Unfashionable

Title: Unfashionable, Making a Difference in the World by Being Different

Author: Tullian Tchividjian

Publisher: Multinomah, April 2009

Pages: 175

Begun: July 14, 2009

Completed: July 15, 2009

~ Our eschatology (how we understand the consummation of God's kingdom) dramatically affects our missiology (what we're to do in the meantime). If we don't have a vivid understanding of what the divine objective is, our mission will lack focus, direction, and purpose.  We won't have the sense of identity we desperately need as twenty-first-century pilgrims. ~ Unfashionable, p. 77.

Here is a book that is going to have an impact on many young thinkers who are interested in the things of God; and hardcore fundamentalists are going to be as mad about Tullian Tchividjian's influence on their young'uns as they are about John Piper's as soon as they learn how to pronounce his name (which thankfully won't be real soon!).

This is a book that confronts worldliness head on. It's not about the cultural issues like music and drinking, etc. If you want a good read on those subjects, check out "Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World" edited by C.J. Mahaney. That's a good read. Very practical. Especially for teenagers. 

But Unfashionable goes after a mindset, a culture, and a very helpful definition of worldliness is given and explained throughout the book. "Worldliness is a sleepiness of the soul in which the status, pleasures, comforts, and cares of the world appear solid, stunning, and affecting, while the truths of Scripture become abstractions -- unable to grip the heart or guide our everyday activities."

According to Tchividjian the "greatest challenge facing most Christians is not persecution but seduction." His answer is different. Flinging himself with abandon into the controversy of eschatology, Tchividjian will probably do more damage to the typical dispensational "Left Behind" ideology of evangelical bench warmers than the academic and esoteric attraction of Covenantal theologians which appeals only to critical thinkers, a small minority. In other words, Tullian sounds like a pastor and, wow!, it works as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not saying he's unhinged me from my fairly strong premillennialism, but I will say that he excited me with a big picture understanding of eschatology that makes sense and makes me want to live as if Jesus is King now, not just in the future. Too many times Christians pay lip service to the concept that Jesus is King, but the fact that they have been indoctrinated to believe that the Kingdom is only future has had a dulling effect on their sense of purpose now unless they are a part of the small minority of people that find a constant energy from the purpose of evangelism, a narrow understanding of the Great Commission.

Tullian says fairly convincingly that the goal of God in the world is to redeem the whole world. Most interesting, perhaps, is the fact that he is willing to tell the average person (this book was clearly written for regular joes) that despite what they have believed from their Left Behind Series (I don't think he mentions this series by name), the world is not going to be destroyed. It's not God's pattern and the Peter text doesn't actually convincingly say it. Just like Jesus' body had continuity in its resurrection (and so will ours), so also the new earth. The fire will destroy all that is corrup, but it will not utterly destroy the earth. In other words, as I told Jennie several months ago while we were sitting in the back yard, looking at my un-mowed lawn, "Do you realize" - as I stomp my feet -- "this is going to be heaven? Right here! Just new!" 

How does a Christian live in this world effectively. It's not in being fashionable. It's fascinating to me that the grandson of Billy Graham is calling for uncoolness. He denounces, prophetic like, the American obsession with relevance. "I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this pressure from church leaders to fit in with the world: we don't have to." He says the Church has been "seduced by cool" (the title of one of his chapters). The entire book called for living different, for standing out, for preparing to die.

In some ways this book rocked my world. But it wasn't a surprise rocking. My mind has been mulling some of these concepts for a long time and I have found myself drifting into an arena of thinking hitherto closed off to me because of my hyper-dispensational roots. I cried at times. Suddenly decisions that I have made in my past came to the forefront and the regret that I made those decisions was elucidated by the fact that they were made in complete consistency with my theology of the time. I think I would have taken more time just to be a more well-rounded person.

One example: I hurried out of school to save the lost. After all, the only thing that mattered in life more than everything else was to get as many people saved as I could before the rapture. Since finding the Puritans and deepening in my understanding of God's big picture I have mourned to the point of fighting sinful bitterness that I acted so much and so often in devout compliance with my sincerest belief. But God is gracious and I know that it is pure mercy to be a discoverer of His plan, even if in my sinful presumption it strikes me as being twenty years late. Slowly, the eyes of my heart have been opening to a deep-seated worldliness that I thought was pious dissatisfaction with how little I was doing for God because I wasn't getting souls saved or doing "spiritual" work as effectively as others. I would put off time with my children or serving them, not thinking that receiving them was receiving King Jesus; and I would grumble when I had to do mundane things like mow my lawn, not considering it an act of service on the King's lawn. Too many times I have been sinfully frustrated when my ministry didn't have success, not realizing that King Jesus probably didn't want me to succeed. He would have liked me to have understood sooner than I have that the desire to prevail in ministry (even if it is for Him) could be a serpentine worldliness. The poem that Tullian shared captures it brilliantly:

My orders are to fight;

Then if I bleed, or fail,

Or strongly win, what matters it?

God only doth prevail.

The servant craveth naught

Except to serve with might.

I was not told to win or lose -

My orders are to fight.

I told Jennie that I want her to read this book. Or, we'll read it together. For me it has been spiritually forceful. Enriching. I highly recommend it.