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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Christian?

July 8, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Why Christian?” was a question put before Professor Douglas John Hall by one of the many students who end up in his office asking more about the theology he teaches. He notes the possibility that the question was asked rhetorically, maybe even a bit sarcastically, like those near Jesus who threw questions more like daggers than candid inquiries. But it is also possible the student just wanted to hear an honest explanation: In a world of so many spiritual options, in a world of reasons to reject religion altogether, Why Christianity? Regardless of tone or motive, the seasoned professor of theology decided to answer the question, laying aside the responses that could be given easily after so many years of teaching. “I confess, I [am answering] as much for myself as for you,” he writes to the student who asked the question. “You made me realize that after all these years I needed to face that question in the quite basic and personal way you put it to me.”(1)

On a typical day, my own answer to the question of Christianity might be steeped in the signs and realities of the uniqueness of Christ. Thankfully this answer is not my own. With many who have gone before me, I cannot explain Jesus of Nazareth without concluding his uniqueness:

“Surely this man was the Son of God!”

“Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” “Come and see the man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”(2)

Christianity is not a matter of preference or pedigree, but pilgrimage chosen specifically because a follower has found one worth following. “[Jesus] was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men,” wrote Scottish nobleman James Stewart, “yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God… No one was half so kind or compassionate to sinners yet no one ever spoke such red-hot scorching words about sin… His whole life was love. Yet on one occasion he demanded of the Pharisees how they ever expected to escape the damnation of hell… He saved others but at the last, Himself He did not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confront us in the Gospels.” Why Christian? Because there is none other like Christ.

The incomparability of Jesus Christ answers the questions of a world of spiritual options and religious hostility. Like professor Hall, facing the question “Why Christian?” is typically a matter of confessing the things I know, even as I know I now see but a reflection and will one day see face to face. Still, there are less typical days when the question comes not with hostility or sarcasm or curiosity, but from somewhere within, and the answers are somewhere caught up in despair or injustice or death. When standing over a casket or holding the hand of one whose body is riddled with cancer, “Why Christian?” takes on a different flesh—or else it wavers cold and corpselike. Christ’s uniqueness is suddenly a matter of urgency, needing to be spoken in words that have meaning in valleys of death and shadow. Standing before this body that once breathed, what does it really mean that Christ was unique? Though with a far different kind of trembling certainty, here too Christ’s incomparability is ultimately what matters.

The apologetic of the apostle Paul was always spoken starring life’s “last enemy” dead in the eyes. Whether answering the question “Why Christian?” or standing in jail having been beaten to silence, Paul kept before him the hope of the resurrection as both the proof of Christ’s uniqueness and the assurance that this uniqueness inherently matters. He spoke of the resurrection of Christ and his hope in the resurrection of the dead before the assembled Sanhedrin, before the Roman procurator Felix, and again before Felix’s successor, Festus, who conceded that Paul’s arrest was due to his proclamation “about a dead man named Jesus who Paul claimed was alive.”(3) Even before king Agrippa, Paul’s answer to the first acrimonious signs of the question “Why Christian?” was an appeal to Christ’s uniqueness in the hope of the resurrection. He asked, “Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?…I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen—that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:8, 22). For Paul, and for all who claim the inimitableness of Jesus, if Christ has not been raised, there is no answer to the question “Why Christian?”

Instead, the uniqueness of Christ is an answer for questions that come with sarcasm or sincerity. But so it is an answer with flesh when life’s typical comforts fall by the wayside and the valley of shadows is long and lonely.

“He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.”(4) There is none other like Christ. I know of no other god who weeps with us at gravesides and then shows us in his own dying and rising that death shall not hold its sting.

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

(1) Douglas John Hall, Why Christian: For Those on the Edge of Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998), 11.

(2) Mark 15:39, John 9:32-33, John 4:29.

(3) Acts 23:6, Acts 24:15, 21, Acts 25:19.

(4) Matthew 28:6.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sellouts and Revolutionaries

July 7, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

They both trod along the dusty streets of ancient Palestine: one as an outcast and traitor and the other as a would-be hero. One used his position to cheat and extort his own people. The other carried a dagger under his cloak to swiftly exact vengeance on agents of government extortion. Neither man would have hoped to meet the other. Yet, a stranger from a backwater town would bring the two of them together. In fact, this most unlikely pair would not only meet, but serve alongside each other. All that had previously defined them would give way to a new understanding and a new path of life.

On that most unexpected day, Matthew was collecting taxes from the people. He made sure to extract more than what was necessary to fill his coffers with unlawful profits. The stranger who came by the tax office that day looked like any other man, so it likely came as quite a shock to Matthew when the stranger called out to him, “Follow me.” No one from among the people of Israel would even desire to speak with Matthew—yet this stranger called after him and invited him to follow. To where, he did not know, but his invitation was irresistible. That very night, Matthew invited the stranger to his home for dinner and they reclined at the same table. Even to Matthew, it would have been a radical sight. Seated among the most despised members of society, didn’t the stranger know how deeply this company was hated? How was it that he had come to Matthew’s house, a man hated in all Israel for being a sellout to the Roman government? Yet, here was this intriguing stranger eating and drinking with outsiders and sellouts.(1)

The day that Simon the Zealot was approached would be no less surprising. The Zealots sought any and all means to overthrow their Roman oppressors. As revolutionaries, Simon’s political affiliates hated all that Matthew’s kind represented. For Simon, Matthew was nothing but a colluder with those who sought to oppress the people of Israel. Yet this stranger from Nazareth called both of these men to his side. “Follow me,” he asked. So along with a group of fisherman—Simon Peter, the sons of Zebedee, James and John—and this wretched tax collector, Simon the Zealot was invited to follow this stranger who gathered a most unexpected group of followers.(2)

Why would anyone call such an eclectic collection of people to become his followers? What kind of leader brings together people who for all practical purposes are at opposing ends of the spectrum with regards to their views of the world?

The man was Jesus of Nazareth. And his call to “follow” would upend all their expectations, replace all previous affiliations, and transform their views of the world. This unlikely group would follow Jesus beyond personal expectations and goals, as well as their expectations of him as their leader. The nature of his teachings and his form of radical hospitality would not only change their own lives and views, but transform the world. Jesus called Matthew, as well as Simon, sellouts and revolutionaries alike. And the power of Christ’s message is displayed in the fact that a tax collector authored one of the four gospels, and the Zealot most likely gave his life—not as a revolutionary hero, but as a martyr for the gospel.(3)

Jesus proclaimed good news good enough to bring together a tax collector and a zealot, men from entirely opposing camps, the poor and the rich, the outcast and the sellouts. Indeed, he declared that anyone who does the will of God is his brother and sister and mother. The good news was also given to a former blasphemer, persecutor, and violent aggressor. But this is not what we remember the apostle Paul for either. We remember him for his efforts to take the good news throughout the Roman world. It is this man who said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And I am the foremost of sinners; but I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who would believe in him for life everlasting” (1 Timothy 1:15-16).

The gospel has a way of reaching out and adopting into the family of Jesus a most unlikely group of characters, just as it did for Matthew and Simon and Paul. Jesus called them to follow him—together. And he continues to call disparate groups of individuals together today as the gospel goes forth into the utmost parts of the earth.

This, then, is both the challenge and the opportunity of the gospel. Because it is an invitation broad enough, wide enough, and good enough to include even me, it also reaches out and welcomes those I might not expect and bids me to serve alongside. It challenges me to leave my preconceptions behind, as the door to the kingdom of God swings open to fellow sinners who will become saints. And it ushers us in a community of new allegiances, a body only God could create.

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

(1) See Mark 2:13-17.

(2) See Mark 3:13-19.

(3) Many later church traditions suggest that Simon joined Jude in apostolic ministry. Later tradition suggests that Simon was martyred by being sawn in two. See for example, The Golden Legend (Aurea Legenda) compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, 1275.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Public, Private, and Practical

July 6, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There is no mistaking the presence of unique challenges to belief in our modern day world. Our secular, privatized, consumerist affections have wielded a religion (indeed many religions) that has little or nothing to do with life itself. Coupled with secularism’s privatizing of religion from the public realm, consumerism’s pull creates a context whereby the choice of belief is not only a personal matter, but a matter entirely divorced from the history and communities that inform these beliefs. As professor David Wells notes, “God has been evacuated from the center of our collective life, pushed to the edges of our public square to become an irrelevance to how our world does its business. Marxism rested on a theoretical atheism; our secularized world rests on a practical atheism in the public domain, though one that coexists with private religiosity.”(1) This chasm between public and private, sacred and secular, forces a theology whereby God is largely absent, unknown in the public arena, and silent unless spoken to.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with our evacuation of God and subsequent practical atheism, we live within an understanding of unbounded freedom to pursue and consume whatsoever we will. While we may recognize secularism for what it is, Wells warns: “[W]e do not recognize the corrupting power of our affluence for what it is…. We consider our abundance as essentially harmless and, what is just as important, we have come to need it. The extraordinary and dazzling benefits of our modernized world, benefits that are now indispensable to our way of life, hide the values which accompany them, values which have the power to wrench around our lives in very damaging ways.”(2) Far more than a matter of wealth, our sheer appetites, which we readily appease as if angry gods, bring us to the conclusion that we ourselves are the center of collective life, echoing the call of secularism that God is exactly where God belongs—in quiet, private corners. Even within the church, this outlook is often practically lived if not publicly admitted.

Yet, this dichotomy that is now readily accepted between matters of private faith and public life belies a betrayal of the very identity Jesus sets forth for his followers. The hope within the Christian is not something we are able to keep private—for if the very public act of Christ’s resurrection from the dead was not real, then the very faith our culture would have us keep in private is futile. The events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and the faith that upholds them, do not allow for the dichotomies of public and private, spiritual and physical, sacred and secular. The call of Christ is one that encompasses every possible realm, thus making “private faith” an unintelligible distinction.

Nonetheless, while the challenges of “practical atheism” may indeed be the outworking of a unique cultural moment, it is hardly a new way of life. Though the causes and contexts are certainly different, our current cultural mood is in some ways comparable to the scene Paul discovered in Athens. Standing before these men and women, Paul gently bid them to see that their philosophy amounted to little more than practical atheism. Where there was belief that amounted to very little, where gods were acknowledged but unknown, and worship was offered in ritual, fear, and apathy, Paul set before them the God who is there, the God who is known. While the cultural challenges before us are intricate and unyielding, Christ brings the countercultural hope of a life touched by the God who is there. Practical atheism is unlivable when it is placed beside the one who is known.

Thus we might be encouraged in any attempt to believe, for regardless of the risks and opportunities that fill the world around us, so it is filled of the unfailing love of a present God. And it is this reality that despite ourselves or our obstacles compels the blind to see. On such matters of the Spirit, 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards once noted, “Though great use may be made of external arguments…for they may be greatly serviceable to awaken unbelievers, and bring them to serious consideration, and to confirm the faith of true saints… [T]here is no spiritual conviction…but what arises from an apprehension of the spiritual beauty and glory of divine things. And such a direct apprehension is a gift mediated only by the Holy Spirit of God.”(3) In our pluralistic, privatized, and practically atheistic culture this Spirit indeed continues to move.

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

(1) David Wells, “This Unique Moment: The Changing of the Guard and What It Means For Christians Today,” Modern Reformation, Sept./Oct. Vol. 4, No. 5, 1995, 10.

(2) Ibid., 11.

(3) Jonathon Edwards, Treatise on the Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 307.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Pluralism as Privilege

July 3, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

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” (Acts 17:22). 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. Author John Stackhouse adds: “[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.”(1)

There is no doubt the present world of faith is riddled with the stickiness of choice and the command of preference. But for those willing to receive it, our current context can be a fruitful gift. Like Paul, we will no doubt discover that the obstacles often stand taller than we realized and the words we have to offer fall short. Our pluralistic world wants very little to do with a great many of the things Christians profess. For the Christian, this means it is all the more vital to live the apologetic we attempt to preach among the barrage of choices before our neighbors. While we cannot profess that following Christ will bring fortune or erase hardship, or that discipleship will come easily or without cost, we can portray the coherence of the Christian worldview, the primacy of Christ beside life’s inescapable questions, and the hopeful reality of forgiveness, transformation, and new life. In the words of one of the first believers to recognize the apologetic of authentic living in a world of many gods, idols, and ideologies: we are to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with the God we profess. This, the world will notice whether they are listening or not.

Into this unique culture, the Christian offers the message of Christ crucified, a message that runs counter to every culture that has ever heard it.

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

(1) John Stackhouse, Jr., Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 36.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Spaghetti Monsters and One Less God

July 2, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Among atheist advocates, it has become fashionable to dismiss theism with the mantra that unbelievers, like theists, are atheist with regard to a host of entities considered to be divine at sundry times throughout history. Atheists, we are told, merely acknowledge one less God than theists. If believers understood why they reject Zeus, the argument goes, they would understand why atheists reject their God.

Unfortunately, dismissing theism on such grounds betrays a paltry acquaintance with the very idea of God, let alone the God revealed in the Bible. It is true that many concepts of God present us with entities that are nothing more than glorified human beings. But anyone who is familiar with the relevant religious and philosophical literature on the subject does not need to be told that such untutored notions of God are just pointless red herrings. Popular level atheism may be fodder for invigorating debates on the Internet, but it has little, if anything at all, to do with God.

Take, for instance, the idea of God defended by such a prominent ancient philosopher as Aristotle. Whereas Zeus and his associates held sway at the popular level, David Conway notes that Aristotle defended a God who was unchanging, immaterial, all-powerful, omniscient and indivisible; a God who possessed “perfect goodness and necessary existence.”(1) That is a striking parallel to the God worshipped in the major monotheistic religions of the world. Even among the so-called animistic religions, it is a mistake to think that the concept of God is limited to spirits in natural objects and events, even in cases where the latter are venerated. As Timothy Tennent notes, adherents of these religions acknowledge a being who is the ground of all being.(2)

God is not one being among other beings; God is being itself. In philosophical parlance, God exists necessarily—God cannot not exist! Every other entity finds the reason for its existence in God. Spaghetti monsters and teapots in orbit are material objects that would stand in need of explanation, even if they really did exist, since they do not exist necessarily. But we can also dismiss such examples precisely because we know enough about spaghetti and teapots to know what it would take to get them to play the roles detractors of faith in God assign to them. To say they are infinitely under qualified is a gross understatement.

But not only is God the ground of Being and the reason everything else exists, the Bible tells us that, ultimately, reality is personal. For God, the Being from whom all things came, exists as a Trinity—three Persons in One Being. These truths about God—God’s necessary existence as the grounding of all of reality, the relationships that exist within the Trinity and God’s personal nature—are profound truths about the glory and majesty of God. Only the Christian faith can countenance them all. Thus far from being a problem for Christianity, the Trinity solves a major difficulty for humanity by providing us with a coherent explanation for our origin and purpose; both in this life and in the life to come. The Bible also tells us that human beings are made in the image of God. Our powerful relational capacities are therefore not accidental: they are a reflection of reality at its very core. As a matter of fact, our capacity for relationship can only be fully satisfied when we are properly related to God.

Religious systems that conceive of God as a personal Being who nevertheless exists as a single entity cannot sufficiently account for the fullness of God since such a God lacks anyone with whom he can be in relationship. For example, such a God would have to create out of the necessity to actualize his love. But within the Trinity, there is the eternal unity and community sustained by the self-sufficiency of God.

A common objection to the claim that God, who is love, would not have had someone to love before He created is to ask how God was able to actualize attributes such as anger and mercy, which are also relational in nature, before creation. If mercy can exist in God as a latent capacity sans creation, why can’t love exist in the same way? Once again, there is a serious misconception of the nature of perfect relationships lurking in this objection. Attributes such as anger and mercy are not necessary to the nature of God. They are contingent upon there being imperfect, sentient creatures. They are by definition absent in a perfect relationship, such as the one that exists among the members of the Trinity. They will one day be eternally absent from those who choose to follow God’s way, for “when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2b). No criticism of faith in God that fails to take into account the fullness of God and the perfection promised those from whom sin will be eternally purged touches the essence of the Gospel message.

J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Quoted by Antony Flew in There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008), 92.

(2) Timothy Tennent, “African Traditional Religion in Practice,” https://www.biblicaltraining.org, accessed June 23, 2015.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Servant Like This

July 1, 2015 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

For his fluency with words and unrivaled poetic voice, Isaiah has been called the “Shakespeare of the prophets.” His words are assuredly lyrical; they were also political and prophetic, enduring well beyond his life.

The 53rd chapter of the book of Isaiah offers the image of a servant who embodies a severe faithfulness despite unjust opposition. “He was oppressed and he was afflicted,” writes Isaiah, “but he did not open his mouth” (53:7a). The prophet describes a sufferer of flint-like submission in the face of extreme violence. “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (v.7b). He describes a servant who is crushed and anguished, stricken, and yet somehow satisfied. “As a result of the anguish of his soul,” writes Isaiah, “he will see it and be satisfied; by his knowledge the righteous one, my servant, will justify the many, and he will bear their iniquities” (v.11). Whether Isaiah had in mind someone who fit the description or merely longed to see God’s words come to fruition, the prophet offers an image of one who changes all the rules.

Isaiah utters words abundantly verified in Jesus Christ. Almost 700 years after Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant, Jesus was carrying sorrows and curing infirmities; he was suffering rejection, hatred, and affliction (v.4). He was despised and brushed aside without regard (v.3). He was taken away by a perversion of justice (v.8). He was assigned a grave with the wicked (v.9). Yet he set his face “like a flint” upon the will of God (Isaiah 50:7, Luke 9:51). He was cut off from the land of the living, so that many would live (Isaiah 53:8b).

Whether you hear it as an exile in ancient Israel, a tax collector in 1st century Jerusalem, or cultural observer in contemporary times, Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant is one that warrants contemplation. Even Isaiah, out of whose mouth the description emerged, was compelled to ask with bewilderment: “Who shall consider it?” Who can imagine a man in such circumstances? Who knows what to do with a servant like this? “Who has considered that he was cut off from the land of the living for the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due?” (v.8a). So asks the prophet who would not live to see the suffering servant he described. How much more so should we who see the face of the prophecy consider this description of Christ?

Isaiah 53 describes a Christ oppressed and afflicted but silent, even dumb, in the face of his oppressors. Like a sheep submitting to its shearers, he did not object; he didn’t even open his mouth. He was taken from justice and afflicted by people who seemed to hold some real sense of power over him. Yet he did it all willingly and silently, as if he were allowing them the power in the first place. He was a victim of violence though he had committed no violence himself. He was categorized as wicked though a deceitful word was never on his lips. Who is able to fathom it? Isaiah seems at once to ask both a rhetorical question and a pessimistic one. Will anyone consider it? Is anyone really catching all of this? Who is really in control here—the silent one or the ones who think they are silencing him?

This metaphor of the submissive sheep is pervasive in Isaiah’s description, immediately hastening images of sacrifice, blood, and atonement. Like a lamb, the sufferer was led to slaughter. In the case of most sacrificial animals, they go unsuspectingly; they follow without much thought. But this is clearly not the case in this metaphor. Isaiah describes a man who is led and killed, but he does not go unknowingly. While it may be natural in certain conditions for a man to follow people who end up harming him, it would not be natural for that man to follow silently in the midst of harm. A ewe might not cry with its shearers, but it would certainly bleat if you hit it repeatedly. This lamb went to his death submitting to those who led him, but it was far from unintentional. He followed with a depth of thought we have difficulty considering.

In fact, there is something altogether silencing about the one who remains still and submissive while the ultimate injustice weighs on his shoulders. Isaiah describes a servant who seems immobilized and powerless. It is the unnamed crowd in each verse that seems to be in control. It is they who afflict him, oppress him, and strike him. It is they who lead him to the slaughter and put him in a grave. Yet is it not entirely significant that this nameless crowd, which seems to hold all the power, remains at least structurally inconsequential? There is no real description offered of the oppressors in the entire chapter. “They” did not earn the subject of more than one sentence, perhaps because “they” are not the point. He is.

It is still ours to consider: What if Jesus chose this path for himself? What if he chose to remain silent, to be weak in our nameless hands, to pour himself out even unto death? What if he chose to take on the violence that would bring us peace? What do we do with a servant like this?

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Intention of Asking

June 30, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I had always wanted to visit India. In the India of my imagination, a myriad of colors, smells, sounds, and people danced together. The air would always be saturated by an atmosphere of mystery. India would never be a place that could be categorized neatly or understood completely; comprehension would slip stealthily around a corner just as I thought I had gotten hold of it.

In reality, India was indeed a land of color, contrast, and mystery. Like a whirling dervish, India spins round and round in constant activity, rarely standing still. One cannot help but feel both overwhelmed and exhilarated by life there.

Despite all the complex, continual motion, one constant became apparent to me: Hospitality—gracious, open, generous and dignified—is a way of life. People are always around to serve, whether they are paid to do so or not. Someone is there to take your bags from the car, or someone is bringing you a cup of tea just the way you like it. Someone is enticing you to eat more, and someone is sweeping the city streets clean of leaves, dust, or debris with a broom made from a bundle of twigs. There are household servants, and those designated to serve as a result of their caste. Yet, regardless of why someone is serving, there is always someone to serve, someone who through class or training or culture inhabits an ethos of hospitable care. All one need do is ask and it will be done.

It was in India that I learned something about the nature of request. One morning, having spent a good portion of the previous night dealing with what I affectionately came to call my “spicy stomach,” I was languishing for plain, cold cereal and milk—my normal breakfast when at home. Having enjoyed too much fabulous Indian cuisine, I knew I simply couldn’t have any more or my stomach would rebel entirely. Not wanting to offend my hosts or their generous hospitality, I timidly expressed my desire for bland food. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “Why didn’t you ask?” “My husband and I normally eat eggs and toast or cereal for breakfast!” Instantly, the phrase you do not have because you do not ask came to mind.

In the biblical letter of James, you do not have because you do not ask is used in quite a different context.(1) The author issues a rebuke against the quarrels and conflicts that rage within human beings. We are jealous of others, we covet them, and so we get into conflicts with others because of our lust and our greed.

But I had been thinking for quite some time about the nature of request as it relates to prayer. I was wrestling with the nature of prayer as request in the face of so many no’s as answers. The result was that I simply stopped asking. I began to wonder if God was not hospitable to me any longer and would not honor my requests with answers that accorded my needs. Even in my personal relationships, I had stopped asking for fear of rejection or disappointment. I would sit on my hands, as it were, and stew with resentment and anger. And yet I became haunted by this phrase from James: You do not have because you do not ask.

What seemed a tangential connection between the service culture of India, and my own choice to withhold requests from God, actually revealed a powerful reality about the nature of request. Like household servants who are there at my beckon call, there are some things over which we have total control. If there are weeds in the garden, or if we have a broken faucet, we do not request that the weeds go away, we go out and pull the weeds, or fix the faucet.

There are many things, perhaps even most things, however, over which we exercise minimal, direct control. Instead, we have to make a request—a request that may or may not be granted. As one author notes, “The request, while powerful, does not always get us what we have in mind as we make it. This is true when it is addressed to other human beings and true when it is addressed to God as prayer….It is a great advantage of requesting and prayer that it not be a fail-safe mechanism. For human finitude means that we are all limited in knowledge, in power, in love, and in powers of communication.”(2)

Nevertheless, requests are made and they are powerful because in making them our deepest selves are revealed. We can truly hear what we are asking for. We come to stare at our desires face to face. In so doing, we have the opportunity to see the often complex motivations behind our requests. Furthermore, as we make requests we do so with the knowledge that we cannot always fulfill all that is asked of us, or by us. As we make requests of God and of others, we make them with a tenacious trust in the power of love that grants or withholds.

Prayer is never just asking, nor is it merely a matter of asking for what I want—even as we cling to the hope that the God of the universe cares for what concerns us. While there is no simple explanation to why some requests are granted and some are not, and while there is mystery surrounding the efficacy of request, there is always the power to ask. We may still not have even when we ask with what appears to be the purest intentions, but we always have the power of request. The way into the meaning of request is to start by making them, just as I learned in India. Perhaps as we do, “The circle of our interests will grow in the largeness of God’s love.”(3) Perhaps as we do, the admonition to ask, seek, and knock will not simply be a formula to get what we want, but an invitation to look into what we ask for, whom we seek, and upon which doors we are knocking.

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

(1) See James 4:1-3.

(2) Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998), 239.

(3) Ibid., 242.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God of Possibility

June 29, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.”(1) So begins Nicholas Carr’s now well-circulated essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” His Atlantic article describes the shifting of his own thought patterns; how he once could delve easily into long bouts of prose, but now finds his mind trailing off after skimming only a few pages. As a writer he is the first to applaud the instant wonders of Google searches, information-trails, and hyperlinks ad infinitum. He just wonders aloud about the cost.

University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson is another voice attempting to articulate the current cultural ecosystem, and the minds, souls, and relationships it cultivates. In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education he attempts to describe the turbo-charged orientation of his students to life around them. “They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they’ve ever known… They live to multiply possibilities. They’re enemies of closure… [They] want to take eight classes a term, major promiscuously, have a semester abroad at three different colleges, [and] connect with every likely person who has a page on Facebook.”(2) Edmundson argues that for all the virtues of a generation that lives the possibilities of life so fully, there are detriments to the mind that perpetually seeks more and other options. For many, the moment of maximum pleasure is no longer “the moment of closure, where you sealed the deal,” but rather, “the moment when the choices had been multiplied to the highest sum…the moment of maximum promise.”

There is a phrase in Latin that summarizes the idea that the shape of our deepest affections is the shape of our lives. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi is an axiom of ancient Christianity, meaning: the rule of worship is the rule of belief is the rule of life. That is, our deepest affections (whatever it might be that we focus on most devotedly) shapes the way we believe and, in turn, the way we live. In a cultural ecosystem where we seem to worship possibilities, where freedom is understood as the absence of limitation upon our choices, and where the virtue of good multitasking has replaced the virtue of singleness of heart, it is understandable that we are both truly and metaphorically “all over the place”—mentally, spiritually, even bodily, in a state of perpetual possibility-seeking.

Of course, for the ancient Christians who first repeated the idiom, Lex orandi lex credendi lex vivendi, they did so with Christ in mind as the subject, aware that the human Son of God was the only object of worship who could ever quiet their own restless humanity. Before any formal creeds were written, the early church held this adage, knowing that the essence of their theology would rise from their acts of adoration, thanksgiving, affections. And they knew that the ways of their worship, the things they said when they prayed, their deepest affections, not only defined their ultimate beliefs, but ultimately defined their lives.

No matter our object of worship, the same is true of our lives today. That which claims the most thorough part of our hearts, minds, and time both reflects and shapes our lives. We most certainly live in a time when focusing our minds on one thing is a challenge met with a constant parade of options vying for our attention. The Christian story introduces a God who longs to gather us, whose arm is not too short to save (even from ourselves), nor ear too dull to hear, who is the same yesterday and today.

What’s more, the distracted soul is hardly unique to the age of Google. There was a time when the ancient church father Augustine of Hippo defined his soul as “too cramped” for God to enter. He prayed that God might widen it, seeing too that it needed to be emptied. “You prompt us yourself to find satisfaction in appraising you,” he prayed. “[Y]ou made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you.”(3) Of course, such satisfaction in worship is not likely where God is only one of many possibilities in a never-ending, ever-expanding web of activities and diversions. If faith is only a part of life, then it has become as optional as pursuing one more hyperlink or skimming one more article. But those who fully approach the God of all possibilities find rest and focus, wisdom—and indeed, possibility—for their souls.

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

(1) Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, (July/August 2008).

(2) Mark Edmundson, “Dwelling in Possibilities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 54, Issue 27, Pg. B7.

(3) Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Garry Wills, (New York: Penguin, 2006), 5.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – An Evangelist’s Journey

June 26, 2015 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

I was a baby when my parents became Christians. We were living in Australia. My father, a university lecturer, had been asking deep questions about purpose and meaning for a while when God dramatically broke into his life. Up late one night, marking some of his students’ papers, he had an overwhelming vision in which he saw his own life, including all of his regrets, from the perspective of Jesus. At the end of this, he saw Christ on the cross and found himself on his knees. Having been raised by an atheist father, he did not know much about the Bible. The only phrase he could remember was “Lord I believe, help my unbelief,” and so after saying this, he got up off the floor a changed man. My mother made her own decision to follow Christ six months later after a lot of questioning and searching. My sister and I were suddenly now members of a Christian family.

A couple of years later we moved back to the UK for my father to study theology and prepare for church leadership. He is a gifted and passionate evangelist. Some of my earliest childhood memories are around people discovering Christ for themselves in our home. I still frequently meet people who came to know the Lord through my parents. Sharing what we had discovered as such good news was a completely natural part of our lives. It was something that happened in the course of mundane tasks and daily friendships. It wasn’t something I saw anybody worrying about.

When I started school, I remember meeting children and asking them if they wanted to become Christians. Through a couple of them, their whole families ended up coming to know the Lord and we are still in touch on Facebook now! It wasn’t until secondary school that I really thought about being an evangelist myself. I remember feeling very nervous on my first day at this new school; I didn’t know anyone in my class and I prayed with my family for a Christian friend. On the bus on the way home, I chatted to a friend I had made that day and we started talking about God. She was very open and the next day at school she announced that she was now a Christian. This girl became my closest friend over the next years; God had answered my prayer.

As the teenage years kicked in I became involved with a ministry of YWAM, which was called Kings Kids. We went all over the world doing performing arts and evangelism in the summer holidays. The leaders were absolutely phenomenal Christians who believed that children and young people could minister in the power of the Holy Spirit. In 1991, shortly after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, a team of us went to the Czech Republic. Thousands were on the streets of Prague and we were performing on Charles Bridge and Wensceslas Square. As a fifteen year old I was given the opportunity to share testimonies and preach the gospel in the open air to these crowds. The leaders seemed to think this was absolutely natural and normal; age was no barrier to seeing the Kingdom of God come. Amazing miracles happened on that trip; we saw God at work first hand. In 1994 a team of us were in Uzbekistan and the national television crew came to film what we are doing. I was to preach in this closed country, God again opening such an amazing door.

Kings Kids laid a foundation of mission in my life and at university quite a few of my friends became Christians. But it was at Oxford that I discovered the need for apologetics in evangelism. I remember spending eight hours one day talking to a Jewish friend about the Christian faith. He was terrifyingly intelligent and kept on asking me questions; he had only popped around to my room to borrow something but as we fell into conversation I faced a barrage of questions and objections with no let up. Another friend had grown up in a Christian family but was now studying biology and had become a born-again atheist under the influence of his hero Richard Dawkins. After many late night conversations he confided his despair at the prospect of a godless, hopeless universe but I was unable to convince him otherwise. The need for equipping in apologetics was very real to me. Meanwhile, forty of my friends came to hear Michael Green preach at a mission event and one of the most hardened anti-Christians of the lot secretly signed up for the follow-up course. “Don’t tell anyone—but will you come with me?” was the message slid under my door. What an incredible joy to pray with her only three weeks later.

Discovering a passion for evangelism and preaching was a slow process for me; there wasn’t really a moment when I suddenly knew this was what I was called to be. But from childhood into my teens and then at university, many encouraged me and gave me opportunities to share the gospel I had so grown to love. For all of those people—and for the power of Christ to change lives—I am incredibly thankful.

Amy Orr-Ewing is EMEA Director for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and Director of Programmes for the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics in Oxford, Endland.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Man of Ill Repute

June 25, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

While many industries confess to struggling during times of economic downturn, the identity management industry, a trade emerging from the realities of the Internet Age, is one that gains business steadily regardless. As one such company notes in its mission statement, they began with the realization that “the line dividing people’s ‘online’ lives from their ‘offline’ personal and professional lives was eroding, and quickly.”(1) While the notion of anonymity or the felt-safety of a social network lures users into online disinhibition, reputations are forged in a very public domain. And, as many have discovered, this can come back to haunt them—long after posted pictures are distant memories. In a survey taken in 2006, one in ten hiring managers admitted rejecting candidates because of things they discovered about them on the Internet. With the increasing popularity of social networks, personal video sites, and blogs, today that ratio is now one in two! Hence the need for identity managers—who scour the Internet with an individual’s reputation in mind and scrub websites of image-damaging material—grows almost as quickly as a high-schooler’s Facebook page.

With the boom of the reputation business in mind, I wonder how identity managers might have attempted to deal with the social repute of Jesus. Among officials, politicians, and soldiers, his reputation as a political nightmare and agitator of the people preceded him. Among the religious leaders, his reputation was securely forged by the scandal and outrage of his messianic claims. Beyond these reputations, the most common accusations of his personal depravity had to do with the company he kept, the Sabbath he broke, the food and drink he enjoyed. In two different gospels, Jesus remarks on his reputation as a glutton. “[T]he Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’”(2) In fact, if you were to remove the accounts of his meals or conversations with members of society’s worst, or his parables that incorporated these untouchables, there would be very little left of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

According to etiquette books and accepted social norms, both from the first century and the twenty-first, the reputation of Jesus leaves much to be desired.

Ironically, the reputation of those Jesus left behind does not resemble his reputation much at all. Writing in 1949 with both humor and lament, Dorothy Sayers describes the differences: “For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian churches have labored, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the communion table, founded total abstinence societies in the name of him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatergoing….[F]eeling that the original commandment ‘thou shalt not work’ was rather half hearted, [they] have added to it a new commandment, ‘thou shalt not play.”(3) Her observations have a ring of both comedy and tragedy. The impression Christians often give the world is that Christianity comes with an oddly restricted understanding of words such as “virtue,” “morality,” “faithfulness,” and “goodness.” Curiously, this reputation is far more similar to the law-abiding religion of which Jesus had nothing nice to say. “Woe to you, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 23:23).

When the apostle Paul described the kind of fruit that will flourish in the life of one who follows Jesus, he was not giving the church a checklist or a rigid code like the religious law from which he himself was freed.(4) He was describing the kinds of reputations that emerge precisely when following this friend of tax-collectors and sinners, the drunkard, the Sabbath-breaker: the vicariously human Son of God. This is no mere niceness, an unfeeling, unthinking social obligation to keep the status quo. Jesus loved the broken, discarded people around him to a social fault. He was patient and kind, joyful and peaceful in ways that made the world completely uncomfortable. He was also radical and intense and unsettling in ways that made the religious leaders and others in power completely uncomfortable. His disruptive qualities of goodness and faithfulness were not badges that made it seem permissible to exclude others for their lack of virtue.

Christ’s unfathomable love for God and self-control did not lead him to condemn the world around him or to isolate himself in disgust of their immorality; rather, it moved him to walk to his death for the sake of all.

There are no doubt pockets of the world where the reputation of the church lines up with that of its founder and their presence offers the world a disruptive, countercultural gift. The prophets and identity managers of the church today pray for more of this. Until then, in a world deciphering questions of reputation like “What does it mean to be socially reputable?” or “What is the best way to distinguish oneself?” perhaps we might ask instead, “What will we do with this man of ill repute?”

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

(1) From the website ReputationDefender.com/company accessed Jan 15, 2009.

(2) Luke 7:34, Matthew 11:19.

(3) Dorothy Sayers, “Christian morality” in The Whimsical Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 151-152.

(4) “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Teachers in the Dark

June 24, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Doubt everything, find your own light.(1) So recommends the Buddha in his last words. It sounds like good advice, but then the human heart invariably presses on to doubt itself! After all, what kind of assurance can we have that this light is real light or true? The hunger for meaning, the quest for understanding, the search for answers and solutions are central features of the human condition.

For instance, what is the nature of reality? What is existence all about? What is the purpose of life, if any, and what should we try to give answers to?

A much-neglected resource for reflection in this area is the book of Ecclesiastes, from the preacher, or Qoheleth in Hebrew. It is a book that speaks profoundly to our times by asking questions, by setting out contradictions, and by forcing the reader to feel what absurdity as an outlook is really like.

As the book opens, we are confronted with its most famous words, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” Or in another translation of Ecclesiastes 1:2: “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher, ‘Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’” Not a very inspiring start! He has devoted himself to explore life, to examine what is good for humanity to do under the sun, and his observations have yielded some depressing results: Everything in life seems to be bound by inevitability. Human freedom appears to be constrained by overwhelming necessities, leading to a sense of helplessness. And the endless cycle of repetition leads to a sense of boredom, pointlessness, and despair.

Many a sage, philosopher, and guru have come to similar conclusions. What is unique to Ecclesiastes is how the author tackles the issues and what he leads us to see. By laying out the vanities of life, the propensities of youth, the all-encompassing reach of death, and the vast urgency of wisdom as a potential life-philosophy, he engages a chaotic world with some serious reflections. The writer takes us on a journey through life, and he deals with the questions and exasperations that we all inevitably encounter. His own desire was to try and figure things out so he could live well and be content, and encourage others to do the same. He likely hoped to discover the key or missing ingredient, the clues to true and lasting success and happiness.

Instead, the world he begins to see is one that displays both good and bad at the same time. He sees the superiority of wisdom, yet even the wise are reduced by death. He sees injustice being done and oppressors prevailing, yet he also notes there is a higher justice. He cites the sayings and actions of wise people but then goes on to point out how quickly they are forgotten! It is the tone that wears on us. We see ambiguity and fuzziness, a mixture of pain and problems, food, friends, wisdom, and a spiritual hunger. These things all dwell in the same world at the same time, and this is a difficult reality for many of us to digest. Like Qoheleth, we want better answers, tidier analysis, more comforting visions—and we have them, but not here, in doubt and darkness.

Qoheleth shows us the futility of life without God. He makes us feel what life is like from an honest look at how things truly are.

He gives us a severe picture of reality and suggests that God is still worth seeking somewhere in the midst of it. Even prior to the coming of the Messiah, Qoheleth paints our stark need for the God who is there.

While the world as we know it is indeed disordered and damaged, and to find answers in the world itself is absurd, God does not abandon us to absurdity. Into this world, into its pain and confusion, God, too, became flesh and dwelt among us. And it ended for Jesus as tragically as anything we observe under the sun. He went to the cross with the full force of every ugly, honest reality of Ecclesiastes on his shoulders. And he stood with us in that darkness, giving us an equally severe image of a God worth seeking in the midst of it.

Stuart McAllister is regional director of the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Terry Breverton, Immortal Words: History’s Most Memorable Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (London: Quercus Publishing Place, 2009), 13.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Growing Process

June 23, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

As a gardener, nothing is more rewarding to me than reaping the benefits of my labor whether that is a lovely bouquet of flowers, or the bounty of my fruit and vegetable gardens. When the soil, sun, and rain are just right everything grows, blooms, and produces a bountiful harvest. But, of course, not everything is just right.

Morning glory belongs to a family of unique and tenacious plants. While offering beautiful white or purple blossoms, that beauty belies a more pernicious and tenacious nature to spread and take over one’s entire yard! Morning glory is a variety of bindweed, which grows from rhizomes—underground storage structures that promote the spread of the weed. Hardy, tenacious, and opportunistic, the morning glory will spread in such ways that it will destroy every square inch of the garden.

Battling this plant nemesis in my own gardens has given me a new understanding for the process involved in the cultivation and preservation of gardens. Digging deep to get up as many of the rhizomes as possible takes commitment, hard work, and a great deal of time. Often, I look out over garden beds cleared of any visible evidence of morning glory after my labor, only to look out the next day and see new shoots where I had just cleared them.

With all of this back-breaking labor, it is easy to be tempted towards finding an easier way: A rock garden, perhaps, instead of a green one? Why in the world would anyone be attracted to the inconvenience of going out and working long hours in the hot sun battling insects, weeds, and other pests for a garden? Why would I slave in the summer sun for beauty or for bounty?

When I labor over my garden, or any project for that matter, I am connected to a larger process, and not just an end result. It was my knees that began to ache from bending over, my hands that occasionally encountered a stinging or biting insect of one kind or another, my muscles that would cramp my fingers and hands from relentless weeding and digging. Yet, taking notice of this process makes me aware of my own tendency to desire convenience or to want to give up when things become difficult. Just as one might take for granted the process that goes into getting good food on filled grocery shelves, I often want for the shortcut or the expedience. Working hard to create conditions that enhance thriving for my flowers and vegetables in my own garden connects me to a part of the process that is done on my behalf on a much larger scale. I think of all the people who labor on my behalf so that I might enjoy the wonderful food on my grocery shelves. Going out and doing battle for my own garden reminds me that the process is just as important as the end product.

In many other regards, our busyness and commitment to convenience often keep us from engaging in vital processes that inform us of our beginning and guide us to our end, just as they contribute to a general amnesia about what it takes to put food on our tables. Our consumer conveniences often sever us from vital connections; we forget from whence we have come and where we are going. We look for the quick fix or the shortcut to the end goal, rather than journeying through many arduous processes essential to our growth and development as human persons.

How similarly people of faith often wish for the easy way or the convenience of a ‘seven-step plan’ for spiritual growth. Jesus’s frequent use of agricultural imagery should not surprise us. Some of the most beloved images from Jesus’s conversations with his disciples evoke the vine and branches from grapevines and vineyards that likely filled the landscape. Growing grapes requires a long process. It takes three years to establish a grape planting. Yet, even during the third season, only a limited harvest may be expected from the vines. The first full crop normally takes between four to five years.

Perhaps this knowledge can give new insight into the words of Jesus:

I am the vine; you are the branches…Remain in me, and I will remain in you…no branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine…remain in my love…I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last.(3)

The spiritual life, like our development as human beings, is about the process. Just as in farming, much of that process involves watching and waiting, tilling and cultivating the land, even having to persevere and dig deep to pull out yet another encroaching rhizome. There are no short cuts for a bountiful harvest.

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

(1) “Every Piece of Fruit” cited in Alice Peck Ed., Bread, Body, Spirit (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2008).

(2) John 15:4-16.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Christianity and Violence

June 22, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a 2002 article in The Guardian, author Salman Rushdie, inspired by bouts of violence in his native India, articulated a now-common view on religion. The article was titled, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood.” In it, Rushdie outlined the familiar stance of the vociferous new atheists, bidding the world to stop speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect” and skating around the obvious conclusions about both God and religion. He writes:

“What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! […] India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.“(1)

Rushdie’s voice is merely one among many in the increasingly prevalent conversation about God, religion, and violence. Against Christianity, the critiques come quite specifically. Richard Dawkins describes the Christian story as vicious, sado-masochistic, and repellent, symptomatic of a violent God, a Bible full of violence, and followers willing to overlook that violence, or worse, to embrace it. For Dawkins and his conspirators, God is the problem that initiates the problem of violence: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can be desensitized to their horror.”(2)

Unsatisfied altogether by those who try to interpret the Old Testament through the lenses of the New, those who point to Jesus as fulfilling personally and particularly some of the more uncertain images of God, the new atheists see only continuity in the violence of Christian theology. In Dawkins’ words, “New Testament theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose viciousness even the Old Testament barely succeeds. It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol… The theology and punishment-theory behind it is even worse.”(3)

While the vitriolic rants of the new atheists are filled with arrogance, oddities, and inconsistencies of their own, their well-voiced objections to Christian violence are hardly unique to them. For many, both in and outside the church, it is an issue deeply felt, a problem that needs a viable answer. Why is it that religion and violence often merge? And what is the solution? For the great majority of those who bravely vocalize such a question, the great “solution” of eradicating religion is simply unhelpful. And in fact some are suggesting the exact opposite, suggesting that the cure to religious violence does not rest in less religion or no religion (an argument that has been on the increase since the Enlightenment), but rather more religion.

In a carefully qualified sense, professor Miroslav Volf explains, “I don’t mean, of course, that the cure for violence lies in increased religious zeal… [rather] it lies in a stronger and more intelligent commitment to the faith as faith.” That is, commitment to the kind of faith that is itself good news, truth and beauty incarnate, a story that reinterprets all others. After the horrific murders of nine members of Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last week, the world has been shown such a faith. Addressing the one accused of killing their loved ones, they spoke of mercy and offered forgiveness. They did not speak full of rage, just broken hearts.

As Volf continues, “The more we reduce Christian faith to vague religiosity which serves primarily to energize, heal, and give meaning to the business of life whose content is shaped by factors other than faith (such as national or economic interests), the worse off we will be. Inversely, the more the Christian faith matters to its adherents as faith and the more they practice it as an ongoing tradition with strong ties to its origins and with clear cognitive and moral content, the better off we will be.”(4) In other words, Christ’s Incarnation properly understood as a nonviolent invasion of a violent world by the God of shalom hardly fosters violence.

On the contrary, his violent death at the hands of a life-taking world is entirely reversed at the hands of the life-giving Father and the resurrection of a murdered son. His proclamation of a different kingdom is embodied in a God who steps near enough to consume us, but who offers instead a paradoxical alternative: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). No, Christianity properly understood and entirely embodied cannot be used to incite violence. It instead takes the angry words of its staunchest critics and the vile abuse of misguided disciples, and, like its liberator, lives the radical alternative to the story they tell.

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

(1) Salman Rushdie, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood,” The Guardian, March 9, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/mar/09/society.salmanrushdie, accessed January 15, 2010.

(2) Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 51.

(3) Ibid., 285.

(4) Miroslav Volf, “Christianity and Violence,” Boardman Lectureship in Christian Ethics, March 6, 2002, http://repository.upenn.edu/boardman/2, accessed January 18, 2010.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God With Us

June 19, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a powerful scenario played out in a hot, dry, and dusty wilderness, Jesus said in response to a temptation: “One does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Notice he did not say that man did not live on bread “at all,” as some forms of mysticism and bodily denial might assert. He showed that man did live on bread partially, but not exclusively. In other words, we are both body and spirit, and there is a higher dimension to our existence.

The New Atheists, and the old ones for that matter, would have us embrace what some have called “nothing buttery.” We are nothing but our DNA; we are nothing but our social and biological inheritance; we are nothing but a random collocation of atoms, time, and chance. What is interesting in all this is that those who are saying such things use words. Indeed, they write long books, extensive articles, and scholarly tones to persuade us that we are nothing but “matter in motion.”

Is their use of words, their reliance on reason, their appeal to rationality, a backhanded tribute to Jesus’s claim that there is something higher, more complex, and real that is indeed a major feature of what it is to be human? After all, if my delight in reading or my love of the ideas and impressions that arise from reading are mere chemical reactions with deterministic outcomes, mere responses and not real experiences, then I am left wondering if even my wondering is nothing more than a blind reaction to stimulus. I must confess: I don’t buy it.

If we look at the ancient Scriptures, we see an initial confrontation with several players. Adam and Eve are in an idyllic setting. God is present and in communion with them. Then the “tempter” appears and raises what will be a lasting question, one which has as much bearing on the twenty-first Century as it did when it was first stated: “Did God really say?” (Genesis 3:1). Now, whether we take this question in broad directions (Is there any God who actually speaks?) or in specific directions (Do I believe God is speaking to me now? What should I do in these circumstances? Can I expect insight from God for life?), the thought has vast consequences. Did God really say?

If there is no God, if there is nothing but chance and necessity, then I must fling myself into existence with all the will and hope I can muster and simply allow the dice to land. If there is a God, however, then I not only have access to the author and creator of life, but I can meet and know a God who is called “The Good Shepherd” and reminds us that his name is Immanuel, “God with us.”

In this age of the saturated self, time and space are drowning in voices, noises, and insistent demands—all clamoring for our attention. We might feel at times as if we are suffocating or simply being squished by blind forces that have no consideration or compassion, and we wonder if we can survive. Did God really say? Did God say anything that could help? In a very powerful story told in Genesis 21:8-20, Hagar, who gave birth to Ishmael by Abraham, was sent away as a result of internal family strife and hostility. Abandoned with a young boy, wandering in a wasteland, she collapsed in hopeless despair. We surely feel her sense of utter desperation and loss. Yet into this bleak, dark, and hopeless scenario, God speaks. And his words are words of hope and words of life. Hagar hears what is being communicated and responds.

Of course, it could all be false. It could all be a construct. It could all be nothing but wishful thinking. Perhaps it is all imagination or the work of religious deceivers across time who have created these moving stories to distract us. Perhaps man really does live by bread alone, and what we need to do is simply accept it and get on with life as it is. Or perhaps—perhaps—there is a God, and God is, as Francis Schaeffer said, there and not silent. The choice is real and it is unavoidable. Jesus offers a way and an alternative to the bleak vision of life bound by time, chance, and necessity: Humanity does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Stuart McAllister is regional director of the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Think Again

June 18, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

By Ravi Zacharias

We may be familiar with the concept that faith in God results in works—but we often forget that the reverse is also true.

One of the fundamental distinctives of the Hebrew way of thinking that we find in the Scriptures is the understanding that the knowledge of truth comes by obedience. Christians regard faith as “belief” or “trust,” as the Greek word in the New Testament is often translated. And yet, the word for “faith” in the Old Testament is rendered as “faithfulness,” suggesting that obedience builds and strengthens one’s faith. A classic demonstration of this principle can be seen in the encounter between God and Moses. When Moses demanded proof that God had indeed called him, God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain” (Exodus 3:12). The proof of God’s call was after the obedience, not before.

Similarly, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Jonah did not feel like doing what God had asked them to do and questioned Him. In fact, every heartbeat within them was impelling them to do otherwise. Yet God said they were to obey. The remedy was not to do because they felt like doing it, but just to do and their faith would be strengthened.

There are several other instances in the Bible of this urgent struggle to achieve confidence in the wisdom and will of God, even under the impending shadow of death. Think of the prophet Daniel’s three friends Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego facing King Nebuchadnezzar’s very real threat to toss them into a fiery furnace if they did not bend to his authority. He was not a charitable man, but they refused to disavow their commitment to God, boldly declaring: “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up” (Daniel 3:17-18). God honored their faith, and in his mercy, delivered them even after they were thrown into the fire. They, in turn, experienced the triumph of faith when they stood their ground.

Being aligned with God’s will is no light matter. Nebuchadnezzar had plundered Jerusalem and its temple and took the Jewish people into captivity. He ordered Shadrach, Meschach, Abednego, and Daniel to be instructed in the Babylonian language and philosophy for three years, preparing them to serve in his kingdom. Yet although Daniel and his friends were subjected to a foreign culture, they held to three principles that allowed them to stand against the powerful forces of their day. They drew a line of resistance, a line of dependence, and a line of confidence in God. They resisted the temptation to accommodate themselves to the pagan culture of Babylon. They depended upon God and knew where knowledge and education ended, and where trust and wisdom in God began. And they had confidence that God alone is judge—even as Daniel’s own name indicates. (“Daniel” means “God is my judge.”)

What happened as a result of their obedience to God? Three pagan kings crossed over from their side over onto God’s side. Three pagan kings prayed to the God of Heaven by the time the Book of Daniel ends. The kings steeped them in Babylonian philosophy and tried to change their names and worldview. But, God’s faithful servants ended up changing the kings’ allegiances and identities.

“Sometimes we lose our ability to sense God or see Him at work because we choose not to obey Him. The inherent danger within all of us is that no matter what God does, we may wish He had done it differently. The gift of faith is precisely what makes it possible for us to accept that God works in his own way (which is not always our way), in his own time, and for his purpose.”

Can it still happen? Yes, it can. Certainly it is sometimes easier to resist God’s will than to have faith and confidence in God and in his specific purpose for each one of us. But from the halls of Washington to the boardrooms of Singapore, God is still at work among his people—especially through those who pray.

Prayer teaches us faith and prayer is hard work. It is not a guarantor of getting what we want or a substitute for action. Rather, it undergirds our action with the strength that makes the difference. Faith is that sublime dependence upon God that even though we may not get what we want, we know and love the One who denies us for his good reason and for our ultimate good. It is the assurance that our Lord superintends our lives in our needs and our dependencies, in our successes and accomplishments. The most significant relationships in life are based on this kind of faith. Such faith faces the defeat of desire with the victory of certainty in the One who is in control.

I would suggest that sometimes we lose our ability to sense God or see Him at work because we choose not to obey Him. The inherent danger within all of us is that no matter what God does, we may wish He had done it differently. The gift of faith is precisely what makes it possible for us to accept that God works in his own way (which is not always our way), in his own time, and for his purpose. It is for us to put aside our doubts and fall in line with God’s purpose, always looking forward and waiting patiently for the last link to fall into place. Such are the glorious lessons of faith itself. We do, we obey, we yield, we submit to God even when our natural inclination wants to drag us in the opposite direction.

Only through exercising this kind of faith can the moment be accepted and understood as a small portion of a bigger story. For some of us that individual story may entail a journey that may be long and hard and arduous, but it will be accomplished one moment at a time, one day at a time, each moment and day undergirded by the strength of the indwelling presence of God. Surely, we can rest in Him, confident like Daniel and his friends that the God we serve is able to deliver us—and He will deliver us. True faith depends not only on God’s power but also on his wisdom. The world may caricature it by misunderstanding it. GK Chesterton was right when he said, “Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors.”

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Story and Ice

June 17, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Robi Damelin knows it is all too alluring for the media to depict an extremist screaming at the top of a mountain about a greater nation or the mother of a suicide bomber saying she’s proud to have given her child; the alternative does not sell as well as the sensational. “But I can tell you of all these mothers who’ve lost children,” she says. “I don’t care what they say to the media. I know what happens to them at night when they go to bed. We all share the same pain.”(1)

Damelin is a mother who knows this pain well. Sitting beside her, Ali Abu Awwad, a soft-spoken young man thirty years her junior, knows a similar pain. Robi and Ali each tell stories of loved ones lost to violence, stories that happen to intersect at a place that puts them at painful odds with one another. Each grieves the loss of a family member caused at hands on opposite sides of the same violent conflict. For Ali, filled with the loss of his beloved younger brother, that place of intersection was once filled with thoughts familiar to many in his situation: How many from the other side need to die in order to make my pain feel better? Yet bravely, he began to notice something else at the crossroads of his side and theirs. For both Robi and Ali, it was the tears of the other side that would change the way they tell their stories.

Some stories, as Kafka prescribed, indeed provide the ax for the frozen sea inside us. Rather than crafting for themselves stories that add to the cold sea of hatred and despair which devastated them, Robi and Ali tell of the common grief that cracks the frozen wall between them. They are now a part of a growing network of survivors on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict who share their sorrow, stories of loved ones, and ideas for lasting change. “It’s the shared pain that allows you to open to another place completely,” says Robi. “If you want to be right it’s very easy,” adds Ali. “But to be honest is very difficult. Being honest means to be human.”(2)

Their story brings something I have been thinking about personally into a much broader place. Namely, the stories we tell ourselves powerfully shape our worlds: I am a victim. I am entitled. I am right. I am abandoned. I am in control. These simple narratives rest at the heart of the things we do and say, quietly but decidedly shaping our worldviews, our identities, our humanity. They at times act as self-fulfilling prophecies, narratives which keep us locked in worlds we may even claim we want to leave: I am devastated. I am betrayed. I am on my own. The tale of Ali and Robi shows two people willing to change the more common narratives of power and prerogative to the much less comfortable narratives of shared loss and weakness: We are human. We are grieving. We know the same pain. And as such, they are finding humanity where there was once only suspicion, relationship where a great divide often reigns, and a common story which chips away at a great frozen sea.

Unfortunately, ours is a world often suspicious with regards to common narratives. Even common stories of human existence can be seen as controlling attempts to manipulate or undermine the individual’s story, which is viewed as supreme. The master narrative is similarly dismissed, rejected on grounds of totalitarianism. According to Robert Royal in The New Religious Humanists, the current philosophy is one that favors “petites histoires, that is, personal stories as the only locus of rich meaning open to us.” In this view, he continues, “all the old grands recits—Christianity, Hegelianism, Marxism, even liberalism—are dangerous totalizing and potentially terroristic illusions.”(3) The pervasive postmodern mindset prefers an individual approach to seeing the world, speculating on our origins, perceiving our destinies—independently.

But without undermining the power of personal stories, can we be satisfied with them alone? If petites histoires are really the only locus of meaning open to us, are we content with the effects of being held within those walls? Is the world the better for it? Robi and Ali, for one, would remain enslaved and frozen in a bitter conflict without the commonality that opened their eyes to a deeper humanity. Moreover, without a grand narrative that can truly answer humanity’s grand questions, the individual story only axes away futilely at a frozen abyss it can never crack.

The most remarkable gift of the master narrative I have chosen to tell and retell is that the storytelling is not over. I am instead freed to hear and tell my petites histoires in light of the whole story, which is yet unfolding even as it proclaims a definitive end. Which means, that sometimes the stories I tell myself are mercifully corrected by far greater I am statements than my own. That is to say, the quiet narrative that insists I am alone is told beside, “I am the good shepherd who searches for even one that is lost.”(4) The subtle fable of personal control is confronted by a story of life, death, and resurrection; a remarkable beginning and a far more remarkable end. Stepping both into history and petites histoires, God as storyteller shows us what it means to be human; with one Word, breaking through every frozen barrier.

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

(1) Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad with Krista Tippett “No More Taking Sides,” Speaking of Faith, February 18, 2010.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Gregory Wolfe Ed., The New Religious Humanists (New York: Free Press, 1997), 98.

(4) Cf. John 10:11-14, Luke 15:1-10

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Hell Is Other People

June 16, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre closes his play Huis Clos (“No Exit”) with the pronouncement, “Hell is other people.” The play offers a sardonic vision of hell as the place in which one must spend eternity with individuals one would barely seek to spend five minutes with in real life. As one writer notes, “The most terrible, exasperating torment, in Sartre’s eyes, is the agony of soul caused by having to live forever alongside someone who drives you up the wall. Their annoying habits, their pettiness or cynicism or stupidity, their disposition and tastes that so frustratingly conflict with yours and require, if you are to live in communion with them, some sort of accommodation or concession of your own likes and desires—that, says Sartre, is Hell.”(1) Living in a world in which tolerance is the highest value, most readers find Sartre’s vision highly narcissistic or the logical conclusion of an exclusively individualistic, existentialist philosophy.

For many others, however, Sartre’s sentiments are not so easily dismissed. Living, working, and interacting with other people can indeed create a hellish existence for many. And most of us, if we are honest, can quickly think of the names of individuals whose personal habits or grating personalities makes relating to them very difficult at best. Sartre’s honesty, albeit through a cynical lens, also exposes clear boundaries of human tolerance. On the one hand, the capacity for tolerance is generally based on loving those who are easy to love or who share our own way of living in and viewing the world. On the other hand, the capacity for tolerance easily extends towards external causes, idealism, and abstract principles. These are quickly shattered when we come into contact with the real people who exist not as causes or ideals or principles.

An example from my own life serves to illustrate Sartre’s insight. I am involved in causes working for justice in situations of homelessness, which is a perennial issue where I live. It is easy for me to “love” the broad category of people who are “the homeless” as long as they remain an idea or a concept. Yet, every month when my church holds a dinner for the homeless in our community—the full-range of humanity on display right in front of me—I often feel my “love” is really just thinly veiled patronage. Eating with individuals who have not showered in weeks (or months), who suffer from mental illness, or chemical dependency tests my tolerance in ways that the idea of homelessness never will. This monthly meal highlights how little I truly love those real people seated all around me.

A contemporary of Sartre, C.S. Lewis wrote about this tendency to love causes and ideals more than real people in his novel The Screwtape Letters. He saw this hellish tendency as a carefully constructed diabolical strategy. The demon, Wormwood, was advised to “aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.”(2) The obvious, Lewis notes through his character Screwtape, is the human capacity for both benevolence and malice. Their misdirection and exploitation is not as obvious to us. Diabolical Uncle Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood:

“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary…but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy.”(3)

If benevolence, tolerance, or love are simply attached to ideals involving people we never have any direct contact with in the day to day, how can that really be benevolence? In the same way, how can we say we love our neighbor when our malice towards particular habits or personality quirks is on full display? How quickly we lose our temper with family members; how easily we show offense at those who do not see it our way; how readily we devise strategies to withhold love, or to punish our ever-present offenders?

Lewis highlights a predominant theme in the teaching of Jesus. Throughout the gospels, Jesus corrects the prevailing notion that the neighbor is one just like me, who agrees with me, and sees the world as I see it. The “neighbor” is other people—not an abstraction, but a living, breathing person with habits, views, and quirks that will not only get on our nerves, but also tempt us toward contempt. And love is only a real virtue when it is lived out among real, human relationships. As Lewis’s character Screwtape notes wryly:

“All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from [Satan’s] house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.”(4)

Sartre was honest in revealing the often hellish reality of living with other people. We would much rather love an ideal, a concept (the homeless, or starving children across the world) than the people right in front of us, in our lives right now. In the life of Jesus, we see a man who loved those individuals directly in front of him; he gathered around him a group of disparate people from tax-collectors on the left, to zealot revolutionaries on the right. He delayed arrival at a temple official’s home because an unknown woman touched the hem of his garment. He delivered a man so out of his mind that he had been driven from his community to live in desolate caves. In front of the most important religious officials of his day, he allowed a woman of questionable reputation to anoint his feet with perfume and use her tears and to wipe them with her hair.

The love of Jesus is not a pie in the sky ideal for people he never knew; it was tangible, messy, and ultimately cost him his life. In Jesus, we see heaven on display in the hell of individual lives. If we seek to follow him, vague ideals about tolerance must give way to flesh and blood reality—loving the all-too-human in front of us.

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

(1) Lauren Enk, “Hell is Other People; Or is It?” catholicexchange.com, August 12, 2012, accessed July 10, 2013.

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Rev. ed., (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 16.

(3) Ibid., The Screwtape Letters, 30.

(4) Ibid., 31.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faint Horns in Elfland

June 15, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Whether compelling the visions of a child or inspiring music or architecture, the power of the imagination is often clear.

O hark, O hear! How thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.(1)

But what of the mere presence of the imagination? “I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental,” wrote Lewis. “I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.”(2) Certainly, this taste of a richer fare was sensed in the formative imaginations at which Lewis supped long before he knew he was starving for their Host. Writes Lewis:

“Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete—Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire—all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called ‘tinny.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.”(3)

And while Lewis would come to see that this “lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit,” he is equally certain that God in God’s mercy can profoundly make it such a beginning.(4) My own encounter of the great imagination of C.S. Lewis is similar to a testimony given at his funeral, namely, that “his real power was not proof; it was depiction. There lived in his writings a Christian universe that could be both thought and felt, in which he was at home and in which he made his reader at home.”(5) I believe I probably first loved God as an untame Lion, not because the God I wished for was kinder than the God who is, but because I did not yet see that my deficient vision of God was the vision that needed a better imagination. As Lewis later wrote of his intense love of all Norse mythology, “[A]t the time, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more important than anything else in my experience…More shockingly, they seemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts about Christianity. This may have been—in part, no doubt was—penal blindness; yet that might not be the whole story. If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude toward it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not.”(6)

Even so, in moments of moral crisis, we do not pause to ask what Jane Erye would do, I once heard a writer say. She had referenced the Brian Nichol’s story—the gunman who went on a shooting spree in Atlanta and ended up holding a woman hostage in her apartment where she read to him from The Purpose Drive Life and eventually convinced him to turn himself in. She then asked if this story would have turned out the same if the young girl had read to him from Moby Dick or War and Peace or any of the great classics of history. Her point was clear: the influence of art and imagination is usually not in the thick of things, but on the margins of culture; nor it is always clear and obvious, but often dense and unsettling. And yet there are inarguably characters and stories that indeed become of moral significance, pulling us into worlds that call for attention, compassion, and consideration. Long before I had any idea about the word “allegory” or the concept of good or bad literature, Narnian kings, talking beavers, and the Queen of Glome began appearing in my dreams, beckoning me to another place. In the aftermath of death and subsequent disappointment over the miracle we did not get, it was Aslan’s empathetic tear for the grieving Digory that came to mind when all seemed lost. For Lewis, it was the bright shadow coming out of a George MacDonald book that found him mercifully in the margins. “In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking, even without consent. That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.”(6) But the Spirit no doubt mercifully did.

It is quite true that a young materialist or pessimist, atheist or agnostic who wishes to stay this way cannot be too careful in choosing what to read. God is unscrupulous, as Lewis attests, willing to use our own imaginations against us, our own pens to probe the wounds. If imagination is not the property of materialism, but the playground of heaven, it is nonetheless not the thing itself. But the hopeful signs of God’s own compelling imagination are everywhere—beautiful and terrible, inviting and transforming. It is the encounter with the Gate, not the signs along the way, that transforms the entire journey. It is said that Lewis became more like himself when he finally kneeled and admitted that God was God—”as though the key to his own hidden and locked-away personality was given to him.”(7) Everything is intensified—his loves, his responses, Jack himself—as the one brought in kicking and screaming discovered in Christ and his kingdom the world of Joy he had only before heard feebly. The faint horns of Elfland give way to the resounding glory of the creator and wonders beyond our imagining.

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

(1) Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955), 167.

(2) Lewis, 213-214.

(3) Lewis, 167.

(4) Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 312.

(5) Lewis, 76.

(6) Lewis, 181.

(7) Jacobs, 131.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – At the Border of Faith and Doubt

June 12, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

It seemed like yet another routine border crossing in what was then Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.(1) The year was 1981; Leonid Brezhnev was the head of the Soviet Union, and half of Europe languished under the Communist vision and control. As a young and eager Christian, I had joined a mission whose primary task was to help the church in Eastern Europe. This involved transporting Bibles, hymn books, and Christian literature to believers behind what Winston Churchill called the “Iron Curtain.”

It was indeed an iron curtain: a vast barrier made of barbed-wire fences, mine fields, exclusion zones, guard towers, heavily armed soldiers, and dogs. Although designed allegedly to keep the West out, it was in actuality a vast system of control to keep those under this tyranny in. On this occasion my task was to transit through Czechoslovakia into Poland to deliver my precious cargo of Bibles and books to a contact there.

The literature was concealed in specially designed compartments, and my colleague and I had gone through our routine preborder procedures. We bowed our heads and prayed that God would protect us. We then proceeded to the border crossing between Austria and Czechoslovakia.

It was a cold, bleak, early winter day. It all seemed normal. We entered Czechoslovakia, and the huge barrier descended behind us. We were now locked in. As usual, the unfriendly border guards took our passports, and then the customs inspector arrived. I had been trained to act casual, to pray silently, and to respond to questions. I sensed this time it was different. The man ignored me, concentrated on the structure of our vehicle, and was soon convinced we had something concealed. I became quite tense. They eventually took the keys from me and locked my colleague and me in separate rooms. The guards broke into the special compartments in our vehicle, where they discovered the Bibles and literature.

My colleague and I were handcuffed, not allowed to speak to each other, and put in separate cells with people who spoke no English. The small rooms smelled of disinfectant and had only two bunk beds and a hole in the floor that served as the toilet. The light was kept on all night and some basic food was brought three times a day. The rules were rigid and enforced: no sitting or lying on the beds during the day. This meant shuffling backward and forward for hours in a highly restricted space, then facing a difficult night as we sought to sleep under the glare of the constant light.

Time became blurred. Was it morning, day, evening? I found myself alone, in a hostile place, without anything to read, without anyone to talk to, without any idea when or if we might be released, and with seeming unlimited (and empty) time on my hands. There is nothing like empty time and constricted space to bring to the surface feelings, questions, and doubts.

Contrary to some of the more starry-eyed testimonies I have read, I did not experience overwhelming grace or a profound sense of God’s presence. I did have the assurance that God was there, that God knew what was going on, and that “my times were in his hands” (see Psalm 31:15). My feelings, however, became a source of torment. For some reason I had an initial impression that we would be released quickly and expelled from the country. As the first few days passed with no communication and I had no idea what was happening, I began to wrestle to some degree with doubt. It was intense, it was real, and it was filling my mind and clouding my thoughts and my heart. My doubts seemed to focus on uncertainty as to what God was doing and whether I could actually trust what I thought was his leading. I also was struggling with how much I might be asked to face.

I can well remember a point of surrender. After several days, I resigned myself to the possibility that my imprisonment could last for years. I might not get out for a long time, so I had to make the best of what was and to rest in God. It is a point where we accept the hardship, where we still believe in greater good, and where we surrender to what seems like inevitability. I think I came to relinquish my sense and need for control (I had none anyway) and simply accept that God would be there as promised, and therefore, to rest in Him.

I had crossed an important point that I subsequently discovered in the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Wurmbrand, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vaclav Havel. Scholar Roger Lundin remarks:

“To Bonhoeffer, this is the distinctive ‘difference between Christianity and all religions.’ Our suffering, wrote Bonhoeffer only months before his 1943 arrest, teaches us ‘to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless.’ The interpretive key to human experience is to be found not in our preference for Eden but in our power to share in the sufferings of God and the world: ‘We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune.’”(2)

As those raised in comfort and convenience, the very nature of all this may frighten or repel us. If the message we have believed or the model we have been taught has raised false expectations, then we are going to be subject to doubt and fear, and worse, reject the whole thing. But the gospel and Christianity are concerned with reality, and hence with truth. By this I mean what the true nature of life really is and means. Christianity is not an escape system for us to avoid reality, live above it, or be able to redefine it. Christianity is a way that leads us to grasp what reality is and, by God’s grace and help, to navigate through it to our eternal home.

As I sat thinking, praying, and hoping in the custody of the Czechoslovakian authorities, I was surprised one day when the door opened and I was summoned forth, signaled not to speak, and then led out to a waiting car with my colleague. We were driven in silence to the border. We were handed our passports and our severely damaged vehicle, and we were then expelled from the country. We crossed into Austria and were able to talk for the first time in nearly two weeks. We shared our stories, and we stopped and prayed. We heard missing details; we discovered ways that God worked in us. We spoke of our struggles, our doubts, and our overall confidence.

It would be presumptuous to turn our limited experience and insight into a major pattern for all, yet in the midst of it we were able to detect broader strokes, hidden meanings, and real possibilities. Like Joseph so many centuries before, we could look back on all that happened, reflect on it and say, “They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Excerpted from Stuart McAllister’s chapter “The Role of Doubt and Persecution in Spiritual Transformation” in Ravi Zacharias, ed., Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Ravi Zacharias. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson.

(2) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters, 17, 370, quoted in Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 40.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Death of God

June 11, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“God is dead,” declares Nietzsche’s madman in his oft-quoted passage from The Gay Science. Though not the first to make the declaration, Nietzsche’s philosophical candor and desperate rhetoric unquestionably attribute to its familiarity. In graphic brushstrokes, the parable describes a crime scene:

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God,’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers…Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?…Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’”(1)

Nietzsche’s atheism, unlike recent atheistic mantras, was more than rhetoric and angry words. He recognized that the death of God, even if only the death of an idol, introduced a significant crisis. He understood the critical role of the Christian story to the very underpinnings of European philosophy, history, and culture, and so he understood that God’s death meant that a total—and painful—transformation of reality must occur. If God has died, if God is dead in the sense that God is no longer of use to us, then ours is a world in peril, he reasoned, for everything must change. Our typical means of thought and life and being no longer make sense; the very structures for evaluating everything have become unhinged. For Nietzsche, a world that considers itself free from God is a world that must suffer the disruptive effects of that iconoclasm.

Herein, I believe Nietzsche’s atheistic tale tells a story beneficial no matter the creed or conviction of those who hear it: Gods, too, decompose. Within Nietzsche’s bold atheism is the intellectual integrity that refused to make it sound easy to live with a dead God—a conclusion the self-deemed new atheists are determined to undermine. Moreover, his dogged exposure of idolatrous conceptions of God wherever they exist and honest articulation of the crises that comes in the crashing of such idols is universal in its bearing. Whether atheist or theist, Muslim or Christian, the death of the God we thought we knew is disruptive, excruciating, tragic—and quite often, as Nietzsche attests, necessary.

Yet for Nietzsche and the new atheists, the shattering of religious imagery and concepts is simply deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction. Their iconoclasm ultimately seeks to reveal towers of belief as houses of cards best left in piles at our feet. On the contrary, for the theist, iconoclasm remains the breaking of false and idolatrous conceptions of God, humanity, and the cosmos. But added to this is the exposing of counterfeit motivations for faith, when fear or self-interest lead a person deeper into religion as opposed to love or truth, or when the source of all knowledge becomes something finite rather than the eternal God. While this destruction certainly remains the painful event Nietzsche foretold, God’s death turns out to be one more sign of God’s good presence. As C.S. Lewis observed through his own pain at the death of the God he knew:

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.”(2)

For Lewis, it was the death of his wife that brought about the decomposition of his God. For others, it is the prevalence of suffering or the haunt of God’s silence that begets the troubling sense that our God is dying. At some profound level, the Christian story takes us to God’s death as well, perhaps for some in more ways than one. Like the Incarnation, the crucifixion leaves most of our ideas in ruins at the foot of the cross. The journey to death and Golgotha is an offensive journey to take with God. But blessed are those who take it. Blessed are those in pain over the death of their Gods. Blessed are those who mourn at the tombs and take in the sorrow of the crime scenes. For theirs is somehow the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom somehow able to hold Golgotha, a kingdom able to hold death itself.

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

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181-182.

(2) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 66.

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