Ravi Zacharias and Post-Modernism

This afternoon I took our dog to the dog park at White Rock Lake and brought a book I've been meaning to read for a while, Jesus Among Other Gods by Ravi Zacharias. I first heard Ravi Zacharias while driving from Arizona back to Texas after one of my breaks from school. My youth pastor and mentor Randy gave them to me with only the introduction that this man will change my life. I can still remember listening to his lectures about "Can Man Live Without God" while driving through the forests and plains of northern Arizona and New Mexico. The experience oddly enough, was one I don't think I'll ever forget. Listening to this brilliant yet humble man talk about how he came to know God and who Jesus was in the midst of all the other world religions was profound and life changing. At the time, it was something I really needed. College had posed a serious intellectual challenge to my faith and without thinkers like Ravi Zacharias and others, I could have very easily been swept up into the same pseudo-spiritual post-modern thinking that has paralyzed so many others of my generation.

So, of course I shouldn't have been surprised this afternoon when, within pages of the beginning, he challenged my soul once again. His book begins with a candid look at the true nature of post-modern thinking. As I prepare for full time ministry, I often times forget the particular challenges I will have to face doing ministry in the post-modern, technological, and information-overloaded world. The absolute claim of Christ as the only way to heaven has never been more distasteful to the metanarrative of a culture as it is today. I wanted to share with you what Ravi Zacharias wrote about post-modernism because it really encouraged me and reminded me of the difficult battle those in ministry have of teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

"Yet if the human spirit is to survive and every legitimate discipline to find fruitful expression, truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of a pretended tolerance. All religions, plainly and simply, cannot be true. Some beliefs are false, and we know them to be false. So it does no good to put a halo on the notion of tolerance as if everything could be equally true. To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if the denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true."

I'm excited to read more and be challenged more by this man's faith and brilliance. I'm sure I will be writing more about what I read in his book.