35.

______. 1967. Unger’s Bible Handbook. Chicago: Moody Press.

USA Today. 2008. Ted Turner Apologizes, Joins Churches’ $200M Malaria Fight. April 1. Accessed May 2, 2016. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-04-01-turner-churches_N.htm.

Image: Aftab Uzzaman/Flickr

Ralph D. Winter (12/8/24 – 5/20/09) founded the Roberta Winter Institute.

Beth Snodderly is the RWI's Theologian in Residence and Chair of the Board.

Violence, Suffering, and Evil Are Not God’s Will

People are rejecting the Bible and losing their faith for no other reason than its honesty! They do not realize that the Bible very reliably portrays a nation of people who gradually gained deeper insights, whose flawed words and deeds are not always what the Bible teaches.

By Ralph D. Winter (compiled and edited by Beth Snodderly)

Editor’s Note: Today Beth Snodderly continues her four-part series exploring Ralph Winter’s Four Seeds of Destruction by compiling and condensing material from a number of Winter’s essays. You can read the previous installments here: Are We Building an Enduring Christianity or Not?, and Emotionalism vs. Intellectualism.

Insight into God’s Character: Violence, Suffering, and Evil Are Not God’s Will

We see two significant barriers to Christian belief: a Bible thought to have feet of clay beginning with Genesis 1, and the rampant violence and evil in this world. The reason I am so concerned to identify evil, and become known as a believer in Jesus Christ who is fighting it, is because a great deal of evil in this world is blamed on God. How attractive is our invitation to people to turn to and yield to their Father in Heaven if they continue to believe he is the one who contrives for most everyone and everything to die in suffering? Unless Satan is in the picture and we are known to be fighting his deadly works we are allowing God’s glory to be marred and torn down.

Violence in Nature

Is it a hazard to evangelism to be unable to explain why God’s creation pervasively contains so many violent elements, so much horrible suffering and pain? Ruth Tucker’s book, Walking Away from Faith, implies that to be the case. Do Christian missionaries need to think seriously about the apparent incongruity between the Bible’s “good creation” and a violence-filled nature? I think so.

The “good creation” of Genesis 1 describes both animals and humans as eating plants, not each other. The wolf lying down with the lamb (Isa 11:6) seems to be the kind of creation that could be attributed to God without qualification. On the other hand, most people have simply grown accustomed to the violence of the streets and the forests. Some people believe that everything—violent, painful, or not—is of God and we will someday be able to see this as part of his “mysterious purposes.” 

But now that we have inklings about how DNA can be altered, is it possible to hypothesize that fallen angels (who are at least as intelligent as humans) have been hard at work in distorting God’s original good creation into the violence in nature we now see? David Snoke, a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, asks, “Why were dangerous animals created?” He suggests three possibilities: 1) fallen intermediate beings are responsible for dangerous animals, or 2) the Bible teaches that God is responsible for violence in nature, or 3) some process out of God’s control (like an unaided evolution?) is the cause (Snoke 2004, 119). I vote for the first of the three. He takes the second. Darwin, I suppose, chose the third.

But the phenomenal significance of all this for mission is plain. If dangerous animals are part of God’s original plan, and (thus logically) dangerous pathogens as well, we have no “mission” to eradicate dangerous viruses, bacteria, and parasites. And, in that case we have a perplexingly dangerous God to preach. What do you think?

Violence in the Bible

The danger is illustrated by Hector Avalos, former Pentecostal and now Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Illinois, who has lost his respect for the God of the Bible. He says that the Bible ought not to be studied and he is particularly offended by what he sees as the Bible’s “endorsement of violence” (Avalos 2007, 28). But in describing violence, is the Bible teaching it? Have people like Avalos “given up their faith” trying to explain away a number of disturbing things in the Old Testament, as if the Bible asks us to emulate or approve of all the gruesome and barbaric things it reports?

They may not realize that many things in the Bible are the result of a perfectly reasonable, progressively increasing understanding, which the Bible unblushingly reflects without the pretension of insisting that in the Bible there is “no progress of understanding.” At the time the Old Testament was put together as a book, later insights and interpretations were sometimes mingled with earlier understandings. One instance is the startling contrast between 2 Samuel 24:1-24 and 1 Chronicles 21:1-24. I have for some time considered these two passages to constitute the “Rosetta Stone of Biblical Hermeneutics.” In 2 Samuel the NIV says, “God incited David [to do wrong].” In 1 Chronicles the parallel account says “Satan incited David [to do wrong].” As I see it, the centuries-earlier passage speaks from the viewpoint of God’s overall sovereignty, while the post-exilic (post-Zoroastrian) passage adds a new insight. The people of Israel had become aware of the initiative of an intermediate being (Satan) that was created by God, not to be a robot, but with the same kind of freedom that humans have, namely, the freedom to do evil. The Bible does not attempt to pretend that either of these accounts was dictated from heaven.

Thus, here is an example where we do well to “lose our faith”—that is, lose our specious faith in the idea that our Bibles were dictated by God in the way that Muslims and Mormons claim for their holy books, the Qur’an and the Book of Mormon. Rather, we believe that “prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:21, NIV). The key word here is “human,” implying limited, though inspired, perspective. In other words, many simplistic views of the Bible may need to be given up. Believing in an inerrant Bible is different from believing in inerrant interpretations.

The Bible is unlike any other religious book in the world. It doesn’t tell us of perfect people. It records horrendous evils and describes people who condone those evils. It even portrays the flaws of leaders. But it doesn’t teach those flaws. It records the literal truth of a chosen nation both seeking and denying God’s will. Does it intend for us to take its every sentence, its every event, as a model to be followed? Of course not. In one sense it mirrors for us how deep and dark our human past has been, how far we have come in better understanding God and his will for us. At the same time, for the same reason, it intends that we not slide back. Most important, we cannot logically criticize it for its honesty and accuracy!

But people are rejecting the Bible and losing their faith for no other reason than its honesty! They do not realize that the Bible very reliably portrays a nation of people who across the centuries gradually gained deeper insights, whose flawed words and deeds are not always what the Bible teaches, and that the story as it leads into the New Testament reveals an archangel adversary who is the most basic answer for the presence of suffering.

Human Suffering

Probably the most vexing and ineffective Christian teaching is what we come up with in the face of tragic and evil events. Why does God allow such things? One young person after his freshman year at college said to his dad, “There is so much evil, suffering, and injustice in the world that either there is no God at all or there is a God of questionable power or character.” This idea is all the more devastating when Evangelicals, having essentially given up believing in an intelligent enemy of God, take to explaining tediously that all this evil must be because God’s ways are simply mysterious. Satan, rampant and powerful in the New Testament, has mainly disappeared from significance following Augustine’s injection of some neo-platonic thought into the Christian tradition.

References

Avalos, Hector. 2007. The End of Biblical Studies. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Snoke, David. 2004. “Why Were Dangerous Animals Created?” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (June): 117-25. Accessed April 29, 2016. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2004/PSCF6-04Snoke.pdf.

Image: Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon by John Martin

Ralph D. Winter (12/8/24 – 5/20/09) founded the Roberta Winter Institute.

Beth Snodderly is the RWI's Theologian in Residence and Chair of the Board.

Emotionalism vs. Intellectualism

Are emotional good feelings, however valid and beneficial, any match for the likely moment when logical and hard intellectual questions surface? That is, are emotions more valid, more credible, more durable, than our use of the mind?

By Ralph D. Winter (compiled and edited by Beth Snodderly)

Editor’s Note: Today Beth Snodderly continues her four-part series in which she explores Ralph Winter’s Four Seeds of Destruction by compiling and condensing material from a number of Winter’s essays. You can read the first installment here: Are We Building an Enduring Christianity or Not?

Are we building an enduring Christianity or not? In one sense this question outranks all other mission frontiers, including the Unreached Peoples Frontier. That is, what is the wisdom of avidly building a widespread movement to Christ, which is going to collapse tomorrow into Gospel resistance? Is Christian faith blossoming around the world today only to fade tomorrow when it faces the hard questions of today’s anti-religious onslaught?

Adding Intellectual Insight to Emotional/Experiential Awareness

Christianity has clearly succeeded among rural populations and among uneducated people all over the world, but it is facing increasing opposition from the educated world because of religious teachings, which may have no foundation in the Bible whatsoever.

The reality of rejection of biblical faith accompanying increased education casts quite a shadow over Philip Jenkins’ rosy picture of the future of Christianity in the Global South. Even long before Jenkins’ book, The Next Christendom, appeared, mission leaders had been hailing the splurge of growth on the mission field. My own thoughts about the dread paradox of wild success leading on into desperate failure are as follows: There are at least two dimensions of knowing God in Christ. There is an emotional awe in worship and daily life, call it an awareness of God. And there is an intellectual insight into who he is. Is it possible to be aware of God with very little accurate insight into who he is? Yes. Is it possible to possess a lot of insight into the nature of God with little hour-by-hour awareness of Him? Yes.

Awareness arises in worship and in daily devotions and in hour-by-hour God-consciousness, in “practicing the presence of God.” It is the result of “praying without ceasing.” It flourishes in times of true revival and awakening. It is fair to say that the hallmark of the Evangelical movement in its early days was its stress on authentic, emotional experience. A central feature of the Evangelical Awakening of the 18th Century (which produced Evangelicalism), was an “assurance of salvation,” and, for many, “a second work of grace,” that was highly emotional in its manifestation. And yet that Evangelical Awakening eventually collapsed, largely due to English Evangelicalism’s serious weakness: anti-intellectualism (Rice 2004).

Today, that stress on “experience” (not intellectual knowledge) has moved on into the Pentecostal, Charismatic and Apostolic spheres, while older Evangelicals look on askance, holding tight to their less emotional forms of worship and their lists of doctrines. We are well acquainted with seminaries that have become cemeteries, hoarding massive information in their libraries about God’s nature but handling all that holy information with a professionalism that can easily replace any real awareness of the living God.

So what is the answer? We must begin by recognizing the all-important necessity of both awareness and insight. We must be willing to suspect insight without awareness and also to suspect awareness without insight. Clearly God calls us by heart and mind, not heart or mind. Yet the predominant character of much of the rapidly spreading “faith” around the world today consists of multitudes being entranced by the availability of the promises of God unrelated to a true and thorough insight into the nature of God and his creative handiwork.

Why have many Evangelicals been slow to add insight to awareness? Are emotional good feelings, however valid and beneficial, any match for the likely moment when logical and hard intellectual questions surface? That is, are emotions more valid, more credible, more durable, than our use of the mind? Or, are mind and heart both important? As crucial as it is that we hang on to the historic Evangelical awareness of God, we must seriously and even urgently add a competent intellectual grasp of God’s glory in the much larger world known to modern man.

For example, huge obstacles exist for anyone who would seriously attempt to evangelize in a scientifically-oriented society. If we recognize the existence of the “unreached people” of the scientifically educated community of, say, Hyderabad, we quickly face the frontier of “the religion of science” (Winter 2004c, 36-37). Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, asked, “Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?” (Collins 2003, 112). Most scientists will consider that the Bible is clearly of no value as long as they think it baldly teaches that the universe is only 6,000 years old. It is absolutely tragic that millions of keen thinkers are truly awed into a quasi-religious scientism through their contact with God’s Book of Creation without acknowledging the God of the Bible, while still other millions are caught up in God’s Book of Scripture to the point where they elevate it as a magical object which must somehow provide an explanation for all later scientific exploration of the universe.

We, as Christian leaders, must take the initiative of knowing both the Book of Creation as a revelation of God and the Book of Scripture as a revelation of God. Otherwise, we are planting a superficial and temporary kind of Christianity all around the world. The Unfinished Task is very nearly finished, if in fact we measure that task by geographical or even sociological penetration of the Christian faith. But all such gains are temporary where a population will soon become influenced by the dominant form of education today, which is highly secularized both in science and history—unless the Church does something to bring added insight.

References

Winter, Ralph. 2004c. Twelve Frontiers of Perspective. In Frontiers in Mission: Discovering and Surmounting Barriers to the Missio Dei. 4th ed, 28-40. Pasadena, CA: WCIU Press.

Collins, Francis. 2003. “Can an Evangelical Believe in Evolution?” International Journal of Frontier Missiology 20, no. 4 (Winter): 109-12. Accessed April 29, 2016. http://ijfm.org/PDFs_IJFM/20_4_PDFs/109_Collins.pdf.

Rice, Jonathan. 2004. “The Tragic Failure of Britain’s Evangelical Awakening.” International Journal of Frontier Missiology 21, no. 1 (Spring): 23-25. Accessed April 29, 2016. http://www.ijfm.org/PDFs_IJFM/21_1_PDFs/23_25_Rice.pdf.

Photo Credit: YellowDog/Flickr  -  Josa Júnior/Flickr

Ralph D. Winter (12/8/24 – 5/20/09) founded the Roberta Winter Institute.

Beth Snodderly is the RWI's Theologian in Residence and Chair of the Board.