Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age
is an imaginative and creative approach to Christian apologetics. Chatraw calls for identifying and affirming those touch points that are common in human experience, such as longing for identity and relationship; a yearning for significance, meaning, and purpose. All these resonate with the human quest for fulfillment and the task for Christians is to show how the gospel message offers “a better story.” The charge is not so much to challenge these ideals as to map them to the Christian story. Of course, no apologetic is complete without scrutinizing opposing views, but that is not the central focus here. Instead, as storytellers a “conversational, back-and-forth approach” provides the means by which Chatraw’s “inside out” model can be implemented. By getting “inside” another’s story and discerning their deepest aspirations and the framework upholding them, believers can lead them “out” to “see the splendor of God and his purposes by reimagining the world through the Christian story” (p 11). That “seeing” and “reimagining” will, by God’s grace, find its way into the heart and secure not only belief but fulfillment.
Telling a Better Story received a Christianity Today’s 2021 Book Award for most likely to shape evangelical life, thought, and culture.
Read Josh’s interview with Christianity Today.