[aron]

Originally Posted by awareness

Ravi Zacharias strikes me as a guru from India ... speaking to disgruntled, disenchanted, or desperate, perchance, Christians who are open to anything better.

I'm no stranger to these gurus. They give me the willies.

I watched a couple of his videos and he seems to me to be a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian who is also not afraid to be an intellectual. I.e. to be educated and to think.

So he is simultaneously attempting to traffic in two worlds: among those who think, and among those who believe. Not an easy task.

Now, is he speaking to disenchanted and desperate Christians, as awareness says? I'd say that being a Christian here on this captive planet, in our fallen flesh and with our damaged soul should lead us to be desperate! Zacharias seems to be taking the gospel message to those who imagine that "Believe into the name of Jesus Christ and go to heaven" is an irrational, superstitious, and intellectually demeaning proposition. And he is trying to simultaneously train believers not to be dull but to sharpen their sword and go out and compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Originally Posted by UntoHim

Ravi Zacharias is one of the preeminent theologian/philosophers of our day. (and no I'm not saying he's the one theologian with the one theology for the age...only that he explains the trinity the clearest I've ever heard).

I did enjoy the video. I didn't particularly agree with or understand his explication of the trinity, but that didn't bother me because I've never understood the trinity, at least on the terms that it is commonly presented (Remember Lee with his tea bags and water...).

But I did want to comment on one of Unto's remarks, that Zacharias doesn't have "the one theology for the age"... Zacharias said in another video that he didn't expect everyone to agree with him. He realizes that minds work differently. People can see the same thing and come up with different conclusions. He seems to get this, and doesn't insist on primacy.

What he said that he wanted to do was to engage others in the free market of ideas... "Let the best idea win out in the end", is how he put it. Zacharias is willing to let others think differently, and speak differently, and he believes that if he's also allowed to speak his message, that God loves us so much that He sent His only begotten Son to rescue us from both our sins and our sinful nature, then some people will indeed apprehend the power of the gospel. Zacharias believes that other narratives, both religious and what he calls "naturalistic" (i.e. rational/scientific) have inherent flaws, and contain hidden assumptions that cannot be supported on their own terms. He believes that the Christian message is the one coherent message that can satisfy us all emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, and can bring us back to our source, our Father God.

So he is quite different than Witness Lee, who had some unresolved inner need to be the only voice at the party. Zacharias is taking an entirely different tack, and is quite willing to be one voice among many. If you look at his videos, he seems to go where they don't admire the Christian message. Quite different from gurus who surround themselves with acolytes. It was interesting to watch a video of Zacharias taking confrontational questions from a crowd at an Ivy League university, and turn the tables on the questioners. He would point out that their questions contained implicit assumptions, and he would ask them, where did those assumptions come from? So when they tried to question him, he made them question themselves.