We live in a secular age where distraction is all the rage. So says Alan Noble, author of the book Disruptive Witness. He discusses the forces in our society that make contemplation of spiritual matters difficult and gives some ideas for how Christians can break through the distractions to provide a powerful witness the world. Also in this episode: We find out about the glorious career Alan might have had if things turned out differently.
Links for this episode:
Official website
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Medium
Carillon Brewing Company
We live in a secular age where distraction is all the rage. So says Alan Noble, author of the book Disruptive Witness. He discusses the forces in our society that make contemplation of spiritual matters difficult and gives some ideas for how Christians can break through the distractions to provide a powerful witness the world. Also in this episode: We find out about the glorious career Alan might have had if things turned out differently.
Links for this episode:
Official website
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Medium
Carillon Brewing Company
I have a heart full of questions quieting all my suggestions. What is the meaning of Christian in this American life? I'm feeling awfully foolish spending my life on a message. I look around and I wonder ever if I heard it right.
Amy Mantravadi:Welcome to the(A)Millennial podcast, where we have theological conversations for today's world. I'm your host, Amy Mantravadi, coming to you from Dayton, Ohio, home to the nation's only production brewery in a museum. If you're Southern Baptist, now would be a good time to cover your ears. The Carillon Brewing Company is a living history museum that uses the techniques and equipment of the 1850s to produce its beers. These are served in a hall where you can see the brewers at work in period clothing. It Is also a full service restaurant offering up foods reflective of Dayton's German immigrant heritage. I don't drink beer myself, but I very much enjoy their soups. If you're in town, be sure to stop by and tell them I sent you just so you can hear them say,"Who?" Today, I'll be speaking with Alan Noble, author of the book Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age. In it, he considers some of the challenges that the modern world presents for sharing the Christian faith, not the least of which is that people are too distracted to give much thought to the deep things of life. He has some suggestions for how we can break through the never-ending distractions of this age to provide a beneficial disruption to the mindsets of those who do not know Christ. He also has some ideas for how we can better orient Christian practice to focus ourselves on the eternal. At this point in the podcast, I typically read a passage of scripture that relates to the day's topic, but I'm going to deviate ever so slightly from that pattern today. I will read to you instead from a 12th century devotional work by Bernard of Clairvaux called On Loving God. In it, he said something that I think is very applicable to our modern world and the points Alan raises in his book."If you wish to attain to the consummation of all desire so that nothing unfulfilled will be left, why weary yourself with fruitless efforts running hither and thither only to die long before the goal is reached? It is so that these impious ones wander in a circle, longing after something to gratify their yearnings, yet madly rejecting that which alone can bring them to their desired end, not by exhaustion, but by attainment. They wear themselves out in vain travail without reaching their blessing consummation, because they delight in creatures, not in the Creator. They want to traverse creation, trying all things one by one, rather than think of coming to him, who is Lord of all. And if their utmost longing were realized so that they should have all the world for their own, yet without possessing him who was the author of all being, then the same law of their desires would make them condemn what they had and restlessly seek him whom they still lack: that is, God himself. Rest is in him alone. Man knows no peace in the world, but he has no disturbance when he is with God." Bernard is right. When we chase after the million things of this world that occupy our attention, we end up wearied and unsatisfied. But when we place our hope in and direct our worship toward the one who created us, we have lasting peace. Keeping that in mind, let's move on to today's discussion.
Jon Guerra:[MUSIC PLAYS]
Amy Mantravadi:And I'm here with Dr. Alan Noble. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees at California State University- Bakersfield and his PhD from Baylor University. He's the editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture. He's on the leadership council of The AND Campaign, and his writing has been published by Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, The Gospel Coalition, Vox, Christianity Today, Modern Reformation, and First Things, and he is currently the assistant professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. You can find him on Twitter and Medium@thealannoble and on Facebook and Instagram@oalannoble. So thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really looking forward to talking about your book.
Alan Noble:Yeah, I'm excited. Thanks.
Amy Mantravadi:It's my understanding that before you were a professor of English and evangelical thought leader, you were somewhat of a big deal in the world of hip hop. Is that correct?
Alan Noble:Very little of that is correct, but it's true that I did record two hip hop albums before I got my PhD. Yes, that is true. And we performed some shows, but no big deal. Unfortunately, it was not to be.
Amy Mantravadi:Oh, well, I'm sorry to hear that. But I mean, if ever this evangelical thought leader thing doesn't work out for you, at least you have a fallback career.
Alan Noble:I mean, for real though, every once in a while, when grading gets overwhelming, I think wistfully, you know,"It'd be nice to just spend$10,000, which I don't have, on recording equipment and maybe do hip hop or produce or post-rock post-punk, or, you know- I don't know. Various genres interest me that I would love to be in instrumental music and things, and then I realize that I've got to pay bills, and so I'm like,"I guess I'll grade some- fix these comma splices."
Amy Mantravadi:Well, it's just nice to hear about people's past lives before they became what we know them as today. If at any point today, you want to deliver your answer in the form of a rap or some other spoken word genre, feel free to do so.
Alan Noble:Yeah. Thanks.
Amy Mantravadi:So getting now to the real topic of our discussion today, in this book, you draw a lot upon the writings of the philosopher Charles Taylor, whose work A Secular Age, published in 2007, has been particularly influential on Christian scholars in the Reformed and evangelical world. Taylor uses a couple of terms that pop up often in your own book: one is"immanent frame," and the other is"buffered self." So particularly for those of us who maybe aren't as familiar with that book, could you provide some basic definitions for those terms and explain how they fit in with your book?
Alan Noble:Yes. So they are related concepts. What Taylor is trying to do is give an account of how it is the case that we could go in the West from a situation in which in, let's say 1500, it was perfectly natural and the basic assumption that you'd be raised Christian, to the point where we are today, in the year 2021, where belief in God is possible, but it's only one of many possible belief systems available to us. And he says something like it's increasingly the less plausible for most people. So he's trying to give an account of what happened. How did things change? One of the ways he sees things changing, as he says that for virtually all modern people, we live in what he calls the"immanent frame," and you can think about this as the natural world or the strictly material world. Now he talks about it as a frame because he says even Christians and other people who believe in something transcendent- the spiritual realm, that humans are body and spirit, somebody who believes in a magic let's say, or any kind of supernatural or transcendent ideas- they're still in the immanent frame. It's just that he says that these people live in what would he call the"open immanent frame." The example I like to give is of rainbows. I found this to be a helpful example. When contemporary people, Christian or non-Christian, see a rainbow, I think they have three basic reactions. The first is they sort of elbow whoever's next to them and say,"Hey, look, there's a rainbow." So just a recognition of awe in the face of beauty. The second possibility is they take out their phone and take a picture and post on social media and say,"Hey, look, here's a rainbow," and so there we're mediating our experience with nature. And the third possibility is we might say,"Oh, wow, rainbows. I remember from third grade how rainbows are made. I think it's something like light reflecting and humidity or water." I'm not really sure. I teach English and I was homeschooled, so I don't actually know how rainbows are made, but I think that we think of the natural explanation of it, right? What am I seeing? How is it caused? What causes it, physically? What's interesting is I think, as I said, secular people, people who are not Christians and Christians, have those similar reactions to rainbows, even though for Christians, the rainbow is literally a sign from God to us. And I think if you were to ask a Christian, you're asking the average evangelical in your church,"Hey, is the rainbow a sign from God, that he's not going to flood the entire earth again?" they'd say,"Yeah. Yeah. I remember that because I remember that in Sunday school or I remember reading that passage." So yes, conceptually, we see that. Okay. But when they experience the rainbow, when they experience the physical world, they experience it not as something that has a direct connection to the transcendent- to God- but as something in this world, purely immanent, purely in this immanent frame. So that's the immanent frame. It's our default setting: the default way we move through our modern world. We tend to think of things in purely physical, materialist terms. Even if we believe in religious ideas, our default setting is not to think about them as touching the transcendent. And that's a problem with- We want to believe in the existence of a living, loving God, who is a personal God who interacts with us. The buffered self is related to this. The immanent frame is part of what allows for the buffered self. The best way to understand the buffered self is to think about what Taylor calls"the porous self," which is the sort of medieval and ancient understanding of what it meant to be a person in those times. You would expect that there are things that could, we could say, get to you. So for example, if you went to certain places, spirits could affect you. If you did certain things, you could have some sort of a spiritual reaction moving through the world. For example, there would be sacred times and sacred places, cathedrals, sites, saints' bones, all these things that could affect you. Now, what happens with the rise of the Enlightenment is that people become, Taylor says, more and more stuck in our heads so that we're more rationalist. And as a result, we tend to think of ourselves as buffered, as protected. So we can allow things to influence us if we choose, but it's always a choice. There's nothing out there that can force me to believe in certain things. And so one example that I like to think of is Communion. When I take the Lord's Supper, I believe that it's a means of grace: that God is Christ is actually ministering to me in some spiritual sense, and I don't understand exactly what that is and it's not dependent upon me understanding it. God is affecting me whether I understand it properly or not. And I think sometimes I've taken communion, not in doubt, but in a kind of ignorance or confusion, feelings of guilt. Am I good enough to take this, right? Which is bad theology, but we don't always believe good theology. We don't always feel good theology, I should say. So many times I've come to the table and I've thought."I'm not good enough to receive this." And the beautiful thing, is that in taking the Lord's Supper, God is ministering to me, even though there's nothing I'm doing to earn it. Even when I have these doubts about my own worth, God has ministered to me because he's the one that's acting. He's the one that's faithful. So that's a porous self. That's the idea of the porous self instead of the buffered self. The buffered self goes to the table and says,"Well, if I elect to this will have a certain effect, if I don't elect, then it won't," right? The buffered self imagines that your human consciousness is in command of your feelings, your emotions, your experiences, your meaning, your value, all of these sorts of things. Yes. So those are those two terms.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, thank you. I think that makes it a lot more clear and you do discuss some of that in your book, of course, but I just thought given their importance in your book, those would be two good terms to focus on. Another scholar you draw from is James K.A. Smith, whose Cultural Liturgies series makes the argument that, in the words of another one of his books, You Are What You Love. Like him, you make the point that our habits influence our loves and in turn our beliefs. How have some of the changes that have occurred in Church practice over the past century or so influenced the overall mindset and loves of Christians?
Alan Noble:Yeah, this is a great question because for a couple of reasons, but one is that it ties back to this idea of the buffered self. So if we think of ourselves as buffered, then really the only important thing is what goes on in our heads. It doesn't really matter what our habits are, our practices. I mean, we shouldn't be sinning, let's say: all right, we all agree about that. But our church practices or what we do, our liturgy, isn't really important. What's really important is the ideas. That's how contemporary people too often think, and that is directly related to what Taylor's talking about with this buffered self. If we are buffered selfs, all that matters is that we have right thinking or right doctrine, and what we do with our bodies doesn't really matter. And what Smith and others are pointing to is that actually liturgy does matter. What we do with our bodies is important- that it shapes what we love. As an example, there are so many in the Church and in church services, but I think the passing of the peace or greeting one another, hugging one another in church. I mean, we're still in the middle of the pandemic, so it kind of feels weird- it feels wrong. But that vulnerability of looking at your neighbor, your brother and sister in Christ and embracing them, and acknowledging,"The peace of Christ be with you, I'm passing the peace of Christ. We are sharing in this. We are united through Christ and there is something physical to that." And it helps shape our loves because quite honestly, it is the case, at least for me- sometimes you look at the pew next to you and you think,"I don't particularly like those people. I mean, I don't hate them or anything, but you know, they're not my people. Yeah, we're not into the same things. They have different political views than me. We go to the same church. Hey, that's great, but I don't want to greet them. I don't want to hug them. I don't want to shake their hands either. But here, this part of the liturgy breaks us out of ourself and says,"No, you know what? It doesn't really matter what you think, ok? It doesn't matter what you feel. You are a part of this body." Singing is a similar thing. Singing is bodily, right? We're using our voices. And Paul calls us to encourage one another: to exhort each other with hymns and spiritual songs. And so that means that I don't have the option to just be in my head when it's worship time. I'll tell you, when I was younger and attending a very different church in California, the music was so loud and frankly so tacky that I found myself thinking,"I don't actually need to sing. Why am I singing? I don't even like the lyrics. The music is corny. It's way too loud. My neighbors can't hear my voice anyway. I'm just not going to sing, and to avoid having really bitter thoughts, because I don't like this worship style, I'm just going to pray or I'm going to say the words of a song in my head that I do agree with." So for me at that time, this is what Charles Taylor calls"excarnation." The only part of the worship that mattered was the part that happened in my brain, right? The worship just happened in my brain. It had no external manifestation at all, but since then, I've come to realize that that's disobedient. I am called to sing. Now, that means that the music has to be quiet enough or the volume has to be low enough that other people can hear each other singing, so that we can encourage each other. But there is something that happens when we do that. There is something powerful that happens. It does shape our loves.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, I think those are some good examples. One phenomenon that I've definitely witnessed in having conversations with people is that they often seem to have little sense of the background philosophical assumptions behind their declarations and how those assumptions may in fact contradict one another. And as someone who's on Twitter a lot, this is something that comes up on Twitter a lot. So you discuss this in your book and note that our distraction is partly to blame because we're taking in so much information at such a pace and responding so emotionally to it all that there's little room left for deep thought, and we tend to pick up bits and pieces of belief here and there resulting in a hodgepodge system. You also hit on the fact that much of what we do is actually about signaling our identity to others as much as anything else. For example, you write that,"Identity formation becomes the central concern in our beliefs, or just another way we articulate that identity. Since we hold these beliefs loosely, we have less cognitive dissonance when picking and choosing beliefs that contradict one another. A lack of reflection makes it easier for us to hold contradictory beliefs, but now we see that our secular age contributes to this condition by leveling beliefs." Obviously this has an impact on how we share our faith with others and help them to understand the truths of Christianity. How might such a conversation be different in the 21st century than it was in the 19th or even in the 20th century?
Alan Noble:In the beginning 20th century, you still had a great number of people who saw Christianity as a viable belief system, and who still believed in the possibility of there being truth that is accessible through reason and reflection and meditation- these sorts of things. In other words, you still had people- and I'm thinking of the literature because that's what I do- the modernist poets, someone like T.S. Eliot or novelists like Faulkner or F. Scott Fitzgerald, they might not know what the transcendent truth is, but they believed it was out there: like we could, if we work hard enough- maybe we can get there. And what happens through the 20th century through postmodernism, which is less a movement than a description of what our society goes through, I think most people lose that faith that there is an ultimate truth out there, and instead we do have our subjective experiences and values. So I think in the we're in the earlier 20th century, it would be easier to have a conversation, and also the 19th century, certainly easier to have a meaningful conversation with somebody about the truths of faith, and maybe h ere formal apologetics would be or what we think of traditional apologetics would be helpful: talking about reliability of scriptures and these sorts of things, arguments for the existence of God. Those might've been, I think, more effective, but my fear is that today, when people hear those traditional arguments, that they don't actually interpret what we're saying as an argument for objective truth- this is the one truth- but instead they s ee, as I say in the book, us posturing a lifestyle. What we're really saying- they interpret us- is that this is what we find very satisfying, and so maybe you would find it satisfying, just like people will say- people who are into CrossFit w ill be like,"Hey, come on. This changed my life. You've got to come join this." And there's a kind of evangelism that goes on, r ight? A proselytizing."Hey, come. This is o kay." Or the other one I'd like to pick on is essential oils."You got to try this. This will revolutionize your life." And our appeal is,"This w orked for me, so it's g oing t o work for you." And I'm not saying that that when Christians evangelize, that is the conversation that we are intending to have, but I do suspect that many times, that is how we are heard when we g o give testimonies. People perceive them as another marketing pitch, as another lifestyle on offering before them, which they can pick up if it sounds appetizing or appealing or not, and so that creates the challenge. That's at the heart of this book: the argument of creating a kind of disruptive witness, which isn't a specific thing. There's not a specific method of doing this, although I give some suggestions. Instead, it involves, I think, the recognition that our hearers are probably not going to hear things the way we intend them, because we live in a secular age and they don't think in terms of God actually existing. And so part of our challenge with that background information is inviting them to question their presuppositions, inviting them to- as you read that passage about the fact that we f ail to reflect- inviting people to reflect intentionally. Saying,"Consider this. Spend some time just meditating- considering this possibility." But I also think we need to look for opportunities where the cracks in the secular world are revealed. Taylor says that all modern people feel across pressure. So on one hand, we're being p ulled towards secularism. We want to think in just in terms of the immanent frame: there is no God, it's just us down here living our lives, living our best l ives. But then he says t hat we're also always pulled to the fact that this is inadequate, that it doesn't satisfy us, t hat there's a kind of emptiness, a kind of longing. Well, I think for Christians pointing to that longing, pointing to that pole, emphasizing a nd inviting people to spend time in it a s an opportunity to disrupt their way of thinking about faith, and whether that is- in the book, I talk a lot about- beauty and suffering, I think are two of the most potent ways- when you e xperience great beauty or joy in life, then you recognize, I think, that what you're experiencing is not just an immanent thing. It's not just a this world thing. It can't just be explained through evolutionary biology and psychology. I think that the birth of a child, for example, i s this kind of experience where you think,"This means something that I can't articulate, and I could describe all the medical things that are going on, all the biological things that are going on right now, and I could explain the process of how evolution brought us to this, but it still would not get at the meaning of this event, the birth of this human being. And death, I think- this is similar t o suffering. Suffering i s similar. You can say,"Well, here's the rational, empirical explanation of what death is," but you're left feeling that something is missing. And I think those are opportunities for Christians to step in and say,"Well, you feel something's missing because something is missing, and the thing is God, b ecause he made you for eternity and he made you in his image." And that's why birth is so miraculous and death is tragic in a specific way."
Amy Mantravadi:You write that in many cases in our culture, Christianity is considered, as you just noted, another lifestyle choice among many rather than something rooted in historical fact with eternal implications. It seems to me that certain tendencies of the evangelical church have tended to exacerbate this, such as our abandonment of traditional forms of worship and emphasis on doctrine, and those are two things that you've also mentioned here. The standard narrative that has taken hold in recent decades is that people are abandoning traditional established denominations for non-denominational or broadly evangelical churches, but there's also a move of people in the opposite direction: out of more generically evangelical churches and into those that seem to have more of a connection with historic theology and practice along with more of a high church liturgy. Have you witnessed this latter trend, what would be your thoughts about it, and should we expect it to increase in the coming years? Personally, I've seen it happening with a lot of my friends.
Alan Noble:Yes, me too. I mean, that's my story. I mean, I went to charismatic and non-denominational churches in California that were untethered from tradition, that had a very low view of doctrine, or if they didn't have a low view of doctrine, they were still very shallow traditionally, so their liturgy was very low church. We would never recite a creed: the A postle's Creed, the Nicene Creed. We would not c ite catechisms. There was no sense of history. And I began attending a Presbyterian Church of America when my wife and I moved to Waco for- we pursued our graduate degrees. And it was weird at first, but it very soon felt like home. It felt like the right thing. N ow, I think part of what was going on was that both my wife and I felt a kind of emptiness, a kind of phoniness, a kind of plastic plasticity, the thinness of evangelicalism nod at us- the thinness of evangelicalism nod at us- and part of that has to do with the fact that it's so shifting. There is not a strong core center. There's the Bible, but there's lots of different interpretations and it doesn't seem like there's anything sturdy to it. And the fact that you have an exploding number of denominations and n on-denominational churches. I attended a number of churches where people who never went to seminary- they just read the Bible a lot and then decided I'm going to be a pastor, and then all of a sudden they were a pastor. Those kinds of things to me now are sort of mind boggling. Well, in the modern world- There's a great philosopher named Zygmunt Bauman. He's great, mostly because his name is Zygmunt Bauman, but he also has some really good things to say. He wrote a fabulous book called Liquid Modernity, and in it, he argues that our time- the best way to understand the world that we're living in is as a liquid state. Nothing is solid. Everything is shifting. Values are shifting. Beliefs are shifting. I dentity, belonging, places are shifting. Everything is constantly shifting, and so that gives you a kind of anxiety. I mean, if you think about being on a ship, there's a kind of anxiety. Why can't I feel safe? Why can't I feel sturdy and secure? Well, that's because e verything's shifting under your feet constantly, and sometimes evangelicalism feels like that. And so when you're tapping into- whether it's Presbyterianism or Lutheranism or Anglicanism, or I had a number of friends who became Catholic- I think part of what's happening is they realize this society is sick. This unmoored floating belief systems that appeal to the individual, this is not right. We need something that has a s ure foundation, and I would say more liturgical churches are tapping into that, and I know a number of Baptist churches who are trying to recover those things. So even though it's not a part of most Southern Baptist liturgies to recite the creeds, they're saying,"Hey, we need to go back. We need to do that. That needs to be a part of what we're doing, because we are part of this long tradition. We are grounded in something that goes beyond the contemporary brandings of denominations." So that's my take on what what's going on.
Amy Mantravadi:And of course, there's no such thing as a perfect church or denomination, so sometimes you'll see the movement is brought about by people who have had particularly bad experiences, not even because of anything doctrine or in terms of practice, but just they've had"church hurt," as some people put it. And sometimes looking to that historic tradition, it can be seen as something, like you said, that is likely less likely to give way to one person's authoritarianism because it's rooted in something much deeper with more accountability. But I think more even than just looking at which particular denominations are gaining or losing, the fact that people are feeling the need to go in these different directions does say something about what's missing in our overall culture and the way that we're practicing Christianity in the United States and beyond. In your book, you ask Christians to reconsider how we think about time. Although many people may not be aware of it, we've moved away from the historic Christian notion of time rooted in the liturgical calendar and the divide between the secular and sacred, or ordinary time and higher time, into understandings of time that are entirely rooted in a modern, scientific understanding championed by Isaac Newton and others. So this would perhaps be a good example of the immanent frame as opposed to the non-immanent frame. So you write in your book that in viewing time as raw material, we reject the idea that time may have meaning in itself: that it may be more than a measurement of intervals, but contain truths that place obligations on us to act in certain ways." What have we lost in relying solely upon modern notions of time, and how can the Church take steps to restoring our thinking about time and eternity? And I'll just add that as someone who writes novels set in the 12th century, and I'm constantly having to refer to the liturgical calendar to know what's going on in my character's life, that's helped to make me appreciate how different our thinking about time is now than it was then. So what do you think about that and what are some steps that maybe the Church can take, or should we indeed be trying to go back to previous notions of time? It seems like you feel that we should.
Alan Noble:Yes. I mean, I would say there's really no going back. This is part of the challenge of secularism is that there's no proper going back, and Taylor makes this pretty clear: that we can't go back to a state where the i mmanent frame is not the way we think of things. We can't go t o back to a place where everyone thinks of themselves as a porous self- that these understandings, these postures, these conceptions of life are so deeply rooted in our society, even our technology. So time is a great example of this. We're not going to get rid of the watch, but in t he medieval world where church bells rang the times, people thought of time differently. They conceive of time differently. We can't go back from that, right? I mean, even if you became dictator of the world that said,"All right, all t he clocks are gone." It just can't happen. It can't happen.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. It seems like there would be some negative consequences of that, potentially.
Alan Noble:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So what can we do? Well, I think there are some reasonable things that we can do that push back, I think- ways of resisting, I would say, so that the reign of mechanical time isn't total over our lives. That's the way of putting it right. We want to resist so that the reign of mechanical time is not total over our lives: that there are spaces where we're pushing back. I think Sabbath rest is one great example of it. Sabbath rest is- I talk about in the book- is from a sacred perspective, absurd. It's inefficient, it's gratuitous, it's a waste. It's prodigal. It's a waste. It's a waste of time. If you spend your Sunday- let's say you go to church and you spend time fellowshipping with friends, having them over for dinner, playing together- you know, kids playing together- spending time reading, not trying to work, not trying to labor, not trying to get ahead and make yourself a better person or more financially stable or more accomplished or more improved in some way. If you just rest in God's grace for a day, that's radically different than what the world says, because the world says,"Look, you're going to die. You've got very limited time. You need to use every second to the maximum advantage. You constantly g otta be working. You constantly have to be striving, improving yourself, ok? Maybe you don't go to work on Sunday, but you should be working out. You should be reading things that are going to improve your productivity. You're going to be doing things to make yourself a better person. So it's still always about efficiency a nd earning your place in the world, where I think Sabbath r ests says,"G od's got this." You c an just sit down and you c an just chill and you can enjoy beauty, go outside, go for a walk, just to enjoy beauty- spend time with friends, not in order to network or not in order to rest your mind so that you can be more productive the next day at work, but just because it's good to be with friends. And so those are ways- setting times where you say, this is what I'm going to do here, that this is a special time. It's very difficult to do. I have a hard time with it, to be quite honest, because the d emand, because the rest of society does not think that way. So it's difficult to resist because everyone else is like,"Well, why aren't you working on this? Get to work! Do more!" And we have to be able to say no. So I think that's something- I think a lot of churches I remember, o r actually, I don't remember being a kid when I was younger in evangelical churches, I remember no mention of Advent. No one practised Advent that I knew growing up. It wasn't- Lent was- I never heard of it, never heard of it throughout my teenage years, and now it's much more common i n evangelical churches that aren't even very liturgical to recognize,"Hey, you know what? The seasons are ways of remembering, of acknowledging God and acknowledging his story with us." And so that's, I think, another way of pushing back against that mechanical time.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. I think those are a couple good ideas. And particularly on the Sabbath, like you said, it is very hard, if you want to be practicing the Sabbath, depending on what that means. You know, it means different things to different people, but the world around us is not at all set up to have a Sabbath. So it just puts you into all kinds of practical difficulties that- When I'm reading writings by Christians of yore from centuries past where they're talking about all the things you should or shouldn't do on the Sabbath, I think,"Yeah, but your whole society was doing this," so it became very easy to just say,"I'm not going to have my business open or I'm not going to do even things a lot smaller than that," because everyone else was doing them. But now, maybe I have a conviction that I don't want to be going out to a restaurant Sunday, but none of my friends feel that way, and they're all inviting me out to eat, and if I say no, they're going to be offended. So it puts you into all these situations where you do feel that pressure in both directions and you have to kind of decide, what does it look like to live faithfully and practice the Sabbath in our society? Is it different than it would have been in a previous one? So, yeah, I think you hit on some good things there. In your book, particularly in the latter third or so of the book, you talk a lot about a double movement that involves turning from our observations of God's goodness to expressions of gratitude. Could you explain that a bit more?
Alan Noble:I wrote the book a long time ago, but here's what I think I meant. This has been a great interview because as you read passages, I'm like,"Hey, you know what, I'm glad I said that. I believe that. That's good. Good for me."
Amy Mantravadi:"I'm a pretty good writer. I'm pretty clever."
Alan Noble:"You know what? That's nice-" Writing a book, as you know, you just, you have no idea what you're doing. I mean, you do, but you don't. You have no idea if it's a terrible idea or if it's making any sense and then it's nice afterward.
Amy Mantravadi:I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm totally confident in everything I'm doing.
Alan Noble:But it's a good feeling afterwards, cause sometimes you will go,"Oh, I wrote that? Well, good for me. How about that? What do you know?" In any case...Yeah, so the idea of the double movement- I'm trying to push back against the immanent frame, and at the same time, push it back against our distracted age, and both of what those things do is they keep us in our heads. They keep us from recognizing God's presence in the world, which should lead us to gratitude and repentance and dependence upon him. And so in thinking through these two problems, I couldn't come up with- There's not a five point plan to overcome secularism or a five point plan to overcome distraction, but it seemed to me that there was one truth underneath both of those problems that I could recommend, and that is that if we make a practice- a conscious, intentional practice of being grateful to God for things- that practice pushes back against the immanent frame, because it says,"This is not all that there is." Okay? And it also pushes back against this constant mediated, constant distracted culture, which says,"Just focus on the immediate, right? Just focus on what's in front of you, what's on your screen, what's on your plate. What do you need to be working on next?" So on and so forth. And I guess what I would say is that in our contemporary culture, we're good at the first step- so observing something beautiful, something enjoyable, participating in something that gives us pleasure. But that second step, which is we draw our eyes up to God in gratitude, and we say,"Okay, now I know where this good gift comes from,"- I think secularism and distraction work against that second movement. We're less likely to do that instead. We just reflect on our own pleasure, our own enjoyment. Yeah. So that's what the double movements is about. It's nothing mystical. It's nothing revolutionary. It's merely pointing out the fact that a major challenge of living in the modern world is that we are going to be encouraged not to feel God's presence, and so we are going to have to be more intentional about recognizing when God's presence is felt.
Amy Mantravadi:Imagine that you were speaking to the mother of a young child who also happens to write novels and run a podcast and who finds her opportunities for the much prized quiet time with God to be minimal. How might such a hypothetical person find ways to break through life's continual distractions and focus on the spiritual? And I think this is the part where I'm supposed to say, you know,"Asking for a friend."
Alan Noble:I mean, I'll ask the same thing. So one of the interesting- I've got two days, I think, to finish my next book, and part of the inspiration for the second book comes from that very question, because I've been asked it many times, and as I thought about it and I reflected on it, it gave me serious pause, because I realized I don't have these things figured out either. And so then I began asking myself,"Well, why is that the case?" So I think some of it is because of a lack of willpower, lack of self-control, sloth on my own part. Okay. That's true. But sometimes it's because the contemporary world is- what I'm going to argue in this next book- a fundamentally inhuman world that demands- it puts upon us the anxieties, it puts upon us the worries, the obligations that puts upon us are incredibly draining and stressful and anxiety producing. And as a result, we're all running around frantically trying to keep our lives together, and we're exhausted. I talk in the book about a phrase that keeps echoing in my own head that I tell myself as almost as a kind of prayer. I always say to myself,"I just need to..." So it might be something like,"I just need to do the dishes and then I'll have time to read my kids," or,"I just need to grade this stack of papers, and then I'll get back to reading the Bible in the morning." You know,"I just need to get through this and then I'll exercise and then I'll feel better about myself.""I just need to..." And it never ends. It's always,"I just need to, I just need to," and there's never- that next day- that never comes. So that has drawn me to the conclusion that one of the things we'd need to do is have grace for ourselves because God has grace for us. We need to understand that one of the things that makes it difficult- it's not just our laziness. It's not just our sin nature. It's also that the structures of our society are not made for humans designed in the image of God, and because of that, it's really hard to live a human life. It's really hard to live in honor of God, and you gave a great example of that with the Sabbath, when the entire structure of society demands that you stay busy on Sunday too, it's difficult. It's hard to push back. And so we need to have grace for ourselves and recognize, okay, I'm striving, I'm working towards this, but it's only in God's grace.
Amy Mantravadi:One of the quotes you included from Charles Taylor that really struck a chord with me was where you quoted him as saying,"All joy strives for eternity, because it loses some of its sense if it doesn't last." You reflect on that quote by noting that suffering and tragedy have an ability to break through our distraction and force us to consider things beyond our present moment. As you mentioned earlier in this discussion, the coronavirus pandemic has placed the entire world in one such situation over the past year, and it's been my continual observation that rather than causing people to contemplate their mortality and the things of eternity, we've found all kinds of ways to remain distracted by lesser matters. How can we as Christians use this present situation to call people to a joy that lasts?
Alan Noble:That's a great point. Yeah. I think your analysis is exactly right, and sometimes the lesser things are actually debates about the pandemic itself. I mean, that's been the chief distraction, right? So 4,000 people a day are dying and what are we still debating? Well, should we be wearing masks, right? Or, you know, policy arguments, frantic policy arguments that are important. I'm not saying that they don't matter. Whether we should open schools or not- these things matter. But what I am saying is that when our consciousness, when our imagination primarily conceives of this pandemic in terms of policies and the culture war, which I think that is- for a significant portion of society in America, that is how they are imagining this crisis. They are imagining it in terms of the culture war of right versus left, liberty versus liberalism, whatever it might be, oppressive scientists versus entrepreneurs and free Americans. And so when that happens, it mediates our experience of the pandemic so that it doesn't feel entirely real. I don't think a day has gone by where I've really felt that 4,000 people have died or where it's like hit me, like,"Oh, that's a lot of people who didn't need to die. This is a tragedy. This is, you know, the death toll of 9/11 every day now." It feels- there's a sense of unreality to it, and that protects us. You're right. We're not thinking about mortality. So this is difficult. What can we do? Well, as the pandemic continues to grow, I think one natural reaction is that it hits closer to home, that we know people who are hospitalized, that we know people who have lost family members, and those are opportunities for us to step in and point out and walk alongside people in love. And as I say in the book, it's not that you want to encourage people to suffer needlessly, but I think when we come alongside people who are suffering in the modern world, often our response is,"How do we get them to stop mourning as quickly as possible? Do they need medication? Do we need to distract them? I'll take them out to the movies. What do I need to do so they don't feel this way?" Well, that's not a Christian response. A Christian response is"momento mori," which is remembering death, remembering it, that it's coming for you. And that should turn us to Christ and remember that this life is not all there is. Again, it's pushing back against the immanent frame. So I think as we're walking alongside people who are experiencing mourning, first step is don't be a part of the group that encourages them to just quickly get over it and stop thinking about it and stop feeling that's bad. Okay. Second is find ways of loving them, inviting them to consider the significance of this, allow them to think about the meaning, allow them to feel it- not to torture them, not to manipulate them, but because it is real and because you don't want them to hide from the truth. So those things I think are important. I think publicly Christians ought to be some of the people who are being solemn about this crisis, who are recognizing this solemnity, the tragedy of it, right? So instead of being distracted with all these policy debates, some of which are important, but instead we ought to be a force pushing back and saying,"Thousands of people are dying. What are we doing to mourn this? What are we doing to care for the people who've lost loved ones?" We can treat this as a more human crisis. We have the biblical framework to do that, and I think that would maybe help our neighbors recognize, like you're saying,"Hey, this is real. People are dying. I'm going to die. What does that mean for my life?"
Amy Mantravadi:I've been seeing on social media, this hashtag:#hcqa1. Does that mean anything to you?
Alan Noble:Yes, good plug. So this is the Heidelberg Catechism first question and answer, which is what is our only comfort in life and death: that we are not our own but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. And that is the heart of my next book, which is tentatively titled something like"You Are not Your Own," in which I'm going to argue that the fundamental inhumanity of our contemporary society, which I mentioned earlier, stems from the fact that we have a false anthropology. Our society is built for a certain kind of human. It assumes we're certain kinds of beings. It assumes that we are our own and we belong to ourselves, and so our institutions, our systems, our laws are myths. Our stories, our values, our markets all assume that we are people who belong to ourselves, not to God, and the ramifications of that are innumerable, and they lead to a society that is inhuman. I mean, all societies are built assuming what a human being is, what they're for and what it means to have human flourishing. So if we have a society that gets that question wrong, that doesn't actually build a society for humans as God created us, then we're going to be walking around in a place that doesn't work for us- that doesn't fit, that treats us wrong- and we're going to feel terrible, which I think a lot of people do. And the response to that is the true anthropology, the biblical anthropology, which is that catechism answer, that we are not our own but belong body and soul, in life and death to Christ, and that I think changes things.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, thanks for sharing about that. I'm really looking forward to your new book. I enjoyed the first one, so hopefully the second one will be just as good. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Alan Noble, for joining me to talk today. It's been a pleasure.
Alan Noble:Thank you. Yes. I've had a great time.
Jon Guerra:[inaudible]
Amy Mantravadi:It was an honor to speak with Alan today about his book, Disruptive Witness, which is available from InterVarsity Press. I hope the discussions on this podcast provoke a lot of positive thought for you as they do for me. The music you've been hearing is the song"Citizens" by Jon Guerra off his album Keeper of Days. He will be my guest on the podcast next week, so be sure to listen and hear him explain what led him to write this song and what we can expect from him in the near future."Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever." Amen. Have a great week.
Jon Guerra:Is there a way to live always living in enemy hallways? Don't know my foes from my friends and don't know my friends anymore. Power has several prizes. Handcuffs can come in all sizes. Love has a million disguises, but winning is simply not one.