Telling a Better Story Quotes

“To counter these stories, we must embed our lives in the true story. Through the reading of the Scriptures, the fellowship of the saints, the partaking of the sacraments, daily prayers, and the preaching of the Word, God reorients the way we see the world. Constantly comparing the rival stories to God’s story is essential to not being lulled to sleep in a secular age.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“This book is about engaging the deepest aspirations of our secular friends and asking them to consider how the story of the gospel, as strange as may seem to them at first, just may lead them to what their heart has been looking for all along.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“Christians should pay close attention to how, even in the most “enlightened” modern cultures, our novels and movies remind us of the human hunger for something beyond this world.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“affliction.”19 As Keller goes on to say, “Western societies are perhaps the worst societies in the history of the world at preparing people for suffering and death, because created meaning is not only less rational, but also less durable.”20”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“Yet when people living within this story begin to wonder if they are missing something and even come to realize there is in fact a “hole” in their lives, they often won’t assume it’s “God-shaped.” Instead, given their framing narrative, they’ll likely suspect, especially at first, that they must be missing something in this world, like wealth, achievement, sex, or friends. They assume they simply haven’t reached all their goals yet, and so they put their heads down and recommit to frantically trying to achieve more. Or”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“The idea of god is at once a repository for our awestruck wonderment at life and an answer to the great questions of existence, and a rulebook, too. The soul needs all these explanations—not simply rational explanations, but explanations of the heart. It is also important to understand how often the language of secular, rationalist materialism has failed to answer these needs.1”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“When someone claims they are just using “reason” as opposed to “faith,” we should help them see that this is not how life works. We all believe deeply in things we can’t prove—from basic assumptions about our mind’s ability to perceive truth to our highest ideals and aspirations.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“Until recently, there has never been a society embedded with the assumption that all humans are endowed with inalienable rights and that we should treat all people, regardless of age, race, or ethnicity, with benevolence. These ideals, however, haven’t developed from a secularism devoid of religious influence. To the contrary, these secular values, as we saw in the last chapter, were developed from and make clearest sense as part of the Christian story. Thus, not only is the late modern framework more complicated than it has often been presented by Christian apologists, but it possesses ideas Christians can and should affirm precisely because it’s rooted in Christian thought and tradition.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“The Christian story about the world provided assumptions that were vital to the rise of modern science. It was the Christian belief that the universe is contingent—formed by a personal and sovereign Creator who ordered the universe—that enabled science to mature.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“two of the assumptions essential to modern science—the rationality of the universe and the reliability of basic cognitive faculties—cannot be proven by science. Scientists cannot explain why or how these are true; they simply believe that they are.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“When a transcendent reality is not woven into the social imaginary of a culture, no longer directing people to look outside of themselves to the divinely given fabric of the universe, people will still look for something to guide them.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“Thus, ironically, as James Hunter puts it, “The Enlightenment’s own quest for certainty resulted not in the discovery of new certainties but rather in a pervasive astringent skepticism that questions all, suspects all, distrusts and disbelieves all.”6”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“A shift has occurred in Western culture. Not only is God absent from the fabric of our most important institutions and cultural centers, but an array of competing views about life’s most important questions are available to the public. Religious belief is simply one option among many—and an increasing number see it as a strange one at that.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“The pursuit of individual freedom has meant losing true love. Consumerism has led to despair. And our pop psychology has removed neither our guilt nor our anger. And with the loss of a traditional understanding of sin, we’ve also lost the resources needed to truly forgive and find peace with one another.”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

“At one time in the West, Christianity seemed plausible because elements of the Christian story were intentionally woven into the fabric of everyday life. Leading institutions, daily practices, and common communication assumed realities such as a heavenly realm, a transcendent moral code, sin, divine judgment, and the possibility of ultimate redemption. These formed the tacit background of much of the culture’s everyday stories, the tapestry of meaning by which people lived. At the very least, the belief in God—and more specifically the God of the Bible—seemed a viable option for most and was generally viewed as a positive influence on society”
― Joshua D. Chatraw, Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age