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Ravi is gone. Even if you're a Ravi diehard, there's no productive reason to keep the NDA in place.
Unhiding the bodies allows for transparency, and for appropriate lessons to be learned.
Unhiding the bodies allows for transparency, and for appropriate lessons to be learned.
The Scriptures don't give King David or Judah a pass. While they are presented as Godly men, their scandals are a matter of record, and they each get backhanded in the genealogy of Jesus.
So there's no reason to give Ravi Zacharias a pass either.
So there's no reason to give Ravi Zacharias a pass either.
The larger problem we have in the evangelical world is this paradigm of hero worship. We need to kill that beast, and we need to kill it 2,000 years ago.
Fact is, almost every revered theologian in the last 2,000 years has some very nasty baggage. Many were misogynists; some were downright violent; at least one committed murder; some were slavery apologists, and some even played a role in the institution of slavery in the U.S.
Even C.S. Lewis--arguably the greatest Christian apologist of the last 200 years--was very twisted in various aspects of his personal life.
Ravi Zacharias, like all the above, was very gifted man who had some very deep-seated flaws that undermined his ministry and left at least two women deeply harmed and one child dead.
I know that's hard for many of his fans to accept. But if we aren't going to give King David a pass--and he's been gone a lot longer than RZ has--I see no credible reason to give RZ a pass either.
Yes, there is nothing wrong with admiring the contributions that RZ made to explicating the Christian faith for the common man. I've said it before: he is arguably the best public apologist for the Christian faith since C.S. Lewis.
Having said that, we need to look at the whole truth, not just the part we like. And that means acknowledging the damage that he did to at least three people in the course of his ministry, as well as his inherent pride issues that led him to fraudulently represent his vitae.
Full disclosure will reveal more about how he descended down the path he took with Lori Anne, and that will be instructive to the rest of us.
That is because, the telos of what he did was not an overnight thing, but rather a series of horrible choices in which he shortcutted his integrity and failed to check his lusts. It led him to groom and take sexual advantage of someone who was vulnerable.
The pathology of that--in plain view--will be instructive.
None of this is to preach the man into Hell--I want the same mercy for him that I want for myself--but rather to call him, as an elder, a public minister, to account.
His victims deserve that. And so does the Church.
His victims deserve that. And so does the Church.
