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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truly Human

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Ravi Z

“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, 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 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. 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 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 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.’”

As a Christian, I see 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 us. 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 identity as a child of God and a daughter of humanity. 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 other worldviews or 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 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 caused by evil desires” (2 Peter 1:4).

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, “just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness” (Colossians 2:6-7).

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.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Under Wraps

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Ravi Z

It is nearly impossible for me to keep a surprise. Perhaps I’ve bought a special gift, or have a surprise party or dinner planned for a friend or a loved one, and before you know it, I’m jumping up and down with a frantic enthusiasm spilling the beans and ending all possibility of surprise. I just cannot keep a secret for long.

Part of this inability comes from my genuine enthusiasm in giving gifts to others. But, if I’m really honest, part of this inability comes from my desire to please. More importantly, I want to be well-liked and known as that great friend, or family member who always does such nice things for others. I don’t allow things to stay “under wraps,” as it were, because I want to be noticed. In this admission, I acknowledge that I have not learned well the discipline of secrecy.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks a great deal about keeping things secret. “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…but when you pray, go into your inner room, and pray to your Father who is in secret… [B]ut you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face so that you may not be seen fasting by men, but by your Father who is in secret” (Matthew 6:3, 6, 17-18). In Jesus’s kingdom, there is something to be said for keeping secrets, especially when those secrets nurture humility and protect us from the pride that comes from public lives of righteous living.

Dallas Willard, writing about the spiritual discipline of secrecy Jesus espouses in the Sermon on the Mount, says, “[O]ne of the greatest fallacies of our faith, and actually one of the greatest acts of unbelief, is the thought that our spiritual acts and virtues need to be advertised to be known… [S]ecrecy, rightly practiced enables us to place our public relations department entirely in the hands of God… [W]e allow him to decide when our deeds will be known and when our light will be noticed.”(1) When we desire godly secrecy, Willard goes on to suggest that love and humility before God will develop to the point that we’ll not only see our friends, family, and associates in a better light, but we’ll also develop the very Christian virtue of desiring their good above our own.(2) Paul expressed this very truth to the Philippian church when he told them to “do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4).

Perhaps this practice of secrecy is why Jesus urged many who he healed not to reveal his identity. Perhaps this practice of secrecy is why Jesus avoided the crowds and would often go off to “lonely places” to pray. Jesus placed his public relations department in the hands of God, even when misunderstood or mistreated. He never had the need to reveal surprises in order to be well-liked.

We can follow Jesus more closely as his disciples by keeping surprises and secrets. We do not have to do things in order to gain the approval of others when our public relations are handled by God. Like Jesus, we can practice secret piety, secret prayer, and secret giving. “And your Father who sees in secret will repay you” (Matthew 6:18).

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

(1) Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines, (HarperCollins: New York, 1988), 172-173.

(2) Ibid., 173-174.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Second Greatest

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Sam Harris is one of the well-known band of atheists whose vitriolic rantings and button-pushing avowals seem to draw audiences like reality television. His observations are shouted angrily; his ideas are often inflammatory. His frustration with Christians is spouted with sarcasm, antagonism, and resentment. And something in one of his recent works made me wonder how I might have contributed to it. In an open letter to American Christians, Harris begins, “Thousands of people have written to me to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians believe that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own.”(1)

When one understands apologetics as a defense of the Christian faith, voices like Harris, who attack Christianity and its morality with fluent hostility, seem to justify a defensive stance. How can one respond to those who readily earn and live up to titles like “Darwin’s Rottweiler” without barking a few hostile lines of their own? Is it ever Christ-like to respond to Harris in the manner that Harris responds to Christ?

There is no doubt that Jesus frustrated more than a view scribes; he was fairly harsh on the rich, and he responded angrily to the commercialization of the temple. Yet while these are the scenes we might summon to substantiate hostile words when the God we love is debased with insult, Harris is right. Jesus told anyone who would listen that the greatest commandment is to love God with everything that is in us, and the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as we would ourselves.

In fact, in this scene it is interesting that Jesus noted the second greatest commandment at all. No one had asked this question (we generally are not interested in runner ups), and yet he willingly offered the information. He made note of the second commandment as if it was so near to the greatest commandment to warrant formal connection. Elsewhere, Jesus furthered these instructions so that we would be sure that “neighbor” was not a word with which we could take creative license. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44).

As in many of Jesus’s instructions for being a disciple, his approach hardly seems reasonable. Here he seems to ask that the Harris’s and Dawkins’ of the world be given a respect which they deny others. In fact, we are told that their disrespect is not something that should bring defensiveness but rather enigmatically blessing. Love and pray for those who persecute you. And, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:11-12).

Of course, this is not to say that Jesus did not gently point out the poverty of certain arguments and bias of their sources, blatant double standards, and willful inconsistencies. And in the case of the new atheists, this might include the altogether unwarranted optimism for a world rid of faith. But Christians would do well to remember that Jesus’s harshest words were never reserved for those of other faiths or belief systems, but those from within his own faith. And regardless of the belief system in front of you, Jesus commands respect, humility, and some real degree of the love you claim to know. “Since God so loved us,” writes John “we ought also to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 John 4:11-12).

Obeying the greatest commandment must never be the motivation for disobeying the second greatest. If the bombastic detractors of the Christian faith refuse to see its God, might they at the very least encounter the reality of God’s command to love them in spite of it.

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

(1) Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to the Faith of America (New York: Bantam Books, 2007), vii.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – For the Frozen Sea

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Ravi Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(2) Ibid.

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

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

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – From Disparate Threads

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Some years ago, I was visiting a place known for making the best wedding saris in the world. They were the producers of saris rich in gold and silver threads, resplendent with an array of colors. With such intricacy of product, I expected to see some elaborate system of machines that would boggle the mind in production. But this image could not have been farther from the real scene.

Each sari was made individually by a father and son team.  The father sat above the son on a platform, surrounded by several spools of thread that he would gather into his fingers. The son had only one task. At a nod from his father, he would move the shuttle from one side to the other and back again. This would then be repeated for hundreds of hours, until a magnificent pattern began to emerge.

The son certainly had the easier task. He was only to move at the father’s nod. But making use of these efforts, the father was working to an intricate end. All along, he had the design in his mind and was bringing the right threads together.

The more I reflect on my own life and study the lives of others, I am fascinated to see the design God has for each one of us individually, if we would only respond. All through our days, little reminders show the threads that God has woven into our lives.

Allow me to share a story from my own experience. As one searching for meaning in the throes of a turbulent adolescence, I found myself on a hospital bed from an attempted suicide. It was there that I was read the 14th chapter of John’s Gospel. My attention was fully captured by the part where Jesus says to his disciples: “Because I live, you shall live also” (John 14:19). I turned my life over to Christ that day, committing my pains, struggles, and pursuits to his able hands.

Almost 30 years to the day after this decision, my wife and I were visiting India and decided to visit my grandmother’s grave. With the help of a gardener we walked through the accumulated weeds and rubble until we found the stone marking her grave. With his bucket of water and a small brush, the gardener cleared off the years of caked-on dirt.  To our utter surprise, under her name, a verse gradually appeared. My wife clasped my hand and said, “Look at the verse!” It read: “Because I live, you shall live also.”

A purposeful design emerges when the Father weaves a pattern from what to us may often seem disparate threads. Even today, if you will stop and attend to it, you will see that God is seeking to weave a beautiful tapestry in your life.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beautiful and Terrible

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In one of Shakespeare’s most known and loved passages, the young heroine, Portia, urges Shylock, the moneylender, to show the kind of mercy that “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,” that “is enthroned in the hearts of kings,” and “is an attribute to God Himself.”(1) This arresting image of mercy is both noble and other-worldly, rousing images like that of Caravaggio’s “The Seven Acts of Mercy,” in which an angel’s outstretched hand reaches over seven scenes of mercy: burying the dead, feeding the hungry, refreshing the thirsty, harboring the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and ministering to prisoners.  The seven scenes are based on the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:35-36: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Though Jesus does not specifically reference burial of the dead as an act of mercy, it was deemed merciful by the church during the time of plague, when care of the dead was literally care of one’s neighbors.

Similar depictions of sympathy, provision, and kind leniency often come to mind at the mere thought of mercy wherever it is found. As Caravaggio paints it and Shakespeare depicts it, mercy is beautiful. Images of quiet humanitarianism and heavenly acts of concern afford mercy a reputation worthy of Portia’s words.

Yet this is not the only perception of mercy in action. Even Shakespeare reasons elsewhere, “Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.”(2) There is perhaps no better representation of this contrasting perception than in the practice of “compassionate release” for convicted criminals. Every year, in each of the countries with compassionate release programs, thousands of requests are considered. Though few are granted, it is typically more than unpopular. At the release of the terminally-ill Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1988 bombing of a Pan American jetliner, mercy was justifiably detested. One headline described Megrahi’s release as “an ugly act of ‘mercy.’”(3) Mercy is indeed far less beautiful when its recipients mar the pictures.

Reactions to ‘ugly acts of mercy’ are understandable. In Megrahi’s case, cries for justice were heard across the globe. The sense of injustice was palpable, particularly for those who lost loved ones at the hands of the released man. Much could be said in this case about justice and injustice. For indeed, justice demands that guilt not be swept under the carpet; and yet here, mercy served as the broom. What cannot be said, however, is that we should expect anything different from mercy, that we can expect mercy to always be beautiful, or somehow easier to swallow. Mercy is always ugly to someone.

Yet we rarely see it this way with any consistency. When demanding justice in situations where we have been wronged, mercy’s ugliness is usually clearer. But we seldom apply the same thunderous demands for justice when it works against us. This is well-illustrated by Orual in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Orual, who has spent a lifetime carefully building her case against the gods, meticulously describes each instance where she has been wronged, and demands to be heard by the gods for the sake of justice. But after she has finally had her chance to formally state her case before the gods themselves, she is stunned to hear that it is now her turn to face her judges.

“My judges?” she asks.

“Why, yes, child. The gods have been accused by you. Now’s their turn.”

“I cannot hope for mercy,” she laments to the one beside her.

“Infinite hopes—and fears—may both be yours,” he replies. “Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.”

“Are the gods not just?” she asks.

“Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”(4)

I don’t believe our strong sense of justice is misguided. But justice demands that we apply it to ourselves as thoroughly as we apply it to others. For those who realize the gravity of this equation, no image except the unthinkable injustice of the cross of Christ will console. For here, mercy is indeed as ugly as it is beautiful: “Divine love speaks its most exalted word just as it plunges into unspeakable degradation.”(5) In Christ’s unjust suffering and unfathomable love, we are mercifully restored. Beautifully and terribly, we are liberated.

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

(1) William Shakespeare, The Works of William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, “The Merchant of Venice,” (London: Bickers & Son: 1874), 186.

(2) William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Philadelphia; J.B. Lippincott, 1899), 165.

(3) “Lockerbie Terrorist’s Release Is an Ugly Act of ‘Mercy,’” LA Times, August 21, 2009, http://www.latimes.com, accessed August 24, 2009.

(4) C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Orlando: Harcourt, 1984), 297.

(5) Jeremy S. Begbie, “The Future of Theology Amid the Arts” in Christ Across the Disciplines: Past, Present, Future, ed. Roger Lundin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 160.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Questions in the Boat

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As a Christian writer and speaker, I am often asked what the most frequent questions are regarding the Christian faith. I am frequently asked questions of an intellectual or historic nature: Did Jesus of Nazareth really exist? Is his resurrection from the dead a historical event? How is one to understand the Bible as the Word of God? For some, the questions never go beyond intellectual curiosity or pursuit. For others, these questions need to be answered for constructing a sound apologetic.

Probe a bit deeper, however, and it isn’t difficult to discover that many questions come from the deepest places of the heart. They come because of personal experience with suffering of one form or another. Is there a God? If so, does that God care about me, know me? If so, why does God seemingly allow so much suffering? When the fervent prayers of righteous men and women do not prevent the cancer from spreading, or the child from dying, or the plane from crashing, or the marriage from failing, these more existential questions come like water bursting through the dam.

The kinds of questions I receive are not unique to my contemporary context. They have been asked for millennia.  The technical term for the theist’s response to the issue of suffering is called theodicy. Theodicy is the word given in the seventeenth century by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the great intellectual thinkers of the Enlightenment period.(1) Theodicy attempts to explain how and why there can be suffering in the world if God is all-powerful and loving. In trying to solve this problem, some thinkers have denied the omnipotence of God; God is all-loving, but not able to do anything about suffering. Others dispense of the notion that God is all-loving, at least in any conventional understanding. But, neither of these alternatives provides a satisfactory answer.

Intellectual wrangling over this problem, aside, the experience of suffering in light of both the goodness and power of God has caused many to doubt God, and others to walk away from faith altogether. If God does not prevent suffering, and if God does not care about the sufferer, then for some, the only alternative appears to be that God cannot exist in any meaningful way.

The writers of Scripture wrestled with these questions too. Often, they provided different ways of answering these questions. Some believed that suffering resulted from sin.   Others believed that God causes suffering as a form of punishment. Still others asserted that suffering brings redemption.(2)

In Mark’s gospel, a simple story about a boat caught in a terrible storm provides an altogether different answer framed around three profound questions. When evening had come, Jesus and his disciples got into a boat, most likely to cross the Sea of Galilee, in order to “go over to the other side” (Mark 4:35-41). In the course of their travel, a fierce storm arose suddenly and violently. It was so intense that the waves were not only breaking over the boat, but the boat was filling with water and on the verge of sinking. The gospel writer tells us that Jesus was asleep in the stern of the boat and resting soundly when the disciples roused him with their fearful, first question: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  Jesus seems to ignore their question their question, and instead answers the wind and the waves, “Peace, be still.”  His exhortation to the natural elements of wind and water was nevertheless intended for the disciples as well, for he returns their question with a second question: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” To which the disciples reply to one another with the ultimate question, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?”

It is not entirely unreasonable for those who want to be followers of Jesus to think that because he is in the boat suffering will not arise. But suffering does come, and the wind roars around and the sky turns black, and the storm of all storms appears to envelop all in darkness and terror. Jesus, don’t you care that we are perishing becomes an incredulous for all who would wish for immunity from the troubles of life. But Jesus’s answer reminds us that faith does not insulate us from life’s storms. Indeed, as noted author Craig Barnes has written “Faith…has little to do with our doctrines or even with our belief that Jesus could come up with a miracle if he would only pay attention. Faith has everything to do with seeing that…the Savior [is] on board“(3)

In the midst of difficult and often unending questions about suffering, Jesus is there in the midst of the storm of doubt, in the tumultuous waves of despair, in the gale-force winds of defeat. He rests in the assurance of God’s care in the storm. His presence with the disciples in the storm tells us more about who he is—neither removed from suffering, nor always preventing suffering—then why we suffer. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

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

(1) Bart Ehrman, God’s Problem (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 8.

(2) See for example Proverbs 3:33, “The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous”; Amos 4:1-3, “[Y]ou cows of Bashan who oppress the poor, who crush the needy…the Lord God has sworn in his holiness: the time is surely coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks”; and Isaiah 53, the redemption by the suffering Servant.

(3) M. Craig Barnes, When God Interrupts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 138.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Wrinkles in Time

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Ravi Z

“Uncanny” was one of the vocabulary words on my sixth grade vocabulary list, which was to be found within the book we were reading as a class. I remember thinking Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was exactly that—uncanny, peculiar, and uncomfortably strange. Yet I also remember that it stayed with me—the story of a quirky girl named Meg, her overly-intelligent little brother, and their time-transcending journey to save their physicist father with the help of three mysterious beings. Madeleine L’Engle, the writer whose books invite readers to see time itself differently, passed away not too long ago. But her stories will continue to perplex sixth graders, and stay with us long after we have set them aside.

L’Engle is the writer who first showed me the incredible difference between two words in Greek, which we unfortunately translate identically. To the English reader, chronos and kairos both appear to us as “time.” But in Greek, these words are vastly different. Chronos is the time on your wristwatch, time on the move, passing from present to future and so becoming past. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is time as a moment, a significant occasion, an immeasurable quality. The New Testament writers use the word kairos to communicate God’s time, it is real time—it is the eternal now.

So it might be said for the Christian that when Jesus stepped into time to proclaim the kingdom of God among us, he came to show us in chronos the reality of kairos. “Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos,” writes L’Engle. “Yet during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in kairos.”(1) With this story in mind, L’Engle describes kairos as that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, time where we are completely unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are continually checking our watches.

Whatever your view of religion, it is likely an experience you can recount; a moment so sweet or magnified it seems to stop time. But L’Engle presses the Christian to see it as something to be expected. “Are we willing and able to be surprised?” L’Engle asks. “If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”(2) If we have the courage to see it, the kingdom of God is close at hand, kairos breaking through like Christ into the world.

I imagine Jacob, too, discovered the difference between chronos and kairos when he set aside the past which was about to catch up with him, along with his paralyzing fear of the future, and found himself living in “none other than the house of God.” The prophets and poets describe similar moments of waking to the present and finding the eternal dimensions of time. The shepherds in Bethlehem were going about their ordinary work when the glory of the Lord captured the moment. “Do not be afraid,” the angel announced. “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you” (Luke 2:13-14). At this invasion of kairos into the routine of chronos, the shepherds chose to respond with action: “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15).

Uncanny encounters with time are a part of the human experience. The Christian is given a language to explain these encounters. We live somewhere between the already and the not yet, caught by the eternal now and the one who dwells within it. The implications are both temporal and unending. Will we have the courage to look for glory in the ordinary? To release control of our calendars and watches and note the eternal in our midst? The apostle joins every prophet and poet who proclaimed the coming of the Messiah in history and the return of the king to come, “Behold, now is the time (kairos) of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).

Like Christ, glimpses of the eternal come quietly and unexpectedly; they come and upset our very notion of time and all we discover within it. Why should we be so unreconciled to time if the temporal were our only concern? Or could it be that the eternal Word stepped into flesh, into our bounded realm of time, and literally embodied the reality that time is meaningful because of the eternal one in our midst. The Christian insists that kairos is breaking into chronos and transforming it. With Christ it proclaims, “The kingdom of God is close at hand”—and the temporal world invited to break in along with it. In ordinary moments that hint at such a radical invasion, might we have the courage to be surprised by one who comes so near.

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

(1) Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1982), 93.

(2) Ibid., 99.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – We Fix Things

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“I fix things; that’s what I do,” says Walt Kowalsky, the character played by Clint Eastwood in his movie, Gran Torino. It is a departure from the usual expectations of Eastwood, although the expected scenarios of innocent or weak people, oppressed or threatened by serious bad guys, indeed occurs. What is different in this movie, however, is how Eastwood as the actor/director resolves these issues in an untypical (for him) twist.

The idea of heroes and heroines who “fix things” is a staple of writing, filmmaking, and good novels. Whether it is John Wayne, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Bond, or Jason Bourne, the icon and images play to our expectations. And what are these expectations? It seems that we long for justice, for healing, for an end to evil or wrong in the world.

The Enlightenment era gave birth to a view that one friend describes as “rational man (and woman) in control of their destiny.” Since it was believed that humans were the measure of all things (Protagoras), it followed that our destiny, our problems, and our challenges all rested within the power of our own capacities to resolve. It is as if long before Eastwood’s character, there was a corporate hope expressed: We fix things; that’s what we do.

One is tempted to stop and ask, oh really? The promethean vision of fixing things, and as a result, of ever-refreshed hopes, runs into many walls and recurring obstacles.  I have long come to appreciate Murphy’s Law (if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong); not as a statement of despair, but as an ironic description of human life. This is the inbuilt “oh no” factor that affects projects, plane schedules, the best laid plans—and many of our well intentioned efforts at fixing things. Something is wrong in life and with life, but what is it and why can’t we fix it?

The Christian narrative portrays a great calamity at the heart of existence. A disruption has occurred. The universe and reality is disordered.  There are forces at loose and powers at work that taint things, damage life, corrupt existence, and spoil things. What the Bible describes as sin (cf. Ephesians 2:1-3, Romans 3:23) is certainly one of the most helpful descriptions of what we actually see and experience, and I’d also suggest, one of the most empirically defendable.

When the London Times asked at the turn of the last century “What’s wrong with the world,” the writer G.K. Chesterton wrote a brief letter in response. “Dear Sirs: I am,” he said. By this he meant not that he was alone responsible for all the evils of existence, but that as a sincere member of the human race, he knew he was flawed, damaged, and in need of a help greater than mere human sincerity and an effort to fix things.

Chesterton, like many before him and after him, discovered that the struggle to face was not only external (in society, culture, issues, people or threats), but also internal (in resentments, bitterness, hatred, and a desire for control). Jesus made it clear that externals have little to do with our truest issues; it is what is inside that is our problem: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach…It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:15-16).

Our modern world wants us all to adopt the stance of Eastwood’s character. I fix things. But that is the issue: we don’t, and we can’t. It is not a motivation problem (in many cases).  We usually want to get better, and we want others to get better. On the contrary, it is an ability problem, or in other words, a power problem. We do not have the necessary qualifications or tools for the job. However, there is one who is qualified and whose title, Savior, offers not only what I need, but that which we all need.  The hunger for hope and the desire for things to be “fixed” are met in the one who, on Calvary’s Cross, bore our sin and shame, and rose again to offer new life and hope. Thus, the great hymn writer Augustus Toplady said it best: “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to your cross I cling.”

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Theology of Sleep

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For some people, the fear of sleep accompanies the fear of death. 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 urges 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 victory: ”I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, shall live” (John 11:25-26). 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.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Good Eye

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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 glory and presence 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.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On the Fringes

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Author A.J. Jacobs admits that he was agnostic before he even knew what the word meant. For all the good God seemed to invoke, the potential for abuse was far too high in his mind for God to be taken seriously. In a book exploring religion and religiousness, Jacobs describes an uncle who seemed to confirm this for him. Dabbling religiously in nearly every religion, his uncle went through a phase where he decided to take the Bible completely literally. Thus, heeding the Bible’s command in Deuteronomy 14:25 to secure money in one’s hand, he tied bills to his palms. Heeding the biblical command to wear fringes at the corners of one’s garment, he bought yarn from a kitting shop, made a bunch of tassels, and attached them to every corner he could find on his clothes.(1) While his uncle sought faithfulness to the letter, Jacobs was left with the impression that his uncle was “subtly dangerous.”

There are certainly sections of the Bible that when stripped of context and read in a lifeless vacuum can lead a mind to extremes. Like Jacobs, it is easy to conclude that religion and religiousness are completely ridiculous; or like his uncle, it is possible to assume complete literalism and run in ridiculous directions. The practice of making and wearing tassels on the corners of one’s garment, for instance, commanded in Numbers 15:37, is one such peculiar biblical decree easily dismissed in the name of reason or disemboweled in the name of faithfulness. Yet neither response truly yields an honest view of the command.

In fact, what seems an entirely curious fashion tip for the people of Israel was a common sight in many ancient Near Eastern cultures. Fringed garments were considered ornamental and illustrative of the owner; they were also were thought to hold certain spiritual significances.(2) In Assyria and Babylonia, for instance, fringes were believed to assure the wearer of the protection of the gods. Thus, God’s command of the Israelites to “make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations” took something familiar to the nations and gave it new significance for the nation God called his own. “You will have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the LORD and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes” (Numbers 15:39). Like many of the commands and rituals described in Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the instruction of tassels is about remembrance. The perpetual presence of fringe and tassel was a tangible reminder that all of life, not only moments of piety or prayer, was an opportunity to be in the presence of God. To miss the rich substance of this divine petition is to miss it—and its petitioner—entirely.

But more than this, we do well to carry such social, historical, and linguistic depth throughout other segments of Scripture we might otherwise dismiss. What might have seemed an insignificant quirk of an ancient context finds meaning in texts long thereafter. In ancient times, for instance, tassels were a part of the hem of a garment, which itself was a significant social statement. The hem was the most ornate part of one’s attire, and thus declared the wearer’s importance before the world. It was considered a symbolic extension of one’s person, a means of grasping one’s stature—sometimes literally. Grasping the hem of one from whom you wanted something, you were thought to be grasping the very identity of the owner—and hence it was shameful to refuse the request. The hems of kings’ and nobles’ robes, moreover, were symbolic of their rank and authority, and therefore were often longer, richer in color, or made with more costly fabric. Thus, when David cut the hem of Saul’s robe in the cave, the declaration was as potent as crushing the crown of Queen Elizabeth or impeaching the president. Saul conceded, “Now I know that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand.”

But along with authority, importance, and personhood, holiness was also expressed in antiquity by the fringes and hems of one’s garment. The length of a priest’s or rabbi’s fringes was symbolic of piety, respect, and authority. And this message is perhaps no clearer than in the vision of Isaiah 6 when the very hem of the robe of the LORD filled everything before the prophet’s eyes. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Isaiah envisions the God described in Scripture as one whose person is larger than anything we can imagine, one who comes near to us within a specific context, and fills the world with even the fringes of Himself.

I know only of one other hem that amazed crowds and changed individuals in the same way. Unlike the priests who made “their fringes long” to shout of their piety, this man had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him (Matthew 23:5, Isaiah 53:2). And yet, people came from the very fringes of society hoping to touch even the hem of his robe. They begged him that they might touch even the tassels of his cloak. And indeed, all who touched him were made whole.(3)

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

(1) A. J. Jacobs, A Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 6.

(2) “Fringes,” in J. Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 68-70.

(3) Cf. Matthew 14:36, Matthew 9:20, Luke 8:44, Mark 6:56.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – THE GLAMOUR OF ATHEISM

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The title of this article risks overstatement. Consequently, I hope the reader will do me the courtesy of not regarding it as a cheap ploy for attention. My aim is simple: I wish to examine an aspect of atheism’s imaginative appeal. Christians are frequently accused of wishful thinking, of retreating to the church in the face of a vast and pitiless universe. Though this is clearly a double-edged sword (wishful thinking works both ways), my reason for focusing on the “glamour” of atheism is not so much to craft a rejoinder as to train a lens on a frequently overlooked issue.

Atheism, like any belief system, makes a loud appeal to the imagination, and if we overlook this striking fact we turn a blind eye to one of the key sources of its persuasive power. Specifically, I want to suggest that death is atheism’s ultimate appeal, and that death lends atheism its special glamour. It is in the arena of popular culture in particular that this glamour frequently announces itself most vocally. My hope is that this thesis will seem less controversial and even less outrageous as we progress.

A new type of character has emerged in popular television.[1] Not only is this character a hardened naturalist, this character is a principled cynic when it comes to human motive, an inveterate pessimist on all matters of progress, and an outright fatalist where man’s destiny is concerned. This character sees through everything and everyone, and is not afraid to issue shrill reports on his or her unseemly findings. It goes without saying that “said character” is usually some kind of investigator, preferably a medical doctor or a detective, and that said character usually dispenses with all social formalities in the name of blunt honesty that often borders on misanthropy. After all, said character cannot be bothered with the usual conventions that govern civil society. Said character’s only allegiance is to the truth, and truth rarely agrees with our sense of decorum.

Have you met this character? He goes by the name of Gregory House in the television series House, M.D. We see him in the current BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, and his latest incarnation is detective Rustin (aptly shortened to Rust) Cohle in HBO’s True Detective.

 

 

The following is a brief sampling of detective Rust’s worldview: The world is a “giant gutter in outer space.” Rust says that human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself; we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. Rather, we are things that labor under the illusion of having a self—this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programed with total assurance that we are each somebody when in fact everybody’s nobody. Hence, argues Rust, “The honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand-in-hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

When Rust’s partner poses the very reasonable question of how he manages to get out of bed in the morning, Rust replies, “I tell myself I bear witness. But the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.”

As is often the case with this kind of character, a direct correlation is drawn between Rust’s unflinching outlook and his misery. He is a functional alcoholic throughout most of the show and occasionally abuses drugs in order to subtract sleep from his obsessive work routine. We catch brief glimpses of him working through the details of his case in his spartanly furnished home, the walls decorated with crime-scene photos. He has no friends. His marriage crumbled beneath the weight of a tragedy that took his daughter’s life—a tragedy he describes in positive terms when he is under the influence of his nihilistic worldview. His partner repeatedly describes him as “unstable,” and it is visibly evident that he walks a thin line between genius and madness.

So, what in any of the foregoing could possibly be construed as appealing? As articulate as Rust is on the subject of human nature (or the lack thereof), few will find much inspiration in his conclusion that “everybody’s nobody,” and fewer still will feel compelled to “deny our programming” and waltz headlong into extinction. And yet, I think there is a powerful appeal to Rust’s bleak philosophy, and even a kind of austere beauty to it.

In a masterful essay entitled “Is Theology Poetry?” C.S. Lewis frames atheism in mythological terms, and names Man as the tragic hero of the story.[2] Here is man’s trajectory in brief: From complete emptiness, certain forces and molecules appear and collide, and the cosmos is born from their chaotic convulsions. In the wake of ageless eons and a diverse set of biological wardrobe changes, mankind emerges on faltering steps, survives by brute force and instinct, worships a god fashioned in his own image, becomes enlightened, throws off the shackles of religion to awake in the dawn of a new era of reason and progress where all illusions are well and truly vanquished. But the last act lends the special poignancy to the story that elevates it from melodrama to high art: In the end, nature has her revenge, matter winds down, and man is extinguished as easily as the flame on a candle’s wick. This is atheism in the tradition of high tragedy.

What is the chief appeal of atheism? In a word, death. This story begins and ends with nothingness. Carbon-based life is a brief reprieve between two absolute abysses. We have our minute sliver of time on this minute patch of existence, both of which will be swallowed by oblivion in the long run. Seen in this light, suicide—“denying our programming”—is the most potent and naked expression of human free will on display, a great cosmic revolt against the material upheavals that accidentally produced us in the first place.

This is why atheism is a zero-sum game, a philosophy of death that can offer nothing but death. This is why the rising tide of secularism in the Western world is fostering an indefatigable culture of death. Forged in a crucible of nothingness, we wander as cosmic orphans back to the yawning void from which we were so tragically ejected. In such a stark context, anything more than death, or on the side of life, or even minimally optimistic must be regarded with either pity or callous derision because it is obviously deluded, naïve, or dishonest.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said “existence precedes essence.” In other words, we have no stable or fixed identity that precedes us. The burden of identity, selfhood, and meaning rests solely on our shoulders. But, again, if we came from nothing and are returning inextricably to nothing, life is a temporary accident, and death is the only authentic currency at our disposal. Why is death authentic? Because it is life that is artificial and nothingness that is essential. It is not that this worldview tries to be especially morbid—in many cases it makes a valiant attempt to be life-affirming—it’s simply that it has literally nothing else to offer, or, rather, it has precisely nothing to offer.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that it is impossible for atheists to lead exemplary and even noble lives. Clearly, many do. What I am saying is that, from the standpoint of scientific naturalism, such behavior is an anomaly because naturalism, devoid of any and all metaphysical underpinnings, can provide neither the motivation nor the justification for a truly selfless life. Such values must be borrowed, or smuggled in, so to speak. In a provocative article, the journalist Matthew Parris, himself an avowed atheist, reluctantly concedes that removing Christian evangelism from the continent of Africa would be disastrous. Why? “In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.”[3] My point is not that atheists can’t be good people. My point is that it is manifestly impossible for atheism to “change people’s hearts,” to inspire transformation and rebirth on its own steam. Those wishing to find the ethical resources for such an undertaking must look elsewhere.

The apostle Paul tells us that the mind set on the flesh is death (Romans 8:6). An honest materialist will agree with this statement. If the material universe traces its lineage back to a cosmic accident, then life cannot be regarded as anything other than alien, an intrusion where emptiness will ultimately prevail. So, the materialist mind is set preeminently on emptiness and death.

Part of our unique and pastoral mission as Christian men and women is to revive in people a love of life in a culture of death. We need to work carefully to restore the appeal of life in all of its vital glory. We need to remind this culture of death that life, not emptiness, is essential, primal, and original. In fact, we have value and purpose precisely because we have been created by a personal God in his image, fashioned for intimacy and joy with God as well as with others. We can preach nothing less than eternal life, because anything less than eternal life is simply a temporary loan from a bankrupt universe. Indeed, the poverty of atheism is so total that it is powerless to offer anything more than death.

 

It is this life offered by Christ that stands in stark contrast to the materialist mindset. As RZIM colleague Os Guinness says, “Comparison is the mother of clarity.” My intent has not been to isolate those who resolutely deny any kind of divinity. Rather, my honest hope is that the radical nature of the life that Christ offers us might come into sharp focus when set against the unsparing backdrop of consistent materialism.

David Bentley Hart has said that we have only two options at our disposal: Christ or Nothing.[4] A casual survey of our cultural landscape makes it abundantly clear that our love of life is in desperate need of resuscitation. I believe Christ alone can accomplish this resuscitation.

Cameron McAllister is a member of the speaking and writing team at RZIM.

[1] Strictly speaking, this character is not new, but is in fact ripped right from the pages of an existentialist novel. A primary example would be Meursault from Albert Camus’ The Stranger. However, the sensibilities displayed by this kind of character are new to the world of television.

[2] C.S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 123-126.

[3] This quote is taken from Matthew Parris’s article “As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God” on Come and See Africa’s Website. Accessed April 4, 2014 http://comeandseeafrica.org/casa/atheist/athiestafrica.htm.

[4] See David Bentley Hart, “Christ and Nothing (No Other God)” in his book In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 1-19.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mysterious Fingerprints

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Ravi Z

He seemed to brace himself for what had become the typical barrage of questioning after stating his occupation. The once unrecognized field of “forensic science” now comes attached with visions of beautiful men and women swabbing for DNA, replicating gunfire trajectories, and piecing together the truth with hair, bugs, and CODIS. The tremendous popularity of forensic dramas has made crime scene investigating a household subject. With a real forensic scientist standing in front of me, I admit it was hard to repress my enthusiasm. Predictably, I asked if he watched any of the shows. Humoring my line of questioning for the moment, he admitted that he did not.

The vast public intrigue with forensic science has been increasing as feverously as the viewerships of crime scene television. In Great Britain alone, the increase in students applying for forensic programs is up nearly 33 percent, attributed entirely to the influence of CSI, NCIS, Bones, and many similar programs.(1) They come into their programs believing they already know a great deal about the job because they have seen it all performed. In a more damaging vein, criminologists note the pervasive misinformation that is powerfully influencing criminal justice systems in various ways, particularly and significantly in the minds and expectations of jurors.(2)

Analysts refer to this global phenomenon of forensic pop culture and its consequences as the “CSI Effect,” though speculation on the reasons for our feverish embrace of the motif is wider ranging. In my own right, I find something compellingly uncomplicated in the movement from mystery and crisis through clues and evidence to truth. In less than an hour, I am taken from dark riddle to conclusive resolution. Truth and justice emerge plainly, even where deception, obscurity, and injustice once reigned. In the rare instance when the suspect does not personally own up to the crime after the facts have emerged, the science and its expert witnesses are so definitive that it hardly matters. The truth is clear.

Of course, I know in reality that mysteries are not typically so easily dissected nor the truth so mechanically laid out for the taking. But in that brief hour, I am relieved at the clarity of truth, presented to me quickly and with watertight certainty. English professor Scott Campbell further speculates on the allure of “a longed-for world where deceit is no longer possible and where language finds a close, unbreachable connection to the events it seeks to describe.”(3) On the nature of truth in such a world he notes, “If we know how to look for it, the truth is self-evident. It will, in effect, narrate itself.”

In a world where the category of truth is often subjected to the murkiness of taste and opinion, the attraction to a self-evident, one-dimensional truth is understandable. All the lofty humility of the abstract pluralist cannot beautify the noise of a million clashing voices and truth claims; eventually, we grow weary of the end product and seek a less polluted scene. In the words of the illustrious detective Joe Friday, “All we want are the facts.”

And yet, we must be wary of simplifying the nature of truth in our attempts to simplify our investigations of it. This is precisely what the pluralist must do to make room for all his claims and voices. But in the world of the Christian, the world of truth is far from flat. Nor is its true song a raucous cacophony. Quite the opposite, Swiss theologian Hars Urs von Balthasar oft reflected on the truth as “symphonic.” Elaborating on this, professor Anthony Baker explains, “Truth is not simply a completed score, but the action of playing it back to God the way it was written. Only by following Christ into the cacophony, by descending into hell ourselves, by actively engaging in the redemption of fallen melody, can the church be alive with the resurrective power of the Spirit.”(4)

In other words, truth is not simply something passive that we intercept, like the outcome of a CSI episode that leaves us entirely certain of “what really happened.” Truth certainly has this definitive element; to be sure, the Logos which became flesh is God’s definitive account of truth. But this is something far deeper and more dimensional than cold, unresponsive facts, as further evidenced in John’s description of Christ as one “full of grace and truth” in himself. There is a corresponding, interactive, participatory quality to truth, which takes longer than an hour to absorb and is best understood by engaging its depth and character within a world of impersonal, simplistic alternatives. For if truth is personal—indeed, a Person—it demands a lifetime of shared engagement with the one who is truth and the Spirit who actively leads us into a discovery of this truth.

Without any doubt, the mystery of the Christian religion is great—mystery not in the hidden CSI sense, but mystery revealed. Paul’s description of Jesus is as full of inscrutable truths as it is compelling evidences: “Hewas revealed in flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among Gentiles, believed in throughout the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16). Evidences of the heights and depths of this divine mysterious truth can indeed be received as factual, definitive fingerprints. But so they are clues that point to a multi-dimensional, inexhaustible Person full of grace and truth.

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

(1) Paul Hackett, “Want a Career in Forensics? Here’s Some Hard Evidence,” The Guardian, March 28, 2007.

(2) “Forensics and the Media: A 3-Year Project Examining the ‘CSI Effect’ and a Forensic Pop Culture” presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, Nov. 1, 2006.

(3) Scott Campbell, “‘Dead Men Do Tell Tales’: CSI: Miami and the Case Against Narrative,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Spring 2009, Volume 8, Issue 1.

(4) Anthony D. Baker, “Fiddling with the Melody: Illuminating von Balthasar’s Symphony of Truth,” The Other Journal, Issue 15, May 11, 2009.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Book of Nature

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Ravi Z

“Day after day pours forth speech,” says the psalmist of nature’s glory. “Night after night reveals his greatness.”

As a Scot, I grew up with a love of the countryside. My parents would take us on drives to Loch Lomond, to places like the Trossacks (a beautiful hill and moor area) and many more. These early encounters evoked something that I did not (as a non-believer then) understand. It was the power of beauty itself to speak, not in an audible voice of course, but in some very real sense.

Recently, I drove from Florida to Georgia as the verdant green and array of colors were exploding. I’d be captivated by trees blooming in all their glory, wisps of white, pink, and other shades all mingling in a medley of splendor, and then surprised by bursts of red (which I learned were Azaleas). It was all quite wonderful! Now lest you think I am some strange, European romantic, I have to say that this “noticing” is a result of the patient, constant, and enthusiastic education granted me by my wife.

She has always loved flowers. In my early days of “serious” ministry and dedication to God, I often wondered how one could be sidetracked by such trivia, such commonalities. Yes, flowers and things pointed out were nice when a passing glance was permitted, but they were not important in my mind. They were not the real thing, the serious thing, the main show!

Perhaps it was age, or more likely a divine breakthrough, but one day I began to notice. These things were splendid; they were so unique. They had such detail, so much grandeur, and they evoked delight and joy. C.S. Lewis describes a childhood encounter with a miniature garden that his brother had made in a tin box. He describes the sense of longing, the experience of what he called joy, though fleeting, which was profound and real. Though he didn’t know what to call it then, Lewis was gradually awakened to the power and role of beauty, an influence he would employ to great effect in his writings.

Similarly, John Calvin reminded the world that God has given his creatures two books: the book of nature and the word of God. For the Christian, they are not equal in authority or revelatory power, and yet it is a serious neglect to focus on one at the exclusion of the other.

In today’s world, many are sincerely inspired by nature. They love long walks, visits to the country, and absorbing the beauties of the world around. They often make nature an end in itself. They celebrate its magnificence, but are left to see it all as a random outcome of chance and necessity. Some Christians, through neglect, do much the same thing. A number of years ago, some monks in an Austrian monastery had gotten used to overlooking a particular painting that hung in their hallways. One day a visitor looked in astonishment and realized it was a Reubens, the prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter. A connection was suddenly made between a work of art and its renowned artist. It caused a sensation, an awakening, not the least of which to its value, which was now known.

The psalmist, the Celts, and many others across the centuries learned to see God’s hand in nature and to celebrate God’s goodness and provision from it. Take a few moments today to look at the birds, contemplate the trees, enjoy a walk, and smell the flowers. Perhaps you may just experience a glimmer of God’s glory, too.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Characteristics of Absence

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Ravi Z

The deep-seated impression of a parent in the life of a child is a subject well traversed. From pop-psychology to history to anthropology, the giant place parents occupy from birth to death is as plain as the life they initiated. Of course, the massive giant which occupies this place may well be the absence of that person, inasmuch as the person him or herself. “It doesn’t matter who my father was,” Anne Sexton once wrote, “it matters who I remember he was.”(1) The looming memory of an absent parent is every bit as big as a present one, maybe bigger. Absence itself can become something of a presence.

It is little wonder that the deepest struggle many of us have with faith is in the absence of God. We learn early that absence is a characteristic connected to despair, wrought from disconnectedness, or born of devastation. We do not see our experience of God’s absence as a subject for lament—like the psalmist’s “Rise up, O Lord; O God, lit up your hand; do not forget the oppressed”—but as a sign of doubt. And so, we often do not know how to reconcile the God who appears in burning bushes and dirty stables, who descends ladders and rends the heavens, but whose crushing silence feels every bit as profound. We don’t know what to do with the ruinous sensation of neglect when God comes so close to some but remains far off from others. We hold in mind the one who came near to the rejected Samaritan woman, but we uncomfortably suspect that we might have been given something else, or worse, that God has for some reason simply withdrawn. The sting of abandonment is overwhelming; with Gerard Manley Hopkins, our prayers seem “lost in desert ways/ Our hymn in the vast silence dies.”

Though it does not always come as a consolation, the Bible recounts similar difficulties and suspicions from some of God’s closest followers. “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you,” says Isaiah, “for you have hidden your face from us” (Isaiah 64:7). “Why should you be like a stranger in the land,” demands Jeremiah, “like a traveler turning aside for the night?” (Jeremiah 14:8). There is something consoling in knowing that any relationship—even that of a prophet of God—goes through the ebbs and flows of intimacy with the divine. Even the Son of the God cried out at the sensation of God’s withdrawal: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” Nonetheless, knowing that we are not alone in our pain is not the consolation we seek. Misery’s company does not, any more than reason or rationale itself, have much to say to the child who wants to know why her father left; this is not what she is looking for.

A far better consolation would be the assurance that he never left in the first place. Of course, anyone who has known the sting of abandonment will understandably find such a claim near impossible to fathom. A distant God is every bit as real and hurtful as the disruptive presence of the absent parent. And we have surely known his absence. We have lived with the injurious silence of a one-way relationship. We have known the cold echo of an empty room, unanswered cries, the ache of loss.

But what if the absence of God was not at all like that of an absent parent? What if the moments when God’s distance was most palpable were in fact moments most full of God’s mysterious love? As Alister McGrath suggests in Mystery of the Cross, “God is active and present in his world, quite independently of whether we experience him as being so. Experience declared that God was absent from Calvary, only to have its verdict humiliatingly overturned on the third day.”(2) What if the darkened experiences of God’s distance were filled with the promise that Christ has gone only momentarily to prepare us a room?

Such a leave of absence is no more permanent than the absence of a father who has gone off to work in the morning with the promise to return before bedtime. Such a distance is marked not with isolation and disconnection, but in fact with love and communion. It is the kind of absence that takes on the characteristics of a presence. It is the kind of distance somehow brimming with the promise: I will never leave you or forsake you.

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

(1) Anne Sexton, “A Small Journal,” in The Poet’s Story, ed. Howard Moss (New York: Macmillan, 1973).

(2) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 159.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Good News for Women

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Ravi Z

A New York Times blog written by Nicholas Kristof recently caught my attention. “Does Religion Oppress Women?” was the question and the title of the article. As someone who speaks and writes on behalf of the Christian faith, I have often heard this asserted as a reason against belief in the Christian faith—or any faith at all. But I am also a woman and I wondered how a secular journalist like Kristof might answer this question. Moreover, I wondered what in his travels and experience he had seen that made him write about this topic in particular.

Kristof has traveled extensively across the African continent and has spent time in some of Africa’s poorest communities. In his many essays documenting these experiences, he often talks about the role of faith, acknowledging both its positive role and its negative contribution in the life of African women specifically. He writes, “I’ve seen people kill in the name of religion… But I’ve also seen Catholic nuns showing unbelievable courage and compassion in corners of the world where no other aid workers are around, and mission clinics and church-financed schools too numerous to mention.”(1) So, is religion and Christianity in particular good for women? Kristof does not offer an easy answer to this question.

And of course, there are not easy answers. As recently as April 2010, as reported in Christianity Today magazine, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Christians in some countries in Africa still practiced female genital mutilation.(2) For many, and particularly persons of faith, these findings are very troubling.

In fact, these findings take on doleful irony when one looks at the earliest Christian movement and its attraction for women in particular. The world of the Roman Empire, filled with a diverse array of religious options, could not compete with the growing Christian movement in its appeal to women. So many women were becoming Christians, in fact, that pagan religious leaders used its attraction to women as an argument against Christianity. In his treatise, On True Doctrine, the pagan leader Celsus wrote in alarming terms about the subversive nature of Christianity to the stability of the Empire and regarded the disproportionate number of women among the Christians as evidence of the inherent irrationality and vulgarity of the Christian faith. Historian David Bentley Hart writes of Celsus’s alarm: “It is unlikely that Celsus would have thought the Christians worth his notice had he not recognized something uniquely dangerous lurking in their gospel of love and peace… [A]nd his treatise contains a considerable quantity of contempt for the ridiculous rabble and pliable simpletons that Christianity attracted into its fold: the lowborn and uneducated, slaves, women and children.”(3) Indeed, Christianity attracted women and others deemed on the bottom rung of society because it elevated their status from an often oppressive Roman patriarchy.

Even a cursory survey of the historic evidence concerning women and early Christianity demonstrates an ineluctable pull. Rather than being another force for oppression, Christianity drew women into its fold. Hart adds; “There is no doubt for any historian of early Christianity that this was a religion to which women were powerfully drawn, and one that would not have spread nearly so far or so swiftly but for the great number of women in its fold.”(4) In a world where women were largely viewed as household property or worse, how could they not be drawn to a figure who elevated their worth and status? Jesus, unlike many in his contemporary world, showed extraordinary kindness and care to women—even women of questionable character. He was often criticized for this by the religious of his day. But he welcomed women into his community of disciples just the same.

At the heart of Christianity is Jesus. Jesus raised people up to the full-stature of their humanity. And the earliest followers of Jesus, as Hart concludes, “from the first, placed charity at the center of the spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had, and raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest of religious obligations.”(5) Of Jesus it was said, “A battered reed he will not break off, and a smoldering wick he will not put out.” In a world where women, among many others, are often battered reeds and smoldering wicks, this is liberating, good news.

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

(1) Nicholas Kristof, “Does Religion Oppress Women?” The New York Times, December 15, 2009.

(2) Christianity Today, “Spotlight: What We Learned About Africa,” April 2010, vol. 54, no. 6, 11.

(3) David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 115. See also pp. 159-161.

(4) Ibid., 159-160.

(5) Ibid., 164

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Genuinely Human?

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Ravi Z

The recognition of one’s humanity can be an uncomfortable pill to swallow. Life’s fragility, life’s impermanence, life’s intertwinement with imperfection and disappointment—bitter medicines are easier to accept. The Romantic poets called it “the burden of full consciousness.” To look closely at humanity can indeed be a realization of dread and despair.

For the poet Philip Larkin, to look closely at humanity was to peer into the absurdity of the human existence. Whatever frenetic, cosmic accident that brought about a species so endowed with consciousness, the sting of mortality, incessant fears of failure, and sieges of shame, doubt, and selfishness was, for Larkin, a bitter irony. In a poem titled “The Building,” he describes the human condition as it is revealed in the rooms of a hospital, where one finds “Humans, caught/On ground curiously neutral, homes and names/Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,/ Some old, but most at that vague age that claims/The end of choice, the last of hope; and all/ Here to confess that something has gone wrong./ It must be error of a serious sort,/ For see how many floors it needs, how tall…”(1)

With or without Larkin’s sense of dread, the confession that “something has gone wrong” is often synonymous with the acknowledgment of humanity. “I’m only human,” is a plea for leniency with regards shortcoming; in Webster’s dictionary, “human” itself is an adjective for imperfection, weakness, and fragility. Nevertheless, there are some outlooks and religions that stand diametrically opposed to this idea, seeing humanity with limitless potential, humans as pure, the human spirit as divine. In a vein not unlike the agnostic Larkin, the new atheists see the cruel realities of time and chance as reason in and of itself to dismiss the rose-colored lenses of God and religion. Yet quite unlike Larkin’s concluding outlook of meaninglessness and despair, they often (inexplicably) suggest a rose-colored view of humanity.(2) Still other belief-systems emphasize the depravity of humanity to such a leveling degree that no person can stand up under the burden of guilt and disgust.

In deep contrast to such severe or optimistic readings, Jesus of Nazareth adds an entirely different dimension to the conversation. The Jesus admits in his own flesh that while there is indeed an error of a serious sort, the error is not in “humanness” itself. He provides a way for the great paradox of humanity to be rightly acknowledged: both the deep and sacred honor of being human and yet the profound disgrace of all that is broken. So the Christian’s advantage is not that they find themselves less fallen or closer to perfection than others, nor that they find in their religion a means of simply escaping this world of fragility, brokenness, guilt, suffering, and error. The Christian’s advantage is Christ himself. The human Son of God mediates on our behalf, bringing us back to a full and forgiven humanity. In his life, death, and resurrection, the Christian is able to see their own broken humanity and a world that has gone awry in light of God’s severe and merciful pursuit. In his vicarious humanity, we encounter our own.

“[H]umanity’s mystery,” as one writer expounds, “can be explained only in the mystery of the God who became human.  If people want to look into their own mystery—the meaning of their pain, of their work, of their suffering, of their hope—let them put themselves next to Christ… If I find, on comparing myself with Christ, that my life is a contrast, the opposite of his, then my life is a disaster. I cannot explain that mystery except by returning to Christ, who gives authentic features to a person who wants to be genuinely human.”(3)

The author of these words was well acquainted with the paradox of human nature and the God who became human to bring the world to authentic humanity. Oscar Romero was a Salvadoran priest who saw the very worst and the weakest of humanity in the corruption, violence, and suffering of a country at war within itself. A witness to ongoing violations of human rights, Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victimized. In both the abused and the abusers, he saw the image of God, glimpses of Christ, and the dire need for Christ’s true humanity. For his outcries, Romero was assassinated in the middle of a church service. He was holding up the broken bread of communion, the very sign of Christ’s human body on earth, given for a broken and hungry world.

Surrounded by reasons to be despairing of humanity, there is yet this startling image of a human who gives us cause to reconsider our despair, one whose only brokenness was at our own hands. Christ is more than someone who came to fix what was wrong. He is the image of all that is right, the bread of life for those who seek to be genuinely human.

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

(1) Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 191.

(2) Various Atheist bus campaigns offer well-known examples of this, one a few years ago declaring, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” See Ariane Sherine, “The Atheist Bus Journey,” The Guardian, January 6, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

(3) Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 112.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Way It Is

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Ravi Z

Through winding, trash-strewn roads and poverty-lined streets we made our way to another world. Clotheslines hung from every imaginable protrusion, a symbol of the teeming life that fought to survive there, and a contrast to the empty, darkened world of night. The only light in otherwise pitch-black alleys came from the glow of cigarettes and drug pipes, which for split seconds illumined faces that lived here. It was late and I was sick, discovering after a long flight that I had not escaped the office stomach flu after all. Our van was full of tourists, their resort brochures a troubling, colorful contrast to the streets that would bring them there. Strangers who only moments before wore the expressions of anticipation of vacation now rode in expressionless silence. One man broke that silence, just as the taxi turned the corner seemingly into an entirely new realm and resort. With pain and poverty now literally behind him, he said quietly, “Well… It is what it is.”

These words rung in my ears all weekend, most of which was spent crumpled on the bathroom floor, unable to participate in the wedding we had come to “paradise” to enjoy. In the end, it seemed a metaphor for thoughts I wanted to remember physically and not in mere abstractions. You see, typically, when the drowsy, comfortable world I have come to expect is jarred awake by visions of the way the majority of the world actually lives, the upset that is caused is largely conceptual, immaterial, abstract. Sure, I am momentarily both deeply saddened and humbled by the wealth of resources and rights many of us take for granted in the West. I am aware again of the need to stay involved and vocal about relief efforts and global injustices that take place daily right under our noses. But for the most part, my angst, my theology, my reactions are all abstract, observed mentally, not physically. That is, they remain deeply-felt issues, but not concrete matters of life.

Of course, I am not suggesting that abstract, philosophical ideas are the problem—clearly my vocation is dedicated to the notion that ideas carry consequences, that reflection on questions of truth, beauty, hope, and love are indeed matters vital to the development of fulfilled and finite human beings. What I am suggesting is that the abstract is both hopeless and of no use without the concrete (inasmuch as the concrete is a desert without the infinite). Many of the most stirring theological pronouncements Jesus made were in fact not statements at all—but a life, a death, a meal shared, a daily, physical reality changed, a new possibility realized.

And this is precisely why those simple words “It is what it is” are a coping mechanism that should sicken us every bit as thoroughly as the scenes that make us want to utter them in the first place. Far from a mere collection of abstractions about another world, the Christian life is an active declaration that all is not as it appears. While other worldviews and religions offer an explanation for why and how this world “is what it is,” Christianity offers something different. With the prophets, with the Incarnate Christ, the God-Man among us, every story and parable and interaction declares: “This is not the way it’s supposed to be!”

Professor of theology William Cavanaugh notes that this vital difference in perspective takes form from the very beginning, starting with the way the book of Genesis tells the origins of the world. Instead of telling a creation story like the Babylonians, for instance, where the circumstances of creation are awry from the start, the Hebrews tell a story where all is inherently good from the beginning, but then something goes terribly wrong. What this tells every hearer of the story thereafter is that things are not the way they are supposed to be. As Cavanaugh notes, “There is a revolutionary principle right there in the Scriptures which allows us to unthink the inevitability of sin, to unthink the inevitability of violence, and so on.”(1) The very first story God tells provides a framework for walking through a world enslaved by poverty and violence, sin and deception—a framework that provides both profound meaning (this is not the way it’s supposed to be!) and a concrete call to live daily into other, redemptive possibilities—possibilities Christ himself embodied.

It is thus an inherently Christian task to actively work at unthinking the inevitability of the way things are and to labor accordingly at changing them. Any reflection of truth and beauty, however abstract, if truly lived out by those who believe them, will ultimately address the concrete matters of life as well. For the Christian, this is a world where nothing merely unfortunately is what it is. Imagining other possibilities, working to unthink the divisions, deceptions, and frameworks that keep us bound to creation’s fall and not its redemption, we join the work of Father and Spirit. We join the Son who takes the abstractions of truth and beauty and declares concretely, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

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

(1) William Cavanaugh with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 95, Jan/Feb 2009.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On Defining Atheism

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Ravi Z

A popular tendency among some atheists these days is to define atheism, not as the positive thesis that God does not exist, but as the neutral claim that an atheist is one who simply lacks belief in God. If we could scan the mind of the atheist and catalogue all the beliefs the atheist holds, we would not find a belief of the form, “God exists.” Those who insist on defining atheism in this manner want to avoid the implications of having to defend the claim that God does not exist. They demand justification for faith in God while insisting that they bear no rational burdens in the debate since they are not making any positive claims on the question of God’s existence.

This strategy is mistaken on several levels. To begin with, there is no logical connection between a lack of belief about God in someone’s mind and the conclusion that God does not exist. At best, this definition leads us to agnosticism, roughly the view that we do not know whether or not God exists. For example, there are millions of people on this planet who hold no belief about the Los Angeles Lakers. But it would be quite a stretch to conclude from that empirical fact that the Lakers therefore do not exist.

Additionally, atheism thus defined is a psychological condition, not a cognitive thesis. Conduct a quick search on the Internet, and you will even find atheists who claim that babies are atheists because they lack belief in God. But, as some philosophers have pointed out, that is not a flattering state of affairs for the atheist, for, strictly speaking, a cow, by that definition, is also an atheist. For someone who is intent on merely giving a report about the state of his or her mind, pity, or an equivalent emotion, is the appropriate response, not a reasoned exchange. But nobody who has reflected long and hard about the issues and is prepared to argue vehemently about them should be let off the hook that easily.

In any case, such a definition of atheism goes against the intuitions held by almost everyone who has not been initiated into this way of thinking. In spite of the myriads of nuances one can give to one’s preferred version of denying God’s existence, the traditional view has been that there are ultimately only three attitudes one can take with regard to a particular proposition. Take the proposition, “God exists”. One could (1) affirm the proposition, which is theism, (2) Deny the proposition, which is atheism, or (3) withhold judgment with regard to the proposition, which is agnosticism. Those who affirm the proposition have to give reasons why they think it is true. Those who deny it have to give reasons why they think it is false. Only those who withhold judgment have the right to sit on the fence on the issue. Thus J. J. C. Smart states matter-of-factly, “‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God.”(1)

Nor will an attempt to defend this new definition on the basis of the etymology of the word “atheist” work. The word “atheist” is from the Greek word “Theos” which means “God”, and the “a” is the negation. The “a” is taken to mean “without”, and hence “atheism” simply means “without belief in God”. But this will not do. Even if we grant that the “a” means “without”, we will still not arrive at the conclusion that atheism means “without belief in God”. What is negated in the word “atheism” is not “belief” but “God”. Atheism still means “without God”, not “without belief”. There is no concept of “belief” in the etymology of the word – the word simply means the universe is without God, which is another way of saying that God does not exist.

Semantic quibbles aside, there are deeper problems with this position. The same atheists who decry the irrationality of believing in God still insist on shoehorning theistic ideas into their ontology. Most of them continue to defend the meaning and purpose of life, the validity of objective morality and the assurance that humanity is marching on towards progress and would move thus faster were it not for the shackles of religion. Such cosmic optimism would be unrecognizable to the most prominent atheists of yesteryear, not to mention the many in our day who say as much. It is recognized as a remnant of a biblical tradition that still has some of its grip on the western psyche.

Speaking about the belief that every human life needs to be protected, Richard Rorty wrote, “This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by free-loading atheists like myself.”(2) But if God does not exist, theists live on false hope, and the freeloaders fair no better. Sever the cord between God and those elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the honest among us fly into oblivion with shrills of despair to which only a Nietzsche or a Jean Paul Sartre can do full justice; for the validity of such positive attitudes about life is directly propositional to the plausibility of the existence of a caring God who directs the affairs of mankind.

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

(1) J. J. C. Smart, “Atheism and Agnosticism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

(2) Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 80, No. 10, Part 1: (Oct., 1983), pp. 583-589.