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I’ve been on a little Ravi Zacharias kick in my drive-time listening habits, listening to a ton of podcasts and lectures of his that I’ve packed into my MP3 player over the last couple of years.

One thing I’ve noticed: I really like the way he deals with issues at the level of the heart as well as the mind. To believers, he challenges them to be passionate in the way they follow Christ in a thoroughly biblical way; with unbelievers, he confronts them with the painful emptiness of the soul that they are experiencing — but does so with warmth, empathy, and sensitivity.

Along the way, Ravi will often address existentialism. Now, I’ve never really been able to get a firm grasp of what that means; I only knew it had something to do with Søren Kierkegaard (as came up in the comments of my July 10 post, Becoming What You Understand — remember that thread, John Lee?). But in his September 3, 2006, podcast, taken from his Leadership and Worship lectures, Ravi finally gave me some traction — and explained a bit about Kierkegaard too.

The clearest way to explain it is by contrast:

• The Christian says, “What we are determines what we do.”
• The existentialist says, “What we do determines what we are.”

But Ravi insists that Kierkegaard was not an existentialist in this sense (read the quote below); he was merely focused on the existential, or experience-driven, aspects of life. Christians have plenty to offer when it comes to existential questions; it’s existentialism as an -ism that is incompatible with the Christian worldview.

From a Reformed point of view, this difference is important — we are regenerated first, and then we believe. We are new creations, and because of that, we confess Christ as Lord. As I see it, this means that to reject unconditional election is to take an existential view of man’s fallenness; that is, to say that one can choose to trust God and thereby become a Christian is to say that what one does determines what one is.

If you’re interested in the fuller treatment, here’s an extended quote from Ravi’s podcast and links to the MP3’s. It’s well worth taking in; I’ve only finished part 1 and I look forward to hearing how he develops his thesis that worship is the answer to man’s existential angst.

I’ve talked about the existential predicament. What do I mean by that? … I would call it “the passion of existence.” “The passion of existence.” In other words, whenever a philosopher uses the word, “existential,” he is at least meaning your existence. All right? He is at least meaning your existence.

But in the classical term, what it really means is there is an awful lot of feeling and passion in this existence of mine, and if I can digress a little bit, so that you can build a philosophical base on this as we go along, the fundamental difference between the Christian and the humanist or the existentialist is right here: the Christian, because of who he is, determines what he must do.

The Christian, because of who he is, determines what he must do. I am a creature created in the image of God; therefore, I shall not lie. I am a creature created in the image of God; therefore, I shall not have an overly inflated opinion of myself, as being a mini-creator myself, I am a created, independent individual. “Essence determines existence” is the way I would put it for the Christian. Who I am essentially determined how I exist practically.

If you were to go to the atheistic existentialist — and the reason I’m using “atheistic” before that is because sometimes you might hear someone saying Søren Kierkegaard was the first Christian existentialist, and if that is possible, what you are really hearing them say is, Kierkegaard’s Christianity was highly experience-oriented. That’s all they’re saying. He kept talking about his feelings in the Christian faith, rather than coming up with doctrines. So if you ever asked a fellow like Kierkegaard to write out a doctrinal statement, he’ll say, “Look, that is completely immaterial; I don’t need to know anything about the eternal lostness of man, I don’t need to know anything about the second coming, I don’t need to know anything about the nature of God and this, all I want to tell you is that in my heart I feel a need, and that need is met as I serve God — that’s all that matters to me.”

Basically, atheistic existentialism would say, “what I do determines what I am,” so if a man says, “Look, I find myself running around and being unfaithful to my wife, and you turn around and say there’s something wrong with it, I say, what do you mean there’s something wrong with it — I’m doing it, aren’t I?” We’re all doing it, aren’t we? And you see, this is where they’re coming from.

What I do determines what I am; it’s what I call a “salvation by survey syndrome:” you know, you find out what everybody’s doing, and on the basis of that, decide what everybody ought to be doing. It’s the Masters & Johnson “what’s average is normal; what’s normal is average; what everybody’s doing is good,” and just leave it at that.

Now there is this one thing though: in my experience, what do I feel? I am a creature of feeling; I don’t get up in the morning detached from my sensations and my desires. And may I suggest to you that one of the things we all feel (and sometimes the women are more honest in admitting it than us men, and young people are more honest in showing it than us adults) is what I call the “feeling of loneliness.” We all feel it..

This feeling of loneliness is man’s existential dilemma. Which basically tells me he is driving outside of himself for some kind of fulfillment, and my thesis is going to be how worship ultimately answers these needs that no other relationship can answer.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

Reasons to Believe’s David H. Rogstad has just completed a series of blog posts under the title “Intellectual Repentance,” dealing with 1 Corinthians 2. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I might fuss with his characterization of Paul’s attitude toward reason and argument after the Areopagus event, but I’m right with him about this much:

In order to receive God’s gift of life, [the Corinthians] needed to repent. This repentance is not only from their moral failures. They must lose confidence in their independent, self-sufficient ways of thinking and come to a kind of “intellectual repentance.” We are told in many places in Scripture that human wisdom causes us to be puffed up with pride. For Paul to prepare an argument that appeals solely to the mind may, in fact, convince a mind, but he wants to do much more than simply convince them intellectually. He wants their hearts. (Intellectual Repentance, Part 2)

Now, I’m a big life-of-the-mind guy. In general, I think the 21st-century church is not sufficiently characterized by careful, disciplined, God-honoring thought. A student of Douglas Groothuis has said, “Christians should humbly try to be the smartest people on the planet,” and I wholeheartedly agree.

But there’s a trap that is ever-present when Christians seek intellectual formulations of faith: it becomes sterile. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures given by Michael Ramsden at the European Leadership Forum; he often admonishes his listeners that apologetics died in Europe when it became a sterile, academic discipline. Instead, any banners for intellectual Christianity ought to fly far behind the standard of the Gospel message itself. Put simply, the Gospel, with its transforming power, must come first. Any defense or explanation thereof must come thereafter.

There are all kinds of debates about apologetic methods—presuppositional vs. evidentialist apologetics, and so forth—but I’m beginning to think that’s just the sort of sterilizing phenomenon Ramsden (and others) warn against. I’m reminded that Francis Schaeffer tired of such affairs; he simply left them to the academy and went off to actually minister to people.

Similarly, William Lane Craig cautioned in one of his podcasts,

We must never let apologetics distract us from our primary mission, which is sharing the Gospel. And I would only use apologetics when the unbeliever has questions or objections to the Gospel message that we present. We must never make apologetics our focus of attention or the goal in interacting with nonbelievers. …Always get the Gospel out first, and then deal with the arguments and evidence in favor of the Gospel.

Likewise, Ravi Zacharias warns against letting our intellectual pursuits desiccate our ministry:

For those of us in who are in the ministry, we are immersed in [our message]. We are immersed in it. We speak it, we study it, we read it, we proclaim it, we sit around tables and interact with it. And there’s a point at which something very, very dangerous can happen. It’s what I call that danger point that comes in theological training when the Bible becomes merely a textbook that removes itself from becoming a fire within your bones, which it was when you entered in order to study it. And the challenge of the young theological student is to recognize that as much as he or she is critiquing all avenues of sacred writ (because we are there to defend it) and while we are going through authorship and date and this theory and that theory and higher-critical theories, at the end of the day we had better remember it is not we who are reading the book as much as that the book is reading us. (A Fish Out of Water: Loving People)

O God, help us forget ourselves. Help us to forsake technique in favor of trust in Your sovereignty; help us to be doers of the Word and not just defenders of its truth. Teach us to fear You more than men. Fix our eyes on the Cross, fuel the fires in our bellies, sharpen our minds to glorify You with the truth, soften our hearts to love a lost world, and ready us in every way to make disciples of the nations… Amen.