Preamble:
I have been made painfully aware that in writing this piece I have plumped for sensationalism over sobriety and self-restraint; arousing prurient curiosity in people’s minds over pensive quiescence; stirring the hornet’s nest over letting sleeping dogs lie. Suffice it to say that I do not wish to go beyond providing a journalistic perspective from a Christian stand point. Far be it from me to arrogate the judge’s seat or don the mantle of the prosecutor. I would implore readers to deem this piece as a shaft of light on a delicate issue; regrettably this will have the effect of discommoding some people.
Story:
Were it not for the well confirmed news about the Spas he co-owned and the saga of a grossly inappropriate relationship he pursued some years ago with a married woman the surfacing of which drove him to the despair of posting a documented suicide threat, a sad and smutty tale that ended messily with the filing of a federal law suit and its subsequent withdrawal leading to a settlement involving payment of an untold sum of money to the woman in question that procured her silence with a Non Disclosure Agreement, I should be extremely careful indeed in treading into this story. After all the man was universally admired for the logical, suave and compelling presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, not least here in India, the country where he came from and more particularly right here in Chennai, the city where he was born.
Yes, given the tremendous respect he commanded from millions across the world who watched him live and on television / YouTube, you would not and could not believe that Ravi was “a man of like passions” (James 5:17) as us mere mortal men. Such was the aura around him over the years that English-educated youth in this country with intellectual pretensions would hang on his words receiving them as pearls of wisdom to be treasured and displayed as their own at opportune moments!
(credit: facebook.com)The consummate ease with which he quoted pundits and philosophers some of whose names we have never heard, the finesse he displayed in reciting poetry whose titles we barely knew and whose authors were strangers to us, the rhetoric he employed with its multifarious mesmerizing techniques that never failed to marvel us, the timbre of his smooth voice segueing into an appealing huskiness, the stage whispers, asides and sotto voces tossed about with seemingly careless abandon but which were in reality enunciated with much practised expertise – oh, wasn’t he a master of oration! Add to that the arguments that he adroitly marshaled to buttress his own claims and bulldoze opposing points of view, the doses of humour he deftly injected with genuine jokes, or hilarious vernacular phrases, the complex web he wove with apparently unconnected ideas that perplexed us for the most part, until it was unfurled in the end as a splendrous tapestry we could only gape at in admiration – oh yes, he was a past master in stage craft, and he always left you craving for more of his wonderful verbal magic!
You never doubted that the demi-god in the dais when he mentioned en passant his Cambridge credentials or Oxford scholorship and you tittered with pretentious glee when he confided in you that Cambridge is by far the prettier of the two; you implicitly believed him taking this to be yet another evidence of his ivy league lineage. Presidents, Prime Ministers, sundry other national leaders, business magnates and those who dabble in high finance found him absolutely captivating. HarperCollins with Zondervan in tow and other publishing biggies lined up with advance money to sign him up for forthcoming best-sellers. It was never ever a problem to secure pledges and underwrite expenses to meet the organization’s multi-million dollar budgets.
And to think that the man started his walk with Christ on a hospital bed in New Delhi when he was barely seventeen! God no doubt lifted him as he cast the anchor of his faith deep in the depths of His love, for the strength of his commitment and the intensity he displayed in qualifying himself for a higher calling. Unlike many of his recent detractors, I believe his performance in Hyderabad at the national Youth for Christ as a teenager was quite remarkable and certainly worthy of our unalloyed admiration. I am speaking from my own experience of being exposed to these highly competitive Christian events organized by the YFC in that era. Nor was it an accident that he appeared at the podium in a Billy Graham crusade in Amsterdam way back in 1983 when he was still a young man. It won’t do to slight any of these early signs of greatness that were amply in evidence. I have no doubt that he was empowered with superior gifts by the operation of the person of Holy Spirit in his life and that he was indeed God’s chosen vessel to defend the claims of Christ across continents; he crisscrossed the skies for the better part each year and lived out of hotel rooms whilst preparing to face throngs of people who would shoot some tough questions at him to do with the meaning of life, the point of pain, the forgiveness of sins, Christ’s vicarious atonement, His unique claims as the sole path to moksha.
No Sir, it is not cricket to defame the man and his bonafides. He started well and he certainly ran remarkably well; many of us standing in the sidelines either openly applauded him or silently saluted him. Perhaps even some of us envied his achievements and quietly nursed our aches as we contemplated our inadequacies and lamented our lack of comparable talents. Make no mistake, Ravi strove very hard indeed to lift up the banner of Christ and keep it flying high. Full marks to him!
But somewhere along the way, he seems to have slipped and given the devil a foothold. I don’t know what is your take on this, but I do find it disturbing that he deliberately let the impression gain ground that he studied at the Cambridge University when that wasn’t the case. It turns out that he “went” to Cambridge, yes, but not primarily to the University but to Riddley Hall in Cambridge village and he may have attended some courses in Cambridge but he wasn’t a registered student there. And it is proven that to state casually as Ravi did, that he studied Quantum Physics “at the feet of” Dr. John Polkinghorne was being less than truthful. Likewise Oxford. Time and again he claimed to be a visiting professor at Oxford and alluded to the famous Dr. Lennox as his colleague when that simply wasn’t the case at all! Oh, why oh why? Ravi, you didn’t need to do that. God had raised you up sufficiently in the eyes of your fellow men so much that you didn’t need to falsely add credentials to embellish your resume. People everywhere referred to you as Dr.Ravi Zacharias; we don’t mind that here in India – a country where political leaders with PhDs are dime a dozen; and where it is “safe” to insert a Dr. every time you come across a Rev. But I know things are different in the west where academic rigour is not easily compromised. If it is a an honorary doctorate conferred on you, you are expected to acknowledge it as such. Having lived the better part of your life in Canada and the U.S. surely you knew the standards there.
But part owning a spa? That blows my simple mind. And not one but two with massage parlours to boot! I concede there is nothing illegal or blatantly sinful about it and that a well administered massage works wonders for your back pain. But is it par for the course for a preacher par excellence to be investing huge sums of money in these facilities? I wonder. Forget the dubious vedic treatments said to have been practised there. And we need not take the word of the masseuses there about your misconduct when you visited these places, but, but what about the reported confession of your friend and co-owner of these spas of your suspected shenanigans?
(credit: spritualsoundingboard.com)
When we read in the Bible that ” all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) we believed that Ravi Zacharias was somehow exempt from “all”. We were wowed with his effortless declaration that ” God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”(2 Corinthians 4:6). It was this and more that no doubt led people to repeatedly canonize you at your funeral.
I do not know how the ministry that bears your name plans to regain the trust that has been shattered, the credibility that lies in tatters. It is not fair that you left them to hold the baby! And you have made it well nigh impossible for the team of apologists who take the stage under the banner of RZIM to hold their heads high. Vice President Pence may or may not regret the eulogistic reference to Mars Hill he made so eloquently during your funeral. But I’m afraid the media may not be so generous. While the Christian media would at best call to remembrance John’s sensible words in 1 John 5:21 that say “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” , I’m afraid you have given the secular media a plethora of handles; and they are promptly going to town with drumbeats about the hypocrisy of Christendom and are setting the internet ablaze about the falsity of it all!
I should clarify here that I am no investigator . I certainly do not take it upon myself to point an accusing finger, knowing that three others turn around at me. And just yesterday I reread Paul’s epistle to Romans where he fulminates : “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things” (Romans 2:1) . Therefore I see myself only as a Christian commentator compelled by the need to discuss our problems openly and not behave like Gandhiji’s three monkeys which pretend that all is hunky dory. We live in a culture given to diligent fact-checking – one that loses no time in uploading videos; by their very nature it is difficult to sweep the electronic images under the carpet and blissfully carry on as though nothing is “rotten in the state of Denmark”. But like honest astronauts whose gospel is on the line, let’s admit to “Houston that we do have a problem”, and look to our heavenly Father to steer us aright in this fallen world. And like Nehemiah, embark on rebuilding the damaged walls of Jerusalem with fasting and prayer.
LET BELIEVERS THINK
________________________________