Ralph D. Winter’s Four Seeds of Destruction

Why the Gospel we’re exporting around the world is destined to blossom today, only to fade tomorrow.

By Brian Lowther

Ralph D. Winter established the Roberta Winter Institute to address one major problem. Because of his background as a mission leader and a mission historian, he saw that Evangelical missionaries were exporting a gospel around the world that contained seeds of its own destruction. [1] He recognized that if we do not eliminate these seeds, we could expect people from the hard-won mission fields of today to abandon their faith tomorrow.

Helpfully, he identified four of the most serious “seeds of destruction.”

Ralph D. Winter’s Four Seeds of Destruction

1. The Seed of the Problem of Evil

He predicted that as the people of the newly won mission fields of today become acquainted with the traditional answers to the problem of evil, they will increasingly become skeptical of those answers and their faith in God will gradually collapse. The traditional answer to the problem of evil blames sin on humans, blames temptation on Satan, and blames everything else on God’s mysterious, divine plan. Natural disasters are called “Acts of God.” Deadly diseases prompt questions like, “Why did God take my wife?” In his mind, faith that rests on these approaches to the problem of evil doesn’t stand much of a chance.

His solution was to develop A New Story, a re-framing of the Biblical narrative that answers the problem of evil in a new way, rescues God’s reputation and places the blame for evil at the feet of Satan.

2. The Seed of the Creation Narrative Being Irreconcilable with Modern Science

Secondly, he predicted that as the people of the newly won mission fields of today inevitably become acquainted with the scientific worldview, their faith in God will gradually collapse. Because of his background as an engineer, he knew that the traditional creation narrative does not resonate with a good percentage of scientists or people born in a Westernized, Post-Enlightenment society.

His solution was to develop A New Story, a re-framing of the Biblical narrative that takes what science knows about the history of the universe into account. His story reconciles the Young Earth view with the Old Earth view in a way that he believed would be more plausible to the scientists of today and the believers of tomorrow.

3. The Seed of an Incomplete Mandate

Thirdly, he predicted that as the people of the newly won mission fields of today begin to evangelize and disciple others, they will eventually become disillusioned by the idea that the advance of God’s Kingdom consists primarily (or perhaps merely) of passing out tickets to heaven. He equated this truncated mandate with walking into a desolate, war-torn area and informing the survivors that democracy is all they need to fix their problems. [2] Beyond just saving souls, he saw through history—not just human history, but cosmic history—that God was also about reestablishing shalom in a corrupted creation and defeating the enemy who is responsible for that corruption. Without these larger aspects of God’s redemptive activity being communicated and demonstrated by the people of God, Dr. Winter foresaw a bleak future for the believers of tomorrow.

His solution was to develop A New Story, a re-framing of the Biblical narrative that explores the fuller mandate God has given his children to battle evil and restore shalom to creation.

4. The Seed of Violent Portraits of God

Lastly, on his deathbed he dictated a short essay [3] implying that as the people of the newly won mission fields of today begin to understand the Bible, they will become deeply troubled by the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament (e.g., narratives that depict God violently smiting his enemies, commanding merciless genocide, and causing familial cannibalism). These portraits seem categorically different from Jesus who tells his followers to love their enemies and bless those who curse them. We can extrapolate that some new believers—like so many other Christian communities throughout history—will use these harsh, nationalistic portraits of God to justify their own inclinations toward violence.

As a solution we can utilize resources like Greg Boyd’s forthcoming book, Crucifixion of the Warrior God to build into Dr. Winter’s re-framing of the Biblical narrative a new way to reconcile the violent-tending God of the Old Testament with the self-sacrificial enemy-loving God revealed in Jesus Christ.

A New Activity

In addition to addressing these seeds of destruction through his New Story, Dr. Winter knew that we couldn’t just go out and share a story. That story would have to be backed up and empowered by action. That fuller mandate would have to be obeyed. Therefore, he identified and championed a specific New Activity for the Body of Christ to focus upon: disease eradication.

Why Disease Eradication?

Perhaps the most strategic way to battle evil, restore shalom to creation, and rescue God’s reputation is to address the world problems that are causing the most human suffering. Many of the great human problems such as spiritual darkness, poverty, injustice, and illiteracy have already significantly caught the attention of the Body of Christ. Some of the resulting efforts are focused on addressing the roots of these problems, not just the symptoms. [4] And, while treating the symptoms of disease has always been a hallmark of Christianity, where are the Christian organizations devoted to addressing the social, microbiological, and genetic roots of disease with an eye toward eradicating those diseases, not just healing them?

Conclusion

In the end, we in the Roberta Winter Institute believe that the chief reason the burgeoning mission fields of today will collapse into gospel resistance tomorrow is because these seeds of destruction are unknowingly exported with the gospel like rats on a cargo ship. Where is the wisdom in zealously building a widespread movement to Christ on a foundation of sand? This will continue to be a problem until and unless we eliminate these destructive seeds and obey the fuller mandate God has given us as disciples of his son.

Join us as we explore and expand upon these ideas in the weeks and months ahead here at www.robertawinterinstitute.org.

Endnotes

[1] “When the Church Staggers, Stalls and Sits Down (In the Middle of a War!),” by Ralph D. Winter, Mission Frontiers Magazine, May-June 2008 - http://www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/article/when-the-church-staggers-stalls-and-sits-down-in-the-middle-of-a-war
[2] “Beyond Unreached Peoples,” By Ralph D. Winter, November 2004. Published in Frontiers in Mission, pg. 186
[3] “Let’s Be Fair to the Bible,” Unpublished essay by Ralph D. Winter, May 2009
[4] For more on this, see: http://www.robertawinterinstitute.org/blog/2014/7/4/who-is-addressing-root-causes-of-the-biggest-human-problems

Photo Credit: Richard Thomas/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of
the Roberta Winter Institute

Director's Update

By Brian Lowther

Greetings!

For about the past year, the Roberta Winter Institute (RWI) blog has been dormant, as we’ve been casting around, researching, and developing various ways to disseminate our core content. I’ve personally learned a lot from approaches that fell flat and from small but significant wins. As we’ve experimented, we’ve written an abundance of new material that I’m eager to share with you. I think we’ve landed on a new way to explain the problem the RWI was founded to address and its solution that will be much more compelling and helpful.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll begin publishing that material right here on the RWI blog.

So come back then, check out our new thoughts and share them with a thousand of your closest friends.

As always, thank you for your interest in the Roberta Winter Institute. It is such a privilege for me to tackle some of Ralph Winter’s most interesting and far-sighted ideas and share the results with those of you who have tracked with us over the years. 

All my best,
Brian Lowther
Director, Roberta Winter Institute

P.S. Feel free to follow the RWI on Facebook or Twitter, or subscribe to our RSS feed.

This Week's Links: Some More Thought for Food

By Emily Lewis

This is not the links blog you want to read over your lunch break, unless you're actually hoping to take a break from lunch. Don't say we didn't warn you.

But for starters, here's something mild to whet your appetite. A recent study from the New England Journal of Medicine may have proved the long-held theory that consuming high-allergen foods actually prevents future allergies. "It may sound radical, but it works: Eating peanuts slashes the chance of a peanut allergy, at least in children at high risk of developing one."

Illustration by Oliver Munday

A little more upsetting to the stomach is the recent research into dysfunctional food regulations in the U.S., where responsibility for food safety is divided among fifteen different federal agencies. The most prominent of these are the F.S.I.S. and the F.D.A. -- but, to give you a taste, "Fish are the province of the F.D.A.—except catfish, which falls under the F.S.I.S. Frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the F.D.A., but frozen pizza with slices of pepperoni is monitored by the F.S.I.S. Bagel dogs are F.D.A.; corn dogs, F.S.I.S. The skin of a link sausage is F.D.A., but the meat inside is F.S.I.S. . . . Both the F.S.I.S. and the F.D.A. are also hampered by internal tensions. The regulatory function at the F.S.I.S. can seem like a distant afterthought at the U.S.D.A., whose primary purpose is to advance the interests of American agriculture." But private litigation is finally moving the concern back to the health of the consumer. Read the whole, juicy thing over at the New Yorker.  

But what if it's not the food industry that's killing us? What if it's the food itself. A new film called Forks Over Knives "examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods."

Those so-called "diseases of affluence" afflict many in the first world, but in poorer countries the cause of disease is much simpler and easier to root-out, though it has no less to do with what people put in their mouths."Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically." In such places, improving health infrastructure is one of the most effective approaches to disease eradication. Enter the new poop project from the Gates Foundation. 

Disease eradication worldwide requires people working at both ends of the wealth spectrum . . . and both ends of the intestine (and everywhere in between). For those as hungry to see change as we are, no other answer will satisfy. 

Emily Lewis is the staff writer and online strategist for the Roberta Winter Institute

The Root of Our Desires

By Brian Lowther

Today, I finish my series exploring six common human desires and why God instilled them into us. You can read the first four installments here: The Desire for Survival and Pleasure, The Desire for Power, The Desire for Creativity, and The Desire for Love. As I noted in those four posts, I’m writing from the assumption that our desires at their roots are good and programmed into us by God for a good reason. Specifically, I think his reason is to help us participate with him in bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, which is essentially a battle against darkness and evil. 

I’ve hinted in my three previous entries about the deeper motivations behind the desires for power, creativity and love. Namely:  

Power

“If I am powerful, people will respect me. If they respect me, I can respect myself. That’s at the root of the desire for power. The deeper motivation is self-respect.

Creativity

“If I create or achieve something worthwhile, people will ascribe worth to me. If others ascribe worth to me, then I can ascribe worth to myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for creativity. The deeper motivation is self-worth. 

Love

“If others love me, that means I am lovable. If I am lovable, then I can love myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for love. The deeper motivation is self-love.

Dignity

Self-respect, self-worth and self-love can be summed up nicely with the word dignity. To me, the desire for dignity is at the root of these three desires. In fact, I think dignity is perhaps the most crucial of all our God-given desires. Two reasons for this come to mind. 

First, people voluntarily choose to live without all of the desires I’ve explored and can still lead very meaningful, happy lives.

1. Survival: people lay down their lives for the love of country or family. The sense of honor and sacrifice they experience gives theirs lives and deaths great purpose.
2. Pleasure: People forego worldly pleasures, and accept ascetic conditions in view of a worthwhile goal or belief.
3. Power: Many ministry workers choose a life that has no hope of power, wealth, or status.
4. Creativity: People take meaningless, non-creative jobs if they feel they are contributing to a cause they believe in.
5. Love: Monks and nuns go without the love of a spouse, virtuosos and world-class athletes have few true friends [1], and scientists leave family to travel to the Arctic Circle or outer space for the sake of new discoveries.

People can live happily for long durations, even entire lifetimes with one or more of these desires going unfulfilled. However, people can’t live happily without dignity. You may have heard the World War II story of prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp who were forced to move rubble from a bombed-out factory to a nearby field. The next day, they were forced to move the same rubble back to the factory. The next day, back to the field, day after day until they had no dignity left. They lost their will to live and began to provoke the guards to shoot them. [2]

Second, dignity may be the only desire we can pursue without fear of pursuing it too far. All of the other desires come with a dark side.

1. Survival: Pursued too far, this desire can lead to a kill-or-be-killed attitude.
2. Pleasure: Pursued too far, and one becomes a thrill seeker, living a life of debauchery and immoral self-indulgence.
3. Power: Pursued too far and this desire can lead to tyrannical, power-hungry, greedy behavior or anxiety and insecurity because power, wealth and influence can be lost or taken away, and wisdom can be discredited.
4. Creativity: Pursued too far, and this desire leads to work-a-holism or a reclusive life, holed up in some attic finishing your masterpiece.
5. Love: Pursued too far and this desire leads to neediness, which can lead to loneliness and despair, a “nobody loves me” attitude. “A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing,” [3] just watch almost any current reality TV show.

However, my hunch is that dignity has no dark side. One cannot pursue dignity too far because dignity is simply seeing ourselves the way God sees us. No delusions of grandeur, no competitiveness, no self-loathing, just humble, realistic self-acceptance. I’m struck by the verse, “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) He loves us, respects us, and ascribes infinite worth to us just as we are, despite all of our sniffles and hang-ups and pettiness.

This hints at what it means to glorify God: to display his love by receiving it, reflecting it back to him, and refracting it like prisms to ourselves, to our neighbors (Mark 12:31), and to all creation.

Why Did God Give Us this Desire for Dignity?

This concept comes close to the ancient Greeks’ fourth term for love: agape. 

Agape (divine love - the love of God for man and of man for God)

C. S. Lewis used agape to describe what he believed was the highest level of love known to humanity. [4] The term agape has always been used by Christians to refer to the self-sacrificing love of God for humanity. When 1 John 4:8 says "God is love," the Greek word is agape. 

In the cosmic war motif, agape is many things.

1. Agape is how we can hear and understand the voice of the general.
2. Agape is the antidote to the poison of the enemy, which is lies about the character of God.
3. Agape is different than philia; it is beyond philia. Philia is giving your life for your friends. Agape is giving your life for your enemies. This is how Jesus fought and overcame Satan. By loving his enemies, doing good to those who hated him, blessing those who cursed him, praying for those who mistreated him. (Luke 6:27-28). This is what defeats the enemy. The idea of love as a weapon, self-sacrifice as a weapon is counterintuitive, isn’t it? Martin Luther King understood this principle well, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” [5]

The marvelous thing about agape and dignity is that they won’t allow us to live meaningless lives. They won’t allow us to tolerate disease, torture, rape, social exclusion, slavery, humiliation, objectification, or dehumanization. These things aren’t from God. We’re supposed to rail against them. Even people who don’t know God seem to know this instinctively. God wants us to rebel against the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). We were made for proactive resistance against systemic evil. We were made, in short, for freedom.

Former slave, Elizabeth Freeman once wrote, “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s airth [sic] a free woman—I would.” [6] 

Endnotes

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/kobe-bryant-friends-2015-2
[2] Adapted from “Why in the world am I here” by Rick Warren
[3] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
[4] Ibid
[5] CleverQuotations.com, yyyy.http://www.cleverquotations.com/quote/1498/returning-violence-for-violence-multiplies-violence-adding-deeper-darkness-to-a-night-already-devoid-of-stars-hate-cannot-drive-out-hate-only-love-can-do-that, accessed March 22, 2014.
[6] http://www.thetrustees.org/assets/documents/about-us/press-clips/American-Spirit-Magazine-Elizabeth-Freeman-Feature-March-April2014.pdf

Photo Credit: Austen Squarepants/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of the Roberta Winter Institute

Why Did God Give Us a Desire for Love?

By Brian Lowther

Today I continue my series exploring six common human desires and why God instilled them into us. You can read the first three installments here: The Desire for Survival and Pleasure, The Desire for Power, and The Desire for Creativity. As I noted in those three posts, I’m writing from the assumption that our desires at their roots are good and programmed into us by God for a good reason. Specifically, I think his reason is to help us participate with him in bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, which is essentially a battle against darkness and evil.

Love

Beyond survival, pleasure, power, and creativity I have a deep desire to be loved. In my experience, there is no greater feeling than the engulfing bliss of first love. Romance and fireworks, queasy stomachs and strong sensual passion, it is all absolutely dynamite. I’d go back in a heartbeat to when my wife and I fell in love. Not to change anything, but to relive the intensity of those sublime feelings.

These feelings are undoubtedly good, something I would wish for everyone. But, ultimately they’re just feelings. And, “no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all…But…ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.” [1] In the best cases, being “in love” matures into a second kind of love, that of deliberate commitment and companionship. This is at the core of what many of us desire: a lasting and happy marriage, where infatuation has faded some but a deeper, quieter devotion has replaced it.

The result of either type of love is often children. And, while children are demanding and often infuriating, I never seem to tire of the pitter-patter of small feet, the funny ways they understand the world, or the joy of their affection after a wearisome day.

Not all of us desire marriage or family, but we all desire meaningful friendships. Friendships are the only form of love that everyone can have: i.e., not everyone has a spouse or a child or even parents.  

Why Did God Give Us this Desire to be Loved?

The ancient Greeks gave humanity something very important when they defined human love with the words: eros (romantic love), storge (family love), and philia (companionship love). [2] I think God gave us the desire for human love for reasons that coincide with these Greek words. 

Eros (romantic love)

If we’re talking in strictly military terms, God may have wanted human beings to fill and replenish the earth (Genesis 1:28) because logically, the bigger army usually wins the battle. Eros is perhaps the most expedient way to ensure that humans would “be fruitful and multiply.” (Genesis 1:28).

Storge (family love)

Parental nurture is in some ways, equivalent to bootcamp. It is preparation for battle. Storge protects us as children, shields us from horror and life-threatening situations, trains us until we’re mature enough to fight for and defend others and ourselves. Not every young person has this protection or training of course, because some children are orphans, or suffer child abuse. But it seems that God’s ideal was and is for us to be protected for a time from battle until we are sufficiently prepared.

Also, God must have foreseen that humanity would learn about him and his enemy in a very gradual way, a progressive arc of revelation through the centuries. Thus, he would have to instill a desire for storge (i.e., respect for elders) as a way to pass down that knowledge from one generation to the next, alleviating the need to start from scratch with every successive generation. 

Philia (companionship love) 

Philia in my mind is very closely related to camaraderie, which is a common word; but it has a very specific meaning in the military. It refers to something much deeper than mere friendship and denotes a strong, shared team spirit, a harmony of purpose and companionship. A close French term is “Esprit De Corps,” which indicates the capacity of a group's members to maintain will power and belief in an institution or goal, especially in the face of opposition or hardship. One can easily see how important this is in war. 

Occasionally we hear of a military group or team bonding as if it were an important milestone. This bonding occurs in the process of toiling together in the heat, marching in the cold, struggling for a common goal, fighting a common foe. When a group strives together and triumphs together, they bond. When they battle side-by-side and face death together, they become closer than family. When soldiers bond in this way, they will give their lives for each other. On the battlefield, it is not so much that you are willing to die for your country, but that you are willing to die for your brother in the trench next to you. This may be what Christ meant when he said, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13).

This is the essence of philia. My hunch is that God programmed us with a desire for philia because in order to destroy any work of the devil, he knew we would need the byproducts of camaraderie: teamwork and invincible morale. On their own, individuals can’t “win a war.” To win a war you need a lot of organized effort. Think of the eradication of smallpox, or the Civil Rights Movement – these things required organized human effort on a massive scale.

Self-love

One last thing I find most interesting about the desire for love: as with my desire for power and creativity, my thought process goes, “If others love me that means I am lovable. If I am lovable, then I can love myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for love. The deeper motivation is self-love. I’ll explore this desire for self-love a bit more in my next and last entry.

Endnotes

[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
[2] The Greeks had a fourth word for love, “Agape,” or divine love, which I’ll cover in my next entry.

Photo Credits: 
1.  Felipe Bastos/Flickr
2. PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE/Flickr
3. Darren Johnson / iDJ Photography/Flickr
4. Ikhlasul Amal/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of the Roberta Winter Institute