Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias filled the Nest of the Payne Athletic Center with an overflow audience viewing a live video stream in Hardeman Auditorium on Monday.
“I think when you attend these events like the McGaw lectureship, you realize that there is importance in the work that people like him do and its something that speaks not only to the academic world, but its actually practical to be heard and very important to how we live our life,” senior Bible major Jaron Brandt said.
Bible Professor John Harrison directed the event.
“I think one of the things that is great about having somebody like Ravi is… personality, personal story, the passion with which he will take, the way he articulates the message,” Harrison said.
Zacharias spoke primarily on the issue of secularization in western society.
“What I got from it was that secularization is for one, a problem and because of secularization there is this idea that two competing ideas can’t exist comfortably in the world and that’s what we see in the west,” Brandt said.
According to Zacharias, secularization will eventually lead to a society that knows no shame.
“It [secularization] will produce a generation without a sense of shame,” Zacharias said during his lecture. “Shame isn’t a legitimate expression. We are now called progressive, but actually it is the ultimate form of regression.”
Harrison said Zacharias defined secularization as a process of deleting faith and replacing it with the need to fulfill our own desires, not God’s.
“Secularization refers to the process where more of religious identity, religious faith, it becomes kind of eroded in society as there is more of a focus upon the physical need, physical reality, scientific evaluation of things so that we don’t think about world problems from a perspective of what does God want,” Harrison said.
Zacharias addressed this, saying Christians cannot live a secular life while claiming faith.
“If you live a life of ethical contradiction it will burn you,” Zacharias said.
Zacharias filled his lecture with quotes from philosophers, artists, pop culture icons, poets and personal anecdotes.
“He has this very profound appreciation of the arts and he uses this in ethics and apologetics,” Brandt said.
Following the lecture, two members of Zacharias’s team led the audience in a Q&A with questions taken directly from audience members.
“If there [weren’t] people like him doing the work that he does, the world would honestly not be a better place because we would go around just kind of half thinking,” Brandt said.
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