The Challenge of the Evil One

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.)

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(12) The Challenge of the Evil One

As I’m sorting the books in Ralph Winter’s library, I’m putting little red dots on the books that relate to the Roberta Winter Institute (www.robertawinterinstitute.org). Here’s a key book I read during my mountain retreat time with my family this week:

Lewis, Edwin. 1948. The Creator and the Adversary. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury.

A chapter entitled, “The Challenge to Mortal Combat,” contains Lewis’ interpretation of what it means to pray and act that “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” He describes “a speaker who called upon the American people to cease believing in God because seventeen million persons now living would die of cancer.” But Lewis offers an alternative for those who know that if God’s will is frustrated by the death of a cancer sufferer, there is “still a will of God [the Creator] that the fight against evil [the Adversary] shall be continued.” Instead of ceasing to believe in God, or the goodness of God, Lewis challenged that that speaker “would have made a much better and a much wiser use of his time had he called upon the American people to join with God in the fight against cancer” (pp. 149-50).

This is exactly how Ralph Winter viewed the damage being done to God’s reputation. Winter didn’t see Lewis’ book until 2005 (after I quoted the section above in a paper I wrote for my doctoral studies), but Winter had already written in 2002, “To destroy the works of the devil is one major way in which our testimony of word and deed can glorify the true nature of our living God, our heavenly father. It is not an alternative to evangelism, it will make our evangelism more credible. It is to rectify our God’s damaged reputation. It is to avoid extending the implicit and embarrassing policy of almost constantly misrepresenting Him in our mission work around the world. Attacking the roots of disease is part and parcel of our basic mandate to glorify God in all the earth.”

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