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About the Author:
Ralph D. Winter is a senior mission thinker who has been actively involved from the beginning of the massive mission transition from simply thinking in terms of countries or individuals to thinking in terms of peoples. He is founder of the
U.S. Center for World Mission,
and is currently chancellor of
William Carey
International University. |
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For half a millennium the engine driving our society has been science. Sure, politics and philosophy, religious insight and artistic expression have helped out in their way, but even the efficacy of those things has had its pace measured and set by hard knowledge, our burgeoning comprehension of our material universe; it’s no accident that the dethroning of kings and cardinals followed the dethroning of the Earth from the center of the sky” (Italics added). So says a science writer in the LA Times last Sunday, and so much for the post-modern inclination to pooh pooh the accumulation of concrete scientific insights.
However, whether well understood or not, it is difficult to deny the fact that at no time in the history of science, or in the history of the world for that matter, has there ever been anything remotely comparable to the incredible explosion of scientific knowledge in the past twenty years. The massive, global involvement in the study of what God made, called science, is an activity far more elaborate and inherently awe-inspiring than the study of the works of man, which is called art.
In the process of this enormous pursuit of the work of what obviously must be an intelligent Creator, one might expect breakdowns of relationship between researchers representing the various global cultural traditions. To some extent that has been true, but even this has not been able to throttle the immense, now global, “gold rush” in many scientific fields ranging from 1) the zealous examination of outer space to 2) the exploration of the enormous land mass under Ant- arctica (which happens to be twice the size of the 48 States)—explorations performed by magnetic resonance through an ice layer three miles deep.
In any case, nothing, absolutely no probe of scientific inquiry, has suddenly opened a door into so vast, and totally undreamed-of a new world as the historically recent penetration of the cell. There, in this newly revealed microscopic universe, are mysteries that have infinitely more to do with our future, our mission and our theology than any new insight into the cosmosthe panoply of stars—where we are mere observers, not intimate participants who are crucially affected by the conclusions of the astronomers and cosmologists.
On the other hand, our theologies, that is, our formalized ways of attempting to think Biblically, were hammered out during centuries that were totally blind to the microscopic world. As a result, to this day our religious impulses and purposes, neither our hymns nor our theologies, yet throb with any of the new insights in this huge new sphere, even though the everyday existence of all life is intimately tuned and doomed by these tiny forces. Rather, in place of that new knowledge we have until recently been ignorantly offering a vast range of pseudo explanations which still rule our thinking in many ways. |
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