God is Deeply Concerned about Disease and Suffering

Flickr/Martin Deutsch

In the face of dreadful news such as a cancer diagnosis, many sincere Christian friends come to our side in comfort. “We don't know all of God’s purposes,” they'll advise, “but we need to be able to say, ‘Thank you God for this disease.’ The challenge is to believe without knowing all the answers.” Others will urge us to recognize that “God knows what he is doing,” as if cancer is God’s mysterious initiative. Yet others will suggest that suffering is deserved, either as punishment, or to improve us, or both.

The principal concern in all of this for us in the Roberta Winter Institute is the distortion in many people’s ideas about God. We are convinced that God is deeply concerned about disease and suffering, and not in the business—perish the thought—of inflicting us with pain to deepen our spiritual lives. “If that is God's initiative,” Ralph Winter once asked, “why did his Son go around relieving people of pain and suffering?”

Read more: The Why of the RWI

Links for Today (September 28, 2016)

By Beth Snodderly

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s $3 billion effort aims to rid world of major diseases by end of century

The founder of Facebook and his wife, among the 10 wealthiest couples in the world, announced they are funding an effort to get scientists to collaborate on eliminating major diseases. They are emphasizing the power of collaboration and openness.This is the type of initiative Ralph Winter wanted to see believers get behind to demonstrate that disease is not God's will. Maybe some will!

Jesus’ Demonstrations of God’s Will

“Jesus demonstrated the nature of the life of God, the shalom spoken of by the Old Testament prophets, by overcoming evil with good in his acts of ministry. The appearing of the Son of God resulted in characteristics that are the opposite of those associated with the darkness and hatred of the devil. The ultimate purpose of Jesus’ appearing was to glorify God by bringing life to the children of God, replacing death that is a work of the devil in the present age. The author of the Gospel of John selected six ‘signs’ that represent the ways in which Jesus demonstrated God’s will for the world.”

Alcohol Addiction and Deaths

EXCERPT from a 2014 WHO report: “The net effect of harmful use of alcohol is approximately 3.3 million deaths each year*. … Harmful use of alcohol accounts for 5.9% of all deaths worldwide. … Harmful use of alcohol can also have serious social and economic consequences for individuals other than the drinker and for society at large. Despite the large health, social, and economic burden associated with harmful use of alcohol, it has remained a relatively low priority in public policy, including in public health policy.”

            * In comparison, malaria deaths are under .5 million/year.

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

N.T. Wright and a Theology of Disease

Flickr/Jordon Cooper

By Beth Snodderly

One way to describe the overarching goal Dr. Winter had in mind for the Roberta Winter Institute (RWI) is, “To prompt the theological world to begin working on a ‘theology of disease.’” Admittedly this came to Dr. Winter’s mind as a crucial need due to his first wife’s fatal bout with cancer. Throughout those and the following years he reflected on the types of inadequate responses to disease that are prevalent in the evangelical world and concluded that this was an obstacle to the spread of the gospel among thinking people in major unreached blocs of the world’s peoples. After his wife’s death he founded the RWI to address these issues. These are some quotes from a compilation of his writings I put together several years ago:

The Roberta Winter Institute will try to upgrade our desire to bring glory to God by ending our apparently Neo-Platonist truce with Satan in the realm of all his ingenious and destructive works. Our global mission agencies, which already have to their credit the discovery of the nature of leprosy, will declare war on other sources of disease in addition to being helpfully kind to sick people and preaching resignation amidst suffering.

We need to rectify our understanding of a God who is not the author of the destructive violence in nature, including disease, and who has long sought our help in bringing His kingdom and His will on earth.          

To “destroy Satan’s works” (1 John 3:8) means to take it as part of our efforts, our mission, to glorify God to restore, with God's help, what Satan has distorted. Thus, you see the rationale for establishing the Roberta Winter Institute.

The primary focus of this new institute is public and mission awareness of the need for a new theological sensitivity for destroying the works of the devil.

Several years ago, I came across N.T. Wright’s work and noticed that in many of his writings he has come close to the perspective Dr. Winter was advocating.

Those who now belonged to Jesus’ people  … were thrust out … to fulfill Israel’s vocation on behalf of the world. (The New Testament and the People of God, p. 458)

[Messiah’s message] … compels the followers of Jesus, energized by the power of his Spirit, to go out into the world and make new creation happen, confident that as that work has already begun in Jesus’ resurrection, and will be completed when heaven and earth are united at last, so the signs of that completion can truly be brought to birth in changed lives and societies in the present time. (Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, pp. 145, 146)

The New Testament points to the ultimate future, to the promise of a world set free from evil altogether, and invites us to hold that in our minds and hearts so that we know where we’re going. We are to implement the achievement of Jesus and so to anticipate God’s eventual world. (Evil and the Justice of God, p. 104)

The Christian imagination … needs to be awakened, enlivened and pointed in the right direction. … Christians need to sense permission, from God and from one another, to exercise their imaginations in thinking ahead into God’s new world and into such fresh forms of worship and service as will model and embody aspects of it. We need to have this imagination energized, fed and nourished, so that it is lively and inventive, not sluggishly going around the small circles of a few ideas learned long ago. (Evil and the Justice of God, p. 126)

It seems to me that the Roberta Winter Institute is trying to do what Wright is calling for, attempting to awaken and enliven the Christian imagination to include this new form of service to bring glory to God. Once we acknowledge disease in the category of “evil” (rather than as “God’s will”) we can see the need to mobilize the body of Christ to seek to eradicate diseases as a means of anticipating “God’s eventual world.”

Ultimately, what Dr. Winter would have loved to see is someone like N.T. Wright publicly acknowledge efforts to eradicate disease as one of the signs of what the new creation will look like, and getting behind a scholarly movement to work toward a theology of disease.

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

The Theology of Disease and Our Role in its Eradication

"Death entered the world through Satanic intrusion and disobedience . . . mankind, indeed all of nature, is groaning and awaiting a day when it will be restored to a different, disease-free and death-free reality, redeemed from the law of sin and death."

In this video, Becky Lewis describes two key aspects of a theology of disease: What we believe about God's design of nature in relationship to disease, and what we believe we should do about disease as a result. Exploring the fossil record, Bible history and law, as well as modern scientific advancements, she describes how we can proactively war against these rogue and destructive forces in our own lives, and answers the question, "What should be our role as God’s people in fighting for health today?"

Countering Evil by Eradicating Disease

By Jeff Havenner

Flickr/U.S. Department of Agriculture

Ralph Winter once asked whether pathogenic microorganisms represented "evil intelligent design." My initial thought considering that question was that a "yes" answer gave the devil too much credit. That was my off the cuff response, having never thought much in terms of evil regarding microbial pathogens. My response was like that given in a word association game. Someone says a word and the respondent answers with the first word or phrase that comes to mind. The patterns of immediate answers give clues to the way a person's mind works.

Before we can understand evil with respect to pathogens, we must ask more basically whether science recognizes evil at all. Most practitioners in the sciences have been taught to believe that everything exists as a result of a natural or material cause. Such causes are assumed morally neutral. The understanding of facts or conditions in terms of evil or good is outside of the realm of science. For the microbiologist, the presence of pathogenic microorganisms simply is fact. The fact of pathogens existence and the diseases they manifest represents, at most, some form of species coevolution. Neither God nor the devil are viewed as being behind them.

This view works in an academic sense. Ironically, when pathogenic microorganisms begin interacting badly with human populations and causing epidemic diseases, our attitude changes. Humanity begins to respond to those pathogens as if they are an evil to be combatted and subdued. Just as with word association, our immediate response to disease, our desire to cure it with an antibiotic or other drug or to prevent it by vaccination or even to eradicate it entirely gives us a clue as to how our collective mind seems to work. Whether we admit it or not, we act as if evil does exist as a force that must be fought with intellectual and physical effort. 

Thomas Malthus

Eradication programs are global responses to diseases that are perceived to be evil on a multinational level. The impulse to eradicate disease seems to come from the desire to eliminate a seemingly purposeful enemy of our human existence. This runs counter to what one might expect from a purely Malthusian and Darwinian frame of reference.

Thomas Malthus, an English cleric and 18th Century social theorist, believed that natural disaster, including famine and diseases were acts of God, beneficial in the overall sense to prevent the overpopulation of the planet. The naturalistic view of Darwinian thought was drawn from Malthus and asserted that whatever purely environmental forces do not kill off a species, end up leaving that species stronger over time and can give rise to a whole new species.

The human response to diseases, however, inclines toward preventing and curing them so as to free humanity from their ravages and the deaths they cause. Rather than the reference frames of either Malthus or Darwin, our response to disease thus bears more resemblance to that of Jesus, who, as the Gospels tell us, came into the human world to heal and to cast out evil.   

Reference: A review of Malthus' theories in relation to those of Charles Darwin. 

Jeff Havenner graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in microbiology. He worked at the Frederick Cancer Research Center in oncogenic virology. Following that he was directly commissioned in the US Army and worked at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Department of Rickettsial Diseases.  After leaving the Army he continued his career working in the field of radiation safety and safety management.

Epic, by John Eldredge - A Review

Editor’s Note: This book review was originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of the International Journal of Frontier Missions.

From the author of Wild At Heart comes this Epic: The Story God is Telling, a small book, which, like Brian McLaren’s [The Secret Message of Jesus], is very logically structured. In addition to the important Prologue and Epilogue it tells the story, the epic, of the entire universe in four “Acts.”

In the 16-page Prologue he insists that we must see the overall story, “the larger story,” if we want to understand the sub-plots.

Act One is where all is good and beautiful.

Act Two is the entrance of evil in the form of fallen angels. (Which, my guess is, at the moment in history when predatory life first appeared in the Cambrian era.)

Something happened before our moment on the stage. Before mankind came the angels. . . . This universe is inhabited by other beings . . . Most people do not live as though the Story has a Villain, and that makes life very confusing . . . I am staggered by the level of naiveté that most people live with regarding evil. (pp. 30, 39)

He now quotes a famous passage from C. S. Lewis,

One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death, disease, and sin . . . Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees . . . this is a universe at war. (p. 40)

Act Three is where, he says, the Biblical story begins in Genesis 1:1, after angelic powers went wrong.

This act begins in “darkness . . . is still under way, and we are caught up in it. A love story, set in the midst of a life-and- death battle.” (p. 72)

Act Four gestures toward the final future in a brilliant, eloquent, imaginative flight of fancy which frowns on all human guesses of the grandeur of the future. He says playfully:

I’ve heard innumerable times that “we shall worship God forever.” That “we shall sing one glorious hymn after another, forever and ever, amen” It sounds like hell to me. (p. 80)

The Epilogue is a significant part of the book. He says,

First, things are not what they seem. . . . the unseen world (the rest of reality) is more weighty and more real and more dangerous than the part of reality we can see.

Second, we are at war. . . . We must take this battle seriously. This is no child’s game. This is war . . . a battle for the human heart.

Third, you have a crucial role to play. . . . We must find our courage and rise up to recover our hearts and fight for the hearts of others. (p. 102)

Here we see talk of war. But, strangely, it does not speak of a war against a Dark Power and his works, but a rescue operation for human hearts. That is certainly a basic part of it, but to liberate the French from the Nazi yoke the dark evil of Hitler had to be eliminated first.

““Most people don’t live as though the Story has a Villain, and that makes life very confusing.” ”

Here is a thought: theoretically if every soul on earth were finally born again we would still face a ravaged creation, riddled with violence (in nature) and disease. And God would continue to be blamed for all this evil—unless Christians were finally identifying it with Satan. However, that is precisely why this “thought” is purely theoretical: we CAN’T win everyone without destroying the works of the Devil in that very process. As long as hundreds of millions of mission-field Christians have eyes running with pus and incipient blindness, as long as such horrors are blamed on God (for the lack of a Satan), WE ARE NOT GOING TO WIN MANY MORE PEOPLE. And, all those hundreds of millions of rural people and uneducated people we have recently won are eventually going to lose their faith just as they have in Europe and much of America. We are not winning very many educated people.

We must, it seems to me, accept it as our true mission to fight these horrors in the name of Christ. That is essential if we are to glorify God in all the earth, and that glorification is the basis on which we invite people to accept God as their Father in Heaven—and recruit them to help fight this war.

Both of these two books [Epic and The Secret Message of Jesus] brilliantly describe the restless pew. One of them actually speaks of war, not so much against evil as a rescue operation of humanity.

Thousands of writers and pastors are puzzling over the essential question of what a believer does as a Christian besides being religious and decent and active in (small) good deeds.

Is there something wrong with the DNA of American Evangelical congregations? Many leaders today are suggesting that we need new church pioneers with ideas so different that the very word “church” may not be ideal.

Both authors here are discontent with “normal” church life in America and in one way or another are groping toward something vitally different.

These two book writers, plus myself, plus a whole host of other restless, relentlessly inquiring Christian leaders today are aware that Evangelicals have never in any country of the world grown as prominent in national affairs, have never more closely approximated the culture of those outside of the church, and have never generated in reaction such a profound phobia of religious people taking over the country (witness the avid attention given to the Da Vinci Code book and movie which so skillfully throws doubt on the validity of the entire Christian tradition).

Here we see an outcry for something more, something different, something more serious. I believe what is lacking is a clearer idea of evil and what to do about it.