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by David Odegard

It has become clear now that popular Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias covered up a ravenous sexual brokenness “including sexting, unwanted touching, spiritual abuse, and rape.” You can read the full statement from RZIM here. This brokenness has come to light as every secret eventually must (Luke 12:3). As we examine the posthumous fallout from Ravi’s dark side, hopefully, we are also examining ourselves.

Ravi was a man of immense intellect, and he articulated a Christian worldview very well. We now discover that he seems to have had large holes in his practice as a Christian. The internet has erupted with questions, allegations, and apologies: How did we fail Ravi? How did Ravi fail us? How are we failing God in all this? Not to mention that the watching world is discounting all the very true and remarkable things he said for all those decades because it turns out that he is just as hypocritical as they privately are.

Among the loudest salvos are calls for more accountability. This is certainly true, but it misses the most crucial point: Ravi was able to creatively circumvent all the accountability structure that RZIM actually had in place. Ravi is a tragic reminder that what we know must become who we are if we ever hope to “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:10).

Jesus taught us the way. Christian virtue ethics is that way and it teaches us that we need to allow the Holy Spirit to reshape our mind, will, emotions, and even our bodily habits (see Matthew 22:37). Ravi had a well-developed mental life, but some of his habits appear to have been unreformed. “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). It is natural for human beings to be filled with these things, but when someone turns to Jesus and desires to follow His way, all of that person’s desires must reorient around God Himself. We simply must allow God to reorder our highest loves.

Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). To love God first is the beginning of the good life. We love everything else rightly when we have loved God first “with all your heart.” We must love God with “all our mind,” too. Ravi certainly did this, but this area alone is not enough. Our devotion to Christ must go much deeper than our minds until we have been captured in our whole person.

What does it mean to love God with all of our strength? Dallas Willard taught that sin dwells actually in the members of our bodies (see Romans 6). The muscle memory in our bodies has been trained in a habit of good or bad. Real virtue ethics is the retraining of our habits to align with what we know to be true. To learn more about this I would recommend Dallas Willard’s book Renovation of the Heart; many books have been compiled on this topic, but this one is a great place to begin.

The ancients talked about the head being the seat of reason and the belly being the seat of the primal passions or appetite, after all it is what growls when you are hungry. The head and belly were considered to be at war with one another. The head wanted to contemplate poetry and mathematics; the belly wanted to get drunk, procreate, overeat, and sleep in. Every hung-over student in calculus class testifies to the ancient dilemma.

The ancients had various answers to this dilemma like hedonism (obey the belly) and stoicism (obey the head); these are gross over-simplifications, but they are sufficient. The problem with these approaches is that one is always at war with himself or herself. And the head and belly (reason and passion) will always be at war. “Who shall deliver us from this?” (see Romans 7).

Christian virtue is different. The way of Jesus leads to truth, freedom, and peace with both God and man. Virtue arises from loving God first with all of one’s being—body and soul. If reason is the head and appetite is the belly, then virtue is symbolized by the chest. Virtue is courage and honesty, contentment and justice, etc. Virtue teaches us that the head must rule the belly through the chest, and the chest must be filled with deliberately Christian virtue (see Augustine’s Confessions).

This is why C. S. Lewis’s essay “Men Without Chests” was so critical of the kind of spiritual formation public school children were receiving. It was all head with no virtue, and he drew the obvious conclusion that these children would grow up to be bad adults. To ask them to be kind, upright citizens filled with honor and honesty was absurd since their education divorced ethics from learning. It was like “cutting down the orchard and still demanding its fruit” or “gelding the colts and demanding them to be fruitful and multiply.”

I looked up to Ravi, and the things he spoke were true and good. Truth must go deeper than our minds—it must remake us. In Lewis’s book The Great Divorce, he demonstrates how redemption can reach all the way back through our entire lives so that even our pain, brokenness, and suffering are redemptive toward saving our souls. This is also true for Ravi. Imagine the isolation and despair he must have known, grappling with his sin and not being able to reach out to others for fear of his own reputation. And his suffering is just. That being said, God redeems sinners. Nothing is as important as loving God and knowing Him for all eternity. Let us love God, examine ourselves, and be formed in Christ’s image.

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