Making sense of the Ravi Zacharias scandal

I've read and seen several Christians reflecting on the Ravi scandal. I think the person who gets closest to what I'd want to say is David Wood. It's a long video, but Wood makes several insightful observations and as is often the case Wood is keen in his psychological analyses.

"Former Psychopath Dr. David Wood Shares His Astounding Transformation Into Christian Apologist"

Just my own summary:

1. David Wood goes into some depth about his testimony or conversion with Eric Metaxas. It starts at approximately 32:30 with Wood meeting another inmate named Randy who was a Christian. Wood saw Randy always sitting in his bunk reading his Bible. Randy wouldn't do anything the other inmates were doing.

2. One day Wood told Randy he was only reading the Bible because Randy was born in the US. If Randy had been born in China, then he'd be Buddhist. If India, Hindu. If Saudi Arabia, Muslim. Wood also told Randy "people like you believe whatever you're told to believe". Wood had the same idea of Christianity that he had of objective morality - that it's just a false belief that people are told by others, which they accept, because they don't know how to think for themselves. I guess Wood's idea is that Randy is a sheep. Like everyone else. Except for Wood himself.

3. However, Randy was the first Christian to put up a fight against Wood and argue back against Wood. Randy challenged Wood. The most "annoying" thing for Wood was that Randy would constantly question everything Wood himself believed: "Where did you get your idea then?" And Wood couldn't respond to Randy. Other than with silence.

A failed experiment

https://robertbowman.net/2018/04/14/8-answers-to-why-nabeel-qureshi-was-not-healed-nabeel-qureshi-and-healing-part-10/

Jesus or Allah?

http://journal.rts.edu/review/no-god-one-allah-jesus-former-muslim-investigates-evidence-islam-christianity/

Ravi Zacharias Eulogy at Nabeel Qureshi's Funeral

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbKrkPAZCUw

Last will and testament

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVxFuYZVvKU

Divine signage

Not to belabor the issue, but one more post on Nabeel. Some Muslims say Allah cursed him with cancer as punishment for his apostasy from Islam. You also have Christians asking why he wasn't healed. 

i) If he died of cancer because Allah cursed him, does that mean that when Muslims die of cancer and other diseases, Allah cursed them?

ii) There's a statistical presumption against miracles in the sense that miracles happen less often than not in response to prayer. Indeed, that's probably a dramatic understatement. That doesn't mean there's a general presumption against miracles. Given the Christian worldview, miracles are inevitable. But there's a statistical presumption against any particular miraculous answer to prayer. Miracles are unpredictable, and I daresay most prayers for miracles go unanswered. So there's nothing surprising about the fact that he wasn't healed. That really doesn't require a special explanation. Countless Christians die of cancer and other diseases, prayer notwithstanding.

iii) However, one can overemphasize the fact that prayers for his healing went unanswered. Although he didn't get the miracle he was asking for (and others on his behalf) in this case, to my knowledge, Nabeel is on record claiming that he had at least 5 miraculous signs in his life. In his book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, he recounts a vision and three revelatory dreams that were instrumental in his conversion. 

And after his cancer diagnosis, he said he had a dream of Jesus, which included a sign: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHEDzitxJB0

At the time I took that to be an omen or premonition of his impending death.

Assuming his testimony is truthful, these all had veridical elements. Also, David Wood has vouched for some of the dreams.

My point, then, is this: if we take his word for it, he had five miraculous signs in his life. By contrast, many lifelong Christians have nothing out of the ordinary ever happen to them. 

Ready To Run

Ravi Zacharias has a piece in the Washington Post about Nabeel Qureshi. In the opening of the article, Zacharias refers to a characteristic Qureshi had that few other Christians have in this culture:

The first time I saw him, he sat at a table across from me, one of his legs constantly moving almost subconsciously, as though he was warming up for a run. It was a habit of his restless disposition to stand and gallop. I asked if we could talk about his mission in life. He joined me in the back seat of the car, that leg still moving.

That was Nabeel Qureshi. He hated sitting still. He was a man with a mission, ready to run.

A tale of two cancer patients

Nabeel Qureshi and Christopher Hitchens both died of cancer. Both had powerful inducements to recant their views: Hitchens to recant his atheism, and Nabeel to recant his Christian conversion. Both died as they lived. Hitchens died for nothing while Nabeel died for everything. 

The race is not to the swift

I've discussed Nabeel's situation before, and some of my posts have been occasioned by his dire situation, even if I didn't mention him in particular. But I have some parting thoughts. Christians will have questions about his death, and Muslims will have malicious things to say, so I might as well offer my 2¢.

I can't read God's mind, so I don't have anything "authoritative" to say about this particular case. But a few general observations:

i) From God's standpoint, Christian celebrities don't get special treatment. To be a famous believer doesn't mean you go to the head of the line. From God's perspective, there's no express check-in or express boarding if happen to be a famous. 

I don't mean to suggest that Nabeel was just a celebrity. There are good Christian celebrities and bad Christian celebrities. From everything I've read, he was a sincere and dedicated apologist and missionary. Still, God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34).

ii) There's a sense in which the number of miracles is arbitrary. God would always do one more miracle or one less miracle. There's no intrinsic threshold. 

At the same time, there's a balance to be struck inasmuch as miracles disrupt the future. In a cause-effect world, changing a variable in the present has widening ramifications down the line. So it's a question of what kind of future God wants. There are tradeoffs. One man's meat is another man's poison. A beneficial miracle today may harm someone else tomorrow. 

iii) It's not God's intention to perfect a fallen world. God intercedes often enough to keep the Christian flame going from one generation to another. 

iv) Prayer isn't like buying up lottery tickets, where you raise the odds of getting what you ask for by adding more prayer warriors to the prayer chain. It's not as though, if a nobody patient has one person praying for him, while a celebrity patient has ten thousand people praying for him, the person who gets the most votes wins the heavenly lottery. 

Indeed, the God of 1 Cor 1-3 is apt to confound that calculation. If anything, God is more likely to do a miracle for somebody who's got less going for him. "The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all" (Eccl 9:11).

v) God doesn't love us because we're indispensable to him; rather, he is indispensable to us. 

vi) God cares about little things as well as big things. Nabeel's conversion blew up his family life. His illness brought them back together. That may seem less important from a global perspective than his ministry, but God cares about the little picture as well as the big picture. Individuals. Individual families. 

Due to artificial familiarity, there's a tendency to feel that celebrities belong to all of us. But that's an illusion. They belong to a tight little circle of family and friends. Until he was sidelined by cancer, Nabeel used to spend most of the year on the road. After the diagnosis, family came first.