Ravi Zacharias: In Memoriam

It may strike some as strange that a Catholic Priest in his blog has, to date, only done one In Memoriam, and that was for Billy Graham. Some may even call it a manifestation of religious indifferentism, which I wholeheartedly reject. Yet precious few of our fold in the past sixty years, save men like Fulton Sheen or Robert Barron, have occupied prominent roles in our culture as apologists and evangelists. We as Catholics have much to celebrate in our fidelity to the Great Commission throughout our history. Much good work still is going on, but our efforts have been anemic compared to many Protestants, in my opinion. We recently witnessed the scandal of a Catholic Bishop declaring last October at the Amazonian Synod in Rome that he had never baptized a native Amazonian in thirty years. Yet we must at least give some credit to those intrepid souls who have tried to bring Christ to places as ‘liminal’ as North Korean prison camps and Chinese Communist gulags. These men and women, regardless of their formal Confession, I believe deserve our respect and our admiration, especially in an era when we seem to be far more interested in digging wells and giving relief for temporal ills, rather than focusing above all on the need of the soul for the saving Gospel. Even Mother Teresa recognized that spiritual poverty, to not know God or his Christ, is the worst poverty of all.

Ravi Zacharias was born in Chennai, India, and although his religious upbringing was broadly Anglican, he himself moved toward Evangelicalism after a period of agnosticism, which even resulted in his own attempted suicide as a teenager. But God is as ever the lover of the downtrodden and the destitute.

I first encountered Ravi through the influence of a Baptist friend when I was starting my studies in Classics. I would listen to his talks when the internet was still young. My friend, herself an apologist and an intellectual working for a large multinational pharmaceutical firm, opened to my mind for the first time the possibility that Christianity could be defended via Philosophy. Ravi was the first man, ironically, to introduce me to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I devoured his award winning book, Can Man Live without God? with ravenous enthusiasm. Decades later, when I became a Priest, I still listened to his Podcasts on walks and excursions outdoors.

Apart from the breadth of his knowledge of philosophy, what impressed me so much was his grasp of the exciting work of evangelization going on in the Far East and in the Middle East. His speaking arrangements also fascinated me. He spoke in military academies, in universities, in public halls, and in churches. He especially relished speaking to university students, which is so remarkable in that he did so knowing where Western academia was going, in its positivistic, secular and anti-religious fervor. He went straight to the agora of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and he spoke perennial truths to extremely diverse cultures. He was even doing it as our current ‘cancel culture’ was developing. He was a cultural bridge between East and West, uniting both in the eternal truth of Jesus Christ. Billy Graham and others mostly had speaking engagements in the Anglophone world. Ravi spoke in some of the most culturally and politically volatile locales in the world. He always promoted peace, understanding and true dialogue: not whitewashing differences, while always remaining centered on Christ and his Word in the midst of war and carnage. In an era where we as Catholics are now rehashing the errors of a tired, ineffective ostpolitik, Ravi was an indefatigable voice in defense of human dignity, as based in the conviction that it is based in the constitution of man as created by a loving, provident God.

At the same time, Ravi was a man of culture, which gave his oratory a power and humanity which escaped the facile slogans and therapeutic reductionisms which at times seem to prevail so much in contemporary Western Christianity. He spoke of missionaries compiling whole Bibles from pieces of toilet paper or other waste paper in countries where the Bible was banned. He could quote Saint Paul and T.S. Eliot in the same paragraph. He drew from Vedantic myth and Confucian philosphy as a praeparatio evangelica.

Much like Chuck Colson wrote in his work How Now Shall We Live, he had a very clear approach to the postmodern Christian apologia. To him, the fundamental questions of human existence are essentially religious: where did we come from, what is wrong with the world, can it be fixed, and if so, how, and finally: proclaiming the redemptive message of the Gospel, how now ought we to live, granted this knowledge?

To say Ravi was an intellectual apologist may occlude his simultaneous conviction that the human heart is the locus of religious conversion and encounter with the Risen Savior. He thus was able to unify the mind and the heart. To quote William James, “religious feeling is an absolute addition to the subject’s range of life.” Ravi knew this, and tried to move to the core of what makes an individual a believer or a nonbeliever. That fault line is not primarily intellectual, but affective and spiritual. God and the question of spiritual life was and is not an ornament to pragmatic life, but the core of the meaning of existence. Therein lies so much of the power of his preaching.

I have often lamented that after the Second Vatican Council, and even after the First, Catholic apologetics have tended to lean toward either the confessionally dogmatic or the intellectual. Apologetics for much of our post-Tridentine history has focused more on why Modernism or Protestanism is wrong, and not as much on why Christ and the Gospel is the most important treasure which the Church at large proclaims. As mankind, and especially Western Man has become increasingly ignorant on matters religious, Ravi grasped the indispensability of the kerygma. Catechized people can be religiously informed but spiritually pagan. Is it any surprise, then, that Evanglicalism and Pentecostalism holds such power for men and women in previously Catholic lands? How many times have we heard that people have found Jesus outside of the Catholic Church? By the same token, how many times do we hear that the solution to the decay is more catechesis? More religious information without religious conviction is liable to create skeptics and agnostics, not disciples.

Therefore, I praise Ravi, not because he shared exactly the same beliefs as the Catholic Church. I praise him because he had in so many ways within himself that union of faith and reason that make him, to alter a phrase of the medieval theologians, an anima naturaliter catholica. A naturally Catholic soul. That assertion may offend some, but I would ask many Catholics whether they would rather stand with a good Protestant, or a bad Catholic against the winds of the anti-culture which blows across the world. The gulf between anti-dogmatic, theologically evacuated Catholicism is far less distant than that between the orthodox Catholic and the Protestant that takes seriously our intellectual and spiritual common heritage. And it is precisely in recognizing that that I believe we can move toward closer union and integration. Saint John Henry Newman said that to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant. Evangelicalism in my mind today is a form of Christianity divorced from history and tradition, even as they excel in their radical and biblical proclamation of Christ, crucified and risen. It thus finds itself at a crossroads. It will either rediscover the roots of Apostolic Christianity, or it will degenerate into mere religious enthusiasm, which is only a step away from religious agnosticism.

Ravi, like several other Protestant divines, deserves our respect, even if we do not share the exact same theological beliefs. He certainly deserves our tribute in an age where the Catholic Church seems to be in a crisis in regard to what the Great Commission even means. Whether he serves as a rebuke to our indolence or an inspiration, I hope we can all pray for the happy repose of his soul, and the consolation of his family, and all who mourn his passing.