The Four Foundational Pillars

excerpts from an address given at a United Nations Prayer Breakfast by Dr. Ravi Zacharias.

…In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, lyrics and music that gave rise to a new term, ‘the generation gap.’ In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protests. Church, state and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of nihilism, dominated by hyphenated words beginning with ‘self’—self-image, self-esteem, self-assertion. It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and few had the nerve to tell them that there was indeed a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love, and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.”

The previous description was written at the tail end of the 1980s. Somebody asked me now as a philosopher, if you were to add one more paragraph to that, what would you say has been lost in the 1990s? If there’s one thing I would say, it is that we have lost our ability to reason. The power of critical thinking has gone from induction to deduction and very few are able to think clearly anymore. I have often said the challenge of the truth speaker today is this: How do you reach a generation that listens with its eyes and thinks with its feelings?

…You see, postmodernism plays word games with us. Postmodernism tells us there’s no such thing as truth; no such thing as meaning; no such thing as certainty. I remember lecturing at Ohio State University, … my host was driving me past a new building called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts. He said, “This is America’s first postmodern building.” I was startled for a moment and I said, “What is a postmodern building?” He said, “Well, the architect said that he designed this building with no design in mind. When the architect was asked, ‘Why?’ he said, ‘If life itself is capricious, why should our buildings have any design and any meaning?’ So he has pillars that have no purpose. He has stairways that go nowhere. He has a senseless building built and somebody has paid for it.” I said, “So his argument was that if life has no purpose and design, why should the building have any design?” He said, “That is correct.” I said, “Did he do the same with the foundation?” All of a sudden there was silence. You see, you and I can fool with the infrastructure as much as we would like, but we dare not fool with the foundation because it will call our bluff in a hurry.

How do we determine what are those foundational pillars on which an individual, a family, a society, and our nations can stand? I want to suggest to you that the Bible gives us four foundations … The first that is given to us is the foundation of eternity. King Solomon said that everything seems so fluid in our time, and yet you, God, have put eternity in the heart of man. Eternity is rooted in your heart.

…I recall as a young man … watching one night in 1968 when the American astronauts were the first ones to go around the dark side of the moon. And as they fired their rockets on their homeward journey, they were vouchsafed a glimpse of this universe that nobody had ever been given before. They saw earth rise over the horizon of the moon, draped in a beauteous mixture of black and white, garlanded by the glistening light of the sun against the black void of space. And these human beings, in getting a glimpse of that, found no poet, no lyricist, and no philosopher to come to their aid to describe that awe-inspiring experience. Only one sentence said it for them, and we heard it across the world: “In the beginning, God….” Only God was big enough to explain the complexity and the intelligibility of this world.

…Pause and look at the marvel of this universe and see how the sense of the eternal looms large. But we don’t only see it in our experience, we also sense this quest for eternity in our language. Across every culture, whether you are from the east or the west, you begin to see how we use certain phrases that we take for granted. C. S. Lewis, the famed British thinker, captured it in this little illustration: “We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘My, how he’s grown,’ we exclaim, or, ‘How time flies,’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined, one day, to become a land animal.” “How time flies.” “How he’s grown.” We use these terms as if we were meant to live on and on, and doesn’t that give us a hint of our longing for eternity?

…The second is the dimension of morality—the moral law. Even Immanuel Kant, that so-called skeptical thinker, said two things were always held in his heart: the starry host above and the moral law within. And yet, isn’t it true and terribly tragic that if there’s one thing the world doesn’t know today, it is where to look to for a moral law…I was on a live radio program in Washington and I gave a simple syllogism to start the program: Objective moral values only exist if God exists. Number two, objective moral values do exist; therefore, God exists … The telephone lines then lit up; I knew they would. I said to one man, “Challenge either my ability to give the argument or the assumptions there.” He said, “I deny your first premise that objective moral values do exist.” I said, “You deny it?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Sir, so is it alright for me to be a racist? I can hate a man or a woman on the basis of his or her ethnicity? There are no objective moral values to that? That I can despise you or you can despise me purely on the basis of my ethnicity or yours, is that all right?” There was silence and he hung up. The host said to me a few days later, “You will never believe who you were talking to. Do you know who you were talking to?” I said, “No.” She said, “You were talking to a particular person who was the lead voice in a particular lifestyle in this city, and his biggest criticism against those who stood against him was that they were discriminatory. They discriminated against him purely because of his lifestyle.”

You see, one of the grandest things God has given to us is the dignity of my very ethnicity and your ethnicity, and the only way we can argue for intrinsic worth is if God has given that to us in His own sacred will. Society can’t confer it. Laws do not create it. Mindsets do not affirm it. You are of intrinsic worth not because any society has given it to you, but because it is given to you by God Himself. That is intrinsic value.

...You see, intuitively we long to say that some things are objectively true whether we like to believe it or not. And the only way they can be objectively true is if they are rooted in the high order of God Himself, a transcendent being. Eternity, morality, and the third pillar, the dimension of accountability. If morality goes, how does one become accountable? But morality can’t obviously be understood purely in just horizontal terms, can it? It must be in vertical terms, mustn’t it? Atheistic thinker Hobart Mowrer, one time president of the American Psychological Association, committed suicide in his eighties. He was one time professor at Harvard, instructor at Yale, earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, and he wrote these powerful words: “For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be free in this sense, that is, to have the excuse of being sick rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost. This danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in existentialism, which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity, and with neurotics, themselves, we find ourselves asking, ‘Who am I, what is my deepest destiny, what does living mean?’”

…I remember walking through Auschwitz …. I remember seeing the horrors of thousands of pounds of women’s hair, thousands of suitcases, little toothbrushes, little pairs of shoes. Teenagers were walking out of there with tears running down their faces. It was very sobering. And I saw the words of Adolph Hitler against the gas ovens there, “I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless and cruel.” What happens when you unleash a generation like that—a generation of young people, imperious, relentless and cruel?

You see, when you eradicate eternity, you redefine existence. When you eradicate morality, you destroy essence. When you eradicate accountability, you destroy conscience. Existence, essence, conscience. And the fourth and last pillar is the dimension of charity. When you lose that sense of charity, you have taken away beneficence. How wonderful it would be if we could even find disagreements undergirded by one undeniable passion: that we have learned to state disagreements in love and love our fellow human beings.

… As a young man I became very, very serious in my thinking. I know some of you are here from Cambodia. I remember being in Vietnam and Phnom Pen, and seeing the tragedy of all that was happening. Now we lift our eyes and see the scourge of AIDS and all that happens along with that disease, and our hearts become heavy. How do we deal with such a world? Indeed, an Indian sage once said, “In the modern world, the biggest danger is going to be, how do we ward off absolute violence, absolute violence?”

…Consider these four pillars—eternity, morality, accountability, charity. Jesus said this: that He was with the Father from the beginning. He was uncreated. This Old Testament prophet said, “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Notice the words. He didn’t say the son is born. The son never was born; the son eternally existed, and came as a child of a virgin birth. And then in His perfect life, His death and His resurrection, He embodied what it meant to be moral, for what evil is to life, contradiction is to reason. When an argument is contradictory, the argument breaks down. When evil enters your life, life breaks down. He embodied that which was purity without sin. Accountability said, “I’ve come to do the will of my Father.” And Charity went to the Cross. Even Mahatma Gandhi said this, “Of all the dispositions and teachings of thinkers and ethicists, the one doctrine that I have no sufficient counter for is Jesus on that Cross.” Think about it. He offers it to you and to me. To give us a sense of the eternal, to give us the moral, to give us the accountable, and to give us the charitable. And He arose again from the dead to guarantee that…