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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Fish in Water

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Ravi Z

Most of us recognize that there are forces at work in our world that make communicating more akin to communicating across cultures—even within our home countries. Twitter, texting, and other forms of modern short-hand must be learned just as one would learn a new language. #margaretmanning, @ravizacharias, TTYL, LOL, and other combinations of letters form almost indiscernible words for the tweeting and texting uninitiated.

Beyond these new technological changes in language, simply moving from region to region within a country can mean another language, dialect, or even phrases that are unique to that particular place. Moving, as I did, several years ago from one part of the United States to another introduced me to a new world of sayings, customs, and local culture.

In a similar way, trying to find ways to communicate about matters of my own faith can feel like trying to cross a broken bridge. Beyond that, anyone who claims to present a clear language of faith speaks into a cacophony of languages claiming the same clarity. Is it any wonder, then, that blank stares are the all too often response to the particulars of the unique vocabulary of faith?

Yet everyone—even those who speak what seems to them a clear message—are also informed and shaped by a culture. Speech embodies a whole world of language, experience, and ways of understanding that experience, which in turn shapes the way in which individuals speak about beliefs and values.

There are, therefore, particular difficulties inherent in translation from within one’s own culture. An ancient Chinese proverb highlights this difficult task: “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.”(1) In other words, on what platform does one stand in order to speak into one’s own culture? We are products of the very culture into which we seek to communicate, and we can never fully stand outside our own culture. We are, in the words of the proverb, like fish trying to define water.

Notably, Christians affirm that the heart of the gospel message transcends culture and language, just as surely as it was originally proclaimed within a particular culture and language. After all, the good news of the gospel is about “the Word made flesh“—the Son of God stepping into humanity. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains the dialogical nature of the gospel as a product of culture and yet as a trans-cultural communication when he suggests: “Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.”(2)

Newbigin uses the conversion and transformation of Saul into the apostle Paul as a case in point. His trial before King Agrippa, as recorded in Acts 26, illuminates this cultural dialogue. As Paul shares the story of his conversion, he speaks the language of the Empire, Greek, and not his native Hebrew. Yet earlier, when he was blinded by “a light from heaven, brighter than the sun” and he heard a voice from heaven, it was not in the predominant Greek language. Paul tells Agrippa: “I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew dialect, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’” Paul then asked who was speaking to him, and the voice answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”

Newbigin suggests that this passage provides a means by which we can understand the challenges and the opportunities for gospel communication and translation from within a given culture.(3) First, just as Paul hears the as yet unnamed voice from heaven in his native tongue, the “voice” of the gospel must be offered in the language of the culture into which it is spoken. The gospel must be communicated in a way in which it can truly be heard, and we must accept that the way in which we present it will on some level embody that which is understood and experienced in a particular culture.

Truly communicating the gospel, however, means it will also call into question the way of understanding that is inherent in the culture. Saul truly believed his actions against the Christians were in keeping with the God-ordained desire to preserve and protect Jewish identity and purity of belief. Yet, the voice from heaven revealed that this devotion of Saul was a form of persecution against the very God he claimed to serve.

Finally, as Christians seek to clearly translate and communicate the gospel, conversion is the work of God. No human persuasion, no lofty speculation ever accomplishes the work of conversion. This is God’s work alone accomplished by the Holy Spirit, and those who bear witness in multiple cultural contexts can depend on the work of the Spirit to accomplish what God desires. “[I]n the mysterious providence of God, a word spoken comes with the kind of power of the word that was spoken to Saul on the road to Damascus…it causes the hearer to stop, turn around, and go in a new direction, to accept Jesus as Lord, Guide, and Savior.”(4)

The communication of the gospel into every culture is filled with challenges and opportunities. Without the work of careful translation, Christians can sound as if they are babbling in a foreign tongue. On the other hand, they may immerse themselves so much in cultural study and experience that they lose the prophetic power of gospel proclamation. Indeed, as culture-bound people, there is always a risk of proclaiming a version of the gospel that is more cultural than Christian. Can Christians be willing to hear the radical call to conversion in their own proclamation? Making room for in these proclamations for the transformational work of the Spirit, there is hope that the unique message of God’s deliverance in Christ will not be lost either on the one who hears or the one who speaks.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Cited in Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 21.

(2) Ibid., 4.

(3) Ibid., 5.

(4) Ibid., 7-8.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Wholeness, Not Dichotomy

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Ravi Z

Most scholars agree that the Enlightenment or Age of Reason, which began in the early seventeenth century, set up a great dichotomy that persists in modern time.(1) The great “dichotomy” of the Enlightenment entailed the separation of the public and private realms. The public realm was the world of ascertained by reason alone.  Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains, “The thinkers of the Enlightenment spoke of their age as the age of reason…by which human beings could attain (at least in principle) to a complete understanding of, and thus a full mastery of, nature—of reality in all its forms. Reason, so understood, is sovereign in this enterprise.”(2) In the realm of reason, therefore, revelation from a divine realm was not needed. Human reason could search out and know all the facts about reality, and “no alleged divine revelation, no tradition however ancient, and no dogma however hallowed has the right to veto its exercise.”(3)

The realm of religious belief was now relegated to the realm of private value and private purpose. It wasn’t that the Enlightenment dichotomy cut out God. Rather, it created a distinction between “natural” religion—God’s existence and the moral laws known by all and demonstrable by reason—and “revealed” religion—doctrines as taught by the Bible and the church. The latter realm, dominant in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, came under increasing attack and was eventually relegated to private expression and personal feelings.

Fueled by scientific and philosophical discoveries, the view of the world as the venue of God’s providence and rule, shifted to the view that sovereign reason could discover all that was necessary to advance humanity toward its highest destiny. All of Christianity’s supernatural claims and all of its revelatory content were unnecessary in a world where the Creator had endowed human beings with enough reason to discern what was important simply by looking at the great book of nature. As such, the autonomous, rational human became the center of truth and knowledge, and that was enough.

What emerged from this dichotomy was the belief that the real world was a world of cause and effect, of material bodies guided solely by mathematically stable laws. It was believed, then, that to have discovered the “cause” of something was to have explained it. There was no need to invoke any supernatural “purpose” or “design” as an explanation any longer.

And yet, purpose remains an inescapable element in human life. Newbigin argues: “Human beings do entertain purposes and set out to achieve them. The immense achievements of modern science themselves are, very obviously, the outcome of the purposeful efforts of hundreds of thousands of men and women dedicated to the achievement of something that is valuable—a true understanding of how things are.”(4) Hence, persisting in the belief that science, for example, is value and purpose-free belies an intentional rejection of reality. The pursuit of science to find causes for effects devoid of any larger purpose will ultimately end in the elimination of all ideals. The very zeal that seeks to explain a world without purpose is a purpose in and of itself.

Proclaiming that purpose infuses human endeavor, and as such, that purposeful human endeavor points to purposeful design, and design to a Designer will not necessarily convince those who see a world only of mechanical cause and effect. Yet, scratch the below the surface of the most strident materialists, and one uncovers a yearning for something more than what can be understood by reason alone. As atheist Sam Harris wrote: “This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute….The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ‘spiritual.’”(5)

The gospel of John suggests that reason and revelation need not be dichotomized. In this explanation of the significance of Jesus Christ, the objective and the subjective aspects of truth are revealed in a person: “The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.” The divine principle that undergirds all things, as the Greeks understood the Logos, is embodied in the human person, Jesus, according to John’s gospel. And in the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus we have a new starting point for reason. The resurrection is indeed the very basis “for the perpetual praise of God who not only creates order out of chaos, but also breaks through fixed orders to create ever-new situations of surprise and joy.”(6) Ever-new situations of surprise and joy might involve breaking a false dichotomy between public and private faith and the objective and subjective aspects of reality, even between reason and revelation. This one who brings new life and new ways of knowing invites us to wholeness, and not dichotomy.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Stanley Grenz and Roger Olsen, 20th Century Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 16-17.

(2) Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 25.

(3) Ibid., 25.

(4) Ibid., 35.

(5) Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 227.

(6) Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 150.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Roots and Pendulums

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Ravi Z

The average cell phone user would likely now claim that life without one would be more than inconvenient. Upon its invention, in more ways than one, we became untethered. We no longer get tangled up in phone cords while trying to make dinner, set the table, and finish that conversation with the garrulous friend. Nor do we need to dash home from work in order to make that important phone call. We make it on the way, sitting in traffic, driving to the next appointment, making a stop at the grocery store, or all three. For those who even remember that phones used to have cords, it is with great appreciation that we are no longer operating with a five-foot radius. Yet, this is not to say that we don’t feel a tethering of a different sort. Owning a cell phone can foster the attitude that its owner is always available, always working, always obtainable. While there is no cord to which we are confined, the phone itself can be ironically confining.

But these kinds of shifting dilemmas are not all that uncommon. Just as the pendulum swings in one direction offering some kind of correction, so we often find that the other side introduces a new set of problems. Major and minor movements of history possess a similar, corrective rhythm, swinging from one extreme to another and finding trouble with both. The pendulum swings from one direction, often to an opposite error, or at best, to a new set of challenges.

Within and without its walls, the church, too, is continually responding to what we perceive needs correction. When the need to get away from dead, religious worship initiated certain shifts within the church, it was an observation wisely discerned. But what this meant for many churches was unfortunately a shifting away from history, common liturgy, and its own past—in some cases contributing to a different set of problems. While breaking away from the “religiosity” of history, perhaps some now find themselves tethered in a sense to all things contemporary and individual, unable to draw on the riches of the history from which we have isolated ourselves.  While the intent may have been good, and the shifts did separate us from certain problems within church history, it also seems to have separated us from all of history. As a result, many Christians now seem more divorced from history than ever, having swung so far in one direction that we can no longer see from whence we have come. Coupled with our culture’s general devaluing of anything that is “outdated,” the risk of seeing the church’s identity more in terms of today’s form than its enduring essence seems both high and hazardous.

Something in the image of the ever-oscillating pendulum reminds me of the countercultural professions and practices that are meant to root the church in an identity beyond the one that might exist at any given time or changing mood.  In this ever-moving world, where technological improvements and ideological corrections come more quickly than we often have time to process, the Christian lives not in fear of the future or disdain of the past. Instead he prays for daily sustenance “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). We profess a community “upon whom the end of the ages have come” (1 Corinthians 10:11). And in the midst of a culture consumed with the new, the contemporary, and the progressive, the church roots its very identity in a man who lived 2000 years ago, one who proclaimed the reign of God on earth here and now, but whose future return he also asked we look to expectantly.

Moreover, beside this spirit of awe for the next up and coming thing as a path to meaning, the church professes something Christ left behind as a means to understanding our identity and mission today. Before going to the cross, Jesus imparted that the disciples were to continue breaking bread together, as they had done so often before, but that now these common meals would also hold new meaning. They could not go where Jesus was going, but they were to be partners in what was about to be done. The bread broken was to be his body which would be broken; the cup they share was to be his own blood shared—and their repeated sharing in this common meal was to continually move them to participation in his dying, rising, and victorious life. In this, the disciples were to be united with Christ in an event that would inform all past, present, and future.  As Lesslie Newbigin explains, “[W]hen they are still far from beginning to understand what ‘the reign of God’ means, Jesus does a deed and gives a command that will bind them to him in a continually renewed and deepened participation in the mystery of his own being….The disciples will thus themselves become part of the revealed secret of the presence of the kingdom.”(1) So, too, Christians participate in this revealed secret today.

Counterculturally, the church has a natural gift in this participating, in this communion, a sacrament given for our good, in which we can discover again and again our identity and purpose. Though the pendulum swings, we live both here and now, and also with an understanding of all that is impending and at hand. And we can live as those who mysteriously participate in the death and life of Christ. We can live as those who proclaim the reign of God presently. We can live expectantly, preparing for the fullness of the coming kingdom. Such partaking and participating unites us with Jesus in history, roots us into a tradition beyond the swing of any pendulum, and sends us out with good news into a world ever-restless for the change that will finally make a difference.

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

(1) Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 45.