“Why Jesus?” by Ravi Zacharias

In 2012, concerned about how New Age philosophies were increasingly influencing popular culture (and culture in general), Ravi Zachariaspublished Why Jesus? Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality. It’s still a compelling read.

Zacharias, the founder and chairman of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, headquartered in Atlanta, is an author, speaker, Christian apologist, and radio broadcaster. He’s published numerous books, has outreach centers in Atlanta and Oxford University, and publishes a magazine. His purpose in the 2012 book: to point out the shallowness and often fraud of New Age beliefs and practices and to explain why Christianity remains the compelling narrative.

His discussion focuses on two New Age figures, one who’s obvious and one who’s not.

The obvious one is Deepak Chopra, who melds eastern religion with physics and other sciences (often drawing the ire of scientists). The less-than-obvious one, simply because of her global popularity, is household name Oprah Winfrey. The two have often worked together, and both jointly market a 21-day meditation course. 

Ravi Zacharias

Zacharias includes an extensive examination of what both public figures teach and advocate. He then moves to a discussion of Jesus and Christiantiy, making his case. He explains the core of the Christian message, what personhood and relationship really mean, the loss of Christian faith in the contemporary culture (and what’s replacing it), how we reshape Jesus to suit our prejudices, the problems of Christian mysticism, and how we face a choice between as belief system (or systems) that are built on false assumptions and a belief system built upon “magnificent truths.”

Why Jesus?is a classic Ravi Zacharias book. He speaks compellingly and with often devastating insight; he’s kind but firm. He also clearly calls it as he sees it, and it’s difficult to argue against his reasoning and logic. It’s a solid book.

Related:

A Movie and a Talk.

Walking from East to West  by Ravi Zacharias.

Top photograph by Scott Webb via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Walking from East to West" by Ravi Zacharias

It was the mid-1990s, and we were on our way back to St. Louis from a family vacation at Gulf Shores, Alabama. Somewhere in rural Mississippi, as my wife was desperately trying to find a radio station, she flipped to one where a man was speaking in a startlingly clear voice and presenting a defense of the Christian faith.

It was our official introduction to Ravi Zacharias.

Zacharias is the founder and chairman of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. He is an author, speaker, Christian apologist, and radio broadcaster. He’s published numerous books, has outreach centers in Atlanta and Oxford University, and publishes a magazine.

In 2006, he published a book that is part memoir and part autobiography, Walking from East to West: God in the Shadows. It’s the story of where he came from (born in Madras, India, now called Chennai, and raised in Delhi), who his family was, how he found faith, and how he became one of the best-known Christian speakers in the world.

It’s a story that leave you shaking your head, amazed at what looks like all the world as a plan that was unfolded.

The book is full of surprises. He had a great-great grandmother who was a Christian and buried in a Christian cemetery in India. His father, a fairly high government official, and mother attended an Anglican church in Delhi. He had a difficult, often tense relationship with his father, and it was his mother who provided encouragement. And he became a Christian after a failed suicide attempt, when a director of Youth for Christ in India visited him in the hospital and left a Bible with a specific verse for him.

Ravi Zacharias

He explains how he came to be a preacher – almost by accident, when a good friend couldn’t participate in a preaching competition and Zacharias substituted for him at the last possible moment. (The competition involved being given a topic and 30 minutes to prepare before speaking.) He won, surprising even himself.

After he and his family moved to Canada, he found himself in increasing demand for speaking, including in Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War and Cambodia. He’s known friends, good friends, martyred for their faith. He would go on to found his own international ministry. Yes, it sounds like there was a plan here.

Walking from East to West is a story that leaves one struck with wonder.

Related: A Movie and a Talk.

Top photograph: men weaving fishing nets at Chennai (Madras), India, by Sarathy Selvamani via Unsplash. Used with permission.

John Lennox’s “Against the Flow”

Four teenagers.

Four teenagers caught up in events far beyond their control – war, invasion, defeat.

They are taken away from their families and the only homes they have ever known, and thrust into a pluralistic society and culture that was simultaneously alien and mesmerizing.

Four teenagers: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

The war: Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Judea and Jerusalem.

The pluralistic society and culture: the great city of Babylon.

Four teenagers who not only survived captivity and exile but also managed to keep their faith intact.

It was not without cost. And it wasn’t easy; at times, it was difficult and life-threatening. But they survived, and their faith survived.

John Lennox is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and a speaker on the interface of science, philosophy and religion.  He’s the author of several books, including God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God, Seven Days That Divide the World, God and Stephen Hawking, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target, and Key Bible Concepts (co-author with David Gooding).

He’s also the author of Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, believes Daniel can speak to us across the centuries.

I discovered Lennox’s book while reading Just Thinking, the magazine published by Ravi Zaharias International Ministries. The latest edition has a lengthy excerpt of Against the Flow. I started reading, and I was hooked.

Then I read this column by Frank Bruni, an op-ed columnist at the New York Times since 2011. Bruni, a former restaurant critic, puts into words what our cultural elites believe about Christianity. They don’t like what they see, and if we have to be forced to change, then so be it.

To quote one of my favorite characters in The Lord of the Rings, “War is upon us.” It is a war that we may have already lost. And it goes far beyond the gay marriage controversy in Indiana.

Lennox, in Against the Flow, says we have much to learn from the account of Daniel in the Old Testament. “What makes the story of their faith remarkable,” he writes, “is that they did not simply continue the private devotion to God that they had developed in their homeland; they maintained a high-profile public witness in a pluralistic society that became increasingly antagonistic to their faith.”

For the next few weeks, I’ll be undertaking a discussion of the book.

What I’ve learned from my reading so far: The book sounds uncomfortably familiar, and uncommonly hopeful. 

A Movie and a Talk

On Friday, my wife and I watched the 2010 movie “Sarah’s Key,” starring Kristin Scott Thomas and based on the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. The movie is two stories that become one story – an American journalist (played by Thomas) named Julia Jarmond living in Paris with her French husband and teenaged child, and a young girl caught up in the Vel d’Hiv – the roundup of more than 13,000 Jewish men, women and children in 1942 Paris for eventual transport to Auschwitz.

The name “Vel d’Hiv” is taken from the name of the bicycling velodrome where the 13,000 people were brought – with no sanitation and no food.

The journalist is doing a story on the event, but the story takes a turn for the personal. The apartment in the Marais where her in-laws lived for more than 60 years, where her husband was raised, and which she and her husband are remodeling prior to moving into – belonged to a Jewish family who disappeared in the Vel d’Hiv.

The journalist is drawn into the story of this family, and what her in-laws did and didn’t know. Then she discovers she is pregnant. She’s been told she couldn’t have more children. She’s thrilled – but her husband isn’t. He doesn’t want his life to be disrupted, and he doesn’t want to be “an older father.” He wants his wife to abort the baby.

The movie is about many things, but it asks the question, can one live without hope? Can one escape from internment and certain death only to find a more difficult prison to escape from – the prison of memory and guilt and the prison of one’s own mind? The character of Sarah will answer the question one way; the character of Julia Jarmond will answer it another way.

That was our Friday night. On Saturday, we attended a talk by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias, He is a marvelous speaker and possesses a marvelous intellect. He talked about his latest book, Why Jesus: Rediscovering His Truth in An Age of Mass-Marketed Spirituality, and a lot of other things as well. And he said this:

“The most empirically identifiable fact, and the most intellectually resisted fact, is the depravity of man.”

The scenes from the movie kept running through my mind as I listened. I suspect the movie, as good as it was, ultimately can’t truly convey the horror of what those 13,000 people experienced, and the six million other Jews, and the five million Poles, Russians, resistance fighters, homosexuals and others who died in the Nazi death camps.

We want to believe we are all basically good, that it’s culture or society or something else that causes us to do bad things. Most people don’t rob or kill or hurt or maim, right? We know that if something like the Holocaust confronted us, we would stand up for people, right?

Or would we close our eyes, shut our doors, pull down our curtains and hope they don’t come for us? Or help the authorities round up the Jews, like so many Parisians did? Or separate the fathers from their families, and then the mothers from their children, and send them off on separate trains to the east?

Twenty years ago, a vice president at the People for the American Way suggested that fundamentalist Christians needed to be exterminated. She was criticized for her words, but not much criticized.

Peter Singer, a professor of something called “applied ethics” at Princeton University, criticizes the pro-abortion position by saying they’re attacking the wrong premise – that life begins at conception. The premise to attack, he says, is that it’s wrong to kill an innocent human being, because these kinds of decisions should be based upon a “utilitarian calculation” that compares the preferences of a woman against the preferences of a fetus.

And how exactly does the fetus express its preferences?

The problem is not society or culture. And it’s not “the devil made me do it.” The problem is within us.

Zacharaias also said this: “Maybe we should stop asking if Jesus died on the cross and instead ask why he died on the cross.”

Listening to Ravi Zacharias

Last night, my wife and I heard Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias speak at one of the local churches in St. Louis. Our own church, Central Presbyterian Church, was the host, but our church sanctuary is too small to accommodate the crowds that would come to hear Zacharias.

And come they did.

We first heard him speak on a radio program some 14 or 15 years ago. We were returning home from a family vacation at Gulf Shores, Alabama, and my wife was trying to find a radio station somewhere in rural Mississippi. She finally found one, and we listened to an incredible program, by a man with a wonderful speaking voice and an intellect to match. We had never heard of him before, but now we have, many times.

Here are a few of the notes I took last night:

“The hostility of atheists to Christianity is nothing more than hate and venom masquerading as intellectual thought.”

“Truth is that which conforms to reality as it really is. Truth, by definition, excludes. Truth is exclusionary.”

“Sin is never rational. Sin is never common-sensical. The human heart is desperately wicked.”

“God still uses us in spite of ourselves.”

I’ll have more on what he said tomorrow.