In a world of finger-pointing, Tetsuya Ishikawa paused instead to confess guilt. After seven years at the forefront of the credit markets, he took the idea of a friend to write a book called How I Caused the Credit Crunch because, in the friend’s analysis, “it sounds like you did.”(1) In the form of a novel that discredits the notion of the financial sector as a collaboration of remote, unthinking forces, he admits in flesh and blood that he believes he is guilty, too. Though reviewers note Ishikawa does not remain long with his admission of responsibility, he succeeds in showing the financial markets as a reflection of human choices with real, moral dimensions—and, ultimately, the futility of our ongoing attempts at finding a better scapegoat.

Whenever the subject of blame or fault comes about in any sector of life, whether economic, societal, or individual, scapegoating is a far more common reaction than confession. Most of us are most comfortable when blame is placed as far away from us as possible. Even the word ‘confession,’ the definition of which is concerned with personally owning a fault or belief, is now often associated with the sins of others, which an outspoken soul just happens to be willing to share with the world happily willing to listen: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Confessions of a Columnist. We are interested in those confessions of a former investment banker/warlord/baseball wife because the ‘owning up’ has nothing to do with owning anything.

Perhaps like many of us in our own confessing, Charles Templeton’s 1996 book, Farewell to God, which offered the confessions of a former Christian leader, is filled with moments of confession in both senses of the word: honest commentary and easy scapegoating. In his thoughts that deal with the Christian church, it is particularly apparent. Pointing near and far and wide, Templeton observes that the church indeed has a speckled past: “Across the centuries and on every continent, Christians—the followers of the Prince of Peace—have been the cause of and involved in strife. The church during the Middle Ages was like a terrorist organization.”(2) He admits that some good has come from Christian belief, but that there is altogether too much bad that has come from it. He then cites the church’s declining numbers as evidence that the world is in agreement; people are losing interest because the church is failing to be relevant. Pews are empty; denominations oppose one another; the church is floundering and its influence waning—except perhaps its negative influence, which he insists is on the rise. Of course, Templeton is by no means alone in these accusations.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Wrong With the World? →

The pairing of words in Isaiah 61 comes to mind often, poetry to a world of contrasts. Isaiah describes a coming seismic, paradoxical shift in the way the world operates, at the hands of one who will:

bring good news to the oppressed,

and bind up the broken-hearted,

who will proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

who will provide for those who mourn

and give them beauty for ashes,

the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

Isaiah’s promising description of life as shalom is not a public relations campaign promising the harder realities of life will soon be forgotten, earlier recollections of despair erased. Isaiah’s promising words and the gospel that later brings these promises to life are not catchy political slogans. Instead, they sing a very unflattering, enigmatic song about a very meek Son of God who appears on the scene of a fairly unimpressive city—not the Jerusalem of royalty and fanfare, but the back streets of Bethlehem—a savior who exits shamefully on a hill out of town, crucified between criminals. My toddler’s ‘Storybook Bible’ tells it this way: “So the wise men followed the star out of the big city, along the road, into the little town of Bethlehem. They followed the star through the streets of Bethlehem, out of the nice part of town, through the not-so-nice part of town, into the really-not-nice-at-all part of town, down a little dirt track, until it stopped right over… a little house. But wait. It wasn’t a palace. And there weren’t any guards. Or servants. Or flags. Or red carpets. Or trumpets. Or anything. Did they get it wrong? Or was this what God meant?”

Was this what God meant? I want to suggest that this is a question for philosophers as much as for two year-olds, a question for the oppressed and the brokenhearted as much as for captives on the verge of being set free, and exiles holding the heartbreaking sensation of home under their feet once again. Was this what God meant? If Isaiah’s glimpsing of shalom is not an image campaign or a political slogan attempting to cover over Israel’s years of loss, what is it then? If beauty doesn’t erase ashes, does it sit with them, does it hold them? Or is it just an exasperating look at a fatalism of opposites?

Was this what God meant? How do we hold these paradoxical times of life—beauty and ashes, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, captivity and release, thankfulness and a faint spirit? Whether we ask as the brokenhearted soul looking out with disillusion or as a beaming bride and groom standing on the promise of new hope, an answer is hard to put into words.

But this is why I love the concept of shalom that Isaiah gives us in words but perhaps even more powerfully in image and substance. Isaiah is not necessarily attempting to explain anything away. Beauty and comfort and release and gladness and joy are indeed proclaimed, but it all comes as the promise of a God who is somehow present in the midst of Israel’s complicated, difficult, dark and beautiful realities. Peering at Jesus in that little house in the less than savory section of Bethlehem, the wise men aren’t attempting to justify the strange or dark realities of Jesus’s birth either. A king without a palace. A mother without a husband. A Light in the midst of the dark streets of Bethlehem. Despite the way it looks, they know they have seen the stars align in this child. And, dark though it is, they are giving thanks.

The promise of God’s shalom is not a thin attempt to distract us from our own darkness or a flimsy pat on the back for the profound brokenness of the world. It is not an image campaign to make us feel better, but the promise of one who can somehow hold it all. It is the promise of one who, somehow, is already about the profound work of our restoration and healing, which also, will one day be complete. Hundreds of years after Isaiah gave us this glimpse of shalom, that child from Bethlehem, where the hopes and fears of all the years intersect, stands up in a local synagogue, reading these very words of Isaiah, and announces that he is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s lyric. Jesus is the promise of shalom, the one who is somehow able to hold ashes and still offer us beauty, who both mourns beside us and who dries our very eyes, who embodies the good news to the oppressed and is even now about the work of restoration in the deepest sense of human flourishing we could never imagine. In the phrase of fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, Christ is the very embodiment of the moment of coincidentia oppositorum—the impossible moment when opposites meet. Might our hopes and fears of all the years rest in him tonight.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) “No Place Like Home,” This American Life, episode 520, March 14, 2014. Ira Glass tells the story from the point of view of Calgary.

(2) See Isaiah 61, particularly 61:1-3.

(3) “Dark though it is” is a line from the W.S. Merwin poem, “Thanks,” written in 1927.

http://www.rzim.org/

A shocking story appeared in the Times of India, about a teenager, thirteen years of age, who had taken to prostitution because of her obsessive craze for high-end gadgets and mobile phones. The mother, who runs a grocery shop, did not have any clue of her daughter’s act until the girl spilled the beans abruptly, fearful that she had become pregnant. The shocked mother tried to explain to the teenager that prostitution is illegal and immoral, but the girl refuses to stop or to see anything wrong in the act. She reveals that she had been working independently and booked her clients through a secret secondary phone. The counselor who attended to the teenager noted that she seemed unphased and took quite some time to respond to the counselling, simply repeating in a matter-of-fact tone that, she was strapped for money and unable to buy the latest gizmos and gadgets that her friends used.

This, perhaps, is not an isolated incident but a reflection of a trend among us these days. The young (or, most of us, for that matter), have become so gadget-crazy that they not only draw pleasure, but also their identity from the gadgets that they possess. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality (in fact, the one who first coined the term “virtual reality”), talks about the reductionist tendencies prevalent in the field of Computer Science—for example, reducing thinking to mere “information processing” and prostrating oneself before machines. He points out further, that every software program embodies a personal philosophy: “[I]t is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering….People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – You Are What You Possess →

For anyone who has ever been troubled by the lone sock left at the end of the laundry, help is on the way, and it comes in the form of indignation: Who ever said socks had to come in pairs anyway? At least that is the rebellious philosophy of one sock manufacturer who is single handedly trying to change the way we see “the sock problem.”(1) “The missing sock is never going to go away,” said one of the company’s founders, insisting that this is a way to have fun with one very small real-world problem: “People lose their socks… Let’s embrace the problem, and run with it.”(2) Currently they have in circulation over six hundred thousand socks, all sold without matches in packages of 1, 3, or 7.

Type A personalities aside, the embracing of mismatched socks actually seems to be catching on. I happen to think the idea is clever, particularly among the target market (girls age 9-13), but I also think it may indeed be one more logical outworking of a current philosophical state of mind. “Imbalance by design—and the studied quirkiness it reveals—is everywhere,” notes one cultural observer.(3) Random is the new order, as Apple insisted a few years ago. Whether selling music or socks, in the constant undertow of marketing, the spirit and mood of the age is keenly, if cleverly, seen. But imbalance by design is still by design.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman once jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt—or perhaps a twitter feed. With such a challenge in mind, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins offers up his own one-lined slogan: “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.” This is to say, as he has said elsewhere, the watchmaker is blind. The universe has neither design nor purpose; it exhibits nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

But if the universe has always been a disordered series of time and matter and chance, I’m not alone in my need to understand how we account for the intricate orderedness to life, the uniformity of nature, even the intricacy of the very mind that asks the question. How is it that we can ever accept the non-random consistency of nature in a random world? And what would it really look like if random was the new order? Even in the nonconforming concept of mismatched socks, the factories making them still exhibit a scrupulous degree of order; each random sock is designed and produced with creativity and intent.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Matchless Wonder →

The trial of Dylann Roof has made national headlines for several months, culminating in his being sentenced to death for the murder of nine African American Christians. Welcomed by the participants of the bible study without question, his sinister intentions were executed as heads bowed in prayer. As the news stories retold the testimony of those who survived, the horror was palpable. And in the aftermath of the horror, the tragedy of lives lost in this way while at a church bible study is overwhelming. It is no wonder that some of the relatives of those murdered were filled with rage.

But the real wonder of the trial coverage is the forgiveness offered to Dylann Roof by the majority of the bereaved. “The hate you possess is beyond human comprehension,” Melvin Graham, a brother of one of the victims, Cynthia Hurd, told the young white supremacist seated across the courtroom. “You wanted people to kill each other. But instead of starting a race war, you started a love war.” One victim’s sister-in-law offered to come and pray with Roof before he went to prison if he wanted her to do so. In fact, five family members offered Mr. Roof a measure of public forgiveness at his bond hearing held just two days after the killings.(1)

As I read these news stories, I am in awe of these who understand—in a way I cannot comprehend—that forgiveness is at the heart of Christian faith. Certainly, I understand how an unwillingness to forgive locks us all up in bitterness, and throws away the key. It enslaves us to ingratitude, and chokes out gratefulness. It prevents us from experiencing the freedom that comes with free-flowing grace—both received and given. And I understand all too well that a desire to punish those who have hurt us can easily arise from a sense of moral superiority that deems punishment as more fitting than grace. And yet, these five family members chose to forgive a young man who appears not to recognize his need for it.

Jesus once told a parable of an unforgiving servant in response to a question from his disciple Peter. This servant owed his master a debt so large it could never be repaid in this lifetime. When his master forgave him the debt, he went out and would not forgive his fellow servants their relatively small debts. Peter had asked the question, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus answers, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”(2) Jesus taught that forgiveness is unlimited, and forgiveness by nature is something that cannot be measured in its appropriation. When we fail to forgive, we fail to recognize our own debt, and we fail to appreciate the reality of the limitless scope of forgiving grace on our account. Peter wanted to know at what point he could cease from offering forgiveness—he wanted a hard and fast limit. But in the answer to Peter’s question, Jesus reveals that none of us are in the position to withhold forgiveness from each other. In the end, since we are all in need of forgiveness, to withhold it demonstrates a kind of ingratitude for God’s gracious action towards the debt we could never repay to God.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Giving Forgiveness →

Flashing headlines stopped lesser trains of thought that morning, many of us hearing the news for the first time. The busy flow of strangers and hotel employees walking briskly toward their respective conference rooms stopped, and together we stood watching.

The evening before, a young white male had opened fired on members of a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. Eight members died at the scene, a ninth at the hospital. The victims—Cynthia, Susie, Ethel, Depayne, Clementa, Tywanza, Daniel, Sharonda, and Myra—ranged in ages from 26 to 87. Together that evening, they had been studying the parable of the sower when twenty-one year old Dylann entered the church quietly and was welcomed at the table. He sat with them as they considered the Gospel of Mark and prayed, and then he stood up, uttered a hateful racial speech, and killed nine people in a house of worship.

In the days following, the Charleston shooting continued to command headlines, though not merely in reports of the horrific details as they unfolded. Dylann Roof was apprehended, details of his background given, acquaintances interviewed, inquires made into the gun he used, theories posited on the mindset that lead up to his terrible course of action. But the tragically familiar flow of details following US shootings was interspersed this time with less familiar reporting. Relatives of the victims gunned down at the church faced Dylann merely a day after his actions, offering striking, but not easy, words of forgiveness and mercy. That Sunday, just four days after fellow congregants and their senior pastor were left in a pool of blood in their basement, the church came together for services, the building having been released as a crime scene only hours earlier. Worship commenced as the standing congregation sang of Christ: You are the source of our strength; You are the strength of our lives. Across the city, churches in unison rang morning worship bells in solidarity with Emmanuel AME Church and the victims lost for nine full minutes—a minute for every victim. That evening, a unity chain of clasped hands extended across the 13,200-foot-long Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge from Charleston to the town of Mount Pleasant. The words and actions inspired by this Christian community in lament were a far cry from the “race war” Dylann vowed to the nine victims he would incite with their deaths.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Tale of Two Stories →

In a study included in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine children were shown to overwhelmingly prefer the taste of food that comes in McDonald’s wrappers. The study had preschoolers sample identical foods in packaging from McDonald’s and in matched, but unbranded, packaging. The kids were then asked if the food tasted the same or if one tasted better. The unmarked foods lost the taste test every time. Even apple juice, carrots, and milk tasted better to the kids when taken from the familiar wrappings of the Golden Arches. “This study demonstrates simply and elegantly that advertising literally brainwashes young children into a baseless preference for certain food products,” said a physician from Yale’s School of Medicine. “Children, it seems, literally do judge a food by its cover. And they prefer the cover they know.”(1)

The science of advertising is often about convincing the world that books can and should be judged by their covers. These kids were not merely saying they preferred the taste of McDonald’s food. They actually believed the chicken nugget they thought was from McDonald’s tasted better than an identical nugget. From an early age and on through adulthood, branding is directive in telling us what we think and feel, who we are, what we love, what matters.

But lest we blame television and marketing entirely for the wiles of brand recognition, we should recall that advertisers continue to have employment simply because it works. That is, long before marketers were encouraging customers to judge by image, wrapping, and cover, we were judging by these methods anyway. When the ancient Samuel was looking for the person God would ordain as king, he had a particular image in mind. In fact, when he first laid eyes on Eliab, Samuel thought confidently that this was the one God had chosen. But on the contrary, God said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”(2)

The study with the preschoolers is startling because adults can see clearly that a carrot in a McDonald’s bag is still inherently a carrot. Yet how often are we, too, blindsided by mere wrappings, the cultural repetitions that mold us, the images and liturgies that shape our affections? Is the mistake of a child in believing the food tastes better in a yellow wrapper really any different than our own believing we are better people dressed with the right credentials, covered by the latest fashion, repeating the right belief-systems? Covered in whatever comforts us or completely stripped of our many wrappings, we are the same people underneath.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Shape of Affection →

The following essay from Vince Vitale is an excerpt from his newly released Jesus Among Secular Gods, coauthored with Ravi Zacharias.

The first time I met people who encouraged me to consider God, I was in college. I began by reading the gospels, and I found myself attracted to the Christian message. I found myself especially attracted to the person of Jesus and the beautiful life that he lived. But, to be honest, I assumed that belief in God was for people who didn’t think hard enough. I assumed that smart people somewhere had already disproved belief in God. More specifically, I assumed that there was some purely scientific way of understanding the world, and that miracles had no part in it.

I can remember picking up a book in a university bookshop around that time and reading the back cover, which summarized the book as an attempt to hold on to a form of Christianity while explaining away all the supposed miracles of Jesus in scientific terms. And I remember hoping it could be done, because I was longing for the person of Jesus, but I thought the traditional account of Christianity was just too extraordinary to believe.

I had this assumption that the burden of proof for belief in God must be higher, because God is such an extraordinary option. Richard Dawkins puts it this way:

“If you want to believe in…unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh—the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not.”(1)

I bought into that way of thinking—that God is the crazy option, whereas a fully naturalistic and fully scientifically explainable universe is the sober, sensible, rational option. Without ever really reasoning it through, I accepted the cultural myth that we used to need God to miraculously explain thunder and lightning, rainbows and shooting stars. But now that we have scientific explanations for these things, we should stop believing in God.

That’s actually not a very good argument. A good engineer doesn’t need to keep stepping in to override systems and fix malfunctions. If God is a good engineer, isn’t the ability to explain his design in terms of consistently functioning processes exactly what we should expect?

Moreover, we no longer think we need the moon to explain lunacy. (Lunacy comes from the word lunar, because people used to think the position of the moon explained madness.) Does that mean we should no longer believe in the moon? Should we become not only a-theists but a-moonists?(2) Of course not. Even if the moon doesn’t explain madness, there are many other things, such as the tides of the oceans, that it does explain. Likewise, the reasons for believing in God extend far beyond just scientific reasons and include historical, philosophical, moral, aesthetic, experiential, and relational reasons.

Without thinking it through, I jumped from science to scientism—from the fact that science can explain a lot to the assumption that it can explain everything. However, just because the advancement of science has taught us new things about how the universe works, that doesn’t tell us whether there is a who behind the how.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – “Science Has Disproved God” →

We live in a post-truth society—that’s what The Economist claimed two months ago. Two weeks ago, Oxford English Dictionary chose “post-truth” as its Word of the Year. Go back a bit further, and having 11 percent of America believe that you are “honest and trustworthy” was good enough to have a 9 percent lead in the race to be the next President of the United States. But of course even the polls were post-true.

We are very confused about the truth: There’s the truth, and then there’s the naked truth. There’s the truth, and then there’s the gospel truth (though the Gospel is taken to be obviously false). There’s the honest truth, and then there’s the God’s honest truth (but that has nothing to do with God).

We stretch the truth and bend the truth and twist the truth. We bury the truth because the truth hurts. When we want some¬thing to be false, we knock on wood. When we want something to be true, we cross our fingers. Which wooden cross are we trusting in?

Why do we have such a confused relationship with the truth? Fear. We are afraid of truth. Truth has so often been abused that experience has taught us the trajectory of truth—the trajectory of believing you are right and others are wrong—is from truth to disagreement to devaluing to intolerance to extremism to violence to terrorism.

And if that is the trajectory, then those committed to truth are in fact terrorists in the making. If that is the trajectory, then truth is an act of war, and an act of war leaves you with only two options: fight or flee.

Most of Western society is fleeing. Everything around us is structured to avoid disagreement about the truth: We spend most of our time on Facebook and Twitter where we can “like” and “retweet” but there is no option to “dislike.” Sports no longer teach us how to disagree. In professional sports, we replay every call to avoid disagreement. In youth sports, we don’t keep score and everyone gets a trophy.

When it comes to dating, we use online sites that “match” us with someone so similar in beliefs, background, and personality that as much disagreement as possible is avoided. We no longer meet people different from us at coffee shops because we go to drive-thru Starbucks. We no longer meet people while shopping because everything we could ever need or want is delivered to our door. Culturally, everything around us is set up to avoid disagreement.

The alternative to fleeing is fighting. I was walking around Oxford University a few months ago, and two guys walking just ahead of me were having a spirited conversation about how crazy they found certain Christian positions on ethical issues. One of them wondered out loud whether the only solution would be to shame Christians out of their positions.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truth or Love: What’s Your Choice? →

“What is the good life?” is a question as old as philosophy itself. In fact, it is the question that birthed philosophy as we know it.(1)Posed by ancient Greek thinkers and incorporated into the thought of Socrates through Plato, and then Aristotle, this question gets at the heart of human meaning and purpose. Why are we here, and since we are here, what are we to be doing? What is our meaning and purpose?

Out of the early Greek quest for the answer emerged two schools of thought. From Plato emerged rationalism: the good life consists of ascertaining unchanging ideals—justice, truth, goodness, beauty—those “forms” found in the ideal world. From Aristotle emerged empiricism: the good life consists of ascertaining knowledge through experience—what we can perceive of this world through our senses.(2)

For both Aristotle and Plato, rational thought used in contemplation of ideas is the substance of the good life. Despite the obvious emphasis by both on goodness emerging from the contemplative life of the mind (even though they disagreed on the source of rationality) both philosophers saw the good life as impacting and benefiting society. For Plato, society must emulate justice, truth, goodness, and beauty; so he constructs an ideal society. For Aristotle, virtue lived out in society is the substance of the good life, and well-being arises from well-doing.

Not long ago, I conducted an internet search on the tag “What is the good life?” and I was amazed at what came up as the top results of my search. Most of the entries involved shopping or consumption of one variety or another. Some entries were on locations to live, and still others involved books or other media aimed at helping one construct a good life. Others were the names of stores selling goods to promote “the good life.” There were no immediate entries on Plato, Aristotle, or the philosophical question they raised. There were no results on wisdom or the quest for knowledge lived out in a virtuous life. Instead, most of the entries involved material pursuits and gains. Sadly, this reflects our modern definition of what is good.

Perhaps during tumultuous economic times, it is difficult not to equate material items with the good life, more money, more security, or more opportunity. While it has always been said of every generation that these are times of great crisis and upheaval, we feel this search for meaning anew and afresh today, and perhaps wonder at the practicality or wisdom of looking to the past for insight or understanding into the good life.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Philosophy of the Good →

The ethics of regifting is always a hot discussion at Christmastime and the weeks that follow various office parties and family exchanges. Apparently, there are those who insist that regifting is a tawdry practice, and there are those who have practiced it for years and see no harm. For those who might not be familiar with the concept, Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary offers a helpful definition: To regift is “to give an unwanted gift to someone else” or “to give as a gift something one previously received as a gift.” In any case, two out of three people say they have either regifted or are considering regifting. And while there are no doubt many successful regifters among us, there are also unfortunate stories to show for the less successful, which make the discussion entertaining. Imagine opening the very gift you had given your mother-in-law a year earlier.

The concept of regifting is similar to a word coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. “Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom,” writes Tolkien. “Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.” Whether Hobbit or human, regifting is evidently nothing new.

Even so, when a colleague of mine referred to Christmas as the “season of regifting,” I was certain he had been the victim of too many unfortunate gift exchanges. Except he wasn’t talking about unwanted scarves or random gift-cards. He was talking about the mysterious gift that is resurrected each Christmas and presented again as if new. Year after year, we reopen the story of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the magi, and the star. “God is a regifter,” he said. The child is the gift.

The season of Advent leading through Christmas to the feast day of Epiphany we celebrate today is a journey the church sets before the world to meet the Christ child… again. Each year the same story is recalled and the same expectant hope is given time to grow. Each Christmas is an opportunity to unwrap the same gift we were given last year and the year before and the year before and the year before. Once more we have before us the choice to set it on a shelf like an unwanted present or to receive the child—the gift of the Father—again as if new. Unlike the many mathoms that fill a Hobbit’s house with purposeless treasure, this gift is not useless; neither is it sent out from hands that let go lightly or half-heartedly.

In a Christmas episode of The Simpsons, the character who was playing one of the three wise men in a nativity scene admits to regifting the myrrh he’s brought for baby Jesus. “Because,” he pleads. “Nobody needs myrrh!” There is actually some truth to this. The uses of myrrh are few, and it is, by far, a strange and unlikely gift to receive. Myrrh is a rare and expensive spice, most notably used in embalming the dead. But this myrrh, as the magi knew and the prophecies foreshadowed, was something this child would use.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mathoms and Myrrh →

The following excerpt comes from Ravi Zacharias’s newly released book Jesus Among Secular Gods coauthored with Vince Vitale.

It was years ago when I was speaking at an openly and avowedly atheistic institution that I was fascinated by a questioner who asked what on earth I meant by the term God. The city was Moscow; the setting was the Lenin Military Academy. The atmosphere was tense. Never had I been asked before to define the term in a public gathering. And because I was in a country so historically entrenched in atheism, I suspected the question was both hostile and intentional. I asked the questioner if he was an atheist, to which he replied that he was. I asked him what he was denying. That conversation didn’t go very far. So I tried to explain to him what we meant when we spoke of God.

It is fascinating to talk to a strident atheist and try to get beneath the anger or hostility. God is a trigger word for some that concentrates all his or her stored animosity into a projectile of words. But as the layers of their thinking and experience are unpacked, the meaning of atheism to each one becomes narrower and narrower, each term dying the death of a thousand qualifications. Oftentimes, the description is more visceral and is discussed with pent-up anger rather than in a sensible, respectful discussion. More than once I have been amazed at the anger expressed by members of the atheist groups at one or other of the Ivy League schools in the United States to which I have been invited to speak, anger that I was even invited and that I had the temerity to address them.

In theory, the academy has always been a place where dissent serves a valuable purpose in helping thinking students to weigh out ideas and make intelligent choices. And, dare I say, had I been a Muslim speaker, there would have been no such dissent as I faced. Evidently, being able to instill fear in people has a lot to do with how much freedom of speech you are granted. But alas! For some, at least, civil discourse is impossible. To her credit, at the end of a lecture, one senior officer in one club stood up and thanked me, a veiled apology for the resistance vented before the event. I did appreciate that courtesy.

This unfettered anger on the part of some is quite puzzling to me. I was raised in India where I was not a Hindu and, in fact, never once gave it any serious consideration. For that matter, I’m not sure if I even really believed in God. I was a nominal Christian but never gave that much thought, either. Most of my friends were either Hindu or Muslim or Sikh, with a few others of different faiths. I never recall feeling any anger or hostility toward those who believed differently than me, no matter how ludicrous their beliefs may have seemed to me. Nor do I remember ever being on the receiving end of such anger and hostility because I did not have the same belief.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Examining Religions →

The following essay from Vince Vitale is an excerpt from his newly released Jesus Among Secular Gods coauthored with Ravi Zacharias.

Suppose there was a machine (maybe before long there will be!) that would give you any experience you desired. You could choose to experience winning Olympic gold, or falling in love, or making a great scientific discovery, and then the neurons in your brain would be stimulated such that you would experience a perfect simulation of actually doing these things. In reality, you would be floating in a tank of goo with electrodes hooked up to your brain. Given the choice, should you preprogram your experiences and plug into this machine for the rest of your life?(1)

I join philosopher Robert Nozick, who first devised this thought experiment in the 1970s, in thinking that we should not plug into this “experience machine.” And this suggests the falsity of hedonism, a view dating back over two millennia to the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus. If all that mattered were pleasure (in other words, if hedonism were true), then we should plug into the experience machine and we should encourage everyone we know to plug in as well.

We rightly care about more than just happiness or pleasure. We want to not only feel loved; we want to actually be loved. We want to not only dream of accomplishing our dreams; we want to actually accomplish them. We want to not only feel inside as if we have made a difference in life; we want to actually make a difference. Hedonism is not the desire of our hearts; it is all that is left when every other “ism” has failed us.

A recent academic book suggested that, on hedonistic assumptions, because some animals can feel pleasure like human persons but cannot suffer in some of the worst ways as human persons, those animals could be understood to be more valuable than humans.(2) If the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is the measure of all, these animals score well on pleasure with fewer deductions for the complex psychological pains such as anxiety and disappointment to which the human psyche is vulnerable. This same assumption led utilitarian Jeremy Bentham to the view that “the game of push-pin [a children’s game] is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.”(3) The problem here is not with the logic leading to the conclusions but with the underlying assumption of pleasure as the sole determiner of value.

Pleasure and happiness are good things, but they are not the only good things. We should care not only about feeling good on the inside but also about truth and about the impact that our lives have outside of ourselves. As C.S. Lewis put it, if happiness were all he was after, a good bottle of port would do the trick.(4)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – “Whatever Makes You Happy” →

Around the world, the sentiment is the same even though there are many different ways to convey the message: from the Dutch “Gelukkig Nieuwjaar” to the Greek “Kali Chronia,” from the Spanish “Feliz año Nuevo” to the Swahili “Mwaka Mzuri” or the Urdu “Naya Saal Mubarik,” the citizens of the world wish for a “Happy New Year!” Regardless the time zone, the stroke of midnight ushers in a celebration that encircles the globe. Fireworks fill the skies with explosive colors carrying hopes and dreams for the coming New Year. A new year brings the chance of fresh possibility and promise, of goals and aspirations, and of renewal and growth. It is the chance to start again and, of course, it is hoped that the year will be filled with happiness.

Despite the revelry and festive mood, the advent of each New Year will inevitably usher in its share of sorrow and sadness. Each year brings its share of natural disasters or calamity. Each year brings some nations closer to war or perpetuates ongoing conflict. For some, economic fortunes will be lost. And for others, the New Year will bring personal loss or suffering. While no one likes to think of these things, they too will come to surprise the unsuspecting.

So what is it that we wish for, and what is it that we want when we say, “Happy New Year”? Far deeper than a simple saying, these words house cherished imaginations of possibility and promise. And those cherished imaginations vary depending on the way in which one defines happiness. Some define happiness as a year in which everything goes their way. Others hope for simpler pleasures, and still others simply hope it will be a year of stepping up to the plate, finding a job, or surviving another day despite the aching hunger or aching loneliness.

Like most, my own thoughts for the substance of a happy New Year tend to revolve around achieving certain goals, seeing dreams fulfilled, or feeling deeply connected to a sense of purpose. One of my yearly rituals is to go through the previous year’s calendar to transfer birthdays, anniversaries and other recurring events into my new calendar. As I did so this year, I reviewed the events of the previous year. While this past year was filled with joys and wonderful celebrations, there were losses that filled the pages as well. I wondered aloud what it will mean for me to have a ‘happy New Year’ and what it will mean for others?

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The world is full of beginnings and endings. We begin a new year with a certain hope—another year, another chance, a new day. But we carry with us the same fears, the same longings, the same resolutions. A more cynical riposte might be: Is there ever really anything new about a new year?

When the past or present seems so broken that its shards seem to reach well into the future, new days are often filled more with fear than with promise. I remember a time when I could see the end of a difficult situation, but I could not see a beginning unmarred by the residue of the past. “Is there really such a thing as new day?” was the question I held disconsolately. A friend gave me the following words and asked me to hold them instead:

“But this I call to mind,

and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul,

‘therefore I will hope in him’” (Lamentations 3:21-24).

Spoken in a time of exile, I imagine these words were as pungent for the people they were spoken to as they were for me. The ancient writer of Lamentations held fast to the assurance of things new, even in the midst of a situation that blinded him from any vision of what that could possibly mean. In all of the suffering and sorrow surrounding him, it would not have been unreasonable for him to admit that he saw no way out. With all the damage that had been done, with the uncertainty of exile, and the finality of a destroyed Jerusalem, no one would have blamed him for seeing new mornings as nothing but a cynical promise of more of the same.

But this was not the lament on his lips. Written in the style of an ancient funeral song, the writer’s words, though consumed with death, call to this God by name: The steadfast love of Yahweh never ceases, his mercies never come to an end. Another translation reads, Because of Yahweh’s great love we are not consumed; his mercies are new every morning. What the writer was able to see in the midst of his own lamentation is that only an all-powerful God can truly make a new beginning, a new creation. And new mornings, new years, in and of themselves, are useless and worse than useless if they are not seen as belonging to the one who makes all things new.

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Topic: Just Thinking Magazine by Ravi Zacharias on December 2, 2016

The seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes is best known for his dictum “I think, therefore, I am.” A cynic may well quip that Descartes actually put des cart before des horse, because all he could have legitimately deduced was, “I think, therefore, thinking exists.” I do not intend to defend or counter Cartesian philosophy; I only wish to underscore that thinking has much to do with life and certainty.

One of the tragic casualties of our age has been that of the contemplative life—a life that thinks, thinks things through, and more particularly, thinks God’s thoughts after Him.

A person sitting at his desk and staring out of the window would never be assumed to be working. No! Thinking is not equated with work. Yet, had Newton under his tree or Archimedes in his bathtub bought into that prejudice, some natural laws would still be up in the air or buried under an immovable rock. Pascal’s Pensées, a work that has inspired millions, would have never been penned.

The Bible places supreme value in the thought life. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” Solomon wrote (Proverbs 23:7). Jesus asserted that sin’s gravity lay in the idea itself, not just the act. The apostle Paul admonished the church at Philippi to have the mind of Christ, and to the same people he wrote, “Whatever is true…whatever is pure…if there be any virtue…think on these things” (Philippians 4:8).

The follower of Christ must demonstrate to the world what it is not just to think, but to think justly. But how does one manage this in a culture where progress is determined by pace and defined by quantity?

What is even more destructive is that the greatest demand comes from neither speed nor quantity but rather from the assumption that silence is inimical to life. The radio in the car, music in the elevator, and the symphony entertaining the “on hold” callers add up as impediments to personal reflection. In effect, the mind is denied the privilege of living with itself even briefly and is crowded with outside impulses to cope with aloneness.

Aldous Huxley’s indictment, “Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself from thinking,” seems frightfully true. The price paid for this scenario has been devastating. Indeed, T.S. Eliot observed in his poem “Choruses from The Rock”:

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Think Again: The Dying Art of Thinking →

Before I begin my thoughts for the year ahead, on behalf of our entire team based in fifteen countries, may I first thank all who have stood with us through 2016. I pray that our partnership continues and grows. We need you to stand with us. Because of your help, we have had our best year. I wish you a blessed year ahead.

I was intrigued by the comment made by a leading voice in the present administration, discussing the political changes ahead for the nation following the election in November: “Now we know how the loss of hope feels.” Fascinating, considering that the slogan for the past eight years has been “Hope and Change.” What is more, I well recall those who lost the election eight years ago echoing the same dismay.

These are deep sentiments because the loss of hope can easily become a breeding ground for cynicism and apathy on the one hand, or anger and violence on the other. Where morals are relative, hate and violence become alluring absolutes. That is why hope is that necessary posture of the mind to even move forward against all odds.

I recall seeing a painting years ago of a dilapidated violin with broken strings titled, “Hope.” How was such a title given to a worthless instrument? One had to look closely to see that one string still held firmly taut. In the hands of a maestro, even one string gives hope for a melody.

So I ask, how does a thoughtful person describe the present as bereft of hope? There are two possible answers: the first is what I call the reverse of a feared crossing of purposes. The secular critic despairs at the possibility of the politicization of religion. Rightly so. But what has replaced that fear is equally dreaded, if not worse: making a religion out of politics. Yes indeed, politics is the new creed of the faithless, replacing spiritual truths with the hollow hope of political dominance. Power does corrupt when one loses sight of the vertical dimension of life. We endured a blood-letting slugfest of words on the road to the election. Once the electorate spoke, the losers have tried every conceivable trick in the book to malign the victors. Who would have ever thought that the feuding would continue so long after the voting was done? Why is there such bitterness in the loss? I can only conclude that the deepest convictions of the average person are born from their political theory and that this gives them their creed on all choices and values. David Gelernter, Professor of Computer Science at Yale, wrote a powerful article earlier this year with the provocative title “Why the Left Is So Vicious.”

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Common is the sentiment among recent college graduates that they went in feeling like they knew something, and leave realizing, in fact, how little they know. I remember what this felt like, walking down the aisle to accept my diploma, wondering at the wondering at the irony. Yet as uncomfortable as that moment of recognition might be, I am convinced that the thought is an important place at which to arrive.

Ravi Zacharias tells of being a graduate student when the new encyclopedia Britannica was released in its fifteenth edition. It was a massive collection that had taken fourteen years to produce, and he remembers being fascinated by the statistics: two hundred advisors, three hundred editors, four thousand contributors, over a hundred thousand entries, thirty-four million dollars, forty-three million words. Even so, in the last pages of that work, one of the editors had the audacity to conclude: “Herein contains the entirety of human knowledge.” The number of outdated encyclopedias lying in thrift stores and recycling bins does not help their point.

In the stories of Scripture where God is encountered, we find men and women who, having come in contact God, find themselves blown away by the notion that they didn’t know all that they didn’t know. As Jacob lay dreaming, he saw God appear above a great ladder where God was introduced as the God of his ancestors. Upon waking, Jacob’s his first words were filled with astonishment: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”(1) Hagar, the maidservant of Sarah, had a similar reaction after she encountered God in the desert. Having run away from Sarah’s abuse, Hagar was resting beside a spring when God spoke to her and told her to return. We read that she was amazed: “And she gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the one who sees me.’”(2)

Whatever we see—in the midst of uncertainty, for the year ahead, in life, truth, faith, reality—there is almost always more. In fact, it is probably the one thing we can count on—and the one thing we do not. Christian philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek writes, “We labor under the misimpression that we see what we see, that seeing is believing, that either I see it or I don’t.”(3) Perhaps seeing is not always about 20/20, and seeing God is something else altogether.

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Paul Tillich, the noted existentialist theologian, traveled to Asia to hold conferences with various Buddhist thinkers. He was studying the significance of religious leaders to the movements they had engendered. Tillich asked a simple question. “What if by some fluke, the Buddha had never lived and turned out to be some sort of fabrication? What would be the implications for Buddhism?” Mind you, Tillich was concerned with the indispensability of the Buddha—not his authenticity.

The scholars did not hesitate to answer. If the Buddha was a myth, they said, it did not matter at all. Why? Because Buddhism should be judged as an abstract philosophy—as a system of living. Whether its concepts originated with the Buddha is irrelevant. As an aside, I think the Buddha himself would have concurred. Knowing that his death was imminent, he beseeched his followers not to focus on him but to remember his teachings. Not his life but his way of life was to be attended to and propagated.

So, what of other world religions? Hinduism, as a conglomeration of thinkers and philosophies and gods, can certainly do without many of its deities. Some other major religions face the same predicament.

Is Christianity similar? Could God the Father have sent another instead of Jesus? May I say to you, and please hear me, that the answer is most categorically No. Jesus did not merely claim to be a prophet in a continuum of prophets. He is the unique and human Son of God, part of the very godhead that Christianity calls the Trinity. The apostle Paul says it this way:

“[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible… He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together… For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”(1)

Moreover, Jesus himself prayed, “[Father] you have given [me] authority over all people to give eternal life to all whom you have given [me]. And this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”(2)

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