This blog highlights books from
Ralph Winter’s Library and compares excerpts to Winter’s own writings on one or
more of the themes from his list of twelve “Frontiers of Perspective.” (See the
full list at the end of this blog.)
…
(12) The Challenge of the Evil One
Lewis, Edwin. 1948. The
Creator and the Adversary. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury.
Edwin Lewis writes, “Too often we forget our Lord’s own
ministry among men. We rightly enough declare that the Church is called to
proclaim and exemplify the Gospel, but have we fully understood what this
Gospel is? … ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it
more abundantly.’ So said Jesus, and it belongs to us to inquire what he meant
by abundant life. How better can we tell than by considering the record of his
own days among men? Too often when we do this we pass over … his “mighty
works.” … Can it be that what they signify is as much a part of ‘the simple
Gospel’ as are his most kindly sayings? Can it be that what the ‘mighty works’
were directed against was a form of
evil whose continued presence in the world is … a sign of the Adversary’s
activity and a challenge to the Creator and His Kingdom? Then what were they
directed against? They were directed against pain, against disease, … against
hunger,… For Jesus all these were the evidences not of the will of God but of
they denial of his will. They bespoke the reign of that ’strong man’ whom he
himself said he must first bind before he could despoil.” … The miracles … mean
that they Church of Christ is committed by the example of her Lord to an
unrelenting attack upon hunger and the causes thereof, and upon disease and the
causes thereof…. God is against
them, and he fought them, as he did in Christ, as an evidence of his real will
and purpose.” (pp. 265-66).
In
an explanation for the founding of the Roberta Winter Institute
(www.robertawinterinstitute.org) Dr. Winter told his staff, “The
primary focus of this new institute will not be laboratory science but public
and mission awareness of the need for a new theological sensitivity for
destroying the works of the devil.”
Ralph Winter’s 12 “Frontiers of
Perspective” represent major shifts in his thinking that “profoundly modified
and molded his perception of the mission task”:
(1)
Unreached Peoples
(2) The
Great Commission and Abraham
(3) From
the Unfinished Task to the Finishable Task
(4) Failure
with the Large Groups and the Off-setting Trend to “Radical Contextualization”
(5) Reverse
Contextualization, the Recontextualization of Our Own Tradition
(6) The
Reclaiming of the Gospel of the Kingdom
(7) Beyond
Christianity
(8) A
Different Type of Recruitment
(9) A
Trojan Horse
(10)
Needed: a Revolution in Pastoral Training
(11) The
Religion of Science
(12) The
Challenge of the Evil One
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