Researchers believe they have come up with a questionnaire that can measure a person’s chances of dying within the next four years.  According to one of the test’s designers, it is reported to be roughly 81 percent accurate among those who are 50 years or older.  Their report, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, claims the assessment will be useful to doctors in offering prognostic information and to patients who want a more determined look at the future. Regardless of the questionnaire’s effectiveness, however, the headline still strikes me as ironic: “Test Helps You Predict Chances of Dying.”(1) It brings to mind the lines of Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.”  We don’t need a test, of course, to tell us our chances of dying.

British statesman and avowed atheist Roy Hattersley writes in the Guardian of an experience at a funeral. It was a funeral, he said, which almost converted him to the belief that funeral services—of which he has disapproved for years—ought to be encouraged. His conclusion was forged as he sang the hymns and studied the proclamations of a crowd that seemed sincere: “[T]he church is so much better at staging last farewells than non-believers could ever be.”(2) He continues, “‘Death where is thy sting, grave where is thy victory?’ are stupid questions. But even those of us who do not expect salvation find a note of triumph in the burial service. There could be a godless thanksgiving for and celebration of the life of [whomever]. The music might be much the same. But it would not have the uplifting effect without the magnificent, meaningless, words.”

I had never been to a funeral until I was the seminary intern for a small rural church in Oklahoma. I had attended a visitation once and a few memorial services years earlier, but I had never watched a family move from planning to wake to service to burial, until I assisted more families through the entire funeral process than seemed possible for the small congregation. The number of deaths seemed to me grossly disproportionate to the number births in the church that year.

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The story of the twelve Thai boys in the cave, which gripped the attention and held the breath of the world for over a fortnight, has, thankfully, ended happily. One is quite aware that this real-life story, as all such poignant stories, should be taken in its own unicity and integrity. Real stories are not mere stories to be insensitively and carelessly “used” for analogical or allegorical purposes—an infraction of which (we) preachers are often guilty.

And yet, irresistibly, the 18-day saga of the “Dingy Dozen” is an almost-perfect dramatic enactment of the gospel story. In the first place, we have the twelve members of the “Wild Boars” football team, who went on a “wild bore” into the cave. These boys were no ordinary boys. They were all ably-gifted with fine genes, ample talent, and bright futures. But through a mixture of daredevilry and delinquency, chance and circumstance, they ended up where they ended up, precariously perched on a ledge, helpless and hopeless—“between a rock and a hard place” and “between the devil and the deep blue sea” rolled into one!

This ordeal and predicament of “The Twelve” is a snapshot of the human condition, as diagnosed by the Bible. “Twelve Tribes” or “Twelve Apostles” created good and glorious, but invariably “foolish, disobedient, led astray, enslaved,” find their way into lostness.(1) They got there on their own, but they can no longer get out on their own. No way forward. No way back. No light. No food. No air. No help. No hope:

“Out of the depths I cry out to you, O LORD!”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The (Other) Allegory of the Cave →

One is never more aware of pluralism’s sticky presence then when sitting in a round table discussion about faith. Like a wad of well-chewed gum that has been stepped in again and again, the strings of religious thought and life are many, and often messy, sticking to our souls at times unbeknownst and unannounced. In the end, the sticky web is not only hard to identify for what it once was, but everyone feels polluted by it. On a bad day, this is my hopeless image of the pluralistic world around me. In this picture, pluralism is far more than a mere plurality of options, but an intricate, gooey mesh of amalgamating outlooks, ideas, objectives, and practices—through which all shoes must step.

Our current cultural landscape takes on both kinds of pluralism in this sense—plurality and relativism. There are more options and isms at our reach than we know what to do with. There is also the sense that all of these options are relative, easily mingled, and chosen by personal preference. For the Christian who confesses one choice that is not relative, chosen not because it is preferred but because it is true, the oddity is obvious. The unpopular stance leaves the pluralist convinced of Christian arrogance and the Christian wondering if he must resign himself to a life of cultural naysaying. And while the former will likely hold onto the conviction of Christianity’s arrogance, perhaps for the later there is another option. The Christian indeed lives in a world where the challenge of pluralism is great because the scope of pluralism is extraordinary. Yet while this may lend itself to gloomy pictures of being stuck in horrific webs of chewing gum, the reality of this pluralistic context can also carry with it images of opportunity and hope.

As it did for Paul who used the signs of all religions to specifically encounter one, pluralism can present an occasion for believers to engage a world that is “very religious in every way.”(1)  It can bring out questions that may not otherwise have been asked, both for ourselves and others—Is Buddhism really claiming anything different than Christianity? Is this particular belief cultural whim or sustainable hope?—thus serving as a catalyst for examination and discovery. Our pluralistic context can also offer a chance to live without the social power to which Christians have grown accustomed, without the cultural control, or the comfortable existence that so often becomes the faith’s downfall. As one author notes: “[M]ulticulturalism and extensive religious plurality can offer an opportunity for Christians to shed the baggage of cultural dominance that has often impeded or distorted the spread of the gospel. It may be, indeed, that the decline of Christian hegemony can offer the Church the occasion to adopt a new and more effective stance of humble service toward societies it no longer controls.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Pluralism as Privilege →