By Brian Lowther
What distressed Ralph Winter about those who accepted disease and suffering as if it were from God’s hand was the way it profaned the true nature of God – i.e. loving, good, powerful, etc. Winter looked to the example of Jesus, who was deeply concerned about physical deformities, disease and suffering. Jesus was decidedly not in the business of inflicting people with pain or diseases to deepen their spiritual lives. In fact, if God is in that business, why did Jesus go around relieving people of pain and sickness? You can see why Winter agonized over the fact that for centuries much of the evil, suffering and violence in the world has been attributed to God. He was convinced that this was the reason we were not winning very many educated people to Christ. And he was convinced that if this notion continued, many of those millions of rural people and uneducated people we had recently won would eventually lose their faith just as they have in Europe and much of America.
