Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 19:2 (Nov 2022)
Article: Br’er Ravi In Reverse
Author: James Lutzweiler

Br’er Ravi In Reverse

James Lutzweiler

Formerly Head Archivist, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

For the past several Sundays (I write in May 2017) I have tuned in on the radio to listen to the Gospel Groupies’ Guru, Ravi Zacharias, on my way to church. Ravi has been far more refreshing than the Rev./Br’er B. Ware to whom we listen upon arriving at our Baptist bastion. The latter lad more resembles the sound of an alley cat being pistol-whipped with a dead carp than the conventional tinkling cymbal about which St. Paul euphemistically wrote in I Corinthians 13. But recently Br’er Ravi himself seems in reverse.

I refer specifically and exclusively to his most recent program. I have felt vague impressions from the previous two programs that things were becoming a bit routine and rote for Ravi; but the most recent broadcast was not vague at all. Vacuous even comes to mind. He closed his address with three illustrations only two of which I can remember and none of which carried any coherent segues. In the first of the three Ravi invoked the memory of Augustus Toplady who wrote the hymn “Rock of Ages.” Suddenly he was in the third of three in which he invoked the book/movie entitled The Bridge on the River Kwai. I suppose if I thought about it long enough I could find a tangent connecting these two topics, but it might take me longer than my customary tangents.

Granted for a moment that there was a connection and that I just missed it, what was unmistakable was that Ravi’s rambling recitation of the River Kwai story was a diagramming nightmare. I could not follow where he was going or where he had been, as he attempted to make a point that went way over my head and possibly even way over Hegel’s even higher head. It was after this tongue-twisted illustration-turned-obfuscation that the previous vague impressions suddenly became clear. In short, it seems as if Ravi has come to love the sound of his own voice and has begun to string words together that roll off his tongue more like spittle than simple sanity. I sort of get the feeling that I am listening to a James Joyce meandering stream-of-consciousness monologue than to a sermon by Rabbi Jesus on the Mount.

What has disappointed me most is not what I am hearing Ravi say but what I am not hearing him say. What I hear him say are generalities about current society and impending doom, a la a 1950s and 1960s Russophobic Br’er Billy Graham, but basically doom for America and none for Russia, China, India, Australia or Zimbabwe. And he often includes “we” in his non-specific confession of sins, leading me to think whatever he is confessing is primarily for himself but throwing the rest of us in for cover and for lagniappe. But I must say that if I am to hav...