14. Veritas
From Amsterdam in August of 1983, I had scheduled a stop in India to speak at a small conference of Christian and Missionary Alliance pastors. It was a humbling experience. Some of these men were barefoot, and others had no change of clothes. As I spoke, many took notes on a single piece of paper, because it was all they had to spare. In many of their homes, the children didn’t have books for school.
Yet, these were the cheeriest of men. On the day I left, they sang a song in Hindi that they had composed for me. It brought tears to my eyes to leave them.
At Amsterdam, I had seen some from the middle class and a few from the upper-middle class who were evangelists; now, in India, I was looking at those who worked in rural communities, barely making an adequate living to feed their families. I felt a storm of emotions within me. I realized there was so much facing the church in its efforts to make an impact on culture and society.
In the plane on the way back home to Nyack, facing a new battery of classes, I told Margie, “I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing.” What I had seen and heard at Amsterdam had shown me that there still was not much outreach to the intellectual, nor were there many evangelists who had the training or access to reach those opinion makers of society. The combination of a proclaimer and apologist was very rare, especially the cultural evangelist-apologist. I also knew that many of the evangelists in my homeland of India were speaking mainly to one group of people. They weren’t reaching upward. “Somebody has got to reach them,” I said. At the same time, it was disheartening to see that so many of the devoted ministers in the land of my birth were untaught, untrained, and unprepared. I concluded I had to do something about it.
“I wish there was some way to raise money to start a ministry,” I told Margie, “something both to reach the educated and to train preachers and others in apologetics. But more than that, to help the needy as well. If we could just get fifty thousand dollars, I believe we could build the base for such a ministry.”
Margie had always had as much vision for the Lord’s calling in my life as I have. But now she asked, “Where would we get that kind of money?” My wife had never held me back from any calling the Lord had placed on our lives. Her glance now told me she only wanted me to think sensibly, and of my limits. “Do it, but do it wisely!” is the essence of what she was saying.
I knew she was right. Margie had recognized the need as clearly as I did. We agreed we wouldn’t tell anyone about our vision or the support that would be needed for it. We left it in the Lord’s hands.
Almost immediately after my return, I informed the seminary administrators that I would be leaving, giving them a full year’s notice; it would coincide with the end of my official contract with Alliance Theological Seminary. The administrators were disappointed and tried to talk me out of it, but I waved off every question. “I’m just in the wrong fray,” I explained. “I know I’m battling in the wrong places.”
Once they accepted my resignation, their only request was that I not tell anyone I was leaving until they could find a replacement. That made for two very difficult vows of silence on my part: no one could know the seminary’s need, and no one could know Margie’s and mine. But that mattered little to me at the moment. Once I handed in my resignation, one of the greatest stones I ever bore rolled off my shoulders. Although, in a strange way, I believe the Lord had been shaping me there for an important task as well.
After Amsterdam, invitations began pouring in from all over the world, far beyond what Margie and I could manage. Suddenly, the international scene was opened to me in ways I could not have imagined. The opportunity Billy Graham had given me to preach had provided a platform that couldn’t have come any other way.
Margie and I sensed that this was the beginning of God’s answer to our prayer. Still, we couldn’t envision how it might come to pass. One weekend in November of 1983, as we were wrapping up an engagement at an event called the “Laymen’s Conference” in Vermilion, Ohio, I made a request of the audience.
“We know that most of you are driving back to Cleveland after this,” I said. “If you wouldn’t mind, would you please pray for Margie and me? We’re seeking God’s wisdom on a certain matter.”
A few minutes later, I was carrying our bags through the hotel lobby when a man who had attended the conference approached me. He was direct, yet soft-spoken, in his words.
“Ravi, I did as you asked just now,” he said. “I went to my room and got on my knees, and I asked the Lord to reveal to me the wisdom you need. I asked Him if there was anything I could do to help in the decision you’re making. Now, I don’t know what that decision is, but the Lord did impress on me that I could help. He’s led me to give you a check for fifty thousand dollars.”
I gulped. I could not believe this. Nobody just blindly gives that kind of money to someone they don’t know. Was it a joke?
“Sir, you don’t even know me,” I protested.
He looked me in the eye and said, “I’m going to trust you.”
“And your name?” I asked.
He handed me his card. It read, “D. D. Davis Construction Company.”
I didn’t felt comfortable accepting that amount of money from a stranger, so I explained to Mr. Davis that I would rather meet with him first to explain the burden on our hearts. Then he could think about it. If I was going to be in his vicinity in a few months’ time, I suggested that we could talk then.
“You don’t have to come,” he said. “I have a plane. I’ll come and visit you.”
So there we were, one week later, sitting in the White Plains Hilton across the Hudson River from Nyack, explaining to this stranger and his wife the vision we had for a ministry to reach intellectuals, opinion makers, and “the happy pagan.”
As D. D. and his wife, Velma, listened, tears began streaming down his face.
“I’m not an educated man, Ravi,” he said, “but I know how to make money. I’ve made a lot of it, money I’ll never spend in my lifetime. There’s money to be made on the streets of America, and all you have to do is pick it up. My problem isn’t making money; it’s wisdom in spending it. I want to get behind you.
“In my business, I construct refrigerated buildings, refrigerated trucks, cold-storage warehouses. And I’ve built them in places where people would starve otherwise, because they don’t have a way to preserve their food.
“Ravi, what I’m doing in the food industry, you’re doing with the gospel. You saw those people at the conference. They have no reach to the kinds of places you’re going. You’re the one who’s going to take it there. Get your friends together, and let’s meet with them.”
Margie and I felt a bond immediately with this humble couple, and together we selected a weekend on which to begin our work together. We convened in January of 1984, Margie and I having asked our closest friends to come to Nyack to join us and hear our vision.
I shared how we envisioned a ministry that would communicate the gospel effectively within the context of the prevailing skepticism. It would seek to reach the thinker and to clear all obstacles in his path so that he or she could see the cross, clearly and unhindered.
“The presuppositions of the majority of this world aren’t the same as Christians’ presuppositions,” I pointed out, “and many of their questions are honest ones.” I told them I wanted to address those struggling people — the Thomases of the world — who saw life as not making sense. If the church didn’t place true value on a person’s questioning, then we were effectively absolving ourselves of any responsibility to that person. At the same time, if the skeptic’s questions weren’t honest, we had to address them in ways that exposed his or her dishonesty. Apologetics had to be about much more than answering questions — it had to focus on questioning the questions and clarifying truth claims.
Although the target audience would be the educated, such a ministry would necessarily keep as its aim every stratum of a culture’s population. We would need to keep in view at all times the four arenas where society’s values are shaped — academia, the business community, politics, and the arts.
We immediately allocated a portion of our budget to help needy pastors in India, such as the ones I had been with after Amsterdam ’83. We bought motorbikes and scooters to help with their transportation needs, purchased books and paid school fees for their children’s education, and provided money where needed for struggling families. We all agreed that any attempt at apologetics is ineffective unless your heart is also made tender to the physical needs of the world. I quoted someone who once said, “If you speak to a hurting world, you will never lack for an audience.” In terms of an apologetics ministry, our approach would be to go to places on the basis of our strength and the inviting body’s need, rather than on their strength and our need. In other words, we would not try to create opportunities but would respond to the needs and opportunities brought before us.
I had proposed a different name for the ministry other than my own name, but after everyone pondered it overnight, they advised, “No, Ravi, so much has happened with people in ministry having gone astray. If you give this ministry your name, it will stand up behind your integrity, or fall with the lack of it.”
It was a scary thought to me. My character behind an entire organization? Yet I knew it was only right.
Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) began in August of 1984, in Toronto, Canada. Today our headquarters is in Atlanta, Georgia, and we have offices in Canada, India, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and England, with several other bases planned. We purposely restrained growth at first, but over time the ministry expanded as the Lord’s calling led.
As I moved out of the cloisters — from an anonymous role to a visible one — I was grateful that God had put people around me whom I loved, admired, and trusted. They would be needed for the increasingly heavy load and burden. For example, death threats were suddenly an issue. I was going into hostile countries more often, and I received phone calls from people wanting to get at me, especially from the Muslim world. At times, I suspected people of attempting to take me into places where they could do harm to me. In some Islamic nations, I had to be surrounded by bodyguards while addressing audiences, small and large. Yet, I have to say, even if those bodyguards had not been there, I still would have gone.
Whether you’re in a visible position like mine or embedded like Koos Fietje, you have to learn that you cannot claim a path just because it is less intimidating. You must keep in mind that God does have an appointment with you, that there is a cost to serving him. At the same time, you have to be wise and not careless. To deny the reality that there are some places where you cannot go is to play the fool. More important, if you have not learned to pay the smaller prices of following Christ in your daily life, you will not be prepared to pay the ultimate price in God’s calling.
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the gradual opening of the Communist Eastern Bloc in Europe, I was speaking for Campus Crusade in Los Angeles. As I finished, I was motioned aside and introduced to two men from Russia. One was an interpreter; the other was General Yuri Kirshin, chief historian of the Center for Geopolitical Strategy in Moscow.
“Dr. Zacharias,” the general said through his interpreter, “I am impressed with what I have heard. I would like to invite you to come to Moscow. We would be pleased to have you lecture at the Center, and also at the Lenin Military Academy.”
Frankly, I was awed. The Cold War was still on, and the Soviet regime had not yet been dismantled. I had met with political and military leaders before, but I sensed that this was a significant opportunity.
In turn, almost casually, I invited General Kirshin to our ministry’s upcoming “Founders Weekend” at the Greenbriar Inn in West Virginia to speak to us about what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time. To my great delight, he accepted and came to the event. What I hadn’t planned for was that on the final night of our conference, a World Series game between the Atlanta Braves and the Toronto Blue Jays was on television. At the end of the evening, the ballroom was vacated almost immediately, with people scrambling to find a TV and watch the game.
Instead of addressing our founders, the general spent the rest of the evening talking with me through his interpreter at the front of the ballroom. Our conversation lasted well into the night when, finally, I had the privilege of leading General Kirshin to Christ.
“This is such a wonderful thrill,” he said through tears. “It is unbelievable that I am having this experience!”
Now it was my turn to visit the general in his milieu. Margie and I traveled to Moscow, and my first engagement for the general there was at the Lenin Military Academy. It was a tough environment. Throughout my lecture, one of the officers kept giving me the choke sign. It was exasperating, to the point that I wanted to stop speaking and get into a verbal slugfest with him, but I thought better of it.
As soon as I finished, the officer shot to his feet and demanded, “All your talk is about God, God, God. What on earth is this you’re talking about?”
My response to him was simple. “Sir, are you an atheist?”
“I am.”
“If you don’t know what it is I’m talking about, then how can you deny it?”
“What do you mean?”
(Atheists say that the term “God” is meaningless, yet they don’t bother to know what it is they’re denying.)
“It doesn’t make sense to say you are an atheist,” I pointed out, “if you do not know what you are denying.”
From there a fascinating discussion ensued, with one young officer standing before the gathering and giving a courageous defense of his faith. “I know Jesus Christ,” he stated, “and I know what this man is talking about.” He was the lone officer to do so.
Later, at the hotel where Margie and I were staying, there was a knock on our door. It was the young officer, his hat in his hand. “I want you to know, sir,” he said, “that I have been praying for years that someone would come to the Academy and present a defense of the Christian faith.” We invited him in and had a moving conversation. His goal was to be the first Christian chaplain in the Soviet military. Margie and I prayed for him to have the strength he clearly would need for such a task.
As we drove with General Kirshin to the Center for Geopolitical Strategy, I told him about the young officer’s visit. “I admire your courage for hosting that event,” I said.
“No,” he answered, “the courage was not mine. I could hide behind this event as an academic challenge that I wanted to present to the class. The real courage was in that young man who stood up. That’s the kind of courage it is going to take to win this country.”
The Center for Geopolitical Strategy in Moscow is twelve stories in all, eight above ground and four below. Every Russian premier or president has graduated from the Center, from Mikhail Gorbachev dating back to General Mikhail Kutusov, who fought against Napoleon.
When we arrived, the meeting room was filled with professors formally dressed in their imposing military uniforms. As we began our interaction around a table, they were all staring me down. The iciness of the atmosphere practically hung from the ceiling.
I told them stories right out of their own books. One was of Joseph Stalin, who at one time had been a seminary student but decided to renounce his faith in God. Stalin wasn’t his true name, but a name given to him because it translates in Georgian as “man of steel.” Stalin could will people into a different worldview with his piercing eyes. Even Lenin was afraid of the iron fist when Stalin took the helm.
The professors were clearly becoming uncomfortable at my comments and had to appear as defending their belief in “the State.” They began to challenge me, one by one, with one of them saying, “I know all about your God! I saw my grandmother murdered by a German soldier who was wearing a belt that read, ‘Gott mit Uns’ [‘God with Us’].”
Finally, I said, “Gentlemen, before we go any further, let me tell you a story. This morning, my wife, General Kirshin, and I were walking along on this bitterly cold day in Moscow, heading to our first engagement, when we encountered a man wearing only slacks and wielding a huge machete. He ran straight up to us and stared at me, standing perhaps two feet in front of me. He lifted his blade, and I thought this was the end. Instead, he froze. Then he moved on, yelling and screaming. Prior to that episode, my team was attacked by a band of gypsies. Moscow has become one of the most violent cities in the world; the Russian mafia is controlling the land, and you know it.
“In this room are men who have labored very hard to prepare freedom for the people. But you are not able to prepare the people for freedom. Look at what is happening. After years of imposing an atheistic worldview from above, what has been produced? Unparalleled lawlessness in the land. You could not change the human heart.”
I was addressing ideologies, worldviews, human nature, the human condition, the depravity of the human heart — and the setting allowed me to illustrate it profusely. I ended by sharing my testimony, how as a teenager I had given my life to Christ because of the emptiness and meaninglessness I saw in my life. I contrasted this with a description of Stalin’s last moments on earth, when he clenched his fist toward the heavens, threw his head back, and was gone.
When I finished, there was pin-drop silence in the room. The whole demeanor had changed. They were especially silent when I was sharing my own conversion story. As the session closed, the professors lined up to shake my hand, the sternest of them taking Margie’s hand and kissing it.
As the school’s director bid me farewell, he presented me with a copy from the Center’s library of Charles Dickens’ translation of the New Testament. He told me, “Dr. Zacharias, I believe that what you have said to us here today is true. But it is very difficult to change after seventy years of believing a lie.” There was a sadness in his eyes as he made this admission. They had set a course in history that was based on a lie.
Indeed, his comment told a tale in itself. It was a tragic story of how an entire culture can be shaped by the impact of a single ideology, with lie after lie perpetrated for decades. Ironically, the chief newspaper, Pravda, in reality a vehicle of falsehood, actually means “Truth.”
After the event, General Kirshin took Margie and me to a meager dinner. He was very quiet, reflecting on all that had been said. I decided to tell him a story of how a foreign dignitary had come to confront Stalin, asking him over dinner, “How long do you intend to keep torturing your people and expect them to still follow you?”
Stalin’s response was plain. He called for a live chicken to be brought to the table. He clutched the bird by the neck and began to de-feather it until it was completely denuded. Then he placed it on the ground. Stalin grabbed a piece of bread, got up from the table, and started walking away.
The chicken hobbled behind him and began nuzzling up to his trouser legs. Stalin reached down with a crumb from the bread, and the chicken pecked away at it.
“Do you see this chicken?” Stalin asked his guest. “I inflicted pain on it. Now it will follow me for food the rest of its life. People are like that. If you inflict pain on them, they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”
As I finished this story, I saw tears running down General Kirshin’s face. He knew the cost of atheism was enormous. The Soviets had sacrificed their own people at the altar of power. It was not religion that had been the opiate of the people, but irreligion that had drugged them into the illusion of power and the reality of self-destruction.
I do not know how or exactly when, but after this visit to Moscow I noticed a gradual change in the nature of the invitations I was receiving. God had begun to set the table for me to address the political world, and in 1993 I received an invitation to Bogota, Colombia. There I spoke to members of the judiciary on the importance of having a moral framework.
While I was there, a tall, distinguished-looking man asked to see me at my hotel the following day. I had no idea who he was until I awoke the next morning and saw the hotel surrounded by military tanks. As I opened the door to my room, I saw bomb-sniffing dogs in the hallway. I thought maybe a bomb threat had taken place, but I soon learned that the hotel was being cleared for my visitor.
He had been the main figure in tracking down and capturing the biggest drug lord in Colombia. Now this man’s life was in full-time jeopardy. Over breakfast, he told me, in fluent English, “I have been asked to frame a part of the legal system here. After hearing you speak, I would like to have your thoughts.”
“Sir,” I told him, “you will never be able to find an answer for your society until you find the answer for yourself.”
He looked intrigued. We talked further about how a worldview that is incoherent within will only yield to an incoherence on the outside. What life is about defines how life must be lived.
I asked, “Do you know who God is, and what life is all about?”
“No, sir.”
“Would you be interested in finding out?”
After breakfast, we went up to my room and continued talking. An hour or so later, he bowed his head and trusted in Christ.
It has been gratifying since then to see this humble man have a powerful impact on his country and in the area of international law.
Apologetics is not just giving answers to questions — it is questioning people’s answers, and even questioning their questions. When you question someone’s question, you compel him or her to open up about his or her own assumptions. Our assumptions must be examined.
If you’re predictable in your approach — if your listeners know where you’re going — they will turn you off. If you hand people outlines, they’re already ahead of you, just filling in blanks. If you tell them they need love, they already know that. The task is to find the means to stretch their thinking in unpredictable ways, to take them in directions they are not expecting to go. Sometimes it is through an argument, sometimes through an illustration, sometimes through a stretch of the imagination. But you’ve got to take them in a radius of directions, like the spokes of a wheel. That is an Easterner’s natural way of thinking, while the typical Westerner’s way is more linear.
While I was naturally inclined to the “spokes” idea, it had helped me to enjoy thinking. I realized that was what Chesterton had been doing for me all along. Later, I saw that this approach had done something important for me — helping me to better respect my audience, to see that if this kind of thinking enthralled me, there are bound to be others who are similarly enthralled. Yes, logic is linear, but its implications are radial.
By 1990, the load of ministry had gotten so heavy that I decided to take a sabbatical for the first time since I had started in the ministry. I spent part of that year at Cambridge University in England with my family, and it was a very special time for us.
I was invited to be a visiting scholar, and I decided to focus my studies on the Romantic writers and the moralist philosophers. While at Cambridge, I also had the privilege of sitting under some great minds in other disciplines. I heard Dr. Stephen Hawking lecture, witnessing one of history’s greatest scientific minds come to terms with his own philosophy of life, struggling between agnosticism and theism. My professor in quantum physics was Dr. John Polkinghorne, a latecomer to Christ, who provided me with some powerful ammunition for my ministry in the years to come. And I studied under some of the world’s finest philosophers, many of them skeptics and some radically so. I knew that if I was going to face the challenge of atheism and secularism, which were becoming the reigning worldviews in the West, I needed to hear it from the toughest sources.
My professor of philosophy was Don Cuppitt, who was president of Emmanuel College at Cambridge. He was an ordained Anglican minister, as well as an atheist, and in lecture after lecture he lashed out at the Christian faith. To me, his attacks were flimsy because they seemed so personally motivated. I often thought afterward, “That’s it? That’s the best bullet he’s got? He thinks this is piercing the armor of Christendom?”
Day after day, this man reserved his greatest wrath for Christianity. His larger premise was that all theologies were nothing more than anthropologies. In short, what we believe in our culture about values, we translate and sublimate into a religion.
But one day, as he lectured on Hinduism, I saw that his statements were completely false. “In India, for example,” he declared, “there is a demeaning of women. This has gotten translated into the religion, and it is why Hinduism has become a male-dominated religion.”
I was shocked at how little he knew of that religious worldview or of the Indian culture, for that matter. So I challenged him.
“Dr. Cuppitt, your premise is entirely wrong,” I said. “Are you aware that in Hinduism, the transference of divine power is actually matrilineal? It comes through the feminine deity Shakti. And one of the most powerful deities in India is Kali, the goddess of Calcutta, for whom that city is named.
“I’m afraid your facts are simply wrong. They certainly don’t support your premise that all theology is anthropology. And that premise clearly doesn’t hold true about Christianity. It was the women to whom Jesus revealed himself after the resurrection. Why would he have elevated the testimony of one whose witness would not even be counted in court?”
He was rather shocked. He wasn’t accustomed to that kind of direct challenge in the classroom. But from our exchange, the class went on to have some fascinating discussions, and a bit of backpedaling from the esteemed professor was in order.
In many ways, my sabbatical at Cambridge was a return to the idyllic early days of our family’s life. The time we spent strolling in the evenings and enjoying the surroundings of that magnificent campus was precious. We even added an English border collie to our family, naming him G. K. after G. K. Chesterton. And, of course, there were the fabulous bookstores in Cambridge. Every time I walked into one, I was so overcome by the thrill of knowledge that I had to sit for a moment and gather my thoughts. Then I would begin, browsing through shelf after shelf after shelf.
Cambridge was also significant because it was there that I wrote my first book — A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism. (It has recently been republished under the title The Real Face of Atheism.) The title was based on a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley called “Ozymandias”:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As I wrote the book, the picture I saw in my mind was of a seemingly endless desert, such as I once saw when I rode for an hour on horseback in the Egyptian desert, the barren sands stretching in every direction, almost disorienting the mind. I imagined coming upon a broken statue lying on its side — showing that demigods come and go and that nothing remains of them except their own opinion — a desolate, once-upon-a-time individual. This image was a metaphor for atheism: always trying to dance on the grave of theism, never realizing that in the Christian worldview there is nothing in the grave. Our Savior is risen. Atheism is just too philosophically bankrupt to answer life’s tormenting questions. History is replete with power-mongers who have come and gone.
(That book, The Real Face of Atheism, has now lasted in the arena of sales for over fifteen years.)
My experience at Cambridge that year had reaffirmed to me an important task in apologetics, namely, to unmask the skeptic, because his problem with God isn’t an intellectual one; it is a moral one. The famous atheist Bertrand Russell stated that he didn’t believe in God because “he didn’t give me enough evidence.” I suggest that his problem, and that of many others like him, was not an absence of evidence but the suppression of it. Russell himself admitted that throughout his life, and in all his thinking, he never landed on love. How could a man who never found love tell you what life is all about?
Yet, the demand for morality comes equally from the skeptic, not just from the believer. The host of one of my speaking engagements at a university was driving me to the airport when he informed me, “My wife brought our neighbor to the meeting last night. She’s a medical doctor — and not a believer.”
“What did she think?”
“She was very quiet afterward, and I asked her about her reaction to your lecture. She thought for a moment and said, ‘Very persuasive. I wonder what he’s like in his private life.’ ”
Everything the skeptic had heard was being framed through a moral perspective. I was fascinated by her reaction, for even in her skepticism she made morality an evidence of truth. Yet, a skeptic has no metaphysical basis for such morality. By her reaction, the doctor had demonstrated that deep inside our souls, God’s reason keeps surfacing unwittingly to the skeptic.
In 1993, an event took place that put me on the track of apologetic evangelism from which there was no turning back. It was the “Harvard Veritas Forum.”
The idea of the forum was born out of a discussion I had had in an elevator with a businessman from Ohio, who wanted to bring the Christian faith before some of the finest minds of our time in order to have it tested and challenged. Kelly Monroe, a dedicated young woman who does pioneering Christian work on university campuses, asked me to be the forum’s inaugural speaker. Kelly, author of Finding God at Harvard, was and is one of the most effective workers on the academic scene.
The first Veritas Forum was scheduled to take place at the busiest time on the Harvard calendar, the weekend of the Harvard-Yale football game. No one was sure what kind of turnout we might have. The venue would be Harvard Law School, and that evening, as I stepped to the lectern, the place was packed to overflowing. Every seat was taken, with students and faculty sitting on the stairs, on banisters, and on the floor next to the podium where I stood. That night was made more memorable to me because I had injured my back in Scotland the week before and herniated a disc. I had been in bed for a week, and this was the first day I was on my feet, walking with great caution lest I reinjure it. In that weakness, I delivered two lectures on successive nights: “A Critique of Atheism” and “A Defense of the Christian Faith.”
The response both nights was tremendous. Each time I finished, students and faculty stood to their feet and applauded. It made a profound impact upon those who were there. Some even deemed the lectureship and its impact quite historic. For that, the credit should go to Kelly and her team for their hard work behind the scenes and for the seeds that had long been sown leading up to the event. After the first lecture, young Christians came forward to tell me that, up until then, they had felt forced to lie low in their beliefs. Now they had been given the robust confidence to present their faith again. In fact, on the final night, I was joined on a panel by some Christian students who were eager to answer the questions of their schoolmates. It was a remarkable evening. Their brilliant young minds engaged the challenges to faith from every direction.
Not long after that experience at the Harvard Veritas Forum, Chuck Colson contacted me. He had heard the taped lectures, and he strongly encouraged me to put them into print. “Ravi, you cannot leave it just with the talks,” he said. “This has to go out to readers.”
With his encouragement and his suggestion to Word Publishing (now called W Publishing Group), the book became Can Man Live Without God. In it, the lectures I delivered at Harvard were put to print and even expanded upon. (The question-and-answer sessions, which had been so robust and lively, we left unedited and intact.) In this book, I traced what happened to the world after Nietzsche announced the “death of God.” The publisher had expected the book to last for twelve to eighteen months on the shelves. After eleven years in print, it is still my bestselling book.
I have received letters from readers in Germany, the former Soviet Union, and former Eastern Bloc countries, including one from a former atheist professor in Albania who said the book changed his life. He was so thrilled that it had been translated into Albanian because that was the most atheistic country in the world. Now the minister of religion in Albania has had the book distributed to every university faculty member. Newscasters, actors, politicians, university students, and homemakers write moving letters of how the book has changed their lives. I marvel that the circumstances that brought Can Man Live Without God into being could only have come through the grace of God.
The Harvard experience opened to us the university campuses of North America and, indeed, around the world. Following the forum, invitations to colleges just took off. I have spoken on almost every major campus — Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, you name it. If we haven’t been to a major school, it is more often than not because we haven’t yet had the time to accommodate the request.
I had seen for years that the university scene was one of immense need. University students all over the world are longing and hungry. Now, as I look back over the past twenty-one years, I can’t help wondering what would have happened in North America were it not for campus organizations such as InterVarsity, Navigators, Campus Crusade, and others that took the university challenge seriously. Yet, the need remains and is ever-increasing, even as ideologues in professorial positions often berate or ridicule religion in general and Christianity in particular. The lines have become clearly drawn, and it is up to the thinking Christian to train the mind, take seriously the questioner, and respond with intelligence and relevance. I can honestly say that on every campus we visit, the response is beyond what we ever expected. Yes, truth is on the scaffold, as James Russell Lowell wrote, but the scaffold is swaying the future, and God is in the shadows, keeping watch — keeping watch upon His truth and upon His own.