Walking from East to West: God in the Shadows

by Ravi Zacharias

I’ve been given a unique opportunity to learn to think in different languages, to be shaped by different cultures, to have a completely different way of measuring values in order to decipher the between-the-lines hints of the world and, if I may dare say it, the breaking points within each.

You really only learn to think like the other when you speak their language and share a cultural DNA.

This connection with past generations and centuries is one reason why it is very hard for anyone from the East to convert to Christianity. It is a much more intricate matter than in the West where, generally speaking, one thinks individually. In the East, one’s thinking is collective.

Hinduism alone has 330 million deities.

Today, India boasts of being the most religious country in the world. Eighty percent of India is Hindu, and if India and Pakistan had not separated, it would also be the largest Muslim country in the world.

We were cricket buddies, hockey buddies, tennis buddies, table tennis buddies. My friends also were the reason I became fluent in Hindi, because that is what they all spoke. And their friendship provided me with a wonderful respite from school, where things were always tough for me. I barely squeaked through each level or grade, and at times I was punished severely both at school and at home.

Interesting that he barely squeaked by in school.

“God alone knows how to humble us without humiliating us, and how to lift us up without flattering us.”

there is a thin line between respect and undue exaltation.

God has an appointment with each of us, and it is critical that every man and woman know this. He will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is. This is a reassuring truth to know for every believer, and a necessary trust for anyone who ministers in areas of great risk.

When God puts a broken life back together, He removes the scars because He builds from the inside out. And when God steadies a faltering life, He puts you on His footing.

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.

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.

Yes, logic is linear, but its implications are radial.

(That book, The Real Face of Atheism, has now lasted in the arena of sales for over fifteen years.)

Can Man Live Without God. In it, the lectures I delivered at Harvard were put to print and even expanded upon.

In this book, I traced what happened to the world after Nietzsche announced the “death of God.”

While the languages of the tongue and the anguish of experience may vary, the language of the soul is the same all over the world.