In what ways are followers of Jesus demonstrating God's loving character through caring for the sick, preventing disease, and even attempting to eradicate some diseases?
Photo credit: Sanofi Pasteur - Flickr
by Beth Snodderly, Editor
Ralph Winter founded the Roberta Winter Institute to “declare war on [the] sources of disease, in addition to being kind helpfully to sick people.”[1] Although Winter wrote in 2002 that “Virtually no one is trying to figure out how to eradicate pathogens” (Winter 2008, 174), that is no longer true. WCIU Board member, Dr. Richard Gunasekera, is carrying on Winter’s vision through his research with nano molecules, first at Rice University and now at Biola University.
by Brian Lowther
“There is absolutely no evidence I know of in all the world of any theologically driven interest in combating disease at its origins. I have not found any work of theology, any chapter, any paragraph, nor to my knowledge any sermon urging us—whether in the pew or in professional missions—to go to battle against the many disease pathogens we now know to be eradicable.” —Ralph D. Winter, December 2001
This quote has inspired much of our effort here in the Roberta Winter Institute. It has also compelled us to search high and low to prove this notion wrong. In recent years a few initiatives addressing malaria have cropped up; some led by Christian groups.
Read Moreby Beth Snodderly
One way to describe the overarching goal Ralph Winter had in mind for the Roberta Winter Institute (RWI) was “to prompt the theological world to begin working on a ‘theology of disease.’” He reflected on the types of inadequate responses to disease that are prevalent in the evangelical world and concluded that this was an obstacle to the spread of the gospel among thinking people in major unreached blocs of the world’s peoples.
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