THE BOOK IS CALLED 'UNFASHIONABLE' - Part 1
Enjoy this conversation between Ed Stetzer and author Tullian Tchividjian.
Tullian Tchividjian's new book, Unfashionable, boldly addresses the issue of what it means to be the church in the world, while refusing to be of it. This is a theologically driven book that calls the church to "contextualize without compromise."
Tullian's is a voice of reasoned, biblical sanity when many who are having this discussion are talking past one another with unhelpful and exaggerated rhetoric.
I spoke with Tullian recently and asked him to talk to us about this new book.
ES: Tullian Tchividjian. I hope I got the name right.
TT: You got it perfect. I'm actually very, very impressed. It's Tchividjian, which rhymes with "religion."
ES: Which rhymes with religion. That's how I learned it. I remember sitting in New York City, and you telling me that. So I never forget. Well, so glad to talk to you about Unfashionable. I really enjoyed the book, but if you remember, during our conversation you asked me to endorse it. I almost didn't. I was kind of reading, and it seemed very negative about engaging culture, but then I'm thinking I know Tullian, and he's very positive about engaging culture, and you have kind of blazed this trail between the two. There's this one quote in your book that says, "It's both sad and ironic that the shift is now putting the church in the wrong place at the right time. Just when our culture is yearning for something different, many churches are developing creative ways to be the same. Just as many in our culture are beginning to search back in time, many churches are pronouncing the irrelevance of the past." So tell what's the big idea here that's driving Unfashionable, Making a Difference in the World by Being Different when you're a pretty culturally relevant guy? What's your message here that you're trying to communicate?
TT: Well, about two and a half years ago I was asked by an interviewer what troubling trends do you see emerging in the evangelical world amongst young evangelicals, specifically in America? And I said, right away our fascination with fitting it. And I said to the interviewer that it seems that when you scan the landscape of evangelicalism across America, many churches and Christians have come to the conclusion that the best way to reach the world is to become just like the world, so we go out of our way to convince the world in a thousand different ways that there's really nothing different between us, between the church and the world, that we want to go out of our way to convince the world that we're really the same.
And so the overarching thesis of Unfashionable is this: Christians make a difference in this world by being different from this world. They don't make a difference by being the same. And over and over again in the book I borrow this line from sociologist Peter Berger where he said that the church is to live against the world for the sake of the world. And so there's this tension that exists between being in the world, but not of the world. What I seek to do in the book is really tease out what does it mean to be in the world, but not of the world; what does it mean to live against the world for the sake of the world; what does it really look like for Christians to make a difference in the world by being different from the world? My goal is to really spell that out theologically, to spell it out practically. I talk about the fact that according to Jesus, Christianity is not cool. Jesus says some pretty remarkably unfashionable things, like if you want to live you must die, that if you're eye or your hand causes you to sin, pluck it out or cut it off. He just - the way up is down, the way down is up. I mean everything in God's kingdom moves backwards according to the world's standards, so to speak. And so I try to tease out that tension so that the reader can understand what it really means to engage this world in an unfashionable way.
ES: And I think you do a wonderful job with those. Very encouraged and challenged by the book. It seems that right now, we're in the midst of a conversation on this. How do we engage culture? How are we in the world, but not of it? Your book stands out, I think, as a fresh voice in the midst of that, perhaps for me, because the ways in which you are calling people to be different than the world are not the ways that many of the; to be blunt, the angry voices of some parts of evangelicalism are saying, "Listen, put your suit and tie back on, cut your hair, don't listen to any music that was written in the last 100 years." and then you're godly. So in what ways are we talking about being different cause I mean I know your church plant does some progressive things. Now you're serving at Coral Ridge. In what ways, give me some examples what you are taking about and some ways that you're not talking about?
TT: Yeah, that's good. Well, obviously, by unfashionable I'm not talking about the clothes you wear, your hairstyle, the music you listen to. I'm talking about something much deeper, and I'll give you a couple of examples. There are some silly and there are some more serious mistakes that I think the church makes by trying too hard to fit in. A silly way would be, for instance, and I talk about these things in the book, walking into a Christian book store and seeing, instead of Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts, a breadcrumb and fish t-shirts.
ES: Those Testamints.
TT: Yeah, Testamints. I walked into one Christian bookstore a while back and there was this comparison list between secular bands and Christian bands. So if you like Dave Matthews Band, you'll love such and such. If you like Counting Crows, you'll love such and such. If you love Beyonce, you'll love - . We're trying way way too hard to convince the world that we're really no different than they are. We've basically created a parallel universe, a copycat culture. And so that's kind of silly because, and it's somewhat frustrating because we think, are we really being creative in a pioneering way, or are we just looking around at what's cool in the world and then copying it with a little sprinkle of Jesus on top?
So those are silly ways, but there are some more serious ways, I think, in which we are capitulating to what's fashionable. For instance, it's very, very common in our culture today, as everybody knows, for there to be a tremendous amount of ambiguity regarding the notion of truth. I mean it is vogue to be vague, for instance, that the more uncertain we are, the more cool it is, that we don't want to fully embrace the fact, our culture I'm talking about, we don't want to embrace the fact that there is such thing as universal objective truth that is true for everyone everywhere all the time. I mean there are very, very few people in our culture today who would admit that that is true. They would say there is no absolute truth. We've heard it a thousand times.
Well, the church has always been the pack of people on this planet who have embraced Jesus' words in John 14:6, I am the way, I am the truth, I am the light. Nobody comes to the Father but by me. We have been that society in society. The church has been that society in society where truth is belief. We do believe there is objective universal knowable truth, that we cannot know truth exhaustively, but we can know truth truly because God has revealed it from outside of us. Well, these days there's so much pressure from the outside world to become ambiguous about the reality of truth that you find even many voices in the Christian church today shying away from their firm belief that universal objective outside of us truth exists for everyone, revealed by God to his people. And so that's a much more serious, much more dangerous way that we're trying to be fashionable, that we're trying to fit in the notion of truth, which is a big one, obviously.
So I'm not addressing what kind of music we should play in worship, because those things, to me, are just, they're unimportant. You can be too fashionable and be traditional. You can be too fashionable and be contemporary. You can be unfashionable and be traditional. You can be unfashionable and contemporary. That's not what I address at all. I'm addressing much more of this idea that we have adopted or absorbed a worldly mindset in the way that we think about money and relationships, truth, all of those things that I outline in the book. And I define worldly
Continues tomorrow.
