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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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You might be interested in the main reason for my thinking about a Part II. One of our good friends, considering FMF membership, has a doctorate in missiology from the seminary in Portland where Rick Wood got his M.Div. and Tim Lewis got an M.A.. He was quite troubled by Part I, and there ensued a multi-cycled correspondence on the whole thing.
I will present some of his comments and my response to them:
RDW to Henry Harrison:
Robby shared with me the following three sentences from you, and I am very grateful for your
response. In fact, I prize highly anyone's com- ments. I cannot know what or how to say things if I have no idea what is puzzling or unacceptable.
<< Personally, I find a great deal to counter in Dr. Winter's July 31 paper on "Theologizing Prehistory." I find it extremely speculative and much of it ultimately impossible of proof one way or another. Further, it takes a particular theological position on the origin of man which I would hope (and, again, assume based on what you have said) is not an official position of FMF or affiliates. >>
You are correct, and I even said so in the paper itself—that this is all highly speculative. And I assure you it is not “official.” In fact, I introduced the paper to our group that day by saying they have never heard from me anything more speculative!
I am chiefly concerned that when we try to evangelize the 160,000 highly educated scientists in, say, the city of Hyderabad, India, for example, we must have at least a theologically sound "speculation" about WHAT THEY THINK THEY KNOW about the main events of earth history. To begin where they ARE is sound pedagogy, surely. It is now too late in history simply to match wits with the Swamis. India is highly industrialized, and the now millions of Western-educated Hindus go around with something like an intellectual dual personality. If we can't win this cutting edge kind of people we falter desperately in our sharing of the Gospel with the 600 million Hindus. In some ways they are the “gate keepers” of many less-well- educated members of the Hindu community. But we Evangelicals also have a tough time dealing with and digesting the world of science.
In the last 20 years the scientific world has racked up oodles and oodles of additional evidences from the "rocks" than they ever had before. They have more than 1,000 times more concrete evidence about the strange phase of earth's history in which the dinosauer type of life predominated, for example, which they regard as fairly recent, but almost totally eclipsed by an asteroidal collision (see the Princeton University Press book, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez).
Ever since the moon landing scientists have been scouring the earth for similar impact craters (despite enormous weathering here unlike the moon's surface) and have by now developed a widely held concensus con- cerning at least four “major extinction events,” the latter of which, it seems to me, is the one which most likely preceeded the events described in Genesis One, and the first appearance of man, an event exceedingly recent by contrast even to the period of the dinosaurs.
Thus, my speculation about the origin of man fits in perfectly with the Young Earth view, and the Genesis record. What is it that you refer to when you speak of my "particular theological position on the origin of man?"
In regard to Satan, the Biblical record in Genesis does not state when he first broke away from God. Do you have any ideas (speculation) about when that happened? Obviously it happened before the events in Eden because he appears there full blown. It must have been earlier? How much earlier? I have speculated that, if we take the record of the rocks at face value, the most likely time would be (despite the fatal damage this does to the ridiculous Darwinian theory) when predatory forms of life in abundance suddenly appeared in the "record of the rocks," namely, at what is widely held in stupefied awe in Darwinian circles, the "Cambrian Explosion" of life forms, pegged at 550 million years ago. When would you put the fall of Satan?
Scientists in Hyderabad will likely have a Hindu predisposition to believe that all evil is of God (ominously similar to Augustine's Neo Platonism bequeathed to Aquinas, Calvin, and many contemporary pastors), and thus, will have no initial interest in the Christian understanding of Satan. However, I don't feel Evangelical theology says very much in detail about what Satan is doing either. But I have speculated that the hardest thing for the theistic position that we hold (in contrast to Hindu thought) is our ambiguous theological inheritance in regard to the origin of what I would call "deformed" life. To rehabilitate Satan, so to speak, and begin to put the blame on him for widespread distortion of God-created life forms, is to me the most satisfying (speculative) way to confront the pervasive violence and evil in nature, the existence of deadly bacteria, incredibly intelligent parasites, etc. I think this perspective (albeit speculative) can be electrifying to keen intellects with a Hindu background, because in that background lies at least dormant and unresolved the sweeping conviction that all life is sacred, and, of course, the resulting paradox is that so much of it is deadly, violent and life destroying.
Furthermore, our evangelism of Hindus is blunted and weakened seriously, it would seem, by our own unresolved inheritance in regard to evil. We find it difficult, yet logical, given Augustine's input, that the pastors of Massachusetts ganged up on Jonathan
Edwards to condemn him for “interfering with Divine Providence” when he set out to protect his mission-field Indians from that very deadly pathogen, smallpox (eliminated between 1976 and 1986). We cannot and do not normally in our evangelism claim that God is NOT the author of smallpox, malaria, etc. We leave it to our hearers to suppose that our God either does not know of the ravages of malaria, does not care, or does not have the ability to do anything to eliminate this kind of suffering and death. My speculation is that our Gospel would carry far greater conviction if we allied our God on the side of planned opposition to these deadly pathogens, rather than letting this be the exclusive domain of the new gods, “the scientists.” I have speculated, as you can see, that these deadly pathogens are Satan's work, specifically the result of his dark angels' tinkering with DNA. Would our usual evangelism do well to contain that idea, clearly absolving our God from such blatant evil? Just specula- tion. What do you think?
Believe me, I truly am eager to have your further feedback. RDW >>
Well, he responded and I continue with
comments from him and to him: Dear Henry,
Thanks for your comments. I will touch on a few of your lines:
<< I was referring to the evident assumption in your paper that man was not simply created, directly by God, on the sixth literal day of creation. Your paper speculates on ages of genetic alterations, extinctions, etc. before the advent of man on what you called the "Edenic experiment." The theological position implied is that death on the earth did not come from the sin of man, but existed long before his sin. >>
I do indeed believe God directly created man on the sixth day. That is part of what I said was to underwrite. But, just like C.I. Scofield (on whose study Bible I grew up) I believe that a whole lot preceeded the events of Genesis One. And, I am aware that only by allowing secular people to go on thinking that the earth is five billion years old can I see how we can begin to insist to them that the creation of humans in fellowship with God, by contrast, is exceedingly recent and totally distinct from that past. And just as the
"experiment" in which Noah was born was wiped out and God began all over again, so Genesis itself might well represent starting all over again. In fact, not only the most widely used study Bible, Scofield's, but almost all Evangelical scholars in his day and prior to that believed that the easiest way to account for "the record of the rocks" was to assume that all that happened before Genesis 1:2, and that Satan appeared in Eden with a vast crime record behind him.
Indeed, Henry Morris (whom I have known and respected since I was a teenager) and his ICR friends took a brand new tack, and launched a very different theory when they began writing as they did, essentially embracing the ideas of a recent creation as eloquently enunciated by Ellen White, founder and prophetess of the Seventh-Day Adventist tradition. In Morris and his associates her ideas have for many home schoolers triumphed over the accepted geology of the Scofield Bible which I was brought up on and which has long represented most Evangelicals other than Seventh-Day Adventists.
White’s ideas through the ICR have come into their own and captured many people today, including members of our fellowship, even some of my own daughters. And for one good reason: they seem to uphold the Bible more effectively. In any case I have no interest whatsoever in twisting their arms or shaming them in any way. This is simply the now-huge and very respectable home school movement's point of view. But in Evangelical scientific circles, professors in Christian col- leges, etc. the highly Evangelical American Scientific Affiliation (with its 7,000 members) the ICR position is in the distinct minority. Hugh Ross (Reasons to Believe) alone is no doubt more widely accepted than ICR apart from homeschooling parents.
One point here: the destructive effect of Adam's sin is not denied by postulating that there had already been destructive effects deriving from Satan's earlier fall.
Another of your paragraphs:
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Yes, this is Ellen White’s idea all right. I would prefer to remain in a mode of speculation when it comes to such things. How well are you acquainted with the American Scientific Affiliation? As you know, I am not unwilling to speculate in ways that diverge from "accepted thought." But that is only when I become aware of something which could readily explain how "accepted thought" went wrong. In this case, do you know of anything that would steer virtually the entire ASA in the wrong direction? I am not a student of either position. I simply don't know how I could easily be convinced against a large, strong, well-balanced group of such Evangelical scholars.
Another paragraph:
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All my life I have assumed that Adam's was the first sin. I never stopped to think that Satan already existed before Adam, and that Satan's enormous rebellion would quite naturally explain pervasive destruction and distortion and predation in that long period Scofield (and many others) have always talked about prior to Adam. I don't think this belittles the tragic results of Adam's sin. It is simply a larger context.
One more:
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How dearly I wish this were true. Literally hundreds of people have come by our door to pray for my wife. Not a single person has ever ventured any comment on the subject of God's obedient people having any responsibility to find out what causes cancer. Oh, they have almost all urged this or that dietary "defense." But "offensive" action against cancer? Nary a word, nor apparently a thought. Indeed some have said, and perhaps more have thought, that there must surely be some sin in her life that God would do such a thing to her. I don't discount that sinful ways brings much evil upon us. But, is not at least some evil the work of Satan? And, do we ever, in the Name of Christ, set out to "destroy the works of the devil"?
Our theological tradition since Augustine has stripped Satan of any obvious works to be destroyed. Since Augustine, we have been led to think that God is the one who brings all suffering and death. And of course this much is true: God works all things (even evil) for good. But, don't you see WHY those pas- tors did not lift a finger to help Edwards? They thought he was fighting God. It is also true that as a missionary he could not miss the awful evil his forest Indians suffered, while they, as white men, back in their Boston pulpits were relatively immune to smallpox when compared to the Indians.
And don't you see why I suspect that no other Christian in the next 200 and some years lifted a finger to eradicate smallpox? And my chagrin that when it was finally eliminated the effort was not a God-honoring Christian initiative? And, is it not embarrassing that a fine Christian man whose theological training is no more than that of a Sunday School teacher (Jimmy Carter) is the only believer I know who visited the mission field and decided that "living with" disease when that disease can be exterminated is not the best we can do?
Finally:
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Well, wow, I do indeed wish I could “explain the reason that Satan was there in the first place.” But I guess this is something God has not been pleased to reveal. You are quite right that this is a stumbling block for some people. But, it seems to me that to plead ignorant on this one point is far less a stumbling block than to plead ignorant in regard to the entire spectrum of rampant disease pathogens which are being perfected and adjusted minute by minute. Who is doing that? God? I don't believe for a split second that it is a Darwinian process. Then who? Why? Isn't this a lot more to explain?
I hate to see Satan dodging all the blame. I recall a Readers Digest article about a father whose boy died of a strange cancer and the father launched a campaign to find out how to deal with that kind of cancer. In a fund-raising marathon the father himself died as he crossed the finish line. The younger son, employing all-too-common theology, said to his mother, “God would not do two bad things to us in one year, would He?” This is our Christian inheritance which all too often casts only God in the play. Satan is nowhere to be seen, or blamed. All the turmoil and troubles of this world is somehow God’s fault. My pastor, at the Lake Avenue Congregational Church here in Pasadena once said, “Satan's greatest achievement is to cover his tracks.” He has covered them well, it seems. The introduction to Yancey's second edi- tion of Where is God When It Hurts observes that books written centuries ago about suffering tend to give good reasons why God is doing this.
They defend God. Modern books on suffering tend to blame God, to accuse Him of indifference or impotence. Neither view takes into account Satan. That's exactly the way Satan likes it!
Enough for now. Cordially, RDW
Let me now add a comment that is
beyond a response to a letter.
One of the specific points of disturbance is my willingness to speculate about the possi- bility of simultaneously holding both a Young Earth and an Old Earth point of view. Henry believes that his Young-Earth-only view is "rapidly growing in acceptance." He is right about that if you confine your atten- tion to the homeschooling materials now available. My impression is, incidentally, that he is desperately wrong if you look at the wider Evangelical movement. But the issue of how many people believe what is true is not all important. Rather, take the specific point of one of our staff, “The reiteration and amplification of this theme is reinforcing a larger impression that you are absorbed with personal interests and aren't adequately ‘receptor-oriented’.” Well, in fact, it is precisely my awareness of one very straightforward and open “receptor,” Henry, that I am thinking that our disturbed friend speaks for others on our staff who have had little larger perspective in this all important area, which not only impinges on the credibility of the Bible in our international outreach but on my own credibility regarding my belief in the authority and meaning of the Bible.
On the other hand, if anyone feels this is just too relevant, and too touchy an issue to touch, as well as being merely old-hat stuff or personal interest stuff, I would be glad to know that. I might add that one of my grand- daughters, going off to Wheaton, is going to be bumping head-on into the unfortunate polarization between those Evangelicals who believe the earth (indeed the universe) is only 10,000 years old, and those who believe that a good deal of time has passed since the earth was formed. In fact, in a few days our brand new Global Year program will be dealing with several others of my own grandchildren on this very subject. Why do most Evangelical young people lose their faith in college, even Christian colleges? In part because of massive undiscussed discrepancies between what they have been taught to believe and the world views of the science of our time.
As long as we keep these issues under wraps and banish discussion of them in our polite circles we will continue to find ourselves being considered bizarre and incredible by most of the people we wish to influence in the world around us. One of the simplest aims I could have in this forum might be to distinguish very clearly between
1) the Darwinian proposal that forms of life have become more complex across time due to accidental developments, that is, due to an accidental and unguided, unintelligent evolution, and 2) the related but totally different belief that literally dominates all the intellectual circles in the world, namely, that there is such a thing as ancient periods of time for this planet, displaying an amazing spectrum of no-longer existing forms of life, about 1,000 times more than now exist. In our desperation to reject the Darwinian hypothesis which claims no need for an intelligent designer, I fear many of our home-schooled young people (and Portland doctorates) have felt it necessary to deny the antiquity of the earth. Thus, when the Kansas Board of Education suggests teaching something in addition to Darwin, the whole world thinks that the only alternative is the highly visible, and by now somewhat notorious view of the so-called Creationists, which means not believing in the antiquity of the earth! This is like saying that if we feel we must reject the idea (and of course we do) that American automobiles evolved from Model T Fords to Lincoln Continentals in the past 100 years as the result of a wholly unguided and unaided process, the only alternative is to postulate that all of the models and makes of cars in the 20th century were made at the same time, buried in museums to give the impression that they were created over a long period of time, and that there was no evolution of design throughout a century. One view postulates no intelligent assistance in evolution of the automobile, and is of course absurd. The other view postulates that the only way the variety of cars could have happened is that a supreme intelligence made them all at once, in six days of time, a position which is equally difficult to defend even if perfectly possible theoretically. Yet, it is simply not the way our remembered experience and library archives would tell the story.
Thus we find ourselves insisting on an absurdity equal to the Darwinian absurdity. Why do we want to do that? But, even more ominous in the midst of this whole confusion is the fact that by denying the evidence for an old earth we put Satan out of work during the entire expanse of earth's history. We weave a picture that has Satan appearing in the Garden without any known crime record, as if he himself had fallen only a few days earlier and his first evil and corrupting deed was about to happen as he sets out to tempt Adam and Eve. Thus, we blind ourselves to what may be a massive, pervasive and lengthy record of diabolic corruption of the ruler of this earth. By doing so we essentially wander unarmed, undefended among secu- lar scholars, like lambs to the slaughter, una- ware of the very nature of our dangerous innocence, unable to mount an aggressive counterforce even to so blatant and monstrous an evil as heart disease, the number one killer in America today, which in just the past few months took our friends Dave Geisler, Jeff Brom, Woody Philips, without a single voice raised out of concern to find the real cause.
Meanwhile we are lulled into inaction by the perfectly enormous outlay of time and
energy we routinely spend in by-pass surgery, angioplasty, and even in concocting artificial hearts, or worst of all killing imprisoned people in China in order to transplant their hearts into diseased Taiwanese bodies, etc. Can you imagine anything more grotesque? Shall there be no voice raised against our ongoing ignoring of the fact that twenty percent of all heart disease occurs in the total absence of the currently proposed causal factors?
What I am trying to do, groping into it gradually but as fast as I can, is to try to undo a huge and diabolical complex of misunderstandings which enervates and destroys any resistance we might offer to the distorting works of the Devil.
To me the importance and urgency of this endeavor is therefore to some extent directly proportional to the degree of indifference or resistance to it. That is, the more likely our staff includes some who are victims of this diabolical complex, the more reason I feel we have to rush to their assistance, to at least expose them to another view. You might even predict that any true frontier may be a frontier precisely because it is unknown and hard to conceptualize. This does not mean that everything mysterious is a frontier but that in the case of every true frontier there may likely be a debilitating degree of mystery and misunderstanding that complicates our attention to it.
Talk about misunderstanding. If history consists of that period during which human beings wrote things down (which is one definition of history), and if, for discussion's sake, we accept 10,000 years as the length of that historical period, then, assuming a com- monly accepted antiquity of the earth (which is five billion), the period of earth's “prehistory” is then inevitably defined as a period of God's creative activity that is 500,000 times longer than the historical period. You get this 500,000 number if you divide 5 billion years by 10,000 years.
However, even if you focus on prehistory as only the last 500 million years—the last tenth of that period—during which predatory forms of life have been in evidence (and during which conceivably a rebellious Satan began to do his deadly work), prehistory is still 50,000 times as long a period as the historical period. One more comparison: Let’s consider the roughly 5 million years during which the so-called “hominids” appear (these are described as “humanity’s primitive predecessors.” During this 5 million-year period 15 different species grouped in 5 distinct “genuses” appear scattered over a period that is 25 times as long as the homo sapiens period. But note that even the 25-times-longer period of 5 million years is only one thousandth of the 5 billion year earth history, while the homo sapiens period is 1/25th of that one thousandth, and the 10,000 year period of recorded history is 1/20th of 1/25th of 1,1000th of the whole period. That is, history strictly defined is 1/500,000 of the whole.
In this light must we not speculate about that longer, “prehistory” period rather than confine ourselves to events in the 1/500,000th or the 1/50,000th of God's earthly activity? And do so even if that longer period displays to us 50,000 times as much evidence about Satan's works? And even if our Christian leaders around the world are being cut down daily by virtually unassailed but invasive and deadly efforts of “the god of this world,” and our outreach to non-Christians is made inef- fective and substantially incomplete by our own widespread confusion about the pervasive presence of evil everywhere in nature?
I hope my motives are obvious. It must be clear that I suspect that our conventional but long- standing Evangelical reading of the Bible is confused crucially by the weak assumption that the only fountain or origin of evil is the result of Adam's sin, and that Satan in the garden had no past record of wrong. Not only that but I suspect that if you ask the ordinary Evangelical what precisely did Adam's sin do by way of corrupting creation you will commonly find on your hands an essentially speechless individual, an individual coasting along in life with hardly a clue as to what the real dangers are, and tending to assume God is behind the perfectly enormous and pervasive suffering in the world.
I ask you, is such a person well prepared to encompass the earth telling of the glory of God? Are we content to continue presenting a god who is apparently quite content if not happy about all this suffering, including that of my wife? A god who has no plans to conquer suffering in this life? A god who is not asking our collaboration? Do we do well simply to bend our efforts to multiply this kind of extensively blind and limited proclamation? Isn't this issue a mission frontier?
Now, I ask finally, does it matter if this issue has arisen to my attention in part because of a personal concern, which it obviously is? I see no reason to hide or suppress the fact that as I often am occupied rubbing my wife’s back, which is now nearly in constantly pain (She died October 28, 2001), I do in fact wonder why God would allow this, and what might believers have done to head off this kind of cruelty and suffering. After all, necessity is the mother of invention, and many important discoveries have arisen from some one person’s very personal crusade. Does an insight somehow lose relevance, or credibility or significance if it is unearthed by a concerned individual whose pursuit is fueled by personal interest? Is it not possible that my extrapolations on this issue are something brought into the kingdom for such a time as this?
RDW |
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