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

Why do we feel that we have to fill in the details in the Biblical
accounts that the Lord chose to leave out? These speculations are never
universally convincing, and if people get the impression that they are
part of the Biblical teaching, we give them another possible cause for
doubting the Bible.

Gordon Brown (ASA member)

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, IW wrote:

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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 14:39:42 2007