Josh Chatraw - Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

If human beings are not simply rational animals, as Aristotle thought, but storytelling animals, what are the implications for Christian apologetics? In our post-Christian society, the Bible is no longer considered the greatest story ever told, if it is told at all. Today, various stories pit one communitys identity and interests against others. Accordingly, those who wish to defend gospel truth must learn how to recover the plausibility, goodness, and beauty of the Bibles account of what God is doing through Jesus Christ to make things right. Telling a Better Story proceeds with proper confidence to do just that. Josh Chatraw is faithfully attuned to the biblical text while listening with one ear cocked to the various cultural texts (including films) that compete for the attention and allegiance of our hearts and minds. The way forward, he rightly argues, is to show that the Christian story answers our burning questions and leads to flourishing communities. By telling a better story, and embodying it, we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

KEVIN J. VANHOOZER, research professor of systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

The gospel is, first of all, a true story, but it is a story after all. With intellectual verve and winsome charm, Telling a Better Story not only tells but shows how the gospel outnarrates all the other plots offered. Only when our apologetics reaches the imagination of our story-starved age will it be compelling. This book does just that. Definitely a must-read!

MICHAEL HORTON, J. Gresham Machen professor of systematic theology and apologetics, Westminster Seminary

If we are to be compelling witnesses for Jesus, we cant offer answers to questions people are no longer asking. Apologetics, then, is never a static endeavor. It requires listening as well as talkingwhich makes Telling a Better Story an essential book for equipping the church. Using a broad array of sources, Joshua Chatraw has incisively explored the reigning cultural scripts and illuminated the beauty and coherence of the gospel by contrast. This is a book to underline, to study, and to discuss in groups. I look forward to recommending it widely.

JEN POLLOCK MICHEL, award-winning author of Surprised by Paradox and Keeping Place

Joshua Chatraw issues a call to maturity in this remarkable and stirring book, which tells the better story of Jesus Christ. Much as many may want to ignore or dismiss Jesus, he does not give us that option, even nearly two thousand years later. I cant wait to share this book with friends and family who do not yet believe. And I will teach this book in my church too, so we never forget that the Christian story is not only true but also beautiful.

COLLIN HANSEN, author of Blind Spots: Becoming a Courageous, Compassionate, and Commissioned Church

Josh Chatraw points to a better way to do apologetics in our increasingly fragmented worlda way that is more sensitive to beauty, more winsome, and more comprehensively related to human experience. This book will help believers share their faith in a way that actually makes sense to secular people around themand not only logical sense, but cultural and emotional sense too. All Christians who want to share the gospel more effectively in our current cultural setting should read this book!

GAVIN ORTLUND, senior pastor, First Baptist Church of Ojai

An extraordinary exegete of both Scripture and society, Joshua Chatraw has become a leading thinker and writer about what a powerful and penetrating apologetic strategy requires in our late-modern age. Mining insights from the likes of C. S. Lewis, Charles Taylor, Augustine, and many others, he shows readers inspiring and innovative ways to generate substantive conversations about Godstarting with more intentional listening. Dialogical and engaging, irenic and relational, his inside out approach highlights how the cross of Christ can best meet our most compelling existential needsfor meaning and morality, beauty and hope, love and worshipand satisfy our deepest human hungers and highest aspirations. The wild truth of Christianity makes it eminently worthwhile to learn how best to tear down barriers and build bridges of trust and understanding. This book will help you do just that.

DAVID BAGGETT, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Moral Apologetics, Houston Baptist University

ZONDERVAN REFLECTIVE

Telling a Better Story

Copyright 2020 by Joshua D. Chatraw

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Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

ePub Edition May 2020: ISBN 978-0-310-10864-1

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc . Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc .

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Cover design: Emily Weigel

Cover image: banyumilistudio / shutterstock

Interior design: Kait Lamphere

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To my brother Ben,
who lives the Better Story

I looked for something to love, lover of loving that I was.

SAINT AUGUSTINE, CONFESSIONS

But the little sticky leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky, and the woman you love! How will you live, how will you love them?

ALYOSHA, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

For who knows what is good for a person in life, during the few and meaningless days they pass through like a shadow? Who can tell them what will happen under the sun after they are gone?

TEACHER, ECCLESIASTES 6:12

Oh, how I wish this could last forever. And yet change mocks us with her beauty.

OLAF, FROZEN 2

It is for this reason that the present age is better than Christendom. In the old Christendom, everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it. But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.