Milton! thou shouldest be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again:
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

This was the cry of William Wordsworth early in the nineteenth century as he saw the demise of English culture underway. The Church, the state, the home, the writers and shapers of society were called to task, for the nation had lost its soul and was hurtling headlong towards moral defacement. “Milton!” he cried, “England hath need of thee.” I wonder today who we would cry for to be alive again, to lead us through the wilderness.

But where do we look and to whom shall we go? In America the name of Lincoln looms large as a symbol of honor and courage. In racial strife the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. still echoes in our streets, pleading for the end of hate. Do we cry out, “Lincoln, we have need of thee!”? “King, we have need of thee!”? Yet, as I think of them and of what they stood for, I am struck by the realization that both of them were silenced by assassins. The crimson tide of violence, the best voices notwithstanding, has never been stemmed since Cain drew the blood of his brother Abel.

The thundering question emblazoned in newspaper and on many of our minds is often “WHY?” And yet, as one who stands before audiences all over the world facing hard questions I am sometimes tempted to ask a question of the questioner, “Do you really want a solution or is the constant refrain ‘why’ a way of escaping the responsibility of the answer?” The Bible tells us, “He has showed you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Jesus wept over his own beloved city and said, “If only you knew the things that belonged to your peace, but now they are hid from your eyes” (Luke 19:42). Their problem was not the absence of answers, rather, the suppression of them. Our predicament, I believe, is the same. There are some clues we already have—enough to bring correctives within our reach. But do we really want the truth?

There are issues in our society that we must have the courage to address, though they are not popular and never will be, for they stare at us in the face. Our societal indicators are important because they are pointers to the malady. At the root of our cultural rot is a wanton failure to admit our contradictions, and contradiction is to reason what evil is to life. When our reasoning is contradictory, the argument breaks down. When evil invades a life, life breaks down. When hope dies in a life, life is embodied loneliness awaiting escape. We have given our children contradictory assumptions about life and are then shocked at their evil behavior and the disintegration of their lives. This cultural breakdown did not happen overnight. When moralizing reaches the front page in a society that denounces moral moorings, the aberration occurs not when one lives in keeping with that theory but when one smuggles in values while denying that values exist. In a soul-less culture the real question is not why violence or why injustice, but why do we weep at it?

In his cynical way, Malcolm Muggeridge reminded us that all new news is old news happening to new people. He was right. The parents of the first family in Eden questioned whether God had really spoken. Here autonomy squared off against the revelation of God. A value-free society was introduced. Second, the son in turn questioned whether the altar really had any worth. Secularism evicted the sacred and planted the void within. Denying the place of a moral law and thwarting the legitimacy of worship built the first cemetery at Eden. And so it is that we all agree with Muggeridge’s unhappy reminder that atrocities are not new, only the victims are. We would do well, however, to remember another piece of news, which is equally old. In C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters a senior devil is training a junior devil on how to destroy faith in God from the hearts of people: “Work on their horror of the same old thing. The horror of the same old thing is the greatest passion we have put into the human heart.” How appropriate that warning is. We ask why, while we have an aversion or horror for the same old solution. But the stories in the headlines that jar us, in an extraordinary way, bring to light the power of the same old thing.

The Bible only speaks of one remedy: the transformation of the heart by making Christ the center. He is the one who takes us from paradise lost to paradise regained, calling the Miltons among us who will likewise walk where the hurting walk and embrace as the hurting tremble. The world has need of him; the world has need of them. Those who mock the simplicity of the remedy only make evil more complex and unexplainable. Every heart has the potential for murder. Every heart needs a redeemer. That is the message of Christianity. The world took the child born to save and crucified him. But by his triumph over death he brings life to our dead souls and begins the transformation within. Emmanuel, God is with us.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

http://www.rzim.org/

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Greece and Turkey. While there, I marveled at the ancient ruins of the Greek temples and wondered at the beautiful mosaics of Christ covering the ceilings of every church—from a tiny chapel in the countryside to the great cathedral of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. During the tour, we often saw the ruins of the temples standing side by side with ancient Christian churches. Other times, our guide informed us that the Christian church was built upon the now decimated ruins of an ancient temple.

I remember feeling a bit disturbed over the loss of these ancient ruins, which would never be seen again, now built over by largely abandoned Christian chapels. And yet I understood the sweeping movement of Christianity—overturning the pagan environment of Greece and Rome and building churches and chapels as signposts of that victory.

This scene replicated across the landscapes of Greece and Turkey served metaphorically as a picture of the uneasy tension between Christianity and its surrounding culture. On the one hand, church and pagan temple stood side by side, a living picture of the parable Jesus once told about allowing wheat and tares to grow up together until the judgment. On the other hand, churches built on the ruins of pagan temples presented the image of Christianity conquering the pagan religions of the day, standing in triumph and uprooting the tares in victory.

Christianity wrestles with this same tension today, vacillating between constructive engagement in culture on the one hand and eschewing the culture on the other. The art world is often an arena for this battle. Should Christians engage in the arts? If so, how should they engage in the arts? Should there be Christian music, art, and literature? Or should there simply be Christians who make music, produce art, and write literature? In other words, should Christians build next to the pagan temple or replace the pagan temple with a church?

While the answers to these questions can often be complex, perhaps there are some insights from another picture of early Christian interaction using art from the prevailing culture. The catacombs under the streets of Rome are filled with art produced by the early Christians. Interestingly enough, however, the Christian scenes normally used non-Christian forms. Some of the portrayals of Jesus as the Good Shepherd are clearly modeled after pagan pictures in which Orpheus was the central figure.(1) It is not an accident that the early Christians chose to model their art after the pagan depictions of Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was such a brilliant musician that “he moved everything animate and inanimate; his music enchanted the trees and rocks and tamed wild beasts, and even the rivers turned in their course to follow him.”(2) Clearly, the early Christians used this artistic rendering for apologetic reasons; like the myth of Orpheus, they believed Jesus had a cataclysmic influence on all of creation.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Building Culture or Making Ruins →

Ask an American about the most historically significant event of 1776 and you will most certainly hear about the signing of the declaration, independence from Great Britain, and the birthday of our nation. But 1776 also significantly marks the publication of Adam Smith’s influential Wealth of Nations, widely considered the first modern work in the field of economics and a work that remains widely influential today. Both Wealth of Nations and The Declaration of Independence are publications that have inarguably shaped the world in ways beyond even what the original authors imagined.

All the same, historian Mark Noll suggests there is a third publication of 1776 that may have been even more historically influential than both of these momentous options. In a lecture at Harvard University, he argued: “I say with calculated awareness of what else was going on in Philadelphia [the signing of the Declaration of Independence], and in Scotland, where Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, that of all world-historical occurrences in that year, the publication of August Montagu Toplady’s hymn [Rock of Ages] may have been the most consequential.”(1)

This may seem a surprising choice—particularly for those who want to relegate the role of religion to far more primitive histories and perhaps also for those who want to elevate nationalism to religious standing. Noll’s suggestion asks that we look not only beyond our national histories, but beyond the version of history that wants to claim that there has always been a split between the sacred and the secular. Toplady’s hymn is one of the two most reprinted hymns in Christian history, but its words remind us of a history far beyond even this:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood, From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
Not the labours of my hands, Can fulfill Thy law’s demands;

Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow,
All for sin could not atone: Thou must save, and Thou alone.
Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy Cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress; Helpless, look to Thee for grace;

Foul, I to the fountain fly; Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Shadow and Influence →