Ravi Zacharias: The Isolation, Insulation and Danger of Greatness

The tendency to put gifted people with strong and charismatic personalities on a pedestal is a weakness in the church.

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Anyone who pays any attention to apologetics has probably heard of Ravi Zacharias. Before his death last year, he traveled the world for decades as an evangelist and apologist. He spoke at secular universities and challenged non-Christian thinkers and leaders to consider Christian claims and the gospel worldview.

He was a winsome and charming speaker, erudite and polished. He toured the greatest institutions of higher learned on multiple continents and engaged people of all religions and atheists alike in deep conversations on the truth of the Gospel.

His organization, RZIM, boasted top notch Christian thinkers who contributed to the worldwide apologetics ministry. Sam Allberry, Amy Orr-Ewing, Abdu Murray, Nabeel Qureshi, and others were a formidable group of Christian apologists. Ravi Zacharias was greatly loved and much admired for his debonair, sharp-witted oratory and ability to answer people who challenged Christian thinking in public arenas.

I listened to him often and enjoyed his approach and insight. Thus, when a scandal erupted about the credentials on which he identified himself as “doctor”, I was quick to dismiss it. The accusation came from Steve Baughman, an atheist, charging Ravi Zacharias with falsely using the title, “Dr.”, and embellishing his connections to Oxford and Cambridge universities.[i]

Baughman seemed to “have it out” for Ravi Zacharias. He created a website, Ravi Watch[ii], in which he doggedly investigated the apologist and purported to document a number of false claims made by Ravi Zacharias. He was an atheist, so it was easy for Christians to dismiss his claims. Ravi Zacharias did have three honorary degrees, so the confusion about whether he earned a Ph.D seemed overblown.

Around the same time, though, some other allegations were emerging. A woman in Canada, who was a large donor to RZIM, went public with accusations that Ravi Zacharias developed a long-distance relationship with her, requesting nude photos from her and “sexting” with her. Ravi Zacharias strongly denied the claims, but he settled a lawsuit with the accuser for which the parties signed a non-disclosure agreement.[iii]

Most of the Christian world, including me, believed that Ravi Zacharias was being unfairly targeted by people who opposed his worldview and had an axe to grind. The allegations seemed out of character to the man we “knew” from his public ministry. The charges seemed wholly incongruent.

The charges, however, were true.

Sometime after his death on May 19, 2020, additional allegations began to emerge. They came from other sources, other women.

To its credit, RZIM hired an independent firm to investigate the charges. On February 9, 2021, a 12-page report was released from the investigation by RZIM.[iv]

The investigation confirmed allegations and disclosed many more. The report ends with these words:

“Our investigation was limited to Mr. Zacharias’s sexual misconduct, and even as to that issue it was not exhaustive. We acknowledge that we have not spoken to all individuals who may have relevant information to provide. We strived to balance the need for completeness with the need for expediency, and we are confident that we uncovered sufficient evidence to conclude that Mr. Zacharias engaged in sexual misconduct.” (emphasis added)

The release of the report was followed by an apology from the leaders at RZIM and shock from the rest of the Christian world.[v]

In the weeks that followed, the world of Christian apologists and the church have been wrestling with these disclosures. Everyone is talking about it. People are asking: How did it happen? What can we learn about it? What can we do to prevent this from happening again?

Like most shocking events or discoveries, the furor will die down, and we will go back to our daily lives after we have exhausted our initial angst.

We won’t really know the longstanding effects of this scandal for years. Even then, the ripples of this scandal in the Christian world will largely merge into the ether of all the happenings in the world, good and bad, that affect the way people see things and respond to them.  

It will be remembered by many as a reason why they no longer believe, or never believed in the first place. The hopes and faith of many people have been affected. Some will find a way to move on, but others will be dogged by it and a million other doubts.  Many will be tempted to categorize it as an aberration, and for many nothing will change.

I didn’t plan on writing about the Ravi Zacharias scandal. I wasn’t sure I had anything to add to what has already been said. I am skeptical of the real, long-term benefits of the hand-wringing exercises we do when these things occur. We go through the exercises, but we go back to our regular routines as quickly as we are done, and the change we think we are accomplishing isn’t realized.

Not that I have the answers. I have a hard enough time with long-term change in myself from the besetting sins of my youth that haunt me in middle age, and I am in no place of influence.

Yet, we must try. The Christian life is nothing if not a continual posture of repentance, turning to God to receive forgiveness, and desiring to do better. We would truly be doomed if not for a God who forgives us more than seventy times seven. So, we must turn to the Author and Perfecter of our faith – again, and again – for our answers.

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Loving the Sojourner Because God Loves the Sojourner

The terms, aliens, strangers and sojourners, were found throughout Scripture, and the Bible has a lot to say about them.

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During the second half of the Obama administration and leading up to and through much of the Trump administration, immigrants were much in the news. The country was divided over how immigrants should be handled: whether we should build a wall and be more restrictive at the borders; how strictly we should enforce the laws; whether the laws should be changed; whether immigrants from certain countries should be restricted or prohibited; and so on.

Much of the public “discussion” was inflamed with political rhetoric. The tone was angry on both “sides”. It seemed that most people were talking past each other. People took extreme positions. The issues were couched in all or nothing language, as if the choices were to open the borders wide or shut them down completely.

As I talked with people privately on both “sides”, though, the tenor and tone was different. I didn’t speak with anyone who advocated open borders with no security or regulations. I didn’t speak with anyone who wanted to close the borders and keep everyone out. Most people really fell in the middle; it was the inflamed rhetoric that created the appearance that people were amassed at the polar extremes, like angry mobs with pitchforks in their hands.

The heat of the immigration discussion has died down, but the issues haven’t gone away. President Biden has undone most or all of the executive orders issued by President Trump to tighten up border security and other immigration controls, but the laws haven’t changed.

We can expect less and less enforcement and control of the border, but the laws haven’t changed. The issues haven’t been resolved. Our immigration system is still not very workable, and issues are bound to boil to the surface again and demand attention.

I first seriously dug into the “issue” of immigration during the Obama administration. I was buffeted by the opposing winds of political rhetoric, but I wanted to know how Christians should view immigration… if there was a definitive Christian position to be taken. Most Christians I knew were well-versed in the political rhetoric, but I wasn’t hearing a biblically focused critique of the subject.

The Syrian refugee crisis was flooding the news and my conscience. I had to confess that I didn’t know where God stood. I didn’t know what the Bible said on immigration, if anything. I wanted to step back from the political fray and do my own searching of Scripture and meditation to let God speak to me on the issue.

I spent a weekend searching the Scriptures. I discovered that the Bible has much to say on the subject. The terms, aliens, strangers and sojourners, are found throughout Scripture from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and those terms permeate everything from start to finish.

I found that Scripture speaks very clearly and directly on the subject, and it leaves me little room to wonder how we ought to respond to immigration issues in our current day. I wrote about it for the first time in November 12, 2014 in the article, Immigration: the Strangers Among Us.

God’s “view” of immigrants is closely aligned with how God relations with Abraham and his descendants. We might forget that God told Abraham his descendants “would be foreigners in a strange land, and that they would be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years”. (Gen. 15:13; and Acts 7:6) Abraham’s faith also prompted him to live “like a stranger in a foreign country” (as did Isaac and Jacob). (Heb. 11:9)

“For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”

Hebrews 11:10

In fact, this identify of being an alien and a stranger on the earth applies to all people of faith in the past:

“All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

Hebrews 11:13-16

The status of God’s people as aliens and strangers was built into the very fabric of the their relationship with God and emphasized by centuries of living with that status. It became their fundamental sense of identity, and it should be ours also. (1 Peter 2:9-12)

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Opening Our Eyes and Ears to the Global Church to Gain Perspective

American evangelicals can gain perspective from other believers

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I recently read an article by Ed Stetzer and Andrew MacDonald, Waking Up After QAnon: How Can the Church Respond, posted by Christianity Today. The secondary headline is: Evangelicals disproportionately believed conspiracy theories in 2020. How do we recover?

I do not agree completely with everything in this article, but I think it is more “right” than wrong. The following assertion, for instance, certainly rings true to me:

“For years a segment of Christianity has sought to reclaim the United States of America as a Christian nation—or at the very least a nation founded upon Judeo-Christian values. However, they have, at the same time, witnessed the American culture (and, yes, what they see as American elites—media giants, big tech, politicians, and Hollywood) adopt a more secular and progressive agenda.”

I am familiar with the thinking of patriotic Christians because I “grew up” in Christianity in an atmosphere influenced by the Moral Majority and efforts to reclaim the Christian heritage of this country. It was a patriotic movement made “sacred” with Christian reference and fervor.

The community in which I was engaged out of college joined the effort. It seemed that some momentum was being generated in the direction of reclaiming the United States as a Christian nation…. at least while I remained in that community. When I left to go to law school, my perspective changed.

Looking back, I see that patriotic Christianity appeals to a certain narrative of faith and a desire to protect what is familiar and comfortable. It affirms a sense of place in the world as an American Christian who believes fully that the United States was blessed by God more than other nations in the world and stands like a city set on a hill for the world to see.

While I think there may be some truth to that blessing from God, we shouldn’t confuse His blessing for a time (and for His greater purpose) with our own desires for prosperity, influence, protection of lifestyle, culture and familiar life. God raises kings, and he takes them down.

The patriotic movement in the church going back in time was influenced, in part, by the “prosperity gospel”. The focus was on faith. A certain exhilaration accompanies the thinking that we are part of a sacred movement of God’s people uniquely blessed with faith. It was a kind of manifest destiny for the church.

I imagine the 1st Century Jews saw the world similarly, though they didn’t have the prosperity or power of American Christians in 21st Century. Their sense of being God’s people and being culturally “right”, however, made it difficult for them to accept that God loved Gentiles. That tribalism caused the first schism in the early church.

The American exceptionalism that is part of the allure of this politically-charged faith embraces modern Israel and the Jewish state. They see a kinship there, and I believe we are prone to the same kind of error that the early church fell into.

Moving on from that community of my early walk in Christ and seeing faith and the world from different angles changed my perspective. I loved my time in the community of my early Christian years. They did many things right, and they were eager and earnest in their faith in refreshing ways, but I have come to see that patriotic element differently. God is bigger than our patriotic ideas of Him.

(Not that all the people in the church I attended wandered down that road. I know many of them still, and many of them did not get swept up in the patriotic fervor. They have adjusted and adapted, and their perspectives have changed also.)

The real point here is that God has a global and universal purpose. We are as much a part of that purpose as our brothers and sisters in China, or India or in the African American churches in the US.

That is not to say that everyone is right about the way they view the world. We all have our own unique vantage points and perspectives, and for that reason I need to listen to others because they offer perspective that I have trouble seeing from my own, limited position.

Perhaps, if we can all come together in the shared experience of Christ who died for all mankind and learn to set aside the things that divide us, we can catch a more global and universal glimpse of what God is doing in the world. The Stetzer and MacDonald article makes the following statement regarding the headlong embrace of Donald Trump:

“Christians need to understand how this foolishness not only hurts relationships in the local church and community but diminishes our witness. In such situations, our gospel witness is at stake and we cannot afford to be passive.”

This is a major concern. We may have trouble seeing the ways in which we have wandered off the narrow path unless we take time to listen to what other believes are saying.

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How Can You Say your Religion is Right, And Everyone Else is Wrong?

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“How can you say your religion is right and everyone else has it wrong?” This is a common challenge to Christianity, but not just to Christianity. All of the world religions make exclusive truth claims.

Even religions that ascribe to values like unity and universalism (like maybe the Baháʼí faith, which “stresses the unity of all people as its core teaching“) make exclusive truth claims. Their claims deny claims of other, competing religions and worldviews that are expressly more exclusive and/or which ascribe to unity and universal application with different parameters.  

The idea of exclusive religious principles is especially anathema in a post-modern world. It’s the cardinal sin of post-modernism. In such a world, it seems crude and out of step to believe, let alone admit that you believe, that some religious and philosophical assertions are true and others aren’t.

It’s much more acceptable to say that I can have “my belief”, and you can have “your belief”. We would quickly add, “What’s true for me doesn’t have to be true for you.” We believe with religious truth that people should be able to have their preferred spiritual cake and eat it too.

We do this with ethics also. People sometimes conflate religious or spiritual truth with ethics, but that’s another topic maybe for another time. People also, generally, don’t feel so magnanimous in allowing differing beliefs when they feel their own oxen have been proverbially gored. 

In the western, post-modern world, it’s ok for me to believe in chakras, or karma, or queer theory or a particular gender identity (even if my gender identity is unique to me), or aliens and whatever ethical construct goes with those things. It doesn’t need to be internally cohesive. It doesn’t really matter what a person believes, as long as she doesn’t claim it to be universal or exclusive. Claims of universality and exclusivity though, are not tolerated. 

Notice, however, that even this “tolerant” position can’t escape the charge of being an exclusive truth claim. The very claim that no one can make exclusive truth claims is an exclusive truth claim.

The person who says exclusive truth claims are not valid is making that claim contrary to all people who believe that exclusive truth claims are valid. 

I believe that people who are making the claim that religious people (especially) should not make excusive truth claims are doing so in response to people whoa re fanatical, self-righteous, judgmental, and even militant about their truth claims. Much tension in the world, cruelties perpetrated against other people, and even wars are the result of such exclusive religious truth claims. We can’t deny it. 

So what do we do? Following are some thoughts on the subject of truth claims, with some additional comments on the subject of tolerance and respect.

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How Core Identity and Lived Experience Affects Our Views on Immigration in the Church

People of faith live as aliens and strangers on this earth because we look forward to a better country

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What is your identity? Are you just a name? A member of a family? A citizen of a country?

We might give different answers in different contexts, to the question, depending on who is asking “Who are you”? To a certain extent, our identity flows out of our lived experiences.

I identify as a son, a member of a larger family with ancestors who settled in Naperville, IL after emigrating from the Alsace region of France/Germany. I identify as a father and a husband. I identify as the son of a father, who is a lawyer, and I identify as a lawyer myself.

I also identify as a born-again Christian, oen who was once lost and is now found, a follower of Jesus Christ in the process of being renewed in my mind conformed to the image of God.

How we identify ourselves in an ultimate sense reflects our core values and what is ultimately most important to us. Thus, if someone is asking me about my highest identity, or the basis of all identities, or what is my central identify out of which all other identities now flow, I would say I identity as a child of God and follower of Jesus.

Such is the effect of being born again: born into the family of God – born of the Spirit. (John 3:7-8) It means that we now cry to God, “Abba! Father!” Romans 8:15) “Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’” (Gal. 4:6)

Our identity as children of God flows out of our experience of being born again. This identity is first and foremost. It is the identity that qualifies all other identities.

Or, at least it should….

Other identities flow from being born again. We no longer identify as being of the world, though we continue to live in the world. (John 17:16) We identify as citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20), and we identify as “aliens and strangers” in this world. (1 Pet. 2:11)

We know these things, but we might ask, “How much has this identify taken ahold of me?” And, “How much do I identify as a child of God, a citizen of heaven, no longer of this world, but an alien and stranger here?”

“Is this my experience? Do I live this out as my fundamental identity?”

The pull of the world is great. I have to be honest, myself: I experience long stretches of time in which I could not say with integrity that I am living as an alien and stranger in this world. I find myself identifying more closely than I should, perhaps, with things of this world. My experience doesn’t always reveal close alignment with my citizenship in heaven.

The following story really brought the reality of the effect of experience on personal identity home to me. It showed me that how we identify at the core of our being is tied into lived experience, and our lived experience reveals our hearts.

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