The Greatest Mistake in Missions

A Talk at the Kabul Reunion, Colorado Springs

Ralph D. Winter

Sunday, August 8, 2004

Scripture: Genesis 20:1-11

Key text: Abraham replying to Abimilech who was outraged by Abraham's conduct: “I said to myself, ‘There is no fear of God in this place.'”

Undoubtedly, the most unfortunate error of judgment a missionary can possibly make is to assume that none of the people to whom he is ministering have made any spiritual moves in the right direction. Perhaps most of them have not, just as in our own society most people have little awareness of God in their lives. But some of them may have!

On this point the Bible is very clear. God is at work in all parts of the world, and for us to seek out the “man of peace” and build on that foundation is terribly important. Many times mission outreach offers a host of desirable elements, such as the hope of getting out of that society, or going to the States, or getting a job or an education, or some other non-spiritual attraction. But that is not the best foundation to build on.

This was, in a way, what I felt Joe Richie was saying last night. He was insisting that there are Muslims and others in Afghanistan, even—or especially—in villages, who have genuine good will and substantial integrity, with whom we can deal to do real things even though our primary and ulterior motive is not to instruct them in the fine points of the trinity.

My personal pilgrimage in this sphere has led me again and again in recent years to trust the Bible—above things I have heard in church. Indeed, the entire history of missions is basically the history of the Bible. There is no other book like it. If you see a picture of someone going into some sort of religious building carrying a book it won't be a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Shintoist. No other major religion has a book comparable to the level-headed coherence and compelling authority of our Bible.

My oldest daughter, living for years in the mountains of Morocco, found the women down the street would come over any time she promised to tell them more about Jesus. As a result, the Qur'an grows strangely dim in the bright, intelligible light of the New Testament Gospels.

In my pilgrimage with the Bible the most significant new understanding began in an all-too-brief fall term at Prairie Bible Institute, along with Maynard Eyestone. This was the fall of 1949. I went for only one semester because I wanted to see how they taught the Bible using “Search Questions.”

[Digression: Maynard Eyestone and I had already been together two years before in 46-47 at Princeton Seminary when I had planted a tiny seed which grew into a stream of Americans teaching English at Habibia and later founding AIT. That earlier period included the first of the Urbana Conferences (although it was held in Toronto) where I originally heard of the tent-making strategy.]

At Prairie I first heard of the mission significance of the Abrahamic Covenant (Gen 12:1-3). There I was exposed to Exodus 19 (“That all the earth may hear”). I already knew about Isaiah 49:6, “I want you to be my salvation to the ends of the earth.”

The situation with Abimilech began to grow on me. He was outside the covenant and may have had little or no contact with the Bible. Many times in the Bible we see evidence of God working outside of the box, so to speak.

Another phenomenally significant thing to me is what I now call “The Rosetta Stone” of Biblical interpretation. It has become clearer and clearer to me that the Bible employs two paradoxically different ways of explaining what happens. One, more typical of the OT, takes the point of view of the fulfillment of God's purposes. The other, more often in the NT, speaks of human or natural causes.

The most dramatic example of both of these two apparently conflicting points of view can be found in the passages about Joseph in Egypt. It straightforwardly describes the evil intentions of his brothers who sent him into slavery. Later he himself tells them, “You did not send me. God sent me.” The Bible, here, is not contradicting itself but is portraying two strikingly different but equally legitimate and true explanations of the same event. One is from the point of view of instrumental causes. The other looks at the purposes of God in the event.

In this case the two explanatory perspectives are found in the same Biblical passage. More startling is the contrast in perspective as revealed in II Samuel and I Chronicles when David's sin in counting the people comes up. The twenty-five verses describing this event are identical except for one word. In II Sam 24:1 it is God who instigates David to go wrong. In I Chron 21:1 it is Satan who instigates David to go wrong. One account derives from the sovereignty of God, the other from the on-going free will of intermediate beings to do evil.

Indeed, since the OT and the NT extensively side with each of these apparently contrary perspectives, we can at least recognize the importance of not merely attributing everything to God's initiative. As long as intermediate beings, angels (good and bad) and men (good and bad) exist, the NT perspective must be taken seriously.

The plot thickens. If the Abimilech account verifies the work of God's spirit beyond the bounds of His covenant people, then the question may fairly be asked if the Babylonian Captivity did not introduce Jewish theologians into a more ample understanding of causality—that is, the source of evil? Was this due to their exposure to the radical dualism of the Zoroastrian religious tradition, which envisioned two equal gods, one good and one evil?

The influence of Zoroastrianism on Christianity later on can easily be seen in the strong Christian movement called Manichaeism, a tradition in which Augustine first believed. But that kind of Christian dualism is not seen in the NT where Satan is in no way a god equal to the good God. Furthermore, for that very reason, Manichaeism was strongly rejected and suppressed once the Roman government sought to foment a single orthodox tradition and the NT came to the fore as the ultimate basis for doctrine.

Unfortunately, Augustine himself not only saw the error of Manichaeism but flipped to a more neoplatonic point of view in which there was no intelligent angelic opponent of God at all, or at least he did very little, all things being the initiative of God.

Augustine is merely the most influential theologian in history. Much of our present thinking derives not so much from the Bible as it does from doctrinal frameworks built out of Augustinian thinking.

For us today this Augustinian influence is very significant. It seems noble to attribute everything to God, and there is truth in that. But when it comes to our joining with God and His Son in fighting evil, such theology may tie our hands. I Jn 3:8 says “The Son of God appeared for this purpose that He might destroy the works of the devil.”

Neither Luther nor Calvin had the slightest hint about the existence of deadly viruses, bacteria and tiny parasites. Their theology does not address that issue. If they had they might have, following Augustine, decided that such dangerous entities are the work of God and thus we cannot fight against them.

Of course, we know we must help the sick. We are, in Augustine's perspective left without a mandate to seek out and destroy dangerous germs. Thus, when Jonathan Edwards sought to use a primitive vaccine against the ravages of small pox among his native American congregation at Stockbridge, the pastors of Massachusetts formed an “anti-vaccination society” against him and declared that if he went ahead with his idea he would be “interfering with Divine Providence.”He went ahead, trying it out on his own wrists. As the pastors had predicted he died of small pox, which is the very most painful way to die. God killed him. That is the Augustinian perspective again.

As a matter of fact, our entire Evangelical theology today is not so much a theology of war against Satan and his works as it is a rationale for seeking to rescue Christians from that battle into “peace of mind” and assurance of salvation.

For some this, then, expands into a globally relevant Gospel emphasizing to men and nations salvation from the penalty of sin without serious and trenchant efforts literally to deliver them from the power of sin and evil.

This partial Gospel underlies the enduring tension between “evangelism and social action.” That tension is essentially the dichotomy between an intellectually framed Gospel of Eternal Salvation and the more Biblical intuition of many sincere Christian leaders (including many missionaries) in groping their way into the full meaning of the Biblical mandate.

That mandate is to restore the glory of God among all peoples by more adequately representing His character. We misrepresent Him if we talk only about getting to heaven. We must also reveal by our actions His concern for the conquest of evil and evil disease. Tiny pathogens right now globally drag down into pain, distorting suffering, and futility far more than half of all the people in the world alive today. True, humans since Calvin have made amazing progress in stamping out recurrent plagues. However, Christians have not been prominent in that effort. Here again we see God using people outside of the Covenant.

Today we must understand more clearly that neither Western Christianity nor Protestantism, nor even Evangelicalism is the only substantial cultural tradition stemming from the Bible. We must recognize a whole lot of derivations. Greeks developed a tradition (Orthodoxy) from the Bible which is different from the Latin (Roman Catholic) derivation, which is different from the Armenian, which is different from the Ethiopian Orthodox. Even more different are the Semitic derivation called Islam, and the Northern European derivations called Protestantism, Mennonite, Evangelicalism, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Apostolic, etc.

All of these are substantially Biblical. All of them are flawed. All of them are cultural traditions—by now—whose formalized doctrines do not all fairly represent the Bible.

If we can recognize the Spirit of God at work with Abimilech, the Ninevites, Naaman the Syrian, Cornelius, etc. we need to be able to seek out and build upon such people within any of these flawed traditions, specifically Islam.

If we expect to find believing people in all societies we need to avoid calling just our followers “believers.” The Bible does not put as much emphasis on the extensiveness of our intellectual knowledge as the intensiveness of our heart-faith.

Furthermore, it is now reported for all to know that the incredible impact of the Bible on India, for example, has produced between 14 and 24 million daily Bible reading, believers in Jesus Christ who are still part of their Hindu communities . They do not call themselves Christians.

The same is true in more than one movement to Christ within the world's Islamic traditions. In Afghanistan it may be common to demand that a spiritually seeking person distinctly recognize the divinity of Christ, thinking that that is the key point. Curiously, the millions of Ismaili Muslims (many in Afghanistan) already believe Jesus was the Son of God. But, since they still call themselves Muslims, we may demand that they learn and acknowledge still more of our “Christian” doctrinal tradition—and begin to call themselves Christian? Do we preach Christ or Christianity? If the latter, it may be the greatest mistake in missions today.

Addendum: Following that brief period at Prairie things were already moving in Afghanistan and the founding of AIT came to the fore. That was an Afghan government project instigated by Dick Soderberg, a close childhood friend who was one of the first I recruited to teach at Habibia. Maynard and I spent the Jan to June period going up and down the Atlantic picking up from MIT, Rutgers, etc. books and lab equipment that those schools were willing to donate to our newly formed AITI, which was headed up by my father, an intermediate corporation to which U.S. schools could donate things waiting to be shipped to Afghanistan and turned over to the government. My older brother Paul left his engineering career in the States to head up AIT. In the fall of both Maynard and I enrolled for an M.A. in TESL at Columbia University Teachers College, preparing to go to Afghanistan.