The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech in April 2007 exposed a giant contradiction in today’s university culture. The secular, materialist worldview that governs academia does not believe in God or the supernatural. It teaches that there is no absolute standard of right or wrong, or of good and evil.
Yet, when confronted with blatant evil and the awful reality of death, academics find their materialist worldview grossly inadequate. As one professor wrote the day after the tragedy, “We have seen what evil does.”
The Christian professor groups at Virginia Tech had been meeting to pray for the campus long before the tragedy. When the shootings occurred, this heightened awareness of evil among academics proved to be an opportunity for these professors to demonstrate the reality of God, and his love, to their grieving colleagues.
In October 2007, six months after the massacre, these professors and many other Christian groups at Virginia Tech brought Ravi Zacharias to campus to present two evening messages on the topic “Finding Answers Amid Life’s Greatest Losses.”
They also sponsored a luncheon outreach to 180 faculty and grad students and launched another of their regularly held book discussion groups on the book Deliver Us from Evil: Restoring the Soul in a Disintegrating Culture, by Ravi Zacharias.
One of the most redemptive moments occurred a few months after the tragedy when one of the slain students’ parents, who were devoted Christians, returned to the campus where their child crossed into eternity. Some of the Christian professors met with the grieving parents and together they walked through each of the rooms where students died, praying for the campus and calling upon God together.
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