Ravi Zacharias believes the church should be spending more time on the fundamentals. Evangelist, apologist, and host of the weekly radio program "Let My People Think," for over 20 years Zacharias has been addressing basic questions—such as, Does God exist? Who is Jesus? Can I trust the Bible?—and intellectual doubts of the thinking nonbeliever. And since his appearance at Amsterdam '83, Billy Graham's landmark international conference on evangelism, Zacharias has been in demand as a speaker on university campuses throughout the world.

A native of India, Zacharias was born into a family of prestige and power. His father served in key positions under the governments of Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Even as a boy, Zacharias felt overwhelmed by the pressure of following in his father's steps. This pressure sent him off on a personal quest for purpose and truth in life-a quest that took him to the very depths of despair. Ultimately, he found the purpose and truth he sought in the Christian faith. Today he is determined to help others make that same discovery.

"We are living in a world of graduate-level skepticism," says Zacharias. "An undergraduate response will not do. We must be equipped to answer the world's toughest questions." In Zacharias's latest book, "Can Man Live Without God" (Word), he challenges Christians to answer those tough questions with relevance and reason. He recently spoke to CT about his life and ministry.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

Five generations ago your ancestors were from the highest of the Hindu priesthood. With such a strong cultural and religious heritage, what led to your conversion to Christianity?

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

Although my ancestors were Hindu, my immediate family was nominally Christian. My personal conversion took place in a hospital room. I was there because, as a teenager, I had lost all purpose for life itself and had attempted suicide. I believed then and am convinced even more now that outside of God, life is utterly meaningless.

In that hospital room, through the Scriptures, particularly in John 14, I found the answer to my searching. In that chapter, Jesus declares, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me." That spoke volumes to me, because in that verse Jesus is responding to Thomas. It was the apostle Thomas who came to India in the first century to spread the gospel. He was martyred just six miles away from where I was born.

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So as I reflected on Jesus being "the truth," I began to realize that the answers to my questions might lie in him. I prayed a simple prayer to Jesus, telling him that I would leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth if he would take me out of that bed. Five days later, I walked out of that hospital a new man.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

Did you sense a calling to ministry at that point?

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

No. It began sometime after my conversion. One pivotal incident occurred as I was walking with a friend who had just received Christ. We came upon a Griffith Thomas commentary on the book of Romans that was in a garbage bin outside my home.

I still don't know who threw it there, but we picked it up and began to study it line after line. We soon began a Bible study using Thomas's book as a guide. Slowly, the doctrine of justification by faith became rooted in our hearts.

Many other incidents intertwined, but my final calling came at the age of 20 when my family immigrated to Canada. I began to work in the business world. But I sensed in my heart a yearning to preach, because I saw the emptiness in people all around me-an emptiness I once felt. So I decided to take a step of faith, which led to Ontario Bible College and theological training at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

You have said that you took a post as a visiting scholar at Cambridge in order to study under the atheist scholars there. How did that feed into your calling to be an evangelist?

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

Most evangelism is geared toward people in crisis. But how do we reach the countless people out there who sense no need for God? This caused me to want to study under the finest atheistic thinkers of our times so that I could respond with tenable and forceful arguments. I wanted to be an evangelist to the thinker-to the honest skeptic, to what I call the Happy Pagan.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

Beyond addressing the Happy Pagan, what is the primary audience that you're trying to reach?

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

We are concerned with reaching the opinion makers of society. It pleases us that so many of our invitations to speak come from political leadership, from universities, and from the arts and media. I spoke to 1,000 leaders in Johannesburg, South Africa, just a few days before the peace accord was signed. The framers of the accord were present at that meeting.

Since our open forums at Princeton and Harvard two years ago, we have been so inundated with invitations from schools like Berkeley, Cornell, and Yale that I am unable to accept most of these invitations for some years to come.

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CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

It seems that the demand to hear an evangelical apologist would be very low at schools renowned for their liberalism.

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

Thankfully, there are some evangelical voices on these campuses, but they are all too few. One is actually surprised to find out that the students are far more willing to listen than people would ever believe. Secular education leaves the spirit barren; hence, there is a deep hunger. We held the Harvard forums on the weekend of the Harvard-Yale football game, and both nights the attendance was 200 to 400 people beyond seating capacity. At Princeton, they were sitting in the aisles of the auditorium. These are not sympathetic institutions, but I think they respect the fact that we're willing to come. And they, in turn, are willing to listen.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

How would you assess the spiritual condition of America?

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

The famed Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones once said the difference between the East and the West is that the East was wondering which god to believe in and the West was wondering if there was a God. When I came here from India in the sixties, I realized Jones's observation was very appropriate. I noticed that there was a functional atheism here, not necessarily a doctrinal one. In all the vital choices of life, whether it be moral parameters, familial responsibilities, or educational choices, there is a mentality that "I am the captain of my soul."

I believe America's greatest strength is her enterprising spirit. There is no place in the world that facilitates a dream as much as America does, mainly because this nation is so open-minded. But most people's greatest weakness is an abuse of their greatest strength. Our openness, particularly to any ideology or belief system, may be our undoing. As Chesterton used to say, "The point of opening your mouth is to close it upon something solid." And the fact is, we do not know where to close it.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

How can the church counter this lack of spiritual discernment in our society?

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

Most of the time I answer questions not so much as an apologist but as a father. I have three children, and they make you get real in a hurry. We think skepticism is in the world and conviction is in the church. That is not so. If you were to take average Christian young persons and talk to them alone, they would say they are really not sure that the Bible is what they've been taught it is-the inerrant and inspired Word of God. There are silent doubters in our midst. We need to frame our discussions of theology and Scripture in terms that are relevant to the questions and concerns of the skeptical mind. We need to be willing and prepared to respond convincingly to their doubts.

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CHRISTIANITY TODAY:

Are you saying that our vision for evangelism is overlooking a segment of society that is right among us in the church?

RAVI ZACHARIAS:

Absolutely. The pressing matter is this: Before we evangelize the world, how do we first deal with the doubts of our own young people and our own young adults? The average businessman lives with a scorching paganism around him, and you cannot set a tepid Christianity beside that. How can the church prepare its businessmen and -women who go into AT&T or IBM on Monday morning where they are surrounded by highly technical, cerebrally oriented minds that do not have any channels for issues like ethics and morality and fidelity? How do you give them the confidence that the Bible is, indeed, the Word of God? I think the only way to do that is to face the hard questions head-on.

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Timothy Jones is managing editor of Moorings Books and a former associate editor of Christianity Today.

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