The Heidelberg Catechism tells us that our only comfort in life and death is that we belong to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ, but for many people in the modern West, this seems like a false comfort designed to keep us in chains. In his new book, You Are Not Your Own, Dr. Alan Noble argues that the false promises of self-belonging have left us with a world that is inhuman: obsessed with efficiency, built upon self-promotion, and unable to offer hope for eternity. He offers some correctives to popular societal maxims and points us to the hope that is found in Christ. Also in this episode: Listen to the very end to hear us get confused about one of Tim Keller's degrees.
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The Heidelberg Catechism tells us that our only comfort in life and death is that we belong to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ, but for many people in the modern West, this seems like a false comfort designed to keep us in chains. In his new book, You Are Not Your Own, Dr. Alan Noble argues that the false promises of self-belonging have left us with a world that is inhuman: obsessed with efficiency, built upon self-promotion, and unable to offer hope for eternity. He offers some correctives to popular societal maxims and points us to the hope that is found in Christ. Also in this episode: Listen to the very end to hear us get confused about one of Tim Keller's degrees.
Links for this episode:
Purchase the book
Official website
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Medium
[MUSIC]
Amy Mantravadi:Hello and welcome to another episode of the(A)Millennial podcast. My name is Amy Mantravadi, and I'll be your host until such time as I am appointed US ambassador to the United Kingdom. Today, I'm going to be speaking with Dr. Alan Noble about his book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. There's perhaps no concept more fundamental to the modern Western mind than this: that we are free and no one owns us, which is to say that we belong to ourselves. We are or ought to be completely autonomous actors, free to choose from a plethora of options. We must suffer under no compulsion or conditioning, but discover the truth within ourselves and speak it. My young son has a book gifted to him by a friend that features the popular characters of the Peanuts comic strip. In it, Charlie brown and Snoopy proclaim,"Be true to yourself. It's a one job you've got." It was the character Polonius in Shakespeare's play Hamlet who told his son Laertes,"To thine own self be true," though it is worth noting that the phrase carried a somewhat different meaning in that context, and in any case, Polonius is a pompous windbag. Relative, internal, or psychological notions of truth clash with the absolute, transcendent truth of the Christian scriptures. The Bible is clear from the beginning that human beings were created by God and bear his image. We belong to our Creator and not ourselves. The Lord proclaimed through the prophet Ezekiel,"Behold, all souls are mine. The soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine," and the Psalmist implores us,"Know that the Lord himself is God. It is he who has made us and not we ourselves." It is this belonging to God that places us in a covenantal relationship with him and compels us to obey his commands. For example, when the Lord made a covenant with Noah and by extension with all of us living today, he outlawed murder on the basis that all human beings belonged to him saying,"Surely I will require your lifeblood. From every beast I will require it, and from every man. From every man's brother, I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man." As the story of the Bible continues, we get a clearer picture of what it means to belong to God. While all of humanity belongs to him in a general sense, those who are united to Jesus Christ belong in a much more intimate and salvific sense, being directly indwelt by the Holy Spirit. As the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians,"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God and that you are not your own for you? You have been bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body." Not all humans belong to Christ in this way, but only those who have placed their faith in his life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of their sins. As Paul wrote elsewhere, we can either belong to Christ and practice righteousness or take the path of disobedience. In Romans 6:16-18 he says,"Do you not know that when you present yourself to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves to righteousness." But we should not think of slavery to righteousness in anything like the same fashion as slavery to sin, for there is one master who seeks our good and one who seeks our destruction. It is only in acknowledging that we belong to God and gladly serving him with our lives that we are free from the burdens we carry: the burden of sin, the burden of justifying our own existence, the burden of trying to create meaning out of nothing, and the burden of death. For the death we die as Christians, we die with Christ that we may be raised with him to all eternity. To quote from Paul one more time,"But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ and may be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead." The title of Allan's book is taken from the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, a theological document published in the German city of Heidelberg in 1563. It asks,"What is your only comfort in life and death?" and offers this reply:"That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ." Just what that means and how it differs from the prevailing philosophy in modern Western society will be our topic of discussion for today. Before ado is furthered any further, let's head to the interview.
Jon Guerra:[MUSIC]
Amy Mantravadi:And I'm here with Alan Noble, who is the author of the new book You Are Not Your Own. He was educated at California State University in Bakersfield for his bachelor's and master's degrees and at Baylor University for his PhD. He is 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, among others. He is currently the assistant professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, and his books include Disruptive Witness, which we previously talked about, and You Are Not Your Own, which we're going to talk about today. And you can find him on Twitter and Medium@thealannoble and on Facebook and Instagram@oalannoble. So, Alan, thank you so much for joining me today.
Alan Noble:Thank you. Is my Medium- it really is@thealannoble. I got both of them: on Twitter and Medium. Good for me. I didn't realize that. Forgot.
Amy Mantravadi:Made it easier for me to just combine it.
Alan Noble:You know, sometimes I do things right.
Amy Mantravadi:Yes. So before we begin, I just wanted to say, you're the first two-time guest on this podcast...
Alan Noble:Yes!
Amy Mantravadi:...which I think necessitates that I ask, did you not learn your lesson the first time?
Alan Noble:I do have a bad habit of saying"yes" to podcasts. So if you're listening to this and have a podcast, just bear that in mind. I have a hard time saying"no," so be gentle with me.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, I like to see that you're really doing a good job of promoting your identity like that.
Alan Noble:I like to think of it more as trying to get the book in front of enough people to justify the years I've spent working on it.
Amy Mantravadi:Oh, trust me, as a- I say a fellow writer, but not on the same level as you- but as a fellow writer, I understand.
Alan Noble:It's so hard.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. So on my refrigerator, I have a magnet that I picked up in a shop some years ago, and it has, I guess, what you could call an artistic representation of the Loch Ness monster. And it reads,"The most important thing is that I believe in myself."
Alan Noble:That' s good.
Amy Mantravadi:That was how I reacted to it too. That's why I bought it. Obviously the message is meant to be humorous given Nessy's almost certainly nonexistent status, but if there is one message that is promoted by Western culture from infancy to old age, it is that we must all believe in ourselves, march to the beat of our own drum, and trust our hearts. We belong to ourselves and are free from external restraint, even as we have a duty to express our own identity and speak our own truth. So in your book, you label this"the responsibilities of self-belonging" and argue that it is ultimately as burdensome as it is freeing, but it sounds so good to believe in ourselves. What do you see as the fatal flaw in this maxim, and how does it differ from the message of the Bible?
Alan Noble:Were you reading my words or was that a question? The part about"from birth," cause I think- I agree with you or I'm agreeing with myself.
Amy Mantravadi:It is not a direct quote, but you inspired me, and I know you've said many things like that.
Alan Noble:Well, I agree with it, whatever you wrote. I agree with that. That is true. I've been trying to figure out a good image that tries to capture both the sense of excitement and power that people feel in a modern world when they come to believe that they are their own- because it is a very empowering, at least on the surface, feeling, but it's also quickly followed with a sense of despair or being overwhelmed. And one of the images I think about is being adrift in the sea and trying to pull yourself up out of the ocean. Imagine that to make a great life, you have to rise out of the ocean. You're not on the shore, you're in the middle of the ocean. You have to pull yourself up by your own, you know, identity straps, and of course you can't do that. You have to have something to cling on to that will allow you to pull yourself up. But on the other hand, thinking that you're free- that you're not attached to anything, nothing's holding you up, nothing's holding you back. It's just you that is responsible. There is a feeling of excitement because you get to define yourself. You get to choose your path. For a long time, when I heard people talking about using this phrase, you know,"Speak your truth," or,"I'm just saying my truth," or whatever, I thought it was like a meme- like a joke thing or something. And then I saw people using it unironically, and I was like,"Oh no. They mean that. That's scary." So that's a burden. Why is it wrong? I mean, it overwhelms us because just like trying to pull yourself out of the ocean and you don't have enough strength, you will keep trying over and over and you'll keep pushing yourself up and pushing and pushing and kicking, but you won't rise. You'll never rise out of the[inaudible]. So there's the feeling - the experience of living in the modern world is a Sisyphean experience. And that's why the cover of my book has Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, because that's what it's like: you feel like you're doing the same thing over and over, and there's never any real movement, so it's not satisfying. In fact, it's overwhelming and depressing and distressing, and we often self-medicate in order to cope with the suffering because of it. But it's also - more fundamentally, it's unbiblical - unbiblical anthropology because the biblical anthropology is that we fundamentally are not our own, but we belong body and soul in life and death to our faithful savior, Jesus Christ, as to Heidelberg Catechism reads, first question and answer. So any anthropology besides the biblical anthropology is going to leave us deprived, impoverished, exhausted, and overwhelmed in one way or another.
Amy Mantravadi:You know, every once in a while on Twitter- where I spend entirely too much time- I'll say something to the effect that I don't like the phrase,"Speak your truth." And always I have some people who are kind of surprised that I would say that, or sometimes I've commented on the song,"Let It Go," that Elsa sings in Frozen where she says,"No right, no wrong, no rules for me." And I have many people try to explain to me how in the narrative of the story- it doesn't mean what you think it means. Actually, it's the opposite of what you think it means. And I'm like,"I don't think so. I don't think that's why people are so happy when they're singing it." I think honestly, as silly as it sounds that- I mean, Frozen was a very popular movie and watched by a whole generation of children- and that scene where she's creating a whole castle out of these magical powers that she's now showing to everyone that she's always had and she has to express. And so the song about identity expression, as silly as it sounds- I mean, to me that's just about the best example of the kind of mindset you're talking about. And so on the topic of what you're talking about- how it kind of exhausts us, trying to do that- the subtitle of your book, Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, indicates your belief that the responsibilities of self-belonging have created this environment that is antithetical to human flourishing as God intended it. And you provide numerous examples of this in the book, such as the intense competition we feel in all spheres of life; the existential crisis students can face over choosing the perfect career; the widespread reliance on pornography for sexual gratification, which is having just incredibly negative effects on our society; the massive rise in cases of depression and anxiety; and the constant push for greater efficiency at the expense of everything else. You talked about that a lot. One question that kept entering my mind as I was reading was how much of our inhuman situation is due to modern technology and culture, and how much is simply the result of living in a fallen world that is no longer the optimal environment that God designed? Basically have the changes of the past few centuries exacerbated sinful tendencies that were already present in human hearts, or are we seeing something really new?
Alan Noble:Yeah, I think it's about 60:32. That's a joke. I'm sorry. I like to quantify things that are non-quantifiable. Yeah, 64% the Fall and 32%, and the other 4%, I don't know. Yeah, this is something I wrestled with. Maybe it's a cop out because it's a huge question. And in order to answer that we would have to do historical comparison and figure out, okay, well, how's this compare to a previous generation and the generation before that and generation before that? In some ways we have a tendency to try to identify past eras or civilizations as overall superior or inferior, and I think that those kinds of judgments are very difficult to make. So here's where I landed on that question. It is an important question. It's a very valid question. I suspect it's the case that every civilization has in some way misinterpreted or misconstrued what it means to be human because of the Fall, and the result of that has been societies that have created laws that are in one way or another inhuman. Not all of the laws are. Some, in fact, create very humane laws: laws against murder, for example, right? And my guess would be that you could write the kind of book I tried to write here at any point in human history, except that it wouldn't be talking about the same things because at different points in history, we have different problems we're wrestling with. So for example, today most people in the West would agree that something like slavery, especially race-based slavery, is antithetical to the way God created us. It's immoral, especially immoral because we're all made in the image of God, but that hasn't always been the case. But it also hasn't always been the case that we have heavily relied on technology over things like real human contact as we interact with each other, and as we set up our businesses, and our laws, and our practices, and or institutions. So the answer to the question- how much of this is just the fall and how much of this is the specific problems of our society?- I can't- I know I jokingly gave out a percentage, but I can't actually tease those things out. What I can say is that in our time, the specific challenges with the specific ways that the Fall is manifesting in cancerous, dangerous ways are the ways that I try to describe in the book.
Amy Mantravadi:And I mean, like you, I couldn't- it would be impossible to give a percentage on that, especially a percentage that added up to a hundred. But I do sometimes think that there have always been regimes and groups that wanted to put forward basically totalitarian ways of thinking- like ways of thinking that took over everything about how a person operates and that would reach to every person, but without the technological means to control people- You think about empires of years past, and in theory, they controlled huge swaths of land, but they didn't actually: they weren't in the homes of every person, you know, talking to them. But now we're all on our smartphones constantly, so even though we're living in in theory and non-totalitarian regime, just the tools that are available for anybody who wants to spread their ideas and have them take hold of people's hearts are so much more powerful now. And I think that's why in the 20th century, we saw some of the worst totalitarian regimes and most murderous we'd ever seen, because even before the smartphone just radio and all kinds of technologies have allowed that messaging to get out in ways that it really couldn't before. So the positive thing is that we're also able to get the gospel out in ways we haven't been able to before, but on the negative side, there's been a lot negative that has come from those technologies, which in and of themselves are not bad, but all these good things in God's creation, even good things we create can be so easily corrupted.
Alan Noble:Yeah, and I wanted to avoid- cause sometimes I feel like what I've seen happen is people will identify systemic problems, right? So for example, technology: the way we use technology or the way technology uses us, I guess, better to say. And they'll begin to offer a critique of society: to say,"Well, you know, maybe we need to rethink our relationship with technology." And then somebody will come along and say,"Look, the world is fallen. It's just fallen. There's always going to be- because there's sin, there's always going to be problems and we just kind of have to live with it." And I feel like sometimes that's used as an excuse not to look at the specific ways we have allowed injustice or sin or disorder or chaos or rebellion against God to permeate our societies. So in my mind, what I'm thinking is my task, what I am called to do, is to look at where I am in history and geography and identify the places where I can be a witness for Christ. And to do that well, I've got to look at specifics, and as you rightly point out, maybe the human heart hasn't fundamentally changed, but things have changed because there are, as you say, things that can be accomplished today because of the way our society has connected and progressed and things that could not have been accomplished a hundred years ago or even 50 or 25 years ago. And those differences matter when we're thinking about,"What does it mean to live as a faithful Christian in society?" And that's part of what I'm trying to talk about.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. It seems like what you're hitting on there is basically letting the perfect be the enemy of the good: saying,"Well, we're never going to get rid of all the effects of the Fall, so why should we try to address, you know, some of these things that we could address?" And I guess in a positive way, you could say it's just a feeling of being overwhelmed and a feeling of despair, but in a negative way, you could say it's a kind of complacency and a way to just put off dealing with the problems. That's something we're probably always going to have to fight against. So there's a contradiction at the heart of the modern impulse toward identity creation and expression that I've often observed- namely that, and this is a quote from your book,"Identity always requires the acknowledgement of other people." And that's the end of the quote there, but it can never be purely internal, but must relate to something external. I wouldn't want to credit my words to you and ruins people's impression of your writing.
Alan Noble:Well, no, that was good. No, I appreciate that. I'll take it. I'll take that.
Amy Mantravadi:Okay. All right. Not only do all declared identities exist in contrast to other identities, but there is an innate human desire to either have our identity affirmed by others or gain some kind of self-righteous satisfaction from the rejection. You argue that what ends up happening when people disassociate from historical forms of identity, such as religious beliefs or ethnic groupings, is that they end up clustering around new shared identities. How has this affected the shape of our society, particularly in the political sphere?
Alan Noble:So my theory is- and in that section of the book, I'm trying to think through what happens when we think of ourselves as fairly radically autonomous, because we still have to live in community, whether we want to or not. And there are ways that we can keep each other separated. So for example, if we have automatic or self checkout at the grocery store, that enables me to live more isolated and less indebted to my neighbors who in the past would have been working as cashiers. So there are ways we can separate, but for the most part, we still remain in community and to pass laws that will protect me, I'm going to need to create a coalition of people with shared interests. And so I think one of the things that you see happening is identity politics. You see people grouping around and signing up, ascribing to larger groups with shared interests, which are not essentially shared. In other words, there's nothing essential about it, but they're choosing to group themselves with a group because they perceive it to be looking out for their interest. And so I think this is one way of thinking about the culture wars, which define a lot of at least our political discourse, but also our politics in America where someone will feel like they need protection in society against laws that will hurt them and their family or them and their friends, and so they'll join up with some group or some political party that has- or some politicians with an agenda that will claim that it's going to take care of them, but how that is different than the past is- cause, you know, people have always looked out- they've always had self-interest. But what I think has changed in the past is that in previous times- not always, but at times in the West- you've had the idea of the common good. So for example, in early Greek democracies in Athens, there was at least the ideal that when you're voting and you're helping to pass laws, when you're advocating for policies, you want things that are not for your private good, but for the common good: what is actually going to be good for my community, my neighbors. And if we're all just fractured individuals, then the common good doesn't even make sense. There is no common good because that would require some sort of universal values, which we don't have. We just have our personal convictions. So I do think that this idea of identity inevitably leads us towards an identity politics, and once you get there, then we're no longer talking about,"Okay, what is good? What is good for my neighbor? What is good for our society or your community or city?" Instead, we're negotiating, you know,"I'm going to support this because you're going to make sure you're helping my people in this way," and it becomes just different self-interested parties. I don't think democracy can last like that, or at least not successful human flourishing, as you mentioned earlier.
Amy Mantravadi:And maybe people would not say that they're abandoning any notion of the common good, but what they do is basically take the part of the country that doesn't agree with them and sort of declare that to be not the"real America" or what Hillary Clinton referred to:"a basket of deplorables." You know, I adhere to the notion of total depravity, so we are all deplorable in a certain way, but basically ignoring the desires and needs of one group of the population by basically painting them out of the picture and saying,"They're so crazy that we don't have to worry about their good because they're just, I guess, in a way deplorable." And both the Right and the Left does this, so I'm not just trying to pick on Hillary Clinton. But I think that that sort of- you could say maybe even as much as not having a notion of the common good, it's a highly shrinking notion of the common good, getting smaller and smaller as we cancel more and more people and don't have to worry about their concerns.
Alan Noble:That's right. Yeah. If we can exclude them then- yeah, you're absolutely correct. The Right and the Left do this. They'll make some argument that essentially says,"We can't reach these people." I hate this about both major political parties in America: they'll get to a point where they'll say,"You know, this demographic in America, they don't tend to vote for us, so we're not even going to take their concerns, their needs into consideration." And that seems to me so dangerous when we have a political- especially at the federal level saying,"Okay, well, I recognize there's this huge group, this huge population that has these fears, these concerns, these issues, but because they don't usually vote for my party, I'm not even going to address them. I'm not even going to care to listen to them. I'm not going to try to compromise. My constituents really are just my voters and not the entire population that voted." And you're right. So we can write them out of the picture and now we can ignore them. And that's very dangerous.
Amy Mantravadi:I've mentioned that you're a professor of English, so I figured I'd throw in one question that sort of appeals to that side of your identity, you could say. In John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, that's popped up in modern discussions about autonomy and authenticity- In it, we see Satan fallen from heaven and taking up his forced abode in hell, where he chooses to embrace his perceived autonomy. He says,"The mind is its own place, and in it itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." And he later concludes that,"To reign is worth ambition though in hell. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
Alan Noble:That's right.
Amy Mantravadi:So while Milton presented this attitude as an example of literal satanic thinking, many modern readers sympathize with it and even consider Satan a kind of heroic character, or at least an antihero rather than a true villain. Yet the fact remains that the price of reigning in this scenario is that one must reside in hell. So what lessons might we take from that passage in Paradise Lost, and how does it fit in with what you've been arguing? It was just- it definitely entered my mind as I was reading what you were saying in the book.
Alan Noble:Absolutely. No, that's one of the critical passages in literature that deals with this. And as you mentioned, even fairly early readers, you know, early romantics were reading Milton and thinking,"You know what, I think Satan's the hero." I want to say it's Shelley who said that Milton was of Satan's party without knowing it- it might've been somebody else- because he made Satan seems so cool. And he does[inaudible]. When you think about the series of revolutions that happen the early 19th century, but then also continue, it's certainly very much in our American DNA, the idea of revolting against, not being constrained or controlled by some external authority figure. I mean, I'm not going to get into the politics of it, but the whole COVID vaccination thing: there is at least a demographic that I would say in America are reacting to it not because of prudential concerns about the dangers of the vaccine or something, but because they just fundamentally don't want the federal government telling them what to do. It's kind of built into American DNA. You know, it's part of the revolutionary war: it's there. We would rather have liberty than any kind of - freedom - not everyone, but that is a very common theme. And what I want to focus on, and this is absolutely not an original thought, but as you mentioned, this is satanic thinking for Milton: a freedom that is defined as freedom from restraint. That is demonic. It's a false freedom, an illusion of freedom. It's freedom, but being in hell. True freedom for Milton as for the Church for thousands of years - true freedom has been perceived as freedom towards God or freedom to do what is right. And the way I like to talk to my students about it is to think - in that passage where Christ says - this is a paraphrase - "If you're my servants, then you will abide in my word, and then you'll know the truth and the truth will set you free." And I like to point out that we tend to focus - or at least that phrase is used in popular culture, "The truth will set you free." We exclude the first half. We all want freedom, but notice that Christ says that freedom is actually tied to abiding in the Word, which means obedience. So freedom, according to Christ, is not defined as freedom from limits. It's actually being limited by the right things: godly limits, limits that reflect our nature as creatures created by God. And that's what's counter-cultural and difficult for us to understand, because it does seem glorious to be Satan in hell, revolting against a tyrant. It does seem to be heroic, to be lost at sea, trying to pull yourself out of the water, although never being able to make it out. It's a false heroism that leaves us in hell - leaves us destitute and not free at all, really. Enslaved to our passions, our desires, our appetites, our poverty.
Amy Mantravadi:And certainly the apostle Paul talked about that a lot in his epistles where he says,"You're slaves of the one whom you obey," and that you're either basically slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness. And when I read that passage in my modern way of thinking, it can seem really bad. You know, I don't want to be a slave to anything. But the point there as you get at particularly in the last section of your book is that you're either a slave of someone who doesn't have your best interest at heart or a slave of someone who knows your best interest far better than you ever could and is always working for it. So, yeah, I think that sort of fits into what you're saying there. So while highly industrialized, Western nations have tended toward ever more extreme forms of individualism, other parts of the world seem to still be influenced by communal obligations a lot more. The West has done a good job of exporting its ideals throughout the world, but I saw a headline in recent years that in the deeply communal Chinese society, where adult children have cared for their parents for millennia, the government is now taking action to force its younger citizens, many of whom have moved to the city for better jobs, to visit their aging relatives. So have you given any thought to how the responsibilities of self-belonging are expressed in different ways globally? And how does this play into your argument that familial relationships and even geographical location place moral obligations upon us?
Alan Noble:So this is one of the challenges of writing a big book where you're making a big thesis, cause there are lots of exceptions and the exceptions are really fascinating. I don't get into them in the book, but there are many of them. We see this in other countries and other cultures. We see this in immigrant cultures, particularly first-generation immigrants in the United States: they tend to keep that culture. And so for example, I was able to give a talk about this book in Virginia, and I met a wonderful woman who was from a South American culture and she was describing- she was lamenting that upon coming to the United States, one of the things that she's experienced is that people have given her grief because she still has these communal attitudes and these communal practices. So she said, for example, that she really enjoys making dinner for her husband and her co-workers shamed her for that. And their attitude was,"Hey, you shouldn't be making dinner for your husband, but you shouldn't be making dinner at all. You should just be buying food out. You don't have to cook." And she was also sort of shamed for not having a very driven career. There was this idea that she needs to be highly focused on her career and on progressing, and I don't remember what line of work shoes in, but her attitude was that she was going to do her well work excellently, but that her worth and her identity wasn't tied up with her career. And she felt kind of attacked by American culture: by the people she was interacting with. I found that so fascinating, and I've talked with other people that have expressed similar things, and the consensus that I've heard seems to be by the second or third generation of an immigrant family moving here, usually American society tends to win out: that the family ties start to separate, People start moving apart, people don't feel that obligation to go visit grandma and grandpa to take care of them. And that's not always the case, but as you said, we are exporting our values and people from more communal cultures that move here- I think our culture has very corrosive effects on culture and ethnicity: tends to break it down and replace it with a very commercial, market driven culture. So it is true that other cultures have been able to withstand that for a while, and I think that's wonderful. I don't want to speculate on whether they'll be able to hold that up for long or whether the march of technology and the internet, which flattens everything, is going to overwhelm their cultures. I hope that it's not the case. I don't know. I can't read the future.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. And thinking about- for example, my husband's father is from India and that whole side of his family, which is a deeply communal society, and probably of the nations that have progressed technologically to a significant level, I think India is probably just about the most communal in terms of how it's remained. But I wouldn't want to say that,"Oh, well, because India is a more communal society, everything is great there," because it's certainly not, nor would I want to say that everything's great here. But the great thing about the scriptures is that they have a sense of both the individual and the communal, and there's a wonderful balance there between the fact that each of us has a responsibility to believe and follow God, but also that we're part of a Church and we're part of a community, and you have this kind of message that to me is a real balance between Eastern culture and Western culture, because it tries to bring both of those things together. But I think the march of capitalism more than anything, capitalism and Western media being exported, I think are going to continue to make the East look a lot more like the West in those kinds of ways, even if we do import some things from the East. But all the stuff about communal identity and honoring elders and stuff: that is not anything that we're importing. And if you want to get looked at weird today, be a woman my age who says you just want to stay home and take care of your kids. You know, that's sort of- I mean, and in conservative Christian culture that I'm in, obviously there's an idolization of the mother who stays at home and homeschools all her kids, so it can go in the other direction. But in the broader culture that is[inaudible] looked at as,"Well, you're not really making an effort. You're not really trying. You need to get out there and you need to have a career." And so, yeah, I think that definitely hits us from a lot of different angles.
Alan Noble:Yeah. The impression I have is that very often women who choose to stay home with their kids, people look at them or treat them as if they decided to give up a life:"You're done living. You're just not interested in doing anything. What you're doing doesn't count." And to me, that's one of the signs of the deep inhumanity of our society when caring for children, human children- which is literally one of the most basic functions of human life is reproducing and raising children, right? When that is treated as unnatural. Okay. That's clearly a sign that our society is deeply disordered. And you're right: in conservative circles, there's often this idolization of women who don't want a career and choose to stay home and homeschool. But even then, I think very often on the one hand, those kinds of subcultures will idolize those mothers, but they'll also still treat them as uninteresting, right? Like,"She doesn't really have anything to say," or,"She's not really important. There's nothing going on there." So I feel like there's- even when people are supportive of it, sometimes I feel like there's a mixture of this secular idea of needing to create an identity that's meaningful and exciting and interesting. And if you're staying at home, you're not doing that.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, even if you stay at home, you can have a flourishing Instagram account. And, you know, I see a lot of stay at home moms- they'll have these pictures of perfectly, immaculately decorated and cleaned houses and that's part of an identity too. And their hair and makeup is all perfect. And, you know, as a stay at home mom, I know that that's just not realistic in any way, unless you're not sleeping. I that our culture and it's valuing of economic productivity and efficiency above everything else really doesn't leave any room for the hustle and bustle of a normal human life and all the dirty diapers and different things that that involves. So yeah, I think that's a good point. You also make the point in your book that when all truth is individual, there can be no such thing as the common good, which you've already mentioned here in this interview. A biblical anthropology rooted in the fact that all humans are created in God's image allows us to promote the flourishing of every member of society without reference to how it benefits us individually. Indeed, the nearly universal embrace of human rights in the West is resting upon a foundation of Christian principles rather than anything secular, much as some would like to deny it. The historian Tom Holland makes this point in his recent book, Dominion, when he speaks about the founding of the American republic, and I'll just give a quote here. He says,"That all men had been created equal and endowed within inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers that every human being was created in God's image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic, no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might appear to think, was the book of Genesis." And that's the end of the quote. So my question light of all this, and I've been rambling a little bit, is the following: as our society increasingly rejects Christian principles and insists that we all belong to ourselves, will we see an ultimate erosion of belief in human rights as we see the erosion of any notion of a common good?
Alan Noble:Yeah. So I mean, we will, and I think the way it will appear, the format it will take is an incoherent understanding of what human rights are- in an expanding sense of what human rights are. Not expanding reasonably, but expanding to benefit certain parties. And this has always been the challenge of human rights, right? So in the Founding, human rights were defined correctly in many ways, but then in terms of slavery, actually they weren't. So I think we'll still have this problem of human rights continually being redefined to fit a dominant society or dominant culture, and in that sense, not really be tied to the idea of Imago Dei, but instead be tied to power and efficiency, which in our culture is actually much more persuasive than the Bible. So if I can make a big enough stink, if I can create enough political pressure, I can create a human right. So for example, if I can get enough people in America to believe that a specific kind of universal health care is a basic human right, then it is a basic human right in effect, right? And so that's the way I think it can be expanded. I see people talking about this in these ways all the time, where they will take an issue that is a specific issue to their identity group or whatever- it may be an issue of justice, but all of a sudden when they're talking about it, it becomes an issue of human rights. So if you don't affirm me in specific ways, then there's a way in which you're offending my human rights. Well, what exactly are those rights? How are they constituted? Where are they coming from? And I think as with other issues we've talked about, this spans the political parties. Both political parties do this- all kinds of people. Christians can do this too. They can feel like if they assert something loudly enough and they could get the political pressure, then they can make something a human right that's not fundamentally. So I don't see us going back at least completely against most of what we typically call human rights, but I do see us expanding the definition and contracting in order to fit a dominant powerful culture, whatever that may be at that particular point in history.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. I think you make a good point there about the expansion, which is in some way a cheapening, of the notion of human rights. And I guess my personal concern is that if we no longer have any common agreement about where human rights come from or what they are, then when the time comes that we need to justify something or reject it based on human rights concerns, that we're not going to have the philosophical foundation to do that, and it will open up the potential for all kinds of bad things. And one hates to draw on the Nazi example, but if you think about the things that they were able to justify in their culture or the things that were able to be justified in the Soviet union or under Pol Pot's regime, or even things we're justifying here in America. First, you have kind of this redefinition of what a human being is and what human beings are owed, and once you make someone not fully human or take away some of their rights, you can do all kinds of terrible things to them. So I think that if you have everybody disagreeing on what truth is, or only having an individual notion of truth but then thinking that has to be universally applied to everyone- like you said, that's a basic contradiction and definitely going to make things difficult. So we've talked a lot about the problems that are being brought about by this thinking that we are our own. I wanted to move on to talk a little bit about the part of the book where you describe that we actually belong to God and what that entails. So when I'm putting my son to bed every night, I will always put my hand on his head and say,"May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance on you and give you peace." And if my son is disobedient, I remind him that he must obey because,"The Lord is God. It is he who made us, and not we ourselves." If I'm in more of a calm mood, I'll say that. Sometimes, you know, it's just more of a,"No!" These two scriptural quotations, I feel, cut to the heart of what it means to belong to God: to a God who accepts us as his children. And you write in your book that,"It is only in God that we can find someone who can know us without any deception and love us still. Our identity is grounded in the loving gaze of God." And I thought that was sort of a great thought, very much tied to that verse where it's talking about the light of his countenance. But unfortunately for many of those who have experienced the evils of this inhuman world, and particularly those who have been hurt by loved ones or spiritual authorities, it's hard to believe that God truly loves us and desires our good, and we cower before his face instead of being comforted by it. So how do the words of scripture and the Heidelberg Catechism grant us that eternal comfort that we crave?
Alan Noble:I mean, the answer is the gospel. If we are not our own, but belong to Christ, then that means we are not actually lost at sea floundering, trying to pull ourselves out of the water hopelessly: that there is somebody else who can pluck us out. And the way I like to think about it is that we actually stand before God moment by moment. We're all living before God, which as you say can be terrifying because to live before a holy God is to be aware of your sin and your inadequacy. But at the same time, if you understand grace, if you understand the gospel, then you know that you are not standing before God on your own merits, but when he looks upon you, he sees the righteousness of his son. That is what gives us the strength and the competence to stand before God moment by moment, and also the love and gratitude which inspires us to act obediently and to pursue him. And that's really the only way to stand before a holy God is through grace. Anything else you'll just be crushed. Anything else would be even worse than the responsibilities of self-belonging. If you had to stand before God to justify yourself, that would be too much. But when we come to understand grace adequately, come to feel it, then we can delight in the fact that we live before a God who knows us, as you said that I said, who knows us truly without deception and who loves us still. And earlier we were talking about- you mentioned that contradiction built into modern conceptions of identity, where on the one hand we want to be self-created and we want to be utterly unreliant upon other people to craft an identity, but identity is always a presentation of the self to another. There always has to be a witness. And that's one of the reasons it's so reassuring to live before God, because there's always a witness, but he's the one true witness. He's not the witness who is conned by our masks that we put on, by our Instagram accounts where we're cleaning our house perfectly, or at least cleaning one room for the picture or whatever you were mentioning earlier. He's not fooled by any of this, and yet he loves us. And so in that sense, our identity is solid. We feel like it's slippery. We feel like it's uncertain, but it's not actually because there's one who knows us and sees us rightly and loves us still. So our identity is grounded in his gaze.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, I don't have much to say to that, except just,"Amen." I mean, that's true. As you talk about in your book, he's the one that justifies our existence and he also justifies us through the work of his Son, so I think that's just very true. You spend the final portion of the book discussing how Christians who believe we are not our own but belong to Christ should respond to and live in an inhuman world. You make several references to the thought of Jacques Ellul. I probably mispronounced that. In his book, The Meaning of the City...It's one of those names I've read so many times, and yet I don't say it in my normal daily conversation, so...In it, Ellul points to Cain's decision to build a city rather than relying on God's promised protection as evidence of the human desire for autonomy and self-reliance. The city then becomes symbolic of our belief that we belong to ourselves and tends to create an evermore inhuman environment. I should stress here that the city he's talking about is not merely the kind of mega urban centers that first come to mind, but any urban environment where we are, as you put it, overwhelmingly surrounded by a humanly built environment. So Ellul argues that,"It is only in an urban civilization that man has the metaphysical possibility of saying,'I killed God." I dwell on this point because you go on to argue, drawing upon Ellul's thought, that Christians living in the city today are not unlike the ancient Israelites who were exiled in Babylon. Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord told them to"seek the welfare of the city where I've sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will have welfare." How does this provide us with a model for living in the present age? And as a side note, the number of times you talked about the city, I was just waiting on pins and needles for you to quote Tim Keller, but it never happened.
Alan Noble:I know. I should have. I'm sorry. So there are many things about this verse that I love, but one of them is that the implication is not,"Israel, you are going to sanctify and purify- through your works, you are going to redeem this city," because I do think that whether you're talking about progressive Christians or very conservative Christians, our tendency is to follow the tendency of the rest of our society, which is to think in terms of fixing and redeeming and saving our city, our society, our state, our government, our nation. We want to have a plan for fixing everything- for redeeming things. And that verse, you know, suggests that our task is a lot simpler, but also a lot harder, which is being faithful: being where God has put you and being faithful there. It is our temptation to come up with schemes and methods to redeem the city, and then when we don't get the results, we scramble for anything that will get us the results that we want. And one danger there is that we're willing to sin, we're willing to lie or deceive or be manipulative in order to get through an agenda that you think is going to redeem. The city is going to make everything better. And what this verse suggests is that that's not- We need to be praying. We need to do the work of justice where we have a sphere of influence, but that's the extent. God is the one who redeems the city. God is the one who is going to create the New Jerusalem. It's not going to be me and it's not going to be you. Now, he will use us in our cities- literal cities and figurative"the city"- to be a light, to be a witness and to do acts of justice. But here's the difference: when you think that it's your responsibility to save society or save the city and your efforts towards justice don't succeed, you feel like a failure and you feel like,"I need to find a more efficient method, or maybe I just need to stop trying- to stop putting effort into helping the homeless in my city, because honestly it doesn't seem to be doing any good. So I'm going to use my energy doing something else." But what I believe Christians are called to is to do good wherever we find the opportunity to do good without submitting goodness to the standards of efficiency, which is our temptation. We want to make sure we're using the most efficient and effective scientifically proven methods of fixing problems. Sometimes we just have to do what is right and we may not see the change that we were hoping for. That doesn't give us the excuse to stop seeking the welfare of the city. So that's why I like this verse, because I think on the one hand it lifts this- again, another inhuman responsibility to be the savior of the city, but also demands more of us than other contemporary ideologies, because it says just because you're not seeing the results that you think you should have, it doesn't mean that you get to stop caring for the poor, caring for the needy, pursuing justice. You still have that obligation. So it's on the one hand a relief, and on the one hand, what I would call a godly obligation.
Amy Mantravadi:And it's hard to hate the city if you're seeking its welfare, and it's hard to hate people if you're praying for them, as I've often heard people say. So I think that is a really good mindset to have. So this book is dedicated to the memory of your friend, Larry Prater, and you close it by discussing his final days. I was just wondering, would you like to share a bit about him and how he inspired you? I mean, if it's too personal, you don't have to, but it seems like it's something you wanted to talk about.
Alan Noble:Yeah. Larry was- is a great man. Writing is a very scary thing, as you know, because it's hard to do and it makes you very vulnerable, and you often don't know if you're saying something stupid or wrong or not. So it's not easy to begin writing publicly. Then it is very easy to begin and then get so discouraged that you give up. One of the things I loved about Larry is that he's much older than me. He was younger than my grandparents, but significantly older than my parents. And it's not very common for you to meet someone, even if it is online on social media, and make a connection, make a friendship with somebody who's significantly older- very different place in life. He's got grandchildren who now are in college, right? So that's not a normal thing. You know, I've edited Christ in Pop Culture for many years. I don't actively edit it. Now I'm sort of, if anything, a figure head. Erin Straza: she gets all the credit and the other editors support there. But at the time when Christ and Pop Culture, our website, was fairly young, he was really supportive of me. And by supportive, I mean he would share articles. He would write encouraging things. He'd send me books that I wanted to do research. And, you know, there are lots of people were encouraging online, but there's just something about Larry in the messages he would send me and the things he would say when I was going through difficult times, when our kids were going through difficult times, when he would acknowledge that he was praying for us, that I knew this was not just a social media relationship. This was a man of God who was not perfect, but he loved me and he cared and he was supportive, and he was also honest. He would talk about his own struggles and the difficulties, the challenges he had as a grandfather, as a husband, as a father and his doubts and his fears. And that was really helpful for me to see somebody- an older male further along in life's path- who was a man of integrity, but also a man who could be honest about his fears and his anxieties. So he didn't get to see this book published and I was writing it as he was dying from cancer, but yes, he meant a lot to me. And as I say in the dedication, he was someone who I believe practiced this idea of not being his own. And I guess...So one more thing: we're all so tired of men- and this is not male bashing, but the stories of men failing. It's so exhausting to- it's so discouraging to hear another story of a pastor or a leader or a father or some elder or a politician or something who's had an affair or been abusive or living some double life. You can get to a point where you just think,"Is just everyone like this? Is it impossible for people to not be- All right, we're all sinners. Yes, total depravity. I'm right with you, but can no one be faithful? Do we have to be that depraved? And I guess one thing I really was grateful for Larry for was that he was an example to me of a simple, quiet man who wasn't scandalous. And I don't know, I think maybe it's mostly men. I kind of feel like it's mostly men need to see more examples of that. They need models of that in their lives to realize,"No, I don't have to say yes to temptation. I don't have to say yes to sin. I can say no. It's possible. Just because this Christian celebrity crashed, I don't have to. It's possible to be faithful." So I just greatly admired that.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, thank you so much for sharing that, and I do think that as our culture grows more and more inhuman, there is a tremendous beauty to someone who simply lives a faithful life. And that question you've been asking of yourself,"Is it possible to be faithful to the end?" I've wonder that so many times over the years myself in regard to churches or to church leaders or really to anything. And it is true that in a world marred by sin, everybody's going to let you down at a certain point, but things that go beyond the normal letting you down. And I just think one of the most beautiful things is saints who, though imperfect, persevere to the end and finish well, and people like that do not get enough credit. People who are great speakers and write interesting good books and stuff, they get a lot of credit, and people who make a lot of money. How much does our world depend- as it was, I think, in Middlemarch that George Eliot talked about how much our lives depend on people who have hidden lives and rest in unvisited graves, and how much we depend on people like that for our existence. And I just think it's great that you were able to have a cross generational friendship like that. I mean, that's what the Church is supposed to be about: reading Paul's letters, where he talks about older men mentoring younger man. And that's something that my own father has always tried to do. He's had many mentoring relationships throughout the years, and I just think- Even your relationship was not one where- It was in a way a relationship of equals, because you were equal before God even though you're not equal in age or maybe equal in educational level or whatever. So thank you for sharing that. I think that's very helpful. So in conclusion, I've heard a rumor that you're already working on another writing project. Could you tell us anything about that or is that a closely guarded secret?
Alan Noble:Yeah. So over the summer I finished- it's a short book. It's only about just over 20,000 words. So definitely shorter than this, You Are Not Your Own, but it's tentatively called On Getting Out of Bed and based on an essay I wrote about faith and mental health and suicide and persevering and finishing well. When I wrote this essay about maybe two years ago or so, I've continued to receive- even though it's just thrown up on Medium, and now you know where to find it on Medium because it's easy: it's my name. It's just thrown up on the- I didn't get it published anywhere. I didn't even try. I was just sort of vomiting on the page, but I continued to get people emailing me saying that it's the best thing I've written or it's the most helpful thing that I've written. And I'll tell you, I was getting these emails. On one particular weekend, I think in December or January, where I got like four of these emails from strangers and that this article, this essay I wrote- again, it's on Medium. It's not published somewhere significant, and it's like a year old, so how are people even finding this article? And it hit me at a very sensitive moment because I was editing You Are Not Your Own, and when you edit some things, you're usually not very comfortable or proud of it at that point cause you're just like,"Man, I don't...What as I...Does this even work?" And so on the one hand I was feeling insecure about this book, which is very normal. It's just how it goes. And on the other hand I was getting people saying,"This other thing you did was really good." And so I was like,"Man, I should just do that." And so I asked my editor,"Would you guys like a book if I based it off of this essay?" And they said,"Yes." And so I wrote- over the summer, I wrote at least a draft: twenty some odd thousand pages. I want it to be something small, something short, but something helpful for people who are wrestling with depression or mental health, or family members or friends who are, so basically everybody. And trying to give a- it's not a self-help, it's not a how to. It's also not a research work on,"Here are the best practices." I'm not a psychologist. I guess it's what I hope is wisdom and judgment for persevering. And it's also not a memoir. I mean, I know a lot of- and there's nothing against that, but I know there are a lot of discussions, a lot of books about mental health and the faith that are stories, and those can be really good, but I decided I'm not going to tell my story because it's not anybody's business, for one, and for two, if I did that, then it would be about my story and I really don't want- That's not what I want. So that's what I wrote- On Getting Out of Bed- and I'll revise it when I'm not grading papers. And then I don't know when it'll come out, but hopefully sooner rather than later.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, yeah, that's interesting that you say that because- I mean, I probably don't get as many people commenting on my writing as you do, but of all the things I've written, the ones I get the most comments about are what I've written about depression and anxiety. I think there is a real hunger from people for good content, because there's so much bad content out there. So I'm glad that you've written about that, and shoot- 20,000 words. You know, I like to joke that I sneeze and10,000 words come out, so I admire your ability to embrace brevity. So thank you so much for talking with me about this book. I really enjoyed it and I would encourage people to read it.
Alan Noble:Thank you. That's very encouraging. That's very encouraging as a writer.
Jon Guerra:[MUSIC]
Amy Mantravadi:It was a pleasure to speak with Alan about his book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. Next week, I'll be speaking with Dr. Justin Ariel Bailey about his book Reimagining Apologetics. We'll be considering what role the imagination plays in helping people understand and come to love the things of Christ. I hope that conversation will be beneficial to you. This podcast is written and produced by yours truly. Please send all complaints by mail to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. The music you've been listening to is from the song,"Citizens," by Christian recording artist Jon Guerra off his album, Keeper of Days. Reviews and ratings are important in helping people discover new shows. If you have a moment, please leave an honest rating and review for this podcast wherever you listen to it. Also consider mentioning it to friends or sharing episodes on social media. I know your time is valuable and thank you in advance for any help you can provide. Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. Have a great week.
Jon Guerra:[MUSIC]
Alan Noble:Is it Dr. Keller? I don't know. Honorary doctor?
Amy Mantravadi:He has a doctor of ministry.
Alan Noble:Ok. What do we do with that?
Amy Mantravadi:I don't know, and I just interviewed him a few days ago, and I read that, and I'm like,"What do I do with that?" So I just said,"He has a doctor of ministry."
Alan Noble:Did you say doctor of ministry?
Amy Mantravadi:Yes, I did.
Alan Noble:That's amazing. I love it. That's great.