Re: [asa] Fw: Fresh look at creation - article

Winter statement near the beginning that this approach "does not give an
inch to the idea of Darwinian evolution" alerts the savvy reader that it's
not likely to be very helpful. Skimming the rest verifies that assessment.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

----- Original Message -----
From: "IW" <iain@secure.holuwon.com>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:05 AM
Subject: [asa] Fw: Fresh look at creation - article

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I found the below article fascinating. It was sent to me sans sources
so I am not certain where this originates (book, article etc) and have
been unable to find out who to ask permission from to disseminate. My
understanding from the person who s ent it is that it is free to pass
on. I apologize in advance if wrong.

I agree with it that Genesis describes A beginning and not THE
beginning. I am skeptical of some of its postulations but await the
collective and formidable brainpower on this list to respond first.

Missions' Greatest Enemy, Greatest Violence
Ralph D. Winter

Probably few Evangelicals can easily imagine how the longstanding
interpretation of Genesis 1:1 by a Dallas Seminary professor (Dr.
Merrill Unger) could possibly lead to a momentous reinterpretation of
our conventional concepts of Christian mission in terms of enemy and
violence. However, this paper actually has three different purposes:

This paper attempts to defend the trustworthiness of the Bible in the
eyes of the average well-educated secular person by showing how the
Bible does not necessarily conflict with the idea that the universe
started with a bang and is immensely old, and that the Earth itself is
very old and displays a steady progression of increasingly complex life
forms. Even if all that all were true, what would it do to the Bible?

While this paper accepts what most paleontologists believe for the sake
of discussion, its conclusions do not depend on the validity of the
views of contemporary paleontologists. And, for the record, it does not
give an inch to the idea of Darwinian evolution or to a fallible Bible.
Secondly, it is a serious attempt to take the Bible literally and yet
to be capable of belief in both "the young Earth" and "the old Earth"
points of view. I feel sorry when I hear that a famous Bible College
graduate faculty believes in "the old Earth" while the undergraduate
faculty believes in "the young Earth," thinking they are contradictory.

Much more important, in a way, is the proposal that our current
concepts of Christian mission work are good, but incomplete, and in
fact are much too narrow if we are really setting out to glorify God
who is constantly blamed for evil. The novel element here is the idea
that the full implications of the New Testament's concept of Satan have
been largely lost in Western Christianity to the extent that we have
been influenced by Augustine's neo-platonic view of a God who, often
with mysterious reasons, initiates both good and evil with Satan only a
"bystander."

A larger interpretation of mission goes like this: we have
been recruiting people all over the world into God's eternal family,
which is an activity as basic and as significant as you can get. But
while our new "recruits" are now all dressed up in their new uniforms
they do not know they are military uniforms, and are more often hoping
to flee evil rather than fight it.

 Personal righteousness, both
"positional" and actual, would seem to be very thin if it does not turn
around and fight evil. Worse still-far worse-is the fact that if we let
the world fight disease, corruption and violence, God is generally
blamed for "allowing" such evils. We puzzle over evil if we think God
is "behind" all evil--instead of "in front" making good out of evil.
Such a theology requires books that help us to understand When God
Doesn't Make Sense.' However, suffering and violence in a war against
an intelligent enemy don't need to be explained, and for that reason
neither does the verse, "All that will live godly... will suffer
persecution."

We are in a war! Summary Opening the AD 1611 King James
Bible we read "In the beginning God created. . . ." Over the next 400
years this interpretation has been cemented in the minds of millions of
people. It conveys the idea that the Bible begins by describing the
beginning of the entire universe, not merely the new beginning of the
human story. However, not even in 1611 was the universe well
understood. It was likely far less clear to the "holy men of God"
writing in the days of Genesis.' In fact, the "known world" of Moses
would not have even included the idea of a planet, of a sphere hanging
in space.

Similarly, "The ends of the earth" in Isaiah 49:6 never
referred to our planet but to the ends of the earthen plain ending
abruptly where the "fertile crescent" of the Middle East is bounded by
the mountains rising in Turkey and Iran. In other words, the common
interpretation of Genesis today-that the universe began 6,000 years
ago-may simply be the result of reading later understanding into an
earlier text. Such errors are called anachronisms. The error is
understandable.

However, the very serious result is to force the Bible
(unfairly?) to say that the world is only 6,000 years old, and thereby
to create the greatest stumbling block to modern man's trust in the
Bible. Curiously, as long ago as 1958 the chair of the Old Testament
Department at Dallas Theological Seminary, Dr. Merrill Unger, taught
that "the geologic ages" preceded Genesis 1:1 and that the events of
Genesis 1 portray not THE beginning but "a relative beginning (Unger's
Bible Handbook)."3 His was not a new idea even then but today it is
uncommon.

Our problem is that most of the world today assumes that both
our planet and the universe are much older than 6,000 years. The grim
result, then, is that the Bible appears wrong when in fact it may in
fact be a very accurate description of things using terms that were
understood in that day. Thus, Unger's insight is what undergirds the
tentative perspective of this paper, namely, that Satan fell long
before Gen. 1:1, and began distorting all of nature from the Cambrian
Period on, continuing that type of genetic distortion after Adam's
fall, and although he was decisively routed at the turning point of the
Cross, he stalks the land to this day, his works casting blame on "the
God of Creation."

This then sets the stage for a radically expanded
concept of Christian mission. This presentation is both hypothetical
and conjectural. It lays out the predominant secular interpretation of
the history of the universe and more specifically the earth and life on
earth, doing so whenever the phrase is employed "many scientists
believe" simply describing not affirming. It does not give any credence
to Darwinian evolution at all. But it does note that there is no
necessary conflict with Genesis of the secular sequence and time spans,
if, that is, Genesis 1:1 does not describe the origin of the universe
but rather a new creation of the era of "image of God" humans. The
story is cast in narrative form for efficiency and digestible order.
Credit is due to John Eldridge for the concept of "Acts" in a story.

He
has four Acts in his superb little book, The Epic .4 I have split his
third Act into Act III, the Edenic period and Act IV, the period after
the Fall of Adam. Thus, I have five "Acts." Act I: The Creation of the
Universe Thirteen and a half, or so, billion years ago, many scientists
believe, a "Big Bang" occurred, producing the entire universe. (They
don't like the word creating.)
 • For various reasons mentioned below,
such a creation event does not seem to be what Genesis 1:1 is
describing. Four and a half billion years ago, many scientists believe,
planet Earth was formed. About four billion years ago, many scientists
believe, very small forms of life appeared on Earth. For the next 3.5
billion years life forms were still very small.
• This astounding
slowness of the formation of progressively more complex forms of life
may in this case imply that God has for millions of years been doing
that work through intelligent, but finite, intermediate beings who have
been at work in an incredibly complex, and thus lengthy, learning
curve. Perhaps some of them have been small enough to work directly
with DNA. It took a century with thousands of intelligent engineers at
work to "evolve" the Model T Ford into a Lincoln Continental. It did
not happen without intelligent guidance at every point. Prokaryotes
were followed by Eukaryotes about two billion years ago, many
scientists believe.' All angels were good at this time. Then, about 530
million years ago the Ediacaron period displayed small animals with
"radial symmetry" similar to starfish, as well as "bi-polar
symmetry"-with a front and a back and four legs.
• Significantly this
Ediacaron animal life revealed no predation or even defenses against
predation! Still only good angels 6 Act II: The Fall of Satan Next,
relatively suddenly, the "Cambrian Explosion" took place. A wide
variety of different types of animals now appeared, and, for the next
500 million years, all of them can be characterized as horrifyingly
cruel predators or prey or both. Note that this lengthy record of
violent animal life does not seem to fit well into the first chapter of
Genesis, even if the "days" spoken of there might be considered very
long, since the animals described in Genesis are explicitly declared
(v. 29) to be noncarnivorous.
• Here is a thought: this new and
radically different 500-million-year period might have begun when an
intermediate being, an archangel, in turning against his Creator in the
"Fall of Satan" carried perhaps millions of equally rebellious angels
with him, becoming what C. S. Lewis called "a hideous strength" or what
Paul called the "god of this world."
• If the long story of the
earlier, progressive, creation of nonpredatory life had reflected God's
infinite wisdom and goodness, now the pervasive distortion of that
life, if not that of a Satanic foe, would seem clearly to reflect
negatively on God's character. This negative reputation may be seen
today in the very common attribution of tragedies not to Satan, but to
"God's mysterious will." This absence of Satan in people's minds is
what allows a book by the title of When God Doesn't Make Sense,' or a
Harvard professor logically to remark that, "If the God of the
Intelligent Design proponents exists, He must be a divine `sadist' who
creates parasites that blind millions of people."' How can we reply to
such thinking if we do not recognize (point out and fight) "the works
of the devil (I John 3:8)"? Also, during the next 500 million years,
many scientists believe, many asteroidal collisions blotted out life in
various parts of the globe, as if in judgment my thinking--of the
prevailing violence and destructive nature of gruesomely distorted life
forms.
• Forty-five of the resulting craters that have been found are
fifteen miles across or larger. The largest, in the Antarctic, is 300
miles in diameter. It is believed to have occurred 275 million years
ago, and is estimated to have extinguished ninety-seven percent of all
life on Earth. Another large crater, at the north end of Mexico's
Yucatan peninsula, is believed to have occurred 65 million years ago,
and is 100 miles across. It is the one understood to have ended the
onehundred-million-year period of the characteristically violent
dinosaurs.

Many of these forty-five larger asteroids are understood to
have been solid rock miles in diameter moving at the speed of a rifle
bullet at the moment of impact.9 Following the extinction of the
dinosaurs, many scientists believe, mammals came into their own,
growing in size to tons of weight, existing virtually unchallenged
until intelligent pre-humans began to drive them into extinction.
Finally, evidence of distinctive and unprecedented intelligence
appeared, reasonably (in my opinion) the first true humans (but
Satanically distorted, carnivorous, violent, cannibals, not the Genesis
1 type).

The evidence in this case is not fossil bones but indications
of highly intelligent genetic breeding of both plants and animals, that
is, 1) the selective breeding of virtually inedible plants, deriving
corn, wheat, rice, and potatoes, etc., and 2) the selective breeding of
animal life, for example, dangerous wolves into friendly dogs. Both
types of genetic engineering, many paleo-historians and paleontologists
believe, took place about 11,000 years ago'° (about five thousand years
before the Genesis new beginning).

However, despite this early evidence
of sudden, unprecedented intelligence, all fossils of human life that
far back clearly reflect cannibalism and violence, in other words,
durable evidence of intentional, evil distortion" Act III: A New
Beginning and the Fall of Man About 6,000 years ago, at the very
beginning of the Jewish/Christian Bible, we find what may be a series
of events which could possibly be the aftermath of a fairly small
asteroidal collision in the Middle East The idea of an asteroid wiping
out all life in a local region of the earth is conjectural but not
unrealistic.

However, the idea of Genesis describing a new beginning
following a major catastrophe has been fairly widely thought of by
people such as C.I. Scofield, editor of the most widely used reference
Bible of all time, the Scofield Reference Bible; by Merrill Unger, as
mentioned earlier, a Dallas Seminary professor and editor of the
500,000-in-print Unger's Bible Handbook, published by Moody Press, and
perhaps even John Eldredge (Wild at Heart, and The Epic). The book last
mentioned speaks of events "prior to Genesis" on page 19. On page 18
Eldredge says, speaking of Genesis 1:1, An important passage it is, to
be sure. But to grasp this Epic, you cannot start there. That is way
into the story.

That is Act Three. It is a beginning, but it is the
beginning of the human story, the story of life here on earth. As
Hebrew scholar Robert Alter says, a better rendering of the Hebrew goes
"When God began to create heaven and earth." When God began to create
the life we know. And before this? There are events that have preceded
this chapter, events we must know. If you want to look back into the
once upon a time before all time, well, then you have to start with
another passage, from the Gospel of John (1: 1). (Underlining mine)

Genesis 1:2 is the rest of the sentence, describing what God had to
contend with in this particular new beginning. The English translation
"formless and void" is today widely understood not to be a good
translation of the Hebrew idiom, tohu wabohu, which more often in the
Bible means "destroyed and desolate."', The result might then actually
be "When God began to put things back together, to reclaim the heavens
and the earth, the (regional) situation appears to have been destroyed
and desolate." The subsequent verses describe the initial total
darkness surrounding the entire planet, but, then, with light peeking
through as the dust settled.

• Note well that it is typical of even the
smaller of these major asteroidal impacts to kick enough dust into the
atmosphere to block out all light for a time around the entire planet.
Gradually, however, as the dust settles, dim light becomes noticeable
once a day. Eventually the direct rays of the Sun penetrate the
remaining dust and the Sun becomes visible. Later, the Moon. Later, the
stars" These verses surely seem to be a "restoration sequence" rather
than a "creation sequence." If they are viewed as a creation series of
events many scholars have wondered how the dim light of day would have
been created before the sun appeared. The word creation is not even
used. The text simply says "Let there be light."
• Obviously those
humans wiped out in this regional impact would not have been able to
report this sequence. On the other hand, surviving humans scattered
elsewhere around the globe would certainly have been actual eye
witnesses of the darkness and the gradual reappearance of light, the
sun, etc.. Egyptian scholars then could have retained a record of such
observations so as to be the source of information Moses employed in
Genesis.
• Many Bible expos itors are either unaware of, or do not go
along with, the fairly recent search for impact craters on the earth's
surface. This search began in earnest only in 1970 after the first Moon
landing unexpectedly revealed that the hundreds of pock marks on the
Moon were not, as had been assumed, volcanic craters but were impact
craters"
• Beginning in 1812 hundreds of thousands of fossil bones of
violent animals have been dug up which belong to thousands of now
extinct forms of life. Since these animals cannot be the ones described
in Genesis 1, where both animals and man are clearly described as non
carnivorous ,'S they must have either come before Genesis or we must
assume they were distorted into their violence and carnivorous nature
after the Fall of man.

The latter possibility would force enormous
complexity into the last 6,000 years, including much extinction. Bones
have been discovered for a thousand times as many animal species as
survive today. It would seem to be easier to believe, following Unger,
that all of that violent life preceded Genesis, and that, then, Genesis
is describing a new creation of non-distorted life in the "known world"
of the writers. In fact, it may be unfair to the Bible to make it speak
of a planet since at that time people did not know of such a thing.
Indeed, most of the Old Testament is written by (KJV) "holy men of God
who spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.""' A key word here is
"men." Unlike the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon (which are said to have
been dictated by God) the Bible normally contains what these holy
writers, guided by God, understood and their hearers understood.
Reading later knowledge into earlier documents is a common mistake
called anachronism.

• Similarly, the later judgment of the flood would
reasonably be in "the known world." The table of nations in Genesis 11,
the children of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, are nations which Bible maps
locate in the Middle East. There are no Incas or Eskimos. This would
certainly be fair to the Bible. Some of the faculty at Wheaton College
have believed and taught a regional flood for fifty years.
 • Thus,
Genesis may be regional, and, if so, the Edenic events would thus not
be the first or only "new beginning." The flood is another "new
beginning." The selection of Abraham is another "new beginning." Isaac
instead of Ishmael is another "new beginning." The selection of
Jacob/Israel instead of Esau is another "new beginning." The Exodus is
another "new beginning."

The return from Babylon is another "new
beginning." The coming of Christ and the breakthrough to the Gentiles
in the NT is another "new beginning." The Reformation is another new
beginning, and so on and so forth. In any case, the vast majority of
all scientists today, if we continue to tell them that the Bible
teaches that all forms of life are no more than 6,000 years old, will
continue to feel forced to believe that the Bible cannot be trusted.
Luther and Calvin interpreted Psalm 19 to mean that the Sun revolved
around the earth, as against Copernicus' view that the earth revolved
around the Sun.

Unfortunately, people later on did not say Luther and
Calvin misinterpreted the Bible. They said the Bible must be wrong.
However, science in that case did not contradict the Bible. Science
contradicted a misinterpretation of the Bible!

• Thus, it is not to
criticize the Bible, but to defend it, if we recognize that the phrase
"to the ends of the earth" in Isaiah 49:6 only refers to the flat plain
of earth leading up to the mountains of Eastern Iran and Turkey. Only
fairly recently in European languages has the word earth (soil) meant
the Earth (a planet), and it still is not usually used that way.
Genesis 1 may then present the non-carnivorous type of life, animal and
human, which we see again at the end of time in Isaiah 6 and 11 (the
lion lying down with a lamb).

Once Adam and Eve are seduced by Satan
and turned out of Eden, the "sons of God" (the new type of humans
created in Eden in the image of God?) marry the "daughters of
men" (previously distorted and depraved humans beginning 11,000 years
ago?). In that case we can understand why the life spans of the Edenic
humans gradually shorten. Further, it would seem reasonable that the
Edenic type of. noncarnivorous human and animal life, by interbreeding
with the distorted, carnivorous life outside of Eden, would gradually
revert to the life-destroying carnivorous behavior of the pre-Edenic,
preGenesis 1:1, distorted life.

Eventually the non-carnivorous Edenic
version of human and animal life would have had virtually disappeared
into the genetically distorted earlier gene pools. This may be one way
of understanding original sin as something we cannot wish away easily,
it being inherited genetically-something illuminating Romans 3:23, "All
have sinned and come short of the glory of God." This also would enable
us to understand why being "born again" does not change all our inborn
wayward traits even though it allies us with our Father in Heaven
against hardwired genetic evil within which we still must fight-the
sort of conflict we read about in Romans 7.

Act IV: Wartime Far more
important is the fact that this scenario describes a great length of
time Satan has been at work distorting God's creation, producing the
incredible vastness of his corrupting work of which we are mostly
unaware. As one theologian put it, "The greatest achievement of Satan
is to cover his tracks.'17 The cruc ial facts would thus be that 1) we
underestimate what Satan has done and is doing, and 2) we do not
consider it our mission to fight it, and for that reason 3) we very
often attribute the works of Satan to God.

Remember the Harvard
professor mentioned earlier who quite logically remarked that "If the
God of the Intelligent Design proponents exists He must be a divine
`sadist' who creates parasites that blind millions of people." I cannot
forget that damaging statement, even though it is alarmingly
misinformed. (Why can't the Intelligent Design people admit that some
of what they see in nature is evil design, not to be blamed on a
supreme being?)

If Satan exists and opposes God in every way possible,
we might then expect two things to happen: physical distortions and
intellectual delusions. Diabolical Distortions Obviously, if the time
of the Cambrian Explosion were to mark the point when Satan turned
against God, it would mean that Satan began distorting the larger forms
of life genetically a very long period of time before the events in
Genesis even begin. It also seems logical that he would have been
twisting bacteria into dangerous germs, creating destructive viruses,
and inventing extremely clever and deadly parasites like malaria. Are
we supposed to fight germs? Is that part of the verse "The Son of God
appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil
(1 John 3:8)"?

Is this what Jesus meant when He taught us to pray "Thy
Kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven"? Augustine
and Calvin were unaware of germs, yet even our theologians or TV
preachers today do not speak of deadly germs being the work of Satan,
to be destroyed as an intentional mission of Christ and of those who
follow Him-not wanting to blame disease on God. But if you identify and
recognize the enormous global impact of disease-induced suffering as a
sphere of diabolical distortion, then both the great violence
introduced by the fall of Satan and the fall of Adam become a major
reality.

In that case, Satan becomes the enemy and the Christian life
and mission must be seen as part of an all-out war, a war to be fought
not "in addition to winning souls to Christ" but as a means of
glorifying God and thus empowering our evangelism. Disassociating God
from the works of the Devil becomes then both the means and the end of
winning souls to Christ.

Diabolical Delusions A second dimension of
Satanic evil to become aware of and to be fought as a Christian mission
is what could be called diabolic delusions. Millions of people suffer
horribly and die prematurely not only because of disease, but because
of misunderstandings about the origins of disease. The whole history of
medicine has been, in one sense, the mysteriously delayed understanding
of the real causes of disease. Just three of actually hundreds of
examples of this mysterious delay are the fact that the common cold,
tuberculosis, and duodenal ulcers were thought for many centuries not
to be the direct result of destructive germs but rather to be the
result of, respectively, 1) getting cold, 2) sleeping in damp, cold
places and 3) being subject to stress. There are many other types of
diabolical delusions.

Here are merely four of them:
• Down through
history in India thousands and thousands of widows have been burned on
their husbands funeral pyres because of the delusion that they would
thereby be reincarnated at a higher level.
• Thousands of young women
have contracted AIDS in South Africa due to the widespread delusion
that a man with AIDS can be cured by having intercourse with a virgin.
• We are deluded if we think that the world's largest business-the
American medical/pharmaceutical industry--is tracking down the primary
sources of disease. Why are we deluded? Because all of its money comes
from people who are already sick and are paying to be healed. However,
treating the sick and eradicating pathogenic sources of illnesses are
usually very different activities. For the latter the available money
is microscopic.
• In Africa, due to mistaken delusions, 140 million
women have undergone "female genitalmutilation," which often leads to
ruptured bladders (at the time of childbirth) and a resulting life of
being social outcasts. These are some of the destructive delusions
which need to be fought in the Name of Christ. Evangelical Fatalism?
However, Evangelicals, instead of fighting to destroy the "works of the
devil" have gotten accustomed to a plainly fatalistic understanding of
them as "the mysterious will of God." This is the relentless message of
the book already mentioned, When God Doesn't Make Sense (by no less
than James Dobson).

In other words, if there is no Satan, much of life
really "does not make sense," and our concept of the Christian life and
mission becomes diabolically reduced What to Do? Many may think, "What
can I as an individual do? What should I do differently? Isn't it still
important to win people to the Lordship of Christ even if I can't
explain to them how their lives can make a difference in the
identification and destruction of the works of Satan?" Yes, winning
people to Christ is still bedrock.

 But two other things are also true.
1. More and more people can't even be won to Christ because they are
deeply confused by the "good news" of a loving God who would seem to
have created a world of suffering, or to have at least been unwilling
or unable, in general, to rescue us from earthly horrors of evil and
pain until the next world.
2. People who are won to Christ rarely understand that they have been
recruited to become soldiers in an all-out war. Of course we know that
individuals on their own can't "win a war." To win a war you need a
whole lot of things. The United States during the Second World War
would be an example. Swarms of "servicemen" (including women) swirled
about on planes, trains, and buses, heading off to ports of departure
for the various "theaters of war" around the world. Eleven million were
sprayed out across the globe in the Army, Air Corps, and the Navy. But
200 million "civilians" staying behind were equally occupied by the
war. As millions of men disappeared from their jobs women took their
places.

A largely women's workforce ("Rosie the Riveter") built entire
ships one every fourteen days, medium bombers one every hour. Nylon was
needed for parachute cords no more stockings. No more coffee, incoming
ships had no room for such trivialities because more crucial goods took
their place. Any idle moments or unused material were instantly
challenged by "Don't you know there is a war on?" You could get a huge
fine for unnecessary drivingdriving unrelated to the war, like, yes, a
family outing on Sunday!

Gasoline had other more crucial uses. Today,
when Evangelical believers get together they don't compare notes on how
to win the war against the "works of the devil." They compare prices on
home furnishings, vacations, adult toys. Truly, they don't know there
is a war on! We act like we don't live in a wartime economy but in a
time of peace. Organize, Organize, Organize Obviously, individuals need
to organize. Do we need dozens of new specialized mission agencies?
Note that there is not one Christian institution in the world dedicated
to eradication of disease pathogens. Our entire, mammoth
medical/pharmaceutical industry is ninety-nine percent focused on the
needs of people who are already sick, rather than on ways of
eradicating the disease origins.

Our pastors tend to define "Christian
service" as activity in and for and through the local church, not the
labors of the forty-hour week. If, as Rick Warren says, he wants to
transform his "audience into an army," and other pastors by the
thousands would follow him, a veritable revolution might occur. But his
Purpose Driven Life book contains not a single line about the
forty-hour week, much less does it recognize that the forty-hour week
is exactly where, in a major way, we can best actually fight evil,
corruption and disease, efforts crucial to restoring glory to God and
credibility to our evangelism. (In a conversation about this he told me
he is going to write another book.)

This sphere is nowadays being
called "Public Theology." However, although we hear of pastors around
the world losing their lives because of their faith, it is not often we
hear of laymen in the USA even losing their jobs because of, say, being
honest or opposing deception. Basically, the incredible violence we
must fight against in the Name of Christ constitutes an all-out war.
Neither laity nor clergy are well aware of that war. Thus, all true
believers, not just "full time workers," must be willing to organize
against evil, to be creative, and to measure every vocation not by its
pay scale, but by its contribution to that war. It seems very clear
that we must recruit people for this war as well as for heaven. If we
can't do both we will ultimately fail at both.

 This is why the
Christian mission is far more complex and demanding than we thought. I
would hope existing mission agencies could lead the way in the
discovery and the defeat of both 1) Satanic indirectly-inspired human
evil such as war, and such as the corruption that guts almost every
secular type of humanitarian aid, and 2) direct Satanic evil such as
genetic distortions of man and animal, the creation of disease germs
and diabolical delusions. This means seeing mission in very much larger
terms. It also gives a much larger role to laymen than check-book
missions or "after hours Christianity" centering on work in and for the
church.

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Received on Tue Nov 13 07:20:32 2007