Are we building an enduring Christianity or not?

Communities of believers who do not do the hard work of answering the hard questions can expect their children and future generations to abandon their faith.

By Beth Snodderly

Editor’s Note: Last week, here on the RWI blog we published an introduction to Ralph Winter’s Four Seeds of Destruction. Today, Beth Snodderly begins a four-part series exploring these topics in more depth. Enjoy.

Ralph Winter often talked and wrote about why people turn away from faith. He wanted the mission world to be aware that newly reached peoples will eventually follow the pattern of post-Christian Europe if we don’t stop exporting a gospel that contains the seeds of its own destruction. He recognized that communities of believers who do not do the hard work of answering hard questions can expect their children and future generations to abandon their faith in God, as was the case in 19th and early 20th century England. Winter saw that intellectual insight into God’s Word, God’s world, and who God is, needs to accompany emotional and experiential awareness of God. Otherwise, as Winter observed, people turn away from faith once they start asking hard questions about the rampant evil in this world, thinking this is God’s will and not realizing there is a Satan behind it. And if they are unaware of what the Bible really says and means on key issues, if they perceive the Bible to have feet of clay, thinking people are unlikely to be interested in following the Jesus of the Bible.

Winter wanted mission and church practitioners to recognize that they need to lead the way in restoring God’s reputation and glory in the eyes of the on-looking world. Believers need to help potential followers of Jesus see that suffering, violence, and evil are not God’s will and are not from him. Rather, societies and all creation experience the consequences of human and angelic choices, both good and bad, and God does not overrule the free will he has granted his creatures. Winter pointed to the importance of seeing the historical big picture—that God is in an ongoing battle with a spiritual adversary, starting even before Genesis 1. Salvation is thus not just a “ticket to heaven.” Rather, God is asking humans to choose to join him in the battle to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) and demonstrate God’s will for shalom for human societies and all creation.

In my next installment, I’ll explore Ralph Winter’s thoughts on why Christianity has succeeded among rural populations all over the world but is facing increasing opposition from the educated world.

Photo Credit: vonderauvisuals/Flickr

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

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