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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

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A recent poll for a major Internet search company ranked “What is the meaning of life?” as the toughest question of all, coming far above such other existential stumpers as “What is love?”, “Do blondes have more fun?”, and “Why do you never see baby pigeons?”

To ask questions about life’s meaning is to raise the question of purpose: what does it mean to be human? This is perhaps the most important question we can wrestle with. Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychotherapist who survived the horrors of the concentration camps during the Second World War, wrote these oft-quoted words:

For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.(1)

What Frankl was getting at was the question of meaning, does human life have a purpose, is there something we were designed to aim at, something we were intended to be? If atheism is true and there is no God, then there can be no grand purpose to life—we are just freak cosmic accidents, random collocations of atoms thrown up by the tides of time, chaos, and natural selection. We are nothing more than matter, molecules, and atoms. But if that’s true, some fairly drastic consequences follow. For instance, there would be nothing wrong with treating our fellow human beings on that basis, as if they were just particles, as mere things. After all, they would have no inherent value or dignity.

Christianity, however, has always explored the question “what does it mean to be human?” very differently, rooting its answer back in the very first book of the Bible, where we read:

So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.(2)

This aren’t just fancy theological words, this is foundational, not least for human value and dignity. That humans bear God’s image, the imago dei, explains why you have real value, regardless of your gender, race, intelligence, or earning potential—why all human beings are equal. It tells you why human life has dignity, why you must not treat people as means rather than ends, and it also gives a foundation for morality and ethics. All of those things in Western civilization have traditionally sat on the idea that human beings were made in God’s image. Toss that idea away as some of my atheist friends wish to do, and all that stands on the ruined foundation crumbles into dust. I say some atheists: others have reflected more deeply. Listen to these words from French atheist philosopher, Luc Ferry:

The Greek world was fundamentally an aristocratic world, a universe organized as a hierarchy in which those most endowed by nature should in principle be “at the top,” while the less endowed saw themselves occupying inferior ranks. And we should not forget that the Greek city-state was founded on slavery. In direct contradiction, Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identically, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.(3)

But there’s another fascinating aspect to Genesis 1. Inherent in the Hebrew word translated “image” is the idea of reflection. It is the nature of a mirror to reflect the thing at which it is angled. The Bible says that our lives are designed to be orientated at God, the mirror of our souls intended to reflect God’s glory. But if we don’t orient our lives toward God, what will take his place? All of us angle the mirror of our soul at something and if it isn’t God, it will be work, or family, or performance, or money, or, like Narcissus of the Greek legend, ourselves, transfixed by our own image, beauty, cleverness, or reputation. But if you try and build your life around one of those things, you will end up a hollow, empty individual, for it will ultimately let you down.

There is only one way to deal with our brokenness, the scratches on the mirror of our soul, and that is to orient our lives at the one whom the Bible describes as the perfect image of God, Jesus Christ. According to the Bible, Jesus Christ was willing to be trampled on, rejected, broken for us, that our broken image might be remade, forgiven, and restored. The story of the death and resurrection of Jesus is at heart about restoration: the promise and the power to restore the image of God that we have allowed to become so marred and twisted in us.

If all we had was Genesis 1, we would know that human beings are unique, that they have value and dignity. But we would have no way to get back to that image that we have fallen so far from. But the Bible tells the whole story: the story of what God has done about that problem in Jesus, in the True Image of God, in the cross.

Human beings are not just atoms; we are not just matter. We are more than the stuff of which we are made, more than our economic production, our relationships, our biology, our psychology. We are image bearers who carry incredible value and significance—value so high that Jesus was willing to pay the price of his life to redeem and restore that broken image, that the mirror of our souls might be angled at him and reflect the True Image of God as it was intended: and that in so doing, we might be truly human.

Andy Bannister is Canadian director and a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada. His forthcoming book The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: Or the Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments will be released by Monarch in July.

(1) Viktor E. Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 21.

(2) Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011 [2010]), 72.

(3) Genesis 1:27.

Ravi Zacharias

A Slice of Infinity – Race Matters

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As a young girl, I had the unique opportunity to travel to South Africa. We stayed for a month in December when I was just five years old. My father’s parents and sister had immigrated to South Africa from Britain, and it was a rare opportunity to travel to see them. I can still remember the excitement of climbing into the Pan Am jet that would take me to what was surely a land full of adventure. The year was 1971.

Never in my young life had I experienced a place so unlike anything I knew. Growing up in the suburban Midwest of the U.S., my world was filled with snow and concrete, winters lasting long into April with rows and rows of houses lined with sidewalks. South Africa, by contrast, was a land of bright sunshine, vast horizons, beautiful ocean beaches, rugged mountains and diverse landscapes: from the dusty Kalahari Desert to the mountainous coast of Cape Town. Every place was a startling, new discovery of sights, smells, and experiences.

One such experience remains with me to this day. Thirsty after an afternoon at a trampoline park with my South African cousins, we went in search of public drinking fountains. Seeing just such an area not too far beyond where my tired legs could carry me, I ran ahead of the others in order to quench my thirst. Just as I leaned over to drink, a hand grabbed my shoulder and a loud, gruff voice told me not to drink from that fountain. It was for ‘coloreds’ only.

This was the first time, as I reflect back on the event, that I realized my skin color determined my standing in relation to others. I was too young and too thirsty to notice the posted placards on the fountains, or, sadly, to notice that there were only whites on all of the beaches where we frolicked as a family, only white diners in the restaurants where we ate, and only whites in most of the areas and venues we visited. In fact, there were posted designations for ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds’ at all the public places where the two groups might meet. I didn’t understand that apartheid, at that time, was the national policy.

For all the contrasts, here was a similarity between my suburban childhood and my visit to South Africa. Where I grew up, there were only two children of color in my elementary school, and one was of Asian heritage. I do not remember any African Americans in the suburban neighborhoods in which I grew up, and there was no racial diversity in my church. This segregation was far less obvious to me than the intentional policies that made up the apartheid system. Yet, hidden or intentional, the effects of a racist system were the same. How could I not conclude, as a young girl, that race determined where one lived, went to school, or worshipped?

A seminary internship working with young children in Atlanta, Georgia afforded me an alternative experience. I would be the only white person in my internship. I was surprised at how readily boundaries seemed to give way to acceptance. I didn’t seem to be as strange to them as they might have been had they visited me in the suburbs of my childhood. Sharing the same curly hair prompted one young girl to ask me if I was a ‘light-skinned black.’ I felt honored that racial differences were not the only thing she saw.

Yet, I would have been blind not to notice that the opportunities afforded to me simply were not available in this place. And while other principalities conspired with racism to decrease opportunity, I knew then that much of what I took for granted did not exist for these young children. A simple, nutritious breakfast—always available to me—consisted of a soda or a bag of tostada chips from the local Taco Bell for many of the kids I met here.

All these experiences—from the suburbs to South Africa to the urban South—reveal aspects of the human tendency to separate and divide. Yet, an alternative narrative is presented in the Christian gospel. The redemption offered in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is universally available. The reconciling work of Jesus Christ did not recognize the typical categories of human division and power but reached out to Jew and Greek, male and female, bond and free persons. The apostle Paul reminded the Ephesians that “you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded… and strangers to the covenants of promise….But now in Christ Jesus you who were formerly far off have been brought near….For Jesus is our peace, who made both groups into one, and broke down the dividing wall.”(1) The human tendency to separate and divide and control could be transformed to a new impulse, where peace and unity are found in Jesus Christ. But is this just something to hope for in an as yet unrealized future?

F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela could not have been more different but they worked together to help end apartheid in South Africa. Even their most significant differences (that went far beyond the color of their skin) did not thwart their work toward a peaceful transition of power—when most thought bloodshed and violence would ensue. Both men understood that unity and peace were not simply a vision of an other-worldly future, but something that could be undertaken even in the very messy, fraught, and difficult world of the here and now. De Klerk has said that “peace does not fare well where poverty and deprivation reign…. Peace is gravely threatened by inter-group fear and envy…. Racial, class, and religious intolerance and prejudice are its mortal enemies. In our quest for peace, we should constantly ask ourselves what we should do to create conditions in which peace can prosper.”(2)

Many can look at the world around them and despair over human differences which feel insurmountable. There is so much that can engender cynicism and a sense of futility. Yet, for those who would seek a different story, there is a house in which tearing down dividing walls that segregate human beings from each other and from God is the only appropriate response. Built upon the foundation that is Christ Jesus, this house has walls of restoration and renewal, forgiveness and reconciliation, generosity and grace. No one is shut out, and all may come in.

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

(1) Ephesians 2:12-14, emphasis mine.

(2) F. W. de Klerk, Acceptance and Nobel Lecture, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1994.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The March of Easter

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Romans 8:1-2.

When I imagine the women who came to the tomb to see the body of Jesus the day after he was crucified, I understand their sickened panic. The body had been taken somewhere unbeknownst and unknown to them. It was out of their sight, out of their care. He was out of their sight—not an empty shell, not “just” a body, but the one they loved. Mary Magdalene was devastated. She ran to Peter in horror: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

There is something about the human spirit that inherently seems to understand the importance of caring for the dead, of moving them carefully from the place of death to a place of rest, finality, and farewell. What we have come to know commonly as the funeral is based on this fundamentally human behavior. It is understood that the dead cannot remain among the living, and yet their removal from society is never a task met with levity. Evidences of tender ceremony are noted in the oldest human burial sites ever found.(1) This movement of the dead from the place of the living to a place of parting is full of tremendous symbolic meaning.

For British statesman and avowed atheist Roy Hattersley, this meaning and symbolism has been a complicated part of the imagination with which he views the world. For years he has disapproved of the funeral service, finding it a paradoxical attempt to soften the blow of utter darkness, with clergy fulsome about the dead man’s virtues and discreet about his vices, and congregations gathered more as a matter of form than feeling. In the mind (or at the funeral) of one who remains committed to the unpleasant truth that life simply ends as haphazardly as it began, there is no room or reason for the promise of resurrection and the pomp of certain comfort.

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

Hattersley’s attempt to remain consistent from his views of life to his experience of death is admirable. For it is indeed peculiar that an uncompromising atheist can conclude there is something almost necessary in a distinctly Christian burial. If what makes for human existence is, in essence, the material, bodies without any inherent facet of the sacred, then the act of moving a body to the place of farewell is far more a matter of mere disposal than hallowed journey. In other words, Hattersley realizes positions like his leave no room for a “decent send-off,” a beautiful, last farewell. And yet, he is far from alone in his need for it. As Thomas Long notes in his comprehensive study of the funeral practice, “[D]eath and the sacred are inextricably entwined.”(3)

The Christian burial is moved by this understanding, taking its cue from no less than the death and resurrection of the human Son of God. Human beings are seen neither as “just” bodies nor as souls in temporary shells, but as dust—indeed, as material—material into which God has breathed life. Human beings are embodied within a story that the Christian funeral tells again and again: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Because Jesus traveled through death to God before us, Christians believe it possible to make the same journey. Because Christ has journeyed from birth to tomb to the Father, we take this journey again and again with those we love and let go—with both lament and hope.

In this embodied gospel of death and resurrection, suffering and redemption, humanity’s instinctive need to accompany a body from here to there is strikingly met with the particulars of “here” and “there”—namely, life here among the Body of Christ to life resurrected in the presence of the Father. And so, we go the distance with the bodies we love, we accompany them to the grave, we weep at their tombs and we follow them with singing: because it is a journey we do not want to miss.

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

(1) Thomas Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 3.

(2) Roy Hattersley, “A Decent Send-off,” The Guardian, January 16, 2006, accessed March 20, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/16/religion.uk2.

(3) Thomas Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 4.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Curious Values

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One bright spring morning in the early 1630s, a wealthy Dutch merchant was delighted to receive a visit from a sailor bringing a tip-off that a very valuable cargo had just arrived at the docks. As a reward for the information, the merchant presented the sailor with a fine red herring. Whilst the merchant was distracted for a moment, the sailor saw, lying among the debris on the shop counter, what he thought was an onion. Thinking it would go nicely with his fish breakfast, the sailor surreptitiously slipped it into his pocket. That, however, was no onion—it was a Semper Augustus tulip bulb and this was the height of the “Dutch Tulip Craze,” which saw bulbs valued higher than gold and sold for extraordinary sums of money. That one bulb alone was worth three thousand florins (over $1,000)! As soon as he spotted it missing, the furious merchant launched a search of the docks. Finally the sailor was found, sitting happily on a coil of ropes, chewing the last mouthful of his herring and “onion.”(1)

A central idea in economic theory is that something is worth what people are prepared to pay for it, despite it often having no inherent value. Your new mobile communication device may have cost hundreds of dollars but if you’re stranded alone on a desert island, as Tom Hanks found in the movie Cast Away, then your shiny piece of technology becomes completely useless compared to the more mundane basics of life such as food, water, and shelter.

What people are prepared to pay for something, what the market will bear, also tells you a lot about our culture’s priorities, which are often skewed to say the least. We may laugh at the foolishness of Dutch Tulip Mania, but our culture has its own peculiarities which would appear bizarre to anybody from another time and place. What does it say, for example, that in some luxury hotels you can pay $50 for a cup of Black Ivory, one of the world’s most expensive coffees, notable for the fact that the beans from which it has been brewed have been eaten, partially digested, and excreted by elephants?(2)

Our curiously skewed value system is reflected not just in the very expensive but also in the very cheap, even the free. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget, computer scientist and musician Jaron Lanier describes the increasing pressure that our digital culture places on artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers to make their content available free on the Internet. Thus increasingly the only way to make money online is through advertising. Lanier suggests: If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.(3)

So much for objects, then, but what about people—does our worth and value as human beings derive from what somebody is prepared for pay for us? For example, a world famous sports personality like Tiger Woods earns 1,400 times the salary of the average nurse—what does that say about our culture’s values?(4) If our worth derives from our earning capability, what about those who cannot pay their way, such as children? Perhaps their worth derives from the joy they bring to others? In which case, what about those who have nothing to offer anybody: the very old, the homeless, the chronically disabled?

Realizing that human value and dignity cannot possibly be grounded in economics or utility, the last sixty years have seen politicians, lawyers, and activists push the development of human rights theory, a very different approach to the question. Listen to these powerful words from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world… All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.(5)

But what’s the basis for this idea; where, in short, is this noble sentiment grounded?(6) Not every worldview can bear the weight. Indeed, I frequently meet atheists who are deeply and passionately committed to causes like human rights, to fighting injustice, to alleviating poverty—in other words, atheists who believe that we are far more than just matter but are persons with inherent worth. The problem is that their assumptions cannot bear the weight of their aspirations. Human rights is too valuable an idea to build on sand, it needs a foundation, a worldview that can support it.

Among all the world’s peoples, the Dalits of India have experienced some of the greatest sadness, pain and persecution. They sit at the bottom of India’s highly stratified caste system, and are considered “untouchable.”(7) Dalit women often bear the brunt of this and two-thirds of them have been sexually abused and 750,000 trafficked into sexual slavery, yet the conviction rate for crimes against Dalits is just 5.3%.(8) How do you change a mind-set that says that a person is quite literally worthless, because of her caste, her family, her birthplace? Words like “all men are born equal” are just fine-sounding platitudes to those who daily experience such discrimination.

One Dalit religious leader summed up the problem in an interview. He said that by the time a child is fourteen, it is too late to change anything, as by then they have been told all of their life that they are worthless. The only way to correct this, he continued, is from a very young age to speak a different worldview into their lives. And the Dalits are finding that it is the biblical worldview, with its profound message that all of us bear God’s image, that is the most powerful corrective.

If you tell a child all their life that they are worthless, there will be implications. Here in the West, we are trying a different sociological experiment: discovering what will happen if you raise a generation of children to believe they are just accidental collocations of atoms, dancing to their DNA, nothing but a pack of neurons.(9) We may be unpleasantly surprised what happens when they become our future leaders and begin acting out that philosophy.

If atheism is true, then talk of “human rights” is meaningless, as nonsensical as assigning great monetary value to a tulip bulb. On the other hand—the Christian worldview, and only the Christian worldview—gives us a genuine basis for true human value, worth, and dignity. Only the Bible tells you that you are made in the image of God and that you are not merely matter, but that do you matter.

Andy Bannister is Canadian director and a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada. His forthcoming book The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: Or the Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments will be released by Monarch in July.

(1) The story is found in Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Volume 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), 92-93 and is also retold in William H. Davidow, Overconnected: What the Digital Economy Says About Us (New York: Business Plus, 2011) 111.

(2) Eko Armunanto, ‘Elephant’s-poop coffee: The most expensive coffee – $50 a cup’, Digital Journal, 3 June 2013 (http://digitaljournal.com/article/351469, accessed 30 June 2013).

(3) Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Random House, 2011), 83.

(4) See ‘The World’s Highest Paid Athletes”, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/athletes/list/ (accessed 30 June 2013). The nurse’s salary was calculated using http://www.payscale.com.

(5) ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/, accessed 30 June 2013). Quotations from the Preamble and Article 1 (emphasis mine).

(6) See Michael J. Perry, ‘The Morality of Human Rights: A Nonreligious Ground?’, Emory Law Journal 54 (2005), 97-150.

(7) See http://www.dalitfreedom.net/about/about.aspx?page=2

(8) See Luke Harding, ‘Sex hell of Dalit women exposed,’ The Guardian, 9 May 2001 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/may/09/lukeharding, accessed 1 July 2013) and http://idsn.org/caste-discrimination/key-issues/dalit-women/.

(9) Bertrand Russell, ‘A Free Man’s Worship,’

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –    Signs, Slogans, and Escape Vehicles

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In 2010 the Freedom From Religion Foundation launched the largest freethinkers billboard campaign ever to take place in the heart of the US “Bible Belt.” Signs reading “Imagine No Religion” “Sleep in on Sundays” and “In Reason We Trust” were placed throughout Atlanta and beyond in one of many attempts throughout the world to bring positive thoughts of atheism into public discourse. The London bus campaign a few years prior sent hundreds of buses throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and Barcelona with similar slogans: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”(2) The £140,000 multi-media advertising campaign was designed to bring comfort in the probability that God does not exist, a positive contrast to religious advertisements meant to incite fear. The campaign used quotes from influential voices who have shown that embracing atheism, or at least expressing skepticism about the existence of God, is freeing. One quote reads, “An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.” Another, written by nineteenth century American humanist Robert Ingersoll, notes, “The time to be happy is now!”

Reactions to campaigns such as these are generally mixed.  With every sign, plans for additional advertising seem to pop up throughout the world. One slogan provoked strong reactions in Barcelona, where critics branded the words as “an attack on all religions.”(3) Christians in London were on all sides of the debate, with some offended—one bus driver refused to drive his bus—and others optimistic at the opportunity for discussion. Posters and billboards of this nature, says director Paul Woolley of the theology think tank Theos, “encourage people to consider the most important question we will ever face in our lives.”(4)

Christianity has in fact long been indicted as an emotional crutch for those unable to accept life’s difficult realities, those in need of an escape vehicle to take them to another world. To be fair, it is not an entirely undue critique. The Christian is indeed someone marked by an inability to accept the cruelties of this world as status quo. Like the prophets, Christians are well aware that this life marred by cancer, injustice, poverty, corruption, tears, and death is not the way it is supposed to be. We live alert with the distinct notion that humanity was created for something more. Of course, the temptation, then, and one of the more severe misapplications of the faith, is to checkout of this world, living content in Christian circles, and ever-looking upward to better life.  In such a scenario, one’s Christianity is indeed nothing more than wishful thinking, a philosophy wrenched from its founder and marched down an illogical road.

But do the growing numbers of atheists who insist that life without God is “freeing” not succumb to a similar temptation, making life and even death sound better than their own philosophies impart? If God is a farce and life is but rapidly moving time and the unapologetic force of chance is “reassured” really a viable option? If there is no divine being, no creator of time, no one hearing prayers or answering the cries of injustice, can we really be comforted, unworried, even lighthearted about life as we know it? MacBeth was far more honest about humanity on this stage:

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Surely we can attempt to dress such a philosophy in beautiful robes, but in the end we will find it was all an act. Whatever our philosophies, whatever colorful billboards catch our eyes, we do well to follow them to their logical ends.

And thus, whether in the eyes of Christians or atheists, it is more than lamentable that belief in Christ has come to be seen as something for another world, a philosophy for another time, a religion that merely attempts to frighten us in the present for the sake of the future. For the Christian does not make her pilgrimage to new life by way of escape vehicle, sounding sirens along the way. Quite the contrary, Christianity promises glimpses of new life even now, gifts worth searching for as if searching for prized treasure or lost coins. We can live as people transformed by the vicarious humanity of Christ in all his fullness, and we can lament and groan as humans yearning for the fulfillment of more to come. Faith in God is not a source of worry, as the buses and billboards (and perhaps some Christians) suggest, nor is faith in Christ an obstacle for enjoying life. Far from this, by faith the Christian is given a life truly like that of Christ’s—fully human, fully alive. And whether Christian or atheist, freethinker or fretting player, we must take care not to raise billboards that suggest something other than our philosophies impart.

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

(1) “Atheist Activists’ Biggest Billboard Campaign Targets Atlanta,” September 10, 2010, http://newsmax.com, accessed September 10, 2010.

(2) Ariane Sherine, “The Atheist Bus Journey,” January 6 2009, http://guardian.co.uk, accessed January 12, 2009.

(3) Giles Tremlett, “Atheist Bus Ad Campaign Provokes Bitterness in Barcelona,” January 7, 2009, guardian.co.uk, accessed January 12, 2009.

(4) Maria Mackay, “Atheist Bus Ads Say ‘Probably No God’” January 6, 2009, http://christiantoday.com, accessed January 12, 2009.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Creative Sights

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Roald Dahl is best known as a children’s author, particularly for his beloved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which celebrates fifty years this year. His zany plots, fantastic oddities, and unexpected endings make for stories memorable to both parent and child. In one particularly memorable passage for me as a child, Dahl shouts of what happens to children who sit in front of televisions to “loll and slop and lounge about, And stare until their eyes pop out.”(1) I remember hearing often that I shouldn’t watch excessive television; this was the first time I vividly considered what it might do to me (with the help of the Oompa Loompas):

IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!

IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!

IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!

IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND

HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND

A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!

HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!

HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!

HE CANNOT THINK — HE ONLY SEES!(2)

 

I was surprised to learn recently that Dahl’s first published story was neither zany nor imaginative in the sense he is known for. And yet, the paradoxical nature of sight still seems an invisible thread connecting his thoughts together. Dahl served in the Royal Air Force during World War II as a fighter pilot and intelligence officer. His first piece of published writing was an article in the Saturday Evening Post based on his flying experiences and a crash that left him with multiple injuries and months of blindness. He writes:

“This business of looking is the most important part of the fighter-pilot’s job. You’ve got to have a rubber neck and you’ve got to keep it moving the whole time from the moment you get into the air to the moment you arrive back at your base. If you don’t, you won’t last long. You turn slowly from the extreme left to the extreme right, glancing at your instruments as you go past; and then, looking up high, you turn back again from right to left to start all over again. Don’t start gazing into your cockpit, or, sure as eggs, you’ll get jumped sooner or later, and don’t start daydreaming or looking at the beautiful scenery—there’s no future in it.”(3)

In each case, Dahl describes seeing as a complicated business—and blindness, a fearsome consequence of looking after the wrong things.

Faith for me as a young person was something quite like Dahl’s description of the child whose eyes were popping out from starring. I was captivated by what the heavens demanded of me, the rules and disappointments I believed the God of Ideals listed for me ad nauseam. It was a vision that stole the senses and killed the imagination. God was exasperating, and faith, if it could be called that, was life-dulling. Still, I watched on with baited attention.

Mine wasn’t a startled awakening, yet over time, mercifully, the God I so badly wanted to please pulled the plug on the artificial images that seemed to play on a continual, blinding loop in my mind. Lifting my eyes to the human Son of God, the love of God in person stole the show.

This is not to say there is no temptation to gaze toward the many streaming screens of distraction that steal it back again. There are surely visions which when given too high a place of prominence or too much attention skew the view in ways that very much become blinding: a particular worry or a sense of despair, a negative experience fixated in my mind from the past, even an excited preoccupation with the future. Dahl’s description of trying to fly a plane and getting lost gazing at the cockpit is a vivid example to this end. It is not that these things are necessarily even false or wrong visions; there is just little future in staring at them exclusively.

Quite the reverse, there is a lot to look at in the vision of Jesus as vicarious human person, God in flesh like mine and yours and the broken bodies all around us. Jesus surely darts in and out of the scenes that captivate us, often on the sidelines, trying to grab our attention from lesser plots, showing us in flesh and blood what it means to be human. In a recent issue of Image journal, editor Greg Wolf describes the artist somewhat similarly, as “someone who is driven to go out to the margins of society in order to learn what the margins can teach those at the center.”(4) Dahl would no doubt find this an agreeable image, his use of the marginalized Oompa Loompas the strange helpers who bring Charlie and his eager followers to new visions of their own humanity. Jesus in these terms then is God at his most artistic, driven to the margins of humanity itself to show us who we are.

It is a common perception that religion, Christianity included, is a mind-numbing, humanity-stealing collection of rules and controlling stories. How startling then, zany and beautiful and wrenching, the discovery of one who so loves humanity that he lifts our eyes from less imaginative visions and shows us in flesh and blood, life and death, himself, his love, creation remade.

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

(1) Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 137.

(2) Ibid., 138.

(3) “Shot Down Over Libya,” Saturday Evening Post, August 1, 1942.

(4) Gregory Wolfe, “Editorial Statement: Art and Poverty,” Image, Issue 84, Spring 2015.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To Be Known

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There is something about knowing and calling a person by name that gives dignity and worth to that individual. To be able to look someone in the eye and say his or her name communicates knowledge, oftentimes warmth, and a sense of value: I care enough to know your name.

Several years ago, my late husband and I worked among the nameless homeless in Boston. Like so many other homeless individuals all around our country, they were merely faces in a crowd, a nuisance to be avoided, or simply another panhandler asking for money. One gentleman in particular, sprawled against a building in a self-induced alcohol coma became a fixture for me and the other passers-by in Boston’s financial district. He was stepped over and generally regarded as simply another facet of the building against which his stupefied body slumbered. He had no name or value to me, or to anyone who daily passed him by on those cold streets; in fact, at times he seemed barely human.

That is until we began to be involved in this ministry that made a point out of calling people by name. As we participated in this ministry that saw the nameless among us, we learned their names: Bobby, Jim, Fred, John, Daniel, and Carl. We ate meals together and talked with each other. We listened and shared. We asked them to come in off the streets and into a place of warmth and solace. Soon, we couldn’t walk the streets of Boston without seeing these as persons we knew by name, these same ones who were formerly without. Now, I saw Bobby and Jim, Fred and John; they were known to me, and I to them.

It seems ironic to me, in light of this experience, that we know the names of Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Liliane Bettencort, Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, Paul Allen, and Ted Turner. Individuals that we will never know personally become synonymous with power, success, and renown. As a result, they are known and valued by most in our society simply because their names make the Forbes magazine billionaire list year after year.

In the Kingdom of God, though money and power can both be used for kingdom purposes, we aren’t known because of either of them. While we often recognize the names of those who are rich and powerful in our society, Jesus turns our society’s values on their head. He tells us the name of Lazarus, the poor man who lay at the gate of the rich man, who remains the nameless one in this parable. In this story, the rich man is the one not known to God despite all his worldly renown and power. Instead, Lazarus is known and received by God into Abraham’s bosom.

In our culture, our worth is largely determined in monetary measures and buying power. They are the things that our society teaches us to value, and we can name the names of those who attain high levels of both. But to experience the kingdom Jesus offers, to be known and called by name has nothing to do with what we can offer. Human dignity and worth are not defined by what one has or the power one holds. Rather, humanity is redefined by a God who serves, and a willingness to follow in his service. This is the humanity Jesus sets before us. The human Son of God comes in service and offers dignity and worth to those who might otherwise remain nameless. In a world that values status, power, and prestige it is indeed a daring act to follow. But to be known by the one “who came not to be served but to serve and offer his life as a ransom” is humanizing at its very fullest.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   Super Heroes and Humanity

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Nothing quite grips us as much as a good novel or movie where some really sinister characters are finally confronted by a brave hero or heroine, who then rises up to face down tyranny, resist oppression, fight the bad guys, and establish justice.

During the 60s and 70s there was still enough residual optimism around that sci-fi movies brimmed with optimism about humanity and our future. We were explorers in search of brave new worlds. We were ambassadors seeking out strange new civilizations. We were friends seeking the harmony of all in a shared, friendly Galaxy. Yet, the writers needed to add adventure and flavor, so various enemies were encountered and often reasoned with into an eventual accommodation.

The mood shifted however. We believed we were more informed, less naïve, less gullible, and less willing and able to embrace ideals. They all seemed strangely utopian, inauthentic, and a denial of what life is really like. Enter sci-fi 2.0, the upgrade.

The writing is now more realistic, gritty, and dark, and the sheer hardships to be faced are more front and center. Our heroes are more human. Their flaws, their fears, and their unique temperaments are very much in vogue. Yet, they still have a mission, by and large, and that mission is to ‘save’ us. Ironic, isn’t it? We see the continuous recycling of the theme of redemption or the struggle with good and evil, despite our antipathy to such things. It looks like an ingrained quest for some kind of answer, some kind of salvation, some hope that there is a better life, somewhere or some way.

I wonder if we are able to stop and think of Jesus in terms of the heroic. We hear that “he emptied himself” and “took on the form of a bond-servant.” Not only did he accept being made in the likeness of men, but “he humbled himself” even to the point of “death on a cross.”(1) As Dorothy Sayers put so well, the drama is the doctrine. In this story, we see a universe that descends into the grip of an evil power, humanity enslaved and targeted for death and misery, and the creeping control of dark passion as the powers invade, infect, subvert, and seek control.

We are not left to the whims of Han Solo, the skills of James T. Kirk, the powers of the Dark Knight, or the courage of John Connor for help or assistance. But we are confronted by the “Word became flesh,” who in his amazing condescension dwelt among us and whose qualities are such that he is “full of grace and truth.”(2) Grace and truth may not seem like the necessary weapons or equipment needed to take on an enemy of such power, malevolence, or hate. But they are exactly what is needed indeed!

The truth is vital, in that here the true nature of the story is revealed. This is a God-ordered and God-ordained world. It is God’s good creation. It is, nonetheless, also corrupted, damaged, and occupied. However, and this is a big however, the grace of God appears.(3) What a great phrase. He did not appear as a revolutionary, as an idealist, as a highly skilled Ninja, or as some kind of weapons specialist! He appeared as human, and in his mission, he came as a savior, the only rescuer. These redemptive actions, completed by the human Christ, have on-going impact and eternal consequences. Jesus is not an ideal or an icon or a mere image. He is the risen Christ, the Messiah, the human hope of the ages.

Now, all of life is his story. He knows the plot, the players, the parts, the sequence, and when the final act will come with all that this entails. The end will be a good end because it will be his ending. The Batman, Captain Kirk, and all the other miniature heroes offer nothing in comparison. With Peter of old, I want ask, To whom else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.

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

(1) Philippians 2:7-8.

(2) John 1:16-18.

(3) Titus 2:11-14.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   Another Transaction

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There are a great many companies that think very highly of you and all that you deserve. You deserve the best. You have earned a vacation. You deserve to splurge on this because you’re worth it. Whether in plenty or times of economic downturn, flattery actually remains one of the most effective psychological drivers that compounds debt. In a HSBC Direct survey during one such downturn, forty-two percent of the consumers interviewed said they had splurged on themselves in the past month despite hardship. Twenty-eight percent cited their reason for the splurge as simply “because I deserve it.”(1)

Of course, each of us who has ever bought into the idea that L’Oreal thinks I am worth it or BMW believes I deserve the ultimate driving experience probably realizes that we have done exactly that: we have bought the idea, paid for both the product and the flattering suggestion. No one is giving away these things because they think we are worth it; their flattery is quite literally calculated. In effect, it’s not that they think so highly of us, so much as that they want us to think highly of ourselves. Whether we see through this empty sycophancy or not, Geoff Mulgan believes it is working: “‘[B]ecause you’re worth it’ has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.”(2) The enticing words are an invitation to reward ourselves, and it just so happens we agree that we’re worth it—and they are glad.

There is of course much that can be drawn from reflecting on the intemperate desires of a consumer culture and the imagination fostered within its confines. A consumerist view of the world holds a very particular view of humanity and its worth. Beside this prominent vision, the drama of the Christian story fosters another imagination, along with the space and invitation to try on its counterintuitive system of worth. The invitation of a creator who so values creation that he steps into it is one that presents every opportunity to question the psychological drivers of empty flattery and consumer seduction. The Father gives us in Christ a mediator, an advocate, a vicarious redeemer of human identity in human form. While the imagination of a consumer promises flattery, the free invitation of Christ gives a startling commentary on a similar kind of compliment, within a very different transaction. Choosing to become human, Christ has indeed proclaimed our worth. But there is nothing required to accept this unfathomable gesture of a God who takes on flesh.

Accepting the accolade proclaimed in Christ does, however, confront the very banal narcissism that epitomizes our numbed consumer hearts and imaginations. In the words of one observer: “When I look at narcissism I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”(3) Given the highly countercultural alternative of discovering worth in the son of an ordinary peasant woman, we may find that we in fact prefer the consumer transaction that tells us that being human is about what we can buy. We may find that there is something comforting and familiar in paying for our sense of worth and value. We might find it baffling to accept the idea that something deemed a gift could come to us fragile and broken. Or maybe it is the personal nature of his humanness that we find altogether unnerving—namely, Jesus was not simply born a child in first century Bethlehem; he was born a child in first century Bethlehem for you. It is perhaps far easier to accept an empty compliment.

Yet in this drama of God in flesh, we are given nothing less than one to walk beside us on the harder road–one with the worth of the world in mind. Born of a peasant girl in a poor manger, Jesus became a human child, who would become a man, who would be put to death. It is strange to imagine a God who would concede to such a plan. God could have instead come down in glory and power for all to see, silencing crowds, forcing them to look. It would have proved that he was no mere human to look us eye to eye. And it would have made him a God to whom we could not say no, even if it was only to say yes out of fear or force. No instead, he was mindful of us; he became one of us. When we turn to him with nothing to give but love, we know why.

Christ’s is a declaration of human worth that makes every other seem empty, narcissistic, or fleeting at best. And it is worth expending everything to consider what his humanity has to say of our own. What are mere mortals that you should think of them, human beings that you should care for them?

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

(1) “Making Peace with Your Plastic,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept 8, 2008.

(2) Geoff Mulgan, “Because You’re Worth It,” guardian.co.uk, June 12 2006, accessed March 1, 2009.

(3) Brene Brown, Men, Women, and Worthiness (Sounds True, November 15, 2012).

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Through Glass, Darkly

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There’s a scene a few chapters into the comedy science-fiction novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed former president of the galaxy, is in a spot of trouble. A few moments earlier, he had been standing on the bridge of a starship, now he suddenly found himself mysteriously teleported to a café on the strange, alien planet of Ursa Minor Beta. Puzzled at what has just happened, Zaphod instinctively reached into his pocket for his sunglasses:

“[He] felt much more comfortable with them on. They were a double pair of Joo Janta Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.”(1)

What was science-fiction in 1980 when Douglas Adams wrote this passage has become reality in the twenty-first century: augmented reality, to be precise, the new buzzword in computing. Augmented reality is a technology that allows computer-driven data to overlay your view of the real world. Originally developed for military applications (for example, projecting flight information onto the visor of a fighter jet pilot), augmented reality is now breaking in to the world of consumer gadgetry.

One example is Google Glass, recently launched (to a select few, willing to pay $1,500 to get their heads on a beta version of the product) by the California-based Internet search company.(2) At first glance, Glass appears fairly innocuous, looking like a pair of designer spectacles, albeit fashioned by a designer whose aesthetic was more “geek” than “chic.” Pop on Glass, however, and a small computer display just above one lens beams a constant stream of information into your field of view. Now you need never be without the weather, news, travel information, the web, your latest email or tweets, all overlaying your view of the outside world.

Particular controversy has been caused because Google Glass comes equipped with a camera and that raises all manner of privacy issues. The US Congress actually sent a list of questions to Google, one of which was “Will it ship with facial recognition software?” Although Google replied “No,” other software developers have stepped into the gap. One such developer is Stephen Balaban, whose company has launched facial recognition software for Google Glass. In an interview with technology website Ars Technica, the 23 year-old programmer explained his excitement at what a Google Glass headset equipped with his software could do. Balaban waxed lyrical about the wonder of having a conversation with a stranger, all the while your Glass headset looking them up and feeding you information about them:

“I think that would be a fantastic experience to not only understand who you’re talking to but to bring context to a conversation. I would love to live in a world where the things that you have in common with somebody and the shared experiences are available on the fly. I think that makes conversation far more efficient. I think that makes interactions with conversations better. You can relate to them in ways that you couldn’t otherwise.”(3)

Those words haunted me for days afterward: “makes conversation more efficient.” The subtext, the assumption, the worldview reflected here is one that Neil Postman famously called “technopoly,” the idea that technology is king, that there is no human problem that technology cannot solve.(4) Balaban’s statement assumes that what we lack, what we need is more information. I think he’s dead wrong. What most people are crying out for is not more information but deeper relationships.

Yet despite our relational need, we are drawn to technology like moths to a flame. In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, sociologist Sherry Turkle describes the increasing trend we have to outsource relationships to technology, to computers and robots. In one chapter, she recounts the story of Callie, an eleven year-old girl who as part of a research project got to take home two robotic toys. Turkle describes what happened at the end of the three week study when it was time to return the robots:

“Callie is very sad when her three weeks with My Real Baby and AIBO come to an end…Before leaving My Real Baby, Callie opens its box and gives the robot a final, emotional good-bye. She reassures My Real Baby that it will be missed and that ‘the researchers will take good care of you.’ Callie has tried to work through a desire to feel loved by becoming indispensable to her robots. She fears that her parents forget her during their time away (they travel a lot for work); now, Callie’s concern is that My Real Baby and AIBO will forget her… Disappointed by people, she feels safest in the sanctuary of an as-if world.”(5)

As human beings we are designed for relationship and any attempt to outsource this to or augment this basic need with technology is doomed to failure because what we yearn for is not robots but relationship, not programs but persons, not computers but communion. The Christian worldview explains where this desire for relationship, for intimacy comes from: because we are created in the image of a God who, as the doctrine of the Trinity makes clear, is himself persons-in-relation. Theologian Colin Gunton writes:

“To be made in the image of God is to be endowed with a particular kind of personal reality. To be a person is to be made in the image of God: that is the heart of the matter. If God is a communion of persons inseparably related, then… it is in our relatedness to others that our being human consists.”(6)

The God of the Bible is the God who is relational: walking and talking in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, appearing to Abraham, speaking to Moses “as a man talks to his friend” and, ultimately, stepping into history in the incarnation. In many other religions, such as Islam, you achieve salvation, wisdom, nirvana—whatever it is you are seeking—through knowing the right things, through information. In Christianity, by contrast, the question is not what you know but whom you know—Jesus Christ. God so loved the world that God did not send mere information, did not simply augment reality with some new set of moral commandments, but instead God gave himself. And, says the Bible, this theme continues right through into the New Creation, where God will once again walk and talk with us. One day, we shall no longer see as in a glass darkly, but we shall see face to face. For relationship we were made and for relationship, with and through Christ, we are destined.

Andy Bannister is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada.

(1) Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (London: Pan Books, 1980), 33.

(2) Jason Koebler, “Google Opens ‘Glass’ Project to ‘Explorers’ Willing to Pay $1,500,” US News, 20 Feb 2013 (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/02/20/google-opens-glass-project-to-explorers-willing-to-pay-1500/, accessed 25 June 2013).

(3) Cyrus Farivar, “Google may not like it, but facial recognition is coming soon to Glass,” Ars Technica, 8 June 2013 (online at http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/06/google-may-not-like-it-but-facial-recognition-is-coming-soon-to-glass/, accessed 24 June 2013).

(4) Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

(5) Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 78-79.

(6) Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2d Ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 113.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truly Human

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“What does it mean to be human?” has been the inquiring theme of more than a few journals, conferences, and special reports. It is a question that is considered from anthropological, theological, and biological perspectives, from within medical, ethical, social, and spiritual circles. Yet regardless of the examiner, any plumbing of the depths of the nature of humanity is a discovery that the implications are as far-reaching and intricate as the subject itself.

Generation after generation, voices that have spoken to the question of human nature often reflect something of the paradoxical character of humanity. Plato described human life in terms of the dualistic qualities he observed. While the mind is representative of the intellectual soul, the stomach is an appetitive beast that must be tamed. In terms less dividing of mind and body, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the human propensity for both compassion and cruelty at once. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”(1) Speaking in the 17th century, Blaise Pascal made note of further dueling extremes present within humanity. “For after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all—and infinitely far from understanding either… He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”(2)

What does it mean to be human? The seeming paradoxes in and around us make the question difficult to answer. We may sense at times within us contradiction and inconsistency—a desire to be a good friend beside the wherewithal to manipulate, the intention to be a good neighbor beside the tendency to walk away without helping. I find it quite reminiscent of Aslan’s response to the children in Prince Caspian: “‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.’”(3)

As a Christian, I hold my own inconsistencies in the merciful hope of Christ as mediator. The Christian story presents Christ as the truly human Son of God in whom and for whom all creation was made. Stepping into creation, Christ has come to restore the image of true humanity, drying the tears of a broken world, reviving the image of God within us, overcoming the enemies of sin and death.

In the company of Pascal and Solzhenitsyn, I find Christ to provide the only grounding that offers hope for the contradictions within. Far more than a hope merely for the future or an escape vehicle from present reality, Christ redeems the tension within us, the tension between my reductionistic imagination of my human identity and the imaginative hope of living into my identity as a redeemed child of God. We are assured that the promise is ours: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.” For Christ is not only at work redeeming a fallen humanity, resuscitating our nature with his own, standing as the mediator who lifts us to God. Christ came to unite humanity with God so that we can be truly human as he is human.

This is far more hopeful news than many other worldviews and self-help plans impart. For if true humanity is a humanity fully united to its creator, then the possibility is ours. Acting on our own power and authority, independent of God, we merely expose our alienation from God and from our true selves. We fail to know what it means to be most fully human. But united to Christ through faith we are united to another nature entirely. Writes one disciple, “[God] has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world.”(4)

While Christ is the one who makes our resuscitation possible, the one who restores in us the image of God, the process of reviving is also something we actively take hold of as human beings united to the Son. In other words, to live as children made in God’s image and united to Christ is not a static hope, but an active calling made possible by the one who mediates the very hope of what it means to be human. “So then,” in the words of Paul, “live in Christ, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.”(5)

What does it mean to be human? Perhaps we only begin to answer this immense inquiry when we turn to the one who shows us the very meaning of the word.

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

(1) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 75.

(2) Blaise Pascal, Pensess (New York: Penguin, 1995), 61.

(3) C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 152.

(4) 2 Peter 1:4.

(5) Colossians 2:6-7, emphasis mine.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Human Circumference

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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 several 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 a truth about the realities of human tolerance. On the one hand, we generally base our capacity for tolerance on loving those who are easy to love or who are broadly similar to our own way of living and viewing the world. On the other hand, we are easily tolerant of external causes, ideals, and principles, which are quickly lost when we come into contact with individuals who shatter that ideal image.

I was reminded of Sartre’s insight while serving at my church’s hospitality ministry dinner. Homelessness and hunger for the working poor is a perennial issue where I live. While homelessness remains an abstract idea, it is easy for me to ‘love’ the broad category of people who are poor or homeless. Yet, every month at my church dinner for the homeless—the full-range of humanity on display right in front of me-I often see the ways in which my ‘love’ is merely a form of patronage. Eating with individuals who have not showered in weeks (or months), who suffer from mental illness or chemical dependency tests my love of humanity in ways that the abstract category of homelessness never will. A preference for categories makes it very hard for me to love the 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 remote 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 hair to wash them.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Of Death and Sleep

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For some, the fear of not being awake is akin to the fear of not being. Public Radio International personality Ira Glass spent a program discussing his own fear of sleep, along with others who find something worrisome in the altered, vulnerable state of slumber:

“I’d lie awake at night scared to go to sleep,” says Glass of himself as a child. “‘Cause sleep seemed no different than death, you know? You were gone. Not moving, not talking, not thinking. Not aware. Not aware. What could be more frightening? What could be bigger?”(1)

Others describe a similar sense of foreboding in the still of night that is irrationally paralyzing for them: a seven year-old trains himself to resist sleep, a young student describes her extensive intake of caffeine and denial. But one man, speaking bluntly of the fear of death in the middle of the night, attests to the altogether rational quality of his fear. “It’s not an irrational fear… You understand that you’re a mortal; your life is going to be over at some point. You’re fighting the worst enemy in the world as you lie there in bed….you’re trying to fight death and there’s no way you can win.”(2)

Glass closes the program with an excerpt of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” a poem about waking at 4 a.m. and staring around the bedroom, and seeing “what’s really always there:/ Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,/ Making all thought impossible but how/ And where and when I shall myself die.” Larkin, who died a bleak philosopher at 63, continues:

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says no rational being

Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing

that this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Larkin is not the first poet to draw attention to sleep’s grasp of death’s hand, a hand most admit at times fearing, at times simply hoping to outrun. Keats referred to sleep as the “sweet embalmer,” and Donne was convinced that both death and sleep are the same type of action. Glass is right to point to death as the worst enemy of which there is no escape, and sleep, which is similarly unavoidable, is perhaps the disquieting reminder of that which we attempt to deny the rest of the day. For how much of our lives and livelihoods are aimed at outrunning the reality of our deaths? The forces of culture that insist we give up an hour of sleep here or two hours there—the grinding schedules, the unnerving stock piles of e-mail in need of responses, the early-taught/early-learned push for more and more productivity—are part and parcel of the forces that urge us to stop time itself, to live anti-wrinkles, anti-aging, anti-dying. Sleep could well be the daily reminder that some of us need to reclaim the reality of death, the beauty and brevity of life.

This is precisely the rationale with which author and professor Lauren Winner urged the world to sleep more as a means of waking to oft-unchallenged social cues and fears. Writes Winner, “Not only does sleep have evident social consequences, not only would sleeping more make us better neighbors and friends and family members and citizens. Sleeping well may also be part of Christian discipleship, at least in our time and place. It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than ‘the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things.’ A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent.”(3) We are, likewise, bodies living within a culture generally terrified of aging, uncomfortable with death, and desperate for our accomplishments to distract us. The demands that our bodies make for sleep is a good reminder that we are mere creatures, that life is to be revered, and death will come.

This is indeed a sobering reminder, but it need not be only a dire reminder. For to admit there is no escaping the enemy of death is not to say we are left without an ally: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, shall live.”(4) The one who made this claim made it knowing that death would come to all of us, but longing to show the world that it is an enemy he would defeat. Perhaps sleep, then, providing a striking image of finite bodies that will lie down and cease to be, can simultaneously provide us a rousing image of bodies that will rise again.

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

(1) Ira Glass, This American Life, 361: “Fear of Sleep” August 8, 2008.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Lauren Winner, Books & Culture, January/February 2006, Vol. 12, No. 1, pg. 7.

(4) John 11:25-26.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – House and Ladder

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I am not sure what it is as children that makes us readily picture God as seated high above us. But from childhood, we seem to nurture pictures of heaven and all its wonderment as that which spatially exists “above,” while we and all of our worries exist on earth “below.” While this may simply illustrate our need for metaphors as we learn to relate to the world around us, there is also biblical imagery that seems to authenticate the portrayal. Depicting the God who exists beyond all we know, the Scripture writers describe the divine throne as “high and lofty,” the name of the LORD as existing above all names. Yet even metaphors can be misleading when they cease to point beyond themselves. Though the Scriptures use the language and imagery of loftiness, they also pronounce that God’s existence is far more than something “above” us. The startling image of the Incarnation radically erases the likeness of a distant God. The message that comes again and again from the mouth of God on earth is equally startling: The kingdom of God is among us!

Of the many objections to Christianity, there is one in particular that stands out in my mind as troubling. That is, the argument that to be Christian is to withdraw from the world, to follow fairy tales with wishful hearts and myths that insist you stop thinking and believe that all will be right in the end because God says so. It was in such a vein that Karl Marx depicted Christianity as a kind of drug that anesthetizes its consumers to the suffering in the world and the wretchedness of life. Sigmund Freud argued similarly that belief in God functions as an infantile dream that helps us evade the pain and helplessness we both feel and see around us. I don’t find these critiques and others like them troubling because I find them an accurate picture of the kingdom Jesus described. Rather, I find them troubling because so many of us seem to live as if Freud and Marx are quite right in their analyses.

In impervious boxes and minimalist depictions of the Christian story, we live comfortably as if in our own worlds, intent to tell our feel-good stories while withdrawing from the harder scenes of life, content to view the kingdom of God as a world far away from the present, and the rooms of heaven as mere futuristic promises. The kingdom is seen as the place we are journeying toward, the better country the writer of Hebrews describes. In contrast, our place on earth is viewed as temporary, and therefore somehow less vital; like Abraham, we are merely passing through. And as a result, we build chasms that stand between kingdom and earth, today and tomorrow, the physical and the spiritual, the believing world and its world of neighbors. Whether articulated or subconscious, the earth itself even becomes something fleeting and irrelevant—one more commodity here for our use, like shampoo bottles in hotel bathrooms—while Christ is away preparing our permanent rooms.

Yet these chasms we might allow not only belie a posture irresponsible for those called to abundant life and love of neighbors, they betray the identity and decree of the good creator Christianity professes. The stories Jesus left the world with are so much more than wishful thinking; his proclamations of a kingdom here and now are far from permissions of escapism. Further, to view the world around us as a temporary place negates the words of the Christian’s most sacred prayer. Jesus taught his followers to pray: God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done—on earth as it is in heaven. What does it mean that Christ repeatedly declared the kingdom of God as here and now among us? What does it mean that for lack of human praise the very rocks will cry out at the glory of their creator while the trees will clap their hands? Far from being a non-spiritual, kingdom-irrelevant commodity, the earth is filled with rooms of faith, staircases and ladders that assure a constant traffic between heaven and earth, rooms of a good kingdom now seen in part and one day to be seen in full.

Surely the Lord is in this place; how often are we just not aware of it? For if Christ’s proclamations of the kingdom are taken seriously, then we live our lives in none other than the house of God.

The Christian worldview is one that believes at the deepest level in eternal dwellings, in the day when tears will be no more, and in the one who is preparing a house of many rooms. And yet, we very much live with the distinct experience of these promises here and now. Neither Christ nor the kingdom he came to make known is a static entity, something that mattered long ago and might matter once again but not today amidst the world as we know it. On the contrary, all of history, the story of a redemptive creator, the Incarnation and resurrection, declare that the Christian God is far more hands-on than this. Christ is not merely the one who will be near in all eternity. He is among the world today, reigning in a kingdom that is both present and approaching, going out into the depths of cities and neighborhoods that his house may be filled (cf. Luke 14:23). Precisely because the faith Christians proclaim is not a drug that anesthetizes or a dream that deludes, we must live as those aware of the house we live in, ready for the ladders that extend between heaven and earth, and anxious to invite the world inside.

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 –  Discordant Intersections

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The dissonance that comes when personal experience and belief contradict is a painful discord. What do you do, for example, when you have believed that God heals, and yet you watch helplessly as a loved one dies of cancer? How do you affirm the goodness of humanity to a woman who was sexually abused as a young girl? How do you respond when you believe that hard work pays off, and yet you cannot square that formula with a series of professional and personal failures?

The fortress of beliefs we sometimes hold as impenetrable can come crashing down as life’s experiences crush us. In the aftermath, the alternative shelters of cynical doubt or blind faith beckon us to take refuge with them. For most of us, we run perilously between both extremes, without the sense of security that the fortress once provided.

The Bible is replete with stories about individuals who faced the difficult conflict between what they held as truth and what they experienced in their lives. Joseph was told by God through a sequence of dreams that he would one day be a great ruler and that even his family would bow down to him. He had been given a glimpse of his destiny, and he could have easily concluded that the road would soon lead him to the landscape God described. Instead, he was almost murdered by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused by his master’s wife, and spent much of his life in jail. I highly doubt this was the path to glory Joseph imagined for himself.

Surely, Joseph believed in a God who watched over him and ruled the world with justice and mercy. But what was he to do with this demonstration of justice and sovereignty? Sitting in a jail cell falsely accused doesn’t align with our ideas about justice, nor does it seem to point to a merciful sovereign.

Yet despite the contradiction between his life experience and the dreams God had once given him, Joseph seemed to affirm his trust in God. He confirmed God as the provider of dreams and interpretations; he acknowledged God as the one who makes all things known. In every position Joseph found himself in, he found favor with God and prospered. Though in slavery, he was put in charge of Potiphar’s household. Though in prison, he was put in charge of the rest of the prisoners.

Even wrestling through belief and experience, contradiction and discord, God can give new perspective and a deeper understanding. Even in loss, God can alter our understanding of gain. In the words of Craig Barnes:

“The deep fear behind every loss is that we have been abandoned by the God who should have saved us. The transforming moment in Christian conversion comes when we realize that even God has left us. We then discover it was not God, but our image of God that abandoned us…. Only then is change possible.”

Sometimes it is through loss of vision that God restores sight. Indeed, Joseph later tells the very brothers who betrayed him, “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Elsewhere he insists, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” Life doesn’t always go as planned, but the plans of God are sufficient. Joseph witnessed the sovereign hand of God, though probably not in the way he first imagined it. Perhaps we, too, need to look again at our discordant intersections of faith and experience. Often it is God Himself who stands at the crossroads.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   The Labor of Sight

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Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev was a nineteenth-century rabbi known for his mastery of an unwieldy Mishnaic teaching. To carry one’s self with the ayin tovah, or the “good eye,” is to see in a certain light the world and everyone in it. One scholar describes it as the choice “to intentionally focus on what is most pure in each person—to see their highest and holiest potential.”(1) Rabbi Yitzchok was beloved for his good eye, utilized even in cases where virtue seemed entirely wanting and holiness altogether deficient. As one author describes, “He’d roust the local drunk from his stupor on High Holy Days, seat him at the head of the table, and respectfully ask for his wisdom… He extended his caring to all, whether powerful or impoverished, scholarly or simple, righteous or reprobate.”(2) In minds often besieged by warring sides, opinions ad nauseam, and defensive or disparaging thoughts, the good eye is indeed a shift of perception.

I appreciate stories that remind me to keep my eyes opened for all that can be seen but can just as easily be missed. How we learn to see the world, how we labor to see and know the world, is profoundly important. Despite the perseverance of goodness, beauty, and truth around us, the collective wisdom of sociologists, philosophers, historians, and artists all indicates that contemporary culture is structurally estranged from the transcendent.

Learning to see with the good eye may well be a difficult feat without mindful effort and practice. But could it not be an entirely transformative art for both the seer and the world being seen?

Without such effort, consider all that is lost. An article from the Washington Post chronicles a jarring exhibition of our propensity for estrangement—seeing with eyes that are not really seeing, hearing but not hearing. The report describes an experiment they called “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?”(3) Violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, was hired to perform several classical masterpieces at a Metro station during the morning rush hour. Three days prior to his debut at the Metro, Bell had filled Boston’s prestigious Symphony Hall, where only average seats sold for over $100. As he preformed with the same fervor on his handcrafted 1713 Stadivari for nearly an hour at the Metro, however, he took in a total of $32 and change from the 27 people who noticed him. The other thousand people hurried by, altogether unaware, though only three feet away from brilliance. “There was never a crowd, not even for a second.”(4)

Christian scripture is replete with stories that hint that it is always possible to pass over the gifts and grace in front of us, whether a glimpse of beauty or a lifetime of knowing the present glory of the human Son of God. In the words of poet Francis Thompson:

The angels keep their ancient places:-

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendour’d thing.

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful,” wrote Flannery O’Connor to a friend lamentably, including herself in that resistance. There are indeed times when God woos us slowly with beauty, grace, and grandeur, moving among us in a manner that busy or critical lives readily miss while focusing elsewhere. Other times it is we who find ourselves moved nearly to blindness, as we labor to take in the glory of God in a startling moment like Moses or Isaiah. Sometimes, like commuters in the Metro station oblivious of the work of art before us, our estranged faces miss the signs of a many-splendored God entirely. But still other times, we labor intentionally to see with good eyes, and find the world around us transformed with the splendor of the one who first called the world good.

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

(1) Marc Ian Barasch, The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009), 87.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast” The Washington Post, Sunday April 8, 2007.

(4) Ibid.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Dynamism of Faith

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What is the nature of faith? Is faith the sort of thing that is like an impenetrable fortress? Is it a sense of absolute certainty, as is found in mathematical formula, with consistent and guaranteed results? Or is the nature of faith like the feeling one gets when barely hanging on—fingers fatigued, sweaty, and slowly slipping off of whatever prop, cliff, or ledge that holds one from falling into the abyss of disbelief?

I wonder about the nature of faith as I encounter so many different perspectives and experiences. After profound loss, for example, many individuals suffer what is described as a ‘crisis of faith.’ All that seemed a sure foundation before the loss crumbles under the weight of crisis. For others, faith seems a swinging pendulum that vacillates between certainty and doubt. The poet Emily Dickinson wrote that “We both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour.”(1) Still for others faith is a constant assurance, a sense of strength and repose regardless of the assaults to it.

Of course, to ask about the nature of faith is to inquire about the nature of trust and belief. As such, it is not simply a conversation among religious adherents, but a real question over which humans wrestle whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not. We make decisions each and every day about whether or not we will trust the bus driver and the bus to get us to work. We make decisions to trust other drivers on the highway that they will keep their vehicles under control and not careen into our lane of traffic. We make decisions to trust individuals—spouses, children, friends, employers. The exercise of trust is a basic requirement for relationships and for living in this world.

This is why it is so interesting to me that talk of ‘faith’ is often relegated to the margin that is religious discourse. To have ‘faith’ or ‘trust’ or ‘belief’ in scientific studies is simply assumed because science has become the standard by which truth is measured. And yet, even scientists exercise ‘faith’ in relationship to a tradition of knowledge. Assumptions, assured findings from the past, and the methods of science all become a part of the relationship between faith and knowledge. Sometimes, even this relationship comes under testing when what were once considered ‘true’ results are called into question by new assumptions and new data.(2) Relationships are dynamic; going through ebbs and flows, ups and downs, changes and stasis. As such, it seems a complete category mistake to speak of faith and certainty in the same sentence-even in the realm of science. As author Philip Yancey asserts about the necessary uncertainty of faith, “Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?”(3)

It is reasonable, then, to wonder aloud about the nature of faith. One ought to be wary of arriving at a simple definition. For C.S. Lewis, one of the great spokesmen on behalf of the Christianity, the nature of faith was complicated and something that was not easily understood. In his heart-wrenching memoir, A Grief Observed, Lewis writes: “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box.”(4) I believe Lewis articulates a profound dynamic of faith—one never really knows what it is until it is tested. Yet, once tested the true nature of one’s faith is revealed-even when it is revealed to be wanting. In these times, we can reflect honestly about that in which we’ve placed our trust and whether the subject or object of trust is warranted.

Yet, even here where one’s faith might be revealed for what it is and what it is not, there is room for growth and for hope. Philip Yancey reflects that,

“What gives me hope, though, is that Jesus worked with whatever grain of faith a person might muster. He did, after all honor the faith of everyone who asked, from the bold centurion to doubting Thomas to the distraught father who cried, ‘I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief!’”(5)

The true nature of faith is inextricably bound to relationship. As such, it is subject to all of the intricacies and complexities of relationship. At times unshakable and strong, and at other times revealed to be flabby and weak, the nature of faith is dynamic. But entering into a relationship of trust with the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth assures me that despite the complexities, and despite my often small offering of faith, I am welcomed into a relationship anyway. And as my faith is tested, its true nature is progressively revealed.

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

(1) From a letter to Otis Lord, April 30, 1882; Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap, 1958), 728.

(2) As is seen in the recent studies that showed a new gauge for cholesterol was flawed. Cardiologists learned that a new online calculator meant to help them determine a patient’s suitability for cholesterol treatment was flawed, doubling the estimated risk of heart attack or stroke for the average patient. See Gina Kolata, “Flawed gauge for cholesterol risk poses new challenge,” NY Times, November 18, 2013.

(3) Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Do We Expect to Find? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 41.

(4) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins ebooks, 2009), loc 326-329.

(5) Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Do We Expect to Find, 40.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beauty in the Subway

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Dale Henderson gives cello concerts in New York City subway stations because he fears the day when classical music will be no more. He plays for free, focusing primarily on Bach Solo Cello Suites because their “power and beauty unfailingly inspire great appreciation, joy and deep emotion in those who hear them.”(1) Some commuters stop and stare, curious or captivated, many having never heard a cello or Bach concerto before. For Henderson, the music is an offering of something meaningful, seeds for future generations of classical music admirers who would not otherwise know it, beauty well worth lugging his heavy cello down into the subways to protect.

It is not always easy to talk about beauty without a minefield of objections or at best complicating list of qualifiers. Its modern place in the “eye of the beholder” gives it a tenuous feel at best. It’s ancient place as a perfect and ancient ideal is equally abstract. While Henderson describes a world without classical music as soul-less, others may not miss it so much. And the contrast of beauty in a broken and breaking world makes its distinctive encounters increasingly stand out.

One author describes the common, but individual, effect of our varied encounters of the beautiful this way: “‘Beauty’ seems suited to those experiences that stop us in our tracks. Whether it’s a painting called Broadway Boogie-Woogie or a scherzo by Paganini, the beautiful is conducive to stillness. It doesn’t excite us, or necessarily instill in us the desire to replicate it; it simply makes us exist as though we’re existing for that very experience.”(2) His words are rife with the power of beauty to create longing, a desire to somehow participate. Beauty indeed leaves us with the ache of longing for another taste, another glimpse. And for each of us, this longing can come at unique or unsuspecting times—at the spectacular sight of the giant sequoias or a tiny praying mantis, at a concert or watching a First Nation powwow and taking in the colors, the drums, the survival of a betrayed people.

But to suggest that beauty is simply a spectator’s preference, an individual’s pursuit of an abstracted and timeless ideal, is to miss something significant. What of those moments when beauty is neither pleasant nor pretty, but haunting? What of the communal ache of beauty? The well-known scene in Elie Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust when describes a young man named Juliek, an incredibly gifted violinist from Warsaw. Wiesel describes the night when Juliek, on the brink of death, played a Beethoven concerto in the dark for that group of dying, starving men. Wiesel remembers the intensely beautiful, sad and haunting music, noting that it was as if Juliek was playing his very life upon that violin, offering a lament for each of them. Their encounter with the beauty of the composition was humanizing, made all the more jarring in such a dark and dehumanizing setting. In the morning they woke to find Juliek dead, his violin crushed on the floor beside him.

The sometimes haunting interplay between the presence of beauty and its absence, the space between beauty and brokenness only contributes to beauty’s power to stop and still us. But how do we account for it? The severe absence of beauty can stir a common ache within us, a longing that is inexplicable if beauty is merely accidental or an abstraction divorced from reality. Musician and professor Jeremy Begbie suggests another way, “Beauty… has all too often been abstracted from time and temporal movement, and been turned into a static, timeless quality. Suppose, however, we refuse to divorce it from the transformation of the disorder of creation in the history of Jesus Christ. Suppose we begin there? Does this not open up a more dynamic paradigm of beauty?”(3)

The Christian imagination indeed presents a God who not only created and noticed beauty, whose own glory offers present encounters in the world, but the God who is not unfamiliar with the world’s brokenness, transforming a disordered creation by stepping closer into it in Jesus Christ. This is a God who takes all the glimpses and introduces the whole—not as an escape from reality but a deepening of it, one that can hold life as well as death.

I remember vividly one summer when I was working with a group of kids in an afterschool program and a young girl was stung by a bee. She had a severe reaction and the paramedics were unable to revive her. Sitting with one of her young friends at the funeral, somewhere in the middle of it she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “The cut on her face will never heal.” The young girl had a little cut on her forehead from some previous playground encounter, and her friend made this observation in the midst of her own shock and grief. I remember thinking how incredibly insightful her words really were. She was noticing something very simple, but there was something quite profound in her thought. She seemed to be saying instinctively that this wasn’t right, that wounds are meant to heal, that the broken parts of life are not okay: indeed, that wholeness is both our stubborn longing and a most profound calling.

Remarkably, in this little girl’s comment is something that every prophet in the Bible has said—the ones who were trying desperately to open the people’s eyes to the glory of God around them and the ones who were pointing out the absence of glory. Each of them looked around the world, and seeing its broken cuts and ugly blemishes, cried out instinctively, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be!” We were made for wholeness.

Perhaps beauty has an effect on us because it hints at this beauty of God, manifestations that come not intangibly but, like Jesus Christ, within time and community, and thus a beauty that transforms. For God’s beauty is a beauty that is able to embrace life as well as death, a beauty somehow both heart-breakingly entwined with brokenness and offering of something transformingly whole.

Whether a fleeting glimpse in the subway or a quiet act of kindness, whether something that stirred a community or stood up to a culture, each of these dim glimpses suggests not an escape from reality but a calling further into it, such that when we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it.

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

(1) Pia Catton, “A Musician for the Masses Improves His Station,” Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2010.

(2) Arthur Krystal, “Hello, Beautiful: What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty,” Harpers, September 10th, 2010.

(3) Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 224.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   Letting Illusions Die

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Cemetery at West Point Military Academy through a foggy window. Photo by Ben May.

“[W]e are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”(1)

The author of this comment did not have the dashed hopes of a person weary of contemporary political promises; nor the disappointment of a child after his once-adored electronic toy lost its thrill; nor the dispirited outlook of a modern youth disenchanted with rampant consumerism and the daunting purposelessness of life. No, long before computerized games existed, long before Generation Y was disillusioned with Generation X or X with the Baby Boomers before them, disillusionment reigned nonetheless. It was a social commentator in the late 1920’s who made this comment about his own disillusioned culture, words which in fact came more than a decade after a group of literary notables identified themselves as the “Lost Generation,” so-named because of their own general feeling of disillusionment.  In other words, disillusionment is epidemic.

As humans who tell and hear and live by stories, the possibility of taking in a story that is bigger than reality is quite likely. (Advertisers, in fact, count on it.) Subsequently, disillusionment is a quality that follows humanity and its stories around. Yet despite its common occurrence, disillusionment is a crushing blow, and the collateral damage of shattered expectations quite painful. With good reason, we speak of it in terms of the discomfort and disruption that it fosters; we frame the crushing of certain hope and images in terms of loss and difficulty. The disillusioned do not speak of their losses lightly, no more than victims of burglary move quickly past the feeling of loss and violation.

And yet, practically speaking, disillusionment is the loss of illusion. In terms of larceny, then, it is the equivalent of having one’s high cholesterol or a perpetually bad habit stolen. Disillusionment, while painful, is evidence which shows the myths that enchant us need not blind us forever, a sign that what is falsely believed can be shattered by what is genuine. In such terms, disillusion is far less an unwanted intrusion than it is a severe mercy, far more like a surgeon’s excising of a tumor than a cruel removal of hope.

The crucifixion of the Son of God is something like this. The death of God? There are no categories with which to understand it. For those who first held hope in the person of Jesus, it was the same. The death of the one thought to be the Messiah? It was an event that leveled them with disillusioned agony. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright describes the force of this dissonance:
”There were, to be sure, ways of coping with the death of a teacher, or even a leader. The picture of Socrates was available, in the wider world, as a model of unjust death nobly borne. The category of ‘martyr’ was available, within Judaism, for someone who stood up to pagans… The category of failed but still revered Messiah, however, did not exist. A Messiah who died at the hands of the pagans, instead of winning [God’s] battle against them, was a deceiver.”(2)

For those who loved Jesus most, it took time to see that it was not hope but their hopeful illusions that died with him on the cross. Everything they thought God was, every hope for a messiah wielding power and control, every image of God winning the battle and taking a stand against their oppressors, everything they thought they knew about religion, painfully, but mercifully died on a shameful, Roman cross. We, too, can bury our illusions with the body of God. But it is no simple journey. The powerful words of poet W. H. Auden describe what is often the case in a world filled with sickly sweet illusion:

We would rather be ruined than changed;

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.(3)

Yet if we will allow it, this death can be far more than loss. While advertisers count on our moving from one dead illusion to another, the death of Christ tells a completely different kind of story, a demythologizing story, which cuts through the storied layers of illusion we continually create about ourselves, the world, and others. Within such a story, disillusionment is the precursor to nothing short of resurrection. And faith is the audacity to confront our illusions with the cross upon which we find a self-giving God. In the words of author Parker Palmer, “[F]aith is the courage to face into our illusions and allow ourselves to be disillusioned about them, the courage to walk through our illusions and dispel them. Faith…[is] a disillusioned view of reality…that lets the beauty behind the illusions shine through.”(4) Burying our illusions with the body of Christ, we bury them with none other than the one who unites us to himself in life and in death. We may stand in painful disillusionment, but we stand with the vicarious humanity of the Incarnate Son. Thus, for any losses we mourn or graves of dead dreams and visions over which we lament, so we may stand equally aware that we will be mercifully startled by what emerges from the tomb.

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

(1) John Boynton Priestley, “The Disillusioned,” in The Balconinny and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1929), 30.

(2) N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 658.

(3) W.H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 2007), 530.

(4) Parker Palmer, “Faith or Frenzy: Living Contemplation in a World of Action,” The Clampit Lectures, 1972.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   Where Was God?

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Over the last couple of weeks, Kenya, my homeland, has been thrust into the international news headlines due to the senseless massacre of students at the Garissa University. I am deeply saddened by the horrific nature of this tragedy, and I join the many across the world who have been praying for the victims. I especially pray with all sincerity for the parents, siblings, relatives, and friends of the 148 people who lost their lives, and those who were injured. I cannot even begin to imagine the agony the victims of this brutality have been going through.

It has been said that human beings are the only creatures in the world who have learned to ask questions instead of relying on instincts. In times like these, our questions are unleashed upon us in the fullest of force. What can we do? Where was God? These are perhaps two of the most frequent and important questions.

Short of turning back the clock, there is nothing any human being can do to erase the pain of what has taken place. But I would begin by encouraging you to pray sincerely for those affected by this tragedy. Only God can touch the hearts of the victims with his comforting presence. Pray that the authorities will be able to do all they can to bring the terrorists to justice. And yes, pray also for the perpetrators of this evil. From the very pages of the Scriptures to our own day, we meet people, like the Apostle Paul, who singled out others for extermination and who later became heroes of the faith.

In addition to prayer, we also need to remember the victims in an active manner. We are grateful that many world leaders have condemned these attacks, and a few have promised to stand with Kenya in the aftermath of this tragedy. But judging from previous experiences, it is reasonable to expect that the world will soon forget, and move on to another crisis. It can be overwhelming to think of trying to help in the midst of all that goes wrong in our world.

But if we really mean it when we ask what we can do, we need to identify whatever is within our power to do and get involved. These acts of terror and brutality are not just a problem for the victims; they are an affront to humanity. It is incumbent upon all of us to act, including those who insist that their religion has been hijacked by fanatics and that it has nothing to do with terrorism.

We need to let the victims know that they are not forgotten, and our promise to stand with them must be backed by action. Those who work with organizations like Wellspring International, RZIM’s humanitarian arm, know firsthand how meaningful it is to reach out to those who feel abandoned when their crisis no longer makes the headlines. We need to live up to the conviction many of us claim to hold: that all lives, from Los Angeles to Lagos and from Geneva to Garissa, matter.

So then, where was God? This is one question that inevitably comes up when tragedy strikes. It is most pertinent for those who claim that God is all-good and all-powerful. In other words, it is the very goodness of God that gives rise to the question. Deny God, and you lose the right to raise the question of evil, for without God there is no particular way things ought to be. But why would a morally perfect God fail to intervene to stop these atrocities?

One can approach this question in two ways: (1) from an intellectual perspective or (2) from an emotional perspective. In the face of tragedy, the most vexing issue is not whether or not there is a logical contradiction between believing in a perfect God given the reality of evil at the same time. That is actually easier to handle. By creating us as moral beings, God gave us the ability to choose, and with that ability came the possibility of evil.

Our ability to choose is at once God’s most powerful means of conferring dignity upon us as well as a deadly gift, depending on how we choose to use it. Nevertheless, we need to note that God’s jurisdiction extends beyond this life, and when all is said and done, every human being will be held accountable for his or her actions. So the intellectual side of the equation is easier to address. The most difficult problem is the emotional angst one inescapably feels while trying to understand why God would seemingly stand by and watch as these horrendous activities take place.

But it is in the very face of this troublesome question that the gospel message speaks with unparalleled authority and beauty. A day after the Garissa massacre, Christians all over the world celebrated Good Friday—a day in which we remember the ghastly murder of God’s innocent Son, Jesus Christ, on a Roman cross. The crucifixion was preceded by many hours of unbelievable flogging and humiliation.

In the face of this untold horror, Jesus raised this very question with God the Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”(1)

So, where was God when his Son suffered a slow, excruciating death on the cross? In biblical terms, God made the arrangement for this event before the world began.(2) And about seven hundred years before the crucifixion, the prophet Isaiah wrote,

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.(3)

God knew the choices we would make and the depth of the evil in the human heart. God made arrangements for a rescue plan—a plan that has proven to be incredibly effective to multitudes.

A story that has emerged from Garissa offers us a powerful analogy. One of the students, Hellen Titus, told the Kenyan media how she was able to escape from the tragedy as the shooters hovered over her and her fellow students. She covered herself with someone else’s blood and was thereby mistaken for dead.

That is exactly what Jesus has done for us; he invites us to be covered with his blood so that we can live. And when we are thus protected, we may grieve, but we do not grieve like those without hope, and we do not fear those who can only kill the body but cannot touch the soul.

So, why doesn’t God intervene in these types of situations? He has.

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

(1) Matthew 27:46

(2) Revelation 13:8

(3) Isaiah 53:5