Ravi Zacharias Predictions Ring True

I’m currently in the middle of one of those extensive cleanups where you find all sort of things from the past, in this case Connection,  a 14-year old newsletter from Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto.

In the spring of 1998, author, speaker and Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias received an honorary doctorate from Tyndale, and the newsletter summarized his address on the front page:

Five Changes In This Century That Will Change the Future

• the “God is Dead” movement, begun by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
• religious pluralism
• the power to inform through the visual
• the loss of center for cultural molding
  
• the shifting power to a youth culture

Zacharias then suggested that Christians need an apologetic that:

• is seen and not just heard
• is felt and not just argued
• rescues the ends, not only the means

Today, 12 years into that new century we see:

• the rise of militant atheism and a political correctness devoid of God
• pluralism and demographics shifts in Western nations that will move to change laws, political structures and education systems
• the power of screens, visual learning, info graphics; text has been reduced to bullet points or less
• a fragmentation in media that means culture is shaped by a seemingly infinite number of influences
• a world where, even in the modern church, 40 can be too old; though overall power hasn’t shifted to the young so much as to those who can think young, especially in their mastery of the new technologies

While we face challenges Ravi didn’t mention — particularly issues of gender and sexual orientation, the European economic tensions, political instability in the middle east — his words to the Christian university audience were certainly prophetic.

Read some of Ravi’s popular quotes here at C201 and learn more about his ministry at RZIM.