Zacharias began a movement that helped thinkers to believe while also challenging believers to think.
By Brett A. Seybold
For many people, Ravi Zacharias’s use of lofty words and concepts could cause blisters on the brain. After all, how many Christians have actually delved into such disciplines as literature, philosophy, world religions, theology, and the history of human thought, let alone incorporated them into their messages and daily walk in such palpable ways as he did?
Still, for others, his academic accolades were not prestigious enough. Some faulted his credentials, pointing out that honorary doctorates do not equate to actual PhDs.
For most Christians, like myself, however, Zacharias built a traversable bridge between academia and simple piety—a viable threshold from the cerebral to the orthodox and traditional. Zacharias—who died in May of this year at age 74—began a movement that helped thinkers to believe while also challenging believers to think.
For some, his use of logic—allegedly reducible to Western thought patterns—meant he had abandoned his Eastern roots. Yet Zacharias’s unique combination of heritage and thought invited the brightest of missiologists to reevaluate just how far the divide is between East and West when it comes to basic worldview questions.
As a teen, my grades weren’t going to get me into an Ivy League school (regardless of my athletic prowess). When our football team failed to qualify for the playoffs my senior year and a nasty ankle sprain kept me out of the final game, I opted not to stand on the sidelines but, instead, to visit Ozark Christian College’s Ambassadors Rally. (I ended up attending Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary.) I had listened to evangelist and apologist Josh McDowell at a youth conference—I even got to meet him. However, it was Ravi Zacharias who impacted my education and ministry more than any other person, aside from Jesus Christ.
I vividly recall listening regularly to Zacharias’s Sunday morning messages—Let My People Think—on the way to worship during my freshman and sophomore years of college. My friends and I would practically hang on every word amid his crisp emphasis.
He Exemplified Inescapable Logic and Genuine Love
Zacharias was a gifted orator, to say the least. His pitch dives and ascents meshed so eloquently with his energy and intelligence. Every so often, he would draw out the final “ssssss” of a word, tethering the previous sentence to your mind as if to leave a savory aftertaste. He had a way of drawing us into the practical inescapability of logic as he brought the Scriptures to life. His messages entered through our minds and grasped our hearts.
Shortly after an eight-month internship in Germany midway through college, I purchased several of his books as well as his Deliver Us from Evil video series. I must have watched it a dozen times or more.
I recall believing that if I could just articulate the faith in ways Zacharias did, if I could only master his skills, nonbelievers would have to accept the truth of the gospel as virtually undeniable. However, Zacharias grasped the human predicament much more profoundly than I did during my undergraduate days. For him, reaching the lost for Christ involved much more than mere cognitive dexterity. He loved the human heart and aimed to touch it amid every cerebral talk he offered. The more broken the heart, the greater his love for the person.
Zacharias used logic to great effect. (Who can forget how he proved the inescapability of “either-or” logic to the “both-and” thinker by saying, “Are you saying that it’s either the Eastern ‘both-and’ system or nothing else?”) Yet Zacharias never lost sight of the value of reaching the human heart. It was blatantly clear to him that truth claims not geared to include the emotions of the human heart would likely fall short in their impact.
Dr. Gary Habermas, professor of apologetics and philosophy, shared with me this reminiscence of Zacharias: “What I remember most about Ravi, one-on-one, was his exceptionally kind and friendly demeanor, taking an interest in each person as he spoke quietly. Professionally, I remember most his thoughts on Jesus Christ’s unique role among the religious leaders of world history.”
He Addressed a Post-Christian Worldview
As I reflect on this task of weaving together the multiple avenues through which Zacharias’s writing and speaking affected me over the past three decades, I am prominently reminded of his book The Grand Weaver. I recall listening to the audiobook version with my former missions teammate Randy Smelser and several German youth on our way home from an Easter retreat while we were serving the church in Europe. We consumed every word.
I’ll never forget my dear friend Jason Casey borrowing several of Zacharias’s messages I owned on CD, such as “Mind the Gap” and “The Loss of Truth and a Proposal for Its Recovery.” These CDs accompanied him and his family on their journey from Peine, Germany, to Ancona, Italy.
Zacharias struck a chord within us as we and many others labored in Western Europe, which could be considered ground zero of the post-Christian world. He addressed the interface of Christian theology and culture in ways that aided and equipped us to face our daily challenges as evangelists and disciple makers. And with the ever-increasing dominance of the post-Christian mind-set coming to rest upon North America, the call to raise up more voices such as Zacharias’s beckons loudly—especially in the wake of his recent passing.
None compare to Jesus Christ and what he has done for me. Yet, as I reflect back on over two and a half decades of ministry and sojourning with the Lord, I find that Ravi Zacharias has impacted me tremendously as God has woven many beautiful strands into the tapestry of my life. I have read several of his books more than once because, in my opinion, they are simply that good! I also remember sharing the German version of Jesus Among Other Gods (Jesus, der einzig wahrere Gott?) with my scholar friend from Iran, with whom I continue to dialogue.
He Sought to ‘Help Believers Think and Thinkers to Believe’
On April 29, 2014, I finally got to experience Zacharias live at Cincinnati Christian University (my first alma mater). I sat in the front row with my father- and mother-in-law (Greg and Kathy Comp) to my right, and another one of my favorite preachers and mentors, Dan Lang, to my left. Even in his later years, Zacharias could retrieve both Scripture and the thoughts of literary masters with ease. He would often close his eyes in deep concentration as if the script were engraved verbatim on the underside of his eyelids.
As he spoke, it was as if all present understood and agreed to an expectation of silence—not because Zacharias would have ever been visibly perturbed had anyone interrupted, but rather because one of God’s most gifted servants was speaking and no one in the auditorium dared to miss a word. When Zacharias came to speak, the silence between his lines was more richly laden than most classic novels.
After the well-deserved lengthy applause had simmered, I was torn between the opportunity to shake the hand of a man I had hoped to meet for more than two decades and the desire to avoid telling him what certainly half of those present that day told him—namely, that he had impacted them like no other. I never ended up meeting Zacharias in person, but he affected me tremendously.
Often when describing my ministry—KAPOL, short for Kontakt Apologetics—I’ll say, somewhat sheepishly, “I hope to do what Ravi did, but on a smaller scale,” as not to give the impression of chasing after personal glory. In a way, Zacharias has become a standard I cite when attempting to explain my sense of calling as an evangelist, apologist, and theologian.
Like Ravi Zacharias, we all can desire to have “conversations that count,” which become dialogues of difference and turn into relationships that redeem. Like Zacharias and his team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, we should seek to help believers think and thinkers to believe.
Brett Seybold earned a BA and MA from Cincinnati Christian University, an MA from Lincoln Christian University, and is in the dissertation phase of PhD studies in theology and apologetics at Liberty University. He and his wife, Heather, served with a church plant and campus outreach in Germany for a decade. He recently teamed up with Kontaktmission USA to found KAPOL (Kontakt Apologetics).
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