Links for Today (November 7, 2016)

By Beth Snodderly

Breaking the fever: The End Is in Sight for One of Humanity’s Deadliest Plagues

The Economist reported in October 10, 2015: “Since 2000, malaria deaths around the world have fallen by nearly half. The steepest drop has come in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of fatalities occur. Malaria still kills around 450,000 people each year—most of them children in Africa. But the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that better control prevented the deaths of 3.9m African children between 2001 and 2013. … Previous efforts to rid the world of malaria failed because the political will and funds dried up before the disease was conquered. This time it is vital that efforts to stamp out malaria do not become victims of their own success.”

Church Involvement in Fighting World Problems

Ralph D. Winter wrote in 2008: “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. … Getting people reconciled to God AND to His Kingdom business must go together. Otherwise our absence at the front lines 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.”

A Positive Exception to Ralph Winter’s Concern about the Absence of the Church in World Problems

In 2008 billionaire Ted Turner announced he 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 ECLA blog stated in announcing the successful conclusion of the ELCA Malaria Campaign.

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.

Five (obvious) Questions about Malaria Eradication

By Brian Lowther

There is absolutely no evidence I know of in all the world of any theologically driven interest in combating disease at its origins. I have not found any work of theology, any chapter, any paragraph, nor to my knowledge any sermon urging us—whether in the pew or in professional missions—to go to battle against the many disease pathogens we now know to be eradicable.
~ Ralph D. Winter, December 2001

This quote has inspired much of our effort here in the Roberta Winter Institute. It has also compelled us to search high and low to prove this notion wrong. In recent years a few initiatives addressing malaria have cropped up; some led by Christian groups. Off the top of my head, here are two:

• The United Methodist Church’s participation in the “Nothing But Nets” campaign.
• Compassion International’s Malaria Bite Back Program

The key to both of these initiatives—as with most malaria projects—is bed nets. These two endeavors and their secular counterparts (such as the Roll Back Malaria campaign) should be supported and celebrated. But I can’t get a few rather obvious questions out of my mind.

Malaria patient Yim Pros, 12 from Orumchek village in Western Cambodia, came to Ta Sanh Health Center complaining of high fever, chills, and nauseau. He was diagnosed with a severe case of malaria. Yim's mother laid a damp towel over her son to help bring down his fever while he waited for treatment. Gates Foundation/Flickr

Question 1

Will passing out bed nets—crucial as that activity is—eradicate malaria? Even if every person in the world slept under a bed net, mosquitoes would still thrive, because they feed off of animals, not just human beings, right?

Answer

Well, apparently with the exception of one species of mosquito that causes malaria in Macaques monkeys, the mosquitoes that feed off of animals are of limited public health importance.

Question 2

Okay, but even then, what about when people aren’t sleeping? People aren’t going to wear nets 24-hours a day, are they?

Answer

The Anopheles mosquitoes, the most dangerous ones, prefer to feed at night. So wearing bed nets during the day is not necessary.

Question 3

But, bed nets prevent mosquitoes from biting; they don’t kill the mosquitoes, right? I’m reminded of a story in Dan Fountain’s book, Health, the Bible and the Church, in which he describes a village in Africa that was tormented by lions. To prevent the lion attacks, the villagers erected a fence around the entire village. This was effective, but had they really solved the lion problem? A few days later a woman and two children went outside of the fence. Suddenly a lion attacked and carried off one of her children. The woman ran screaming back to the village, “Why can’t you get rid of the lions?”

Answer

Apparently the nets are treated with insecticide, so they do kill at least some of the mosquitoes that land on them, as long as those mosquitos haven’t developed a resistance to the insecticide.

Question 4

The most simplistic solution to malaria—one that my seven-year-old could have thought up— is to wipe out all the mosquitoes. Mankind has shown a remarkable albeit unfortunate effectiveness in driving other species into extinction. Why can’t we apply that same hunter’s ingenuity to mosquitoes? In the 19th Century, hunters nearly wiped out all of the bison in North America because their hides were so lucrative. Why don’t we make mosquito carcasses lucrative?

While this solution is simplistic, I’m not the first one to think of it. In 1996, Manila had a cholera outbreak that killed seven people and sickened 310 others. Health officials determined that flies and roaches were the culprits. So the city government decided to pay 4¢ for every ten dead flies and 6¢ for every ten dead roaches. Eliminating the insects before they infected people helped to end the epidemic. Could this be done with mosquitoes? A $100,000 grant from Bill Gates would buy a lot of dead mosquitoes.

Answer

Well, apparently this solution isn’t the panacea. When the British invaded India, they tried this same method with cobras. Unfortunately people started to breed cobras and once the British Colonists found out, they nixed the reward. Subsequently, the people released their cobras and they ended up with a bigger cobra problem than when they started.

Also killing off all the mosquitoes on earth is tricky. Many of the most successful efforts at eliminating them have involved the use of toxic chemicals like DDT, which has since been banned in many places because of its side effects.

The real question, however, is not can mosquitoes be eradicated, but should mosquitoes be eradicated? The downside to a world without mosquitoes is that other parts of the ecosystem will suffer. There are plants that rely on mosquitoes for pollination, fish that count them as their sole food source and even caribou depend on being bothered by swarms of mosquitoes in order to prompt their migratory patterns. It's unclear whether the plants and animals that depend on these pests would adapt and survive without them. Ridding the world of mosquitoes might save millions of human lives, but the environment would pay the price in more ways than one.

Question 5

So, what’s the solution?

Answer

The current strategy involves insecticide treated bed nets, draining standing water and spraying insecticides. This lowers the mosquito population enough so that sooner or later the malaria infected mosquitoes disappear from a given area, as happened in North America, Europe and much of the Middle East (though each of these regions had the advantage of DDT).

But unless mosquitoes (or more specifically the P. falciparum Plasmodium) are eradicated from the entire world, malaria could become re-established. As long as we have airplanes, a few cases each year will pop up even where malaria has been eliminated. In the U.S. alone there were almost 1,700 cases in 2010, and 2,000 in 2011, a 40-year high.

Thus we turn to vaccines. Perhaps the only real solution is to make all human beings immune to the disease through vaccinations, as happened with smallpox. Vaccines may be especially important in the face of mosquitoes that are becoming increasingly insecticide-resistant. As of this moment, a completely effective vaccine is not yet available for malaria, although several vaccines are under development. Bill Gates—who funds much of this research—recently said, "I'd be disappointed if within 20 years we're not very close to eradicating this globally."

In the end, it may require a completely new solution that we haven’t even considered. But I’ll leave that one to my seven-year-old.

Brian Lowther is the director of the Roberta Winter Institute. 

2015: It's the Beginning of the End for Malaria, Mortality, and Maybe Even Humanity?

By Emily Lewis

"In the fight against infectious bacteria, humans are slowly losing the battle . . . By 2050 it’s expected that, globally, drug-resistant infections will kill more people than cancer." Discover Magazine tells the fascinating story of a new class of antibiotic being developed that might just turn the tide.

But speaking of the future of humanity, if you've been counting down the years since TIME Magazine gave us this scoop (like we have at RWI), then you know we only have 30 more to go until technology makes mankind immortal. Happy new year, everyone!

We at the RWI are finding a lot of things to celebrate in 2015, including organizations like Imagine No Malaria  that are daring to dream of a world where diseases are not just treated or cured, but completely eradicated. "Unlike many other diseases that are awaiting a cure, malaria was eliminated in the U.S. in the 1950s. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, malaria continues to kill a person every 60 seconds. But there is hope . . . our generation can beat malaria once and for all."

And in case you don't know the story of the elimination of malaria in the U.S., here is Malcolm Gladwell's account of the controversial work of Fred Soper, "The Mosquito Killer."

Today's Question: Did God create parasites, or are they the product of malevolent, diabolical tampering? What do you think?