Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 418 Alan Noble - How to Live Well in a Fractured World
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We’re living in a fractured world, pulled in a thousand directions, unsure what it actually means to live a good life. In this episode, I talk with Alan Noble about virtue, telos, and how prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and love reorient us toward a life that is whole, grounded, and shaped by the way of Jesus. We explore decision-making, suffering, agency, and hope - and what it looks like to actually embody these virtues in everyday life.
Dr. O. Alan Noble is Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, and author of four books, including: To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, and You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. Dr. Noble has published articles at The Atlantic, The Gospel Coalition, First Things, and Christianity Today. He lives in Oklahoma City with his wife and three children.
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A thoughtful, deep dive into one of the most talked-about movements in American history.
You know, I don't see another way for the crowd to shift, right? I don't see another way for the church to shift unless we start talking a language of virtue and start recognizing we were made to belong to God. And that has implications, that has direct implications on our lives, that matters to our lives, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. What does it mean for you? How do you change your life if we don't start talking in that kind of language? I don't I don't know how we change
Unknown:you. Josh, hello
Joshua Johnson:and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know, we're surrounded by 1000 competing visions of what it means to live a good life. Social media experts, pastors, culture, it's all coming at us at once, and instead of clarity, it often leaves us fragmented, unsure of who we are or where we're going. So in this conversation, I sit down with Alan noble to talk about virtue, what it means to actually inhabit a life oriented toward the good we explore Telos the direction of our lives and why. Without it, every decision starts to feel overwhelming. We walk through prudence, justice, courage, temperance and the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. These are lived realities that shape who we become. This is about more than self improvement. Is about learning how to live in a fractured world with clarity, courage and hope, and becoming the kind of people who reflect the way of Jesus in the middle of it. So join us. Here is my conversation with Alan. Noble. Alan, welcome to shifting culture. So excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me.
Alan Noble:Thanks for having me. You
Unknown:know
Joshua Johnson:we're going to be talking about your new book to live well, talking about the virtues, how to actually inhabit them, live them, to actually move into what is a good and orienting life. You open your book with T s Eliot's image of a heap of broken images, the shattered pieces of a stained glass window. At once, they were beautiful, but now they're scattered all around. What are you trying to say? What is this world like right now?
Alan Noble:Yeah, so this idea that I'm starting off the book with is that we are thrown into the contemporary world where we're getting lots of conflicting messages about what it means to move through the world. So Tiktok gurus are telling us one thing, experts on YouTube are telling us another thing, pastors are telling us a third thing, our parents are telling us a fourth thing, teachers are telling us a fifth thing, I don't remember what number I'm on. Sixth thing, television is telling us. The sixth thing, you know, movies are telling us the seventh thing, you know, they're on and on and on. We're just hearing different messages about what does it mean to be a good person, what does it mean to be a virtuous person? What does it mean to live the good life? On Instagram, we see other messages given, and so we feel conflicted about what it means to be a good person and the telos, the goal, the purpose, the direction towards which our lives are moving. And so it's like this image of a good life is a picture, and it's just been shattered, and what we're left with is just these fragments, these fragments, and we're trying to put together the pieces, and they don't fit together. And so we're conflicted, and as a result, there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of depression, there's a lot of frustration, and there's also a lot of hunger for answers. There's a deep hunger. And I've seen this working. I My day job is, I'm a English professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, and I've seen this in this in younger generations, a deep hunger for mentorship. For people to say, this is what it looks like to to move through the contemporary world.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, one of the things that you just, I mean, you hit on very briefly, is our tell us it is the where we are going. I think since we don't know where we're going, where we're headed, so our we don't know what decisions we make. We can make decisions feel really difficult, like existential. We have dread over them because we just don't know where we're going. I just recently watched a hidden life so Terrence malick's film about Ron's Jager stodder, and he, you know, he decided not to give an oath to Hitler stood up for what he believes that Jesus probably wouldn't do this. We shouldn't be in this war. We shouldn't do what we're doing. And you know, he was put to death for that decision. He was able to stand and live that life and make that decision because he had eschatological hope. Hope. He had a telos. He knew where he was going, and he was able to be safe. What is our hope? What is our Telos that could actually start then to help us inhabit some of these virtues?
Alan Noble:Yeah, that's a great question, all of the virtues. Let me start by saying that all of the virtues are based on this idea of a telos. We were created for something created to be pointed towards a direction, and if we don't know what direction we're to be pointed to, we can't act virtuously. We can't act justly. We can't act with prudence or fortitude or courage, in other words, or temperance or Faith, Hope or love. And so to answer your question, I would say that we were made it. We were made to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. That's what we were created to do. And so that's our destination, ultimately, in the resurrection, we are going to continue to glorify God and enjoy him forever, and that's what we are called to do now in this life. And so whatever we do with the virtues, that's what we should be doing. That's the end goal of our lives.
Joshua Johnson:I think that's helpful for us as we start to, you know, frame this conversation and what does it actually look like? Because if we don't know what the end goal is. The aim of our lives. We're going to be aimless, right? That's the whole goal of what an aim actually is. So you just mentioned briefly, you did go through those virtues very quickly. Why are you talking about virtues when it comes to good life frame that for us. Why? Why is this important for us to grasp?
Alan Noble:When I was thinking through the problems of modernity, when I was thinking through the problems of the contemporary world and the challenges of that shattered image, that shattered image of the cathedral or of the stained glass window. I was thinking through, how do we move through this world? How do we piece together these fragments to know the proper way to move? And I wanted to turn to something that was older and truer than just a self help book than just Alan Noble's pro tips for being your best self now, right? And the church has traditionally looked at these seven virtues throughout the centuries as classic virtues, classic ways of thinking about living well. In fact, Calvin in his institutes, he doesn't go into the virtues himself. He actually says, look at the church fathers. They talk about the virtues, if you want to. And other people are writing about the virtues, so go read them. But other people have written about the virtues. The Church Fathers have written about the virtues. It's part of our tradition. And so I wanted something older and more established to turn to, rather than my own pro tips of living life. And so I looked at the four classical virtues, the four cardinal virtues, as they're called, and then the three theological virtues, faith, hope and love
Joshua Johnson:as we enter, is there just a technique we could use so that we can maximize our efficiency? And
Alan Noble:that's a great question, yeah? So the answer is no, yeah. So the answer is that with these virtues, what we are doing is we are recognizing that God, through Christ's sacrificial work on the cross, has imputed His righteousness to us, and through an act of gratitude, we are turning ourselves to Him and choosing to live lives through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are choosing out of gratitude to live virtuously, and it's an act of love and in gratitude towards God that we choose to live virtuously. It's not to earn God's favor. It's not to become the best version of ourselves in some optimum self optimization sense. It's because we love God and desire to please Him. This is what we do. It's also because this is what we were created to do. God created us for our telos, and this is what we talked about earlier. God created us to glorify Him and enjoy him forever. And part of that means that we should live justly, that we should make prudent decisions, that we should live temperate lives, that we shouldn't give in to lust, for example, that we shouldn't give in to greed, that we should that we should be courageous, that we should have faith and hope and love. So that's why we do these things, not. So that we can self optimize, optimize, to get ahead of our neighbor, but because we love God and are so thankful for what he did on the cross, we turn to these virtues and choose to be who we were created to be out of love
Joshua Johnson:when we're trying to inhabit some of these virtues, or any, any type of, like, commands of Christ, or like, like trying to live as Christ has invited us to live and embody these. A lot of people go the striving route, and they're doing it out of their own strength to really prove their self worth towards God, right? How do we not get into the trap of proving our self worth towards God, like, what does it take to actually orient ourselves in a way where it's not about us, but it is about God?
Alan Noble:That's a great question. I think, for me personally, this looks like noticing how it affects my mood. So when I fail, do I turn to what Paul describes as, you know, worldly grief and sorrow when I mess up, do I just fall into the sin of despair and feel like, well, I've, you know, I've lost, because that's when I'm not looking to Christ for my salvation, when I'm actually looking to myself for my salvation, because I have failed on my own merits. And so everything is hopeless, right? Whereas, if I'm working to be virtuous and I make a mistake and I recognize that I have forgiveness in Christ through repentance, then I should have godly sorrow, which is I'm contrite, and I can accept Christ forgiveness and move forward with my day. I can forget what lies behind and move forward and strive towards Christ likeness again. And so I would say it's it's looking at, how does it affect my my attitude and my view of myself? Do I do I become when I fail? Do I become morbidly depressed and self deprecating, or can I recognize God's grace for me? That would be one way I would look at things.
Joshua Johnson:I want to go through these virtues and talk about them, and what does it look like to inhabit them. So prudence, which is about choosing decisively. You know, we have a smorgasbord of choices we make all the time. How do we not get caught up in a place where we can't make a decision, or decisions are so so important that they feel overwhelming to us? What does prudence start to look like in our lives.
Alan Noble:The beauty of prudence is there are a couple things that I think prudence evolves that helps us deal with problems like choice paralysis. The modern world gives us lots and lots of choices, and as you mentioned earlier, it often makes those choices existential, like these. These choices are they involve my very existence if I don't make the right choice, my whole life rises or falls on whether I make the right choice. Well, Prudence helps us make these choices by doing a number of things. One is that in prudence, you first survey reality, and so often when we're making choices, we're not actually slowing down and looking at reality as it really is. We're getting lost in our heads, in ruminating, in focusing on our own biases, but we're not slowing down and looking at reality as it really is. What is the situation? What do I know? What are the facts on the ground? And so prudence involves first surveying reality for what it really is. Second, it involves desiring and knowing what the good is. So whenever you make a good choice, you have to orient that according to what the good is. So you can't choose, you know, to buy a good car unless you know what you know a good car looks like. And so you have to figure out what is, what is the good in this situation? Now, for Christians, ultimately, the for everyone, ultimately, the good is to glorify God. But what does that particularly look like in your situation? So if you're, if you're looking at choosing a career path or or whether or not you should, you know, apply for a job. You know, what does that look like in this particular situation? What does the good look like? And that helps you narrow choices down and choose wisely. Then there's a deliberation phase where you invite people in, possibly, or you you contemplate, or you spend time thinking. But then one of my favorite phases. Is you make a judgment and you act resolutely. And for me, this is very powerful, because so often in the contemporary world, we just doubt ourselves, and the world encourages us to doubt ourselves. Are you sure you did this right? Are you sure there's here, that here's another option? Are you sure you want to be married to this person? Here's somebody else. Are you sure you want to buy this car? Here's another car, right? There's always another option. And with prudence, you have to make a choice and then follow it to its conclusion. And I think that's a powerful message. Acting resolutely, we often get stuck at the very first part of what you just said is surveying reality. We have a harder time knowing what reality is these days, yeah, because we have so many things vying for our attention constantly, and so many different versions of what reality actually is. And you talk about slowing down, but what is I mean in this
Joshua Johnson:world that we're living in. What is the surveying reality? How do we do it in a way where I know it's reality?
Alan Noble:All the virtues fit together. And here's where the virtue of temperance actually fits with the virtue of prudence. You can't you can't actually overdo this. You have to actually be temperate with your use of surveying reality. In other words, you can't spend 12 hours talking to six different AI bots about, you know, researching what the best car is or whether this career is right for you, reading every Wikipedia article, researching online, talking to all your different friends, you know there's, there's a point where deliberation has to end, where you actually have to stop looking for facts. And I talk about this in the book. You can't have absolute certainty when you make earthly decisions. You have to act with confidence that you've made a reasonable choice, and that's enough. And if you've looked at a reasonable amount of evidence, and you are reasonably sure that you have looked at their the relevant facts, using your senses, and you've deliberated, you've talked to a reasonable number of people, if that's relevant for you the decision you're making, then you need to just, you have to just move on.
Joshua Johnson:It seems to me that temperance then would actually be helpful for all of these virtues. And so like, even if we think of like acting justly or justice as a virtue, there's all sorts of crazy aspects of justice, and we don't know what it is, but what then is the virtue of justice for the good of all people? Like, what does that look like in this crazy world we're living in?
Alan Noble:So the basic idea of justice is giving each person his due and figuring out what that actually looks like is the task of each person, and it's not an easy task. It involves investigating and understanding what each person's rights are before God and what their relationship is in relation to each other, in relation to the government, in relation to their neighbor and in relation to creation and and so on. But temperance would would affect justice as well. So understanding, you know, being temperate and justice is is important and as well as love, I mean, and prudence. Prudence is important for justice. You can't be a just person if you don't have prudence, if you can't survey reality, well, you can't be just because you won't you won't be able to see the situation rightly and then make a just decision. So that's why we talk about prudence in the book first, or I talk about prudence in the book first before I talk about justice, love, faith, hope, temperance, all of this goes together with justice. One of the things that I find when we're thinking about justice is I want to figure out what is best for all people involved, or all groups involved. But most, most of the time we we focus on one. We we do an either or type of inventory of justice. Like, yeah, this one has been been hurt so that
Joshua Johnson:this, this group over here that hurt them, is all bad, right? And so they don't deserve anything. Like, how do we orient ourselves in a way where we could actually see the humanity of all of us that were made in the image of God that we, all you know, have screwed up and we all need justice. Like, how do we wrap our head around all of that?
Alan Noble:Yeah, so that's where the beauty of this, this basic, classical understanding of. Giving each person what he or she is due is is so lovely because it doesn't say choose in the balance who is more worthy of what they're they are due. It says, Give each person what they are due. So each individual what they are due, not each each group based in the balance, but each person what they are due. And that's a powerful claim, and it's a hard claim, and part of the answer to that is we're not going to get it perfect, and that's the challenge in this life. We are not going to get it perfect. There are going to be lapses, and what I talk about in the book is this need to strive to live. I talk about this concept of prodigal justice, where we strive to be even more generous and kind and gracious to each other than justice strictly demands because we can't be perfectly just, and that's what humanity requires in order to live in a in a humane way.
Joshua Johnson:One thing that you're doing in this book is very counter to American individualism. You're talking about the all the virtues are communal, but you're also talking about here in the Justice part, you talk about how your gifts are not just meant for you, they're meant for the whole community. You're moving us from an individual orientation that we are our own. We own ourselves, and it's about us to it's actually about community, and ultimately we belong to God. How does that reorientation help in a ways that we could see one another again?
Alan Noble:Yeah, this is a that's a great question, and this is an important part of the Justice chapter where I talk about, for example, the idea that we have an obligation not to sin, that this is part of of public good, that it's actually unjust to be living a sinful life, because it actually brings down the public good of a community and and we all intuitively know this. When somebody is living a life of vice, it affects the neighborhood, it affects everyone around them, and it hurts people. We can all think of somebody in our lives who is who has made poor choices, and it hurts us. It traumatizes us. In some cases, it has ripple sin. Always does this. It has ripple effects. And so there's a sense of injustice about this. And so I think what this does is it reminds us that, back to an earlier book I wrote, You are not your own. You belong to God. And Part One of the implications of that is that you belong to the church, and you belong in a lesser sense of I and you belong to your neighborhood in a lesser sense. But there is a kind of belonging that we have that affects us. We are not radically autonomous individuals who dropped from the sky with no history and no future and no connections to creation or anybody else. We are people who are connected to each other. That's how God created us, and that's how the virtues are related. That's how they are connected. That's how they are meant to operate.
Joshua Johnson:So we can't treat the people in our neighborhood as NPCs. They're just dumb. That's right, characters in our own story, where they're actually they have something to contribute to us as well, and what we do actually affects them. That's
Unknown:right, that's
Alan Noble:right, exactly, exactly. And we're tempted to do that, right? We're tempted to do that, you know, so often, when you would, you go grocery shopping, right? It's so easy to think about people as non playable characters, right? Because they're just people in your way with your shopping cart, right? But they're, they are human beings that you have an obligation to to treat as full human beings,
Joshua Johnson:you know. And another book you wrote on getting out of bed, it actually reminds me of fortitude, of suffering steadfastly, of actually being able to wake up through suffering, depression and, you know, difficulty, fortitude is really important. I remember, you know, my son is in third grade, and this year, you know, the very beginning we, you know, meet the teacher night or so they he said, What are your goals for your son? And my number one, I was like, I want my son to have perseverance.
Alan Noble:Yeah, yeah,
Joshua Johnson:he's third grade. If he learns perseverance, like he's gonna set set himself up well for life. This is what I want, perseverance. Why is this so important? I mean, you dedicated a lot of work to fortitude.
Alan Noble:Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. My third book on getting out of bed is, is really a book about fortitude, about courage, and I have a chapter on it in this book. And I. So the argument I make at the beginning of this chapter is that we all are going to suffer at some point in life, and we're all going to face difficulties at some point in this life, and most of us are going to face them repeatedly, and we are going to have to overcome those those sufferings, those those problems, and it's going to require a courage, and we're going to have to know there's going to have to be some inner resources inside of us that allow us to endure and courage, as I define it, using other scholars, is this idea of being vulnerable to suffering for the sake of the good, and all of those parts are important. So often we don't want to be vulnerable. We don't want to be vulnerable because it's scary, and so we don't want our kids to be vulnerable. You know, you were talking about your son. You know, you don't want your son to be lots of people don't want their kids to be vulnerable, and so they bubble wrap their children. We talk about that, you know, and that's not healthy. They need to be in order for your son to earn, learn perseverance, he's got to face challenges, right? I'm sure you know this. Lots of parents, unfortunately don't, and so their kids don't face, learn perseverance. But lots of us, bubble wrap ourselves. We protect ourselves, we don't, we don't take risks, we don't but we have to be vulnerable in order to be courageous. But it's also being courageous requires, or fortitude requires being suffering the risk or being vulnerable to suffering for the sake of the good. So if you are put yourself in danger of suffering for the sake of you know, for fun, that's not courage, that's just taking a wild risk, right? That's just recklessness, right? That's just recklessness. So if you want to jump off a cliff, you know, into it, into the ocean, or something like that, you're not acting courageously. You're you might be having a lot of fun, you know, which is great for you, but you're not acting. That's not actually courage or fortitude, that's just taking a risk. You know, so but that helps us. I think that helps us understand that when we when we act courageously, or when we use when we have fortitude, it's, it's when we are we're suffering, or when we're risking the vulnerability of suffering for the sake of something good, like growing in Christ likeness, or glorifying God or helping other people, which is glorifying God, or whatever the case may be,
Joshua Johnson:or suffering the loss of my Sonics for the good of Oklahoma City, yes,
Alan Noble:so that I can enjoy a championship. That's right, that's right.
Joshua Johnson:Yes, I just I got to enjoy losses of championships. Yeah, I was growing up, but that's right, yeah. So fortitude, it's also formative for us as we suffer, we become more Christ like it's really beneficial for our discipleship as well. Because I think I mean, we live in a world where everything wants to be smooth. We have smooth edges. We want to optimize everything. Why these craggly rocks and sticks and hard, difficult things? Why does that form us as opposed to the, you know, the smoothness of everything else.
Alan Noble:I don't know why God chose suffering for us, but I know a few things. One I know is that on the night he was betrayed, he went and prayed in the garden and asked that the cup would pass. And he faced suffering himself, and he himself struggled with suffering and struggled with courage, and he acted courageously. He faced courage. He faced this, this suffering, and acted courageously, but he wrestled with it, and he chose to face his death courageously. But that doesn't mean that he didn't pray that it would pass. And so what I do know is that that's part of it. I also know that Paul talks about the fact that we can comfort others with the comfort of Christ that He gives us. And that one of the we, one of the ways that to answer your question about, you know, why these crags? Why this How are we formed by this suffering? Well, one of the ways, I think, we're formed by this suffering is that when we suffer, we're able to help other people who suffer. We are able to come alongside others who suffer and speak into their lives in ways that we really couldn't if we hadn't gone through difficulties ourselves. And there's a there's a level of compassion that we. Have that Paul talks about, that is, is beautiful. So, you know, Paul also says that, you know, suffering produces perseverance, and it's just, it's just a reality that that that, that we are sharpened by, by suffering. So it's a reality of life.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, we don't want this, right, but it is good for us to walk, walk through and it helps us say yes to risk and to have courage to move forward in places where, you know, we we wouldn't want to, we don't want to be limited to the the place of I want to keep myself safe. I want to be able to take a risk. You know, I think it's probably why God said, more than anything else, is, Do not be afraid. Do not fear. He's actually encouraging people to take a step to move forward. How do you personally, as Alan noble, how do you take a step? How do you get courage to not fear.
Alan Noble:I think about what the good is. I think about what the good is in particular. So for me, I think about when I'm acting courageously. I think about how choosing to get out of bed. For me, this is it. I struggle with mental health issues, choosing to get out of bed or choosing to face the day. In other words, will will affect my family, will honor my family, will bless my family. That's the good, right? Ultimately, it glorifies God. So that's the ultimate good. And then there's an immediate good. The immediate good is that it's loving to my family. And so I think about those goods, I think about those goods, and I recognize and that's how courage works. That's how the virtue of courage works, right? I endure suffering for the sake of a good, and I focus on that good, and I recognize that my suffering, the suffering of having to do endure anxiety or whatever, whatever emotion I'm feeling, is worth suffering for the sake of this good because it's more important, it's better, it's glorifying to God, than what I'm what I'm experiencing. And the same is true with other kinds of acts of courage that I do, smaller acts of courage, where, whether it's when I'm, you know, submitting a book proposal, and I have to click Send, and I'm anxious about, you know, am I going to get rejected? And, you know, nobody likes to get rejected. You know, nobody likes that feeling. But, you know, it's a little act of courage, but it's an act of courage, you know? And and I recognize, okay, the good is, I believe God has asked me to help others through my writing. And so that's the good. And so I'm focusing on that good. And so I'm going to be faithful to that calling, so I'm going to, so I'm going to act out in faith and do that. And so, so it's focusing on the good
Joshua Johnson:Renee Gerard talks about mimetic desire. And so one of the things that when, when I'm thinking about courage or doing something, it goes against the group. Sometimes, like, if I'm like, say, I mean, like, a big, big complex, like, you have wars with people you have, like, us versus them. If I'm in one group, I have a bunch of desire for us to win, and so we all desire this together. And so it's memetic, like we all just have this little group think. But it takes something different to then, like, jump out of it. And I'm I'm wondering if it actually then will affect the whole group, or if it's just for me, like, Can the whole group change through this? The first question then is, how do we get out of the cycle of mimetic desire when the group wants to do something that is against the virtues, but I know that, like inhabiting these virtues is what is going to give glory to God, and I need to actually act and move forward in those
Alan Noble:Well, that's an interesting question. I hadn't thought about that. I would say that the telos being teleological in your in your Outlook, breaks you out of that memetic desire. Because if your desire is focused on your neighbor, you're not looking upward toward where your Telos is, which is God and his glory, right? Your your focus on your neighbor and the memetic desire. Now, Gerard would probably say there's, there are ways in which you can deceive yourself into into thinking that your tell losses, you know is, is your neighbor's desire, but, but, but, I would say that that if you're if you can be honest with. Yourself about what your tell us is, what the tell us is, glorifying God and enjoying him forever, then you can break out of that memetic desire and actually pursue what is, what is, what is good, and then you will be rubbing, rubbing up against the group, and that will be isolating, and I don't know how that group is going to react, but that is what you're called to do. And we need people who are glorifying God by doing what is right, not pursuing what the crowd perceives to be is good. They're good. That's what we need. And as you said, mentioned, suggested earlier, it's possible that that's how the crowd shifts. Is seeing someone strike out and say, but this is what we are called to. You know, I don't see another way for the crowd to shift, right? I don't see another way for the church to shift unless we start talking a language of virtue and start recognizing we were made to belong to God, and that has implications, that has direct implications on our lives, that matters to our lives, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. What does it mean for you? How do you change your life if we don't start talking in that kind of language? I don't, I don't know how we change. And we have so much programming. I mean, your podcast shifting culture, right? We have so much we have so much language, we have so much content. We have so many fragmented images, shattered images right going back to the beginning of our conversation, coming from culture, saying so many different things that they're getting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and then they're getting a message on Sunday morning, the church needs people who are standing up and saying, This is who we were made To be. What is it? Let's talk about what it looks like to live this out day to day.
Joshua Johnson:Sometimes it is one person speaking up, and then, you know, for some reason it just clicks, and other people like, oh yeah, I forgot. We're we're so autonomous in our thinking, like we're just on autopilot, like it, just, most of our decisions we make in a day are like, just on autopilot. They're not real decisions and good decisions even we're talking about prudence at the very beginning is choosing decisively. We don't do that. We just, we just choose automatically.
Alan Noble:That's right,
Joshua Johnson:how do we stop that automatic choice and say, Oh, I can choose something different. I don't have to do the same thing over and over again. I mean, it's the same thing. I was talking to my spiritual director the other day. I was like, Hey, I wake up, I get on my phone, and I don't want to do this anymore. I've been saying this for two years that I don't want to get on my phone when I first wake up, but it's automatic. And every night, before I go to bed, I say, Tomorrow, I'm not going to get on my phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just automatic. And so I moved my phone out of my room. I got an alarm clock that I could have on my bedside table, so I don't need it for Yeah, that
Alan Noble:Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:and that happened two weeks ago, and I don't get on my phone in the morning right away. You go. And it was a practical thing, but it took two years for me to make a decision to do it. It's so long. How do we stop these automatic things that are deforming us?
Alan Noble:That's an interesting question, because I think one of the features of the contemporary world is the loss of agency. So I have this theory, which I kind of touch on in this book, especially in the courage chapter, but I'm working on this theory right now, and it might appear in my next book. I think one of the features of our contemporary world is this feeling that that we don't have agency in the world, that we don't have the ability to act in our own lives, to change our lives, to change other people's lives, to change the world, to change anything. And so your alarm clock situation, your phone situation, is a great example. You you feel powerless. I talked to a lot of students who feel like they recognize that their phone addiction is disordered and deforming them, but they've kind of feel helpless to do anything about it, you know, 10 when I started teaching, you know, or five years ago, a lot of students felt really happy about their phone addiction, and you had to persuade them you know that it was a bad thing. Now, most of them seem to recognize, gosh, it's not good to be on Tiktok for three hours at night, but, but they're like, I'm addicted, right? So something's changed, but they feel helpless, a lack of agency. So a lack of agency seems to. Be a common feature inhibition. So I think it involves this concept. What I would what I would point to is, is this reality that we are made as creatures that can act in our lives and make choices, and part of it taps into the virtue of courage, that we can change, that we can do things, particularly through the power of the Holy Spirit, that we are not we are new creations. We are new creatures, that we are not enslaved to sin anymore. Yes, we are sinners still, you know, we we stand still, but there's, we've been freed from that bondage. And so we have the ability to to act in ways that we didn't before. And that's, that's a powerful message, and so we need to lean into that and not see or perceive ourselves as passive agents in our lives. I think that's really important,
Joshua Johnson:that agency gives me hope, that things can shift and change. We haven't really mentioned or talked much about the theological virtues, the faith, hope and love, but I want to end we don't have a lot of time left, but end with hope, because we do live in a culture of despair. I think hope is it's hard won at the moment. What is hope in a theological sense that we could grasp and hold on to you in this world of despair?
Alan Noble:I think hope, ultimately is hope in the resurrection. I think it's ultimately hope in the resurrection. I think that's ultimately what hope is. It's hope in Christ and His promises that He will do what He has promised to do, that He will fulfill what he has promised to fulfill that we can trust in those, in those words, and particularly hope in in the resurrection, where all things will be made new, and we will be raised again, and we will see Him face to face. And that's the ultimate hope. And I think all other hopes that we have in life are our shadows of that hope, our shadows of that hope. You know, I hope that my kids are well, but, you know, that's it. That's a shadow hope of, really, the hope in the resurrection. And those hopes matter too. But the ultimate hope is, is Christ's hope in the our hope in Christ in His resurrection. And so, you know, we can hope for peace in the Middle East. We can hope for political divisions to stop. We can hope for lots of different things, but our ultimate hope is grounded in that resurrection and and I think that's important, because lots of things are going to change, and these world events are going to come and go. And if our hope is grounded in in US and in human events changing and bringing about a utopia now, then we are going to be discouraged and let down, and we're going to fall into despair. But if our hope ultimately is in Christ working his good. And one of those hopes too for me, I think one of the big hopes is Paul in Romans, eight, you know, says that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him. And so that's, that's a major hope that I have, is that I don't know what he's doing in my life, and in times it feels like out of control, but I have this hope in what His Word, in his promises. And so I have this hope that that he is working his good in my life. And so I'm not going to despair when trouble comes and fall into that sin of despair. Instead, I'm just gonna hope that he is working his good and know with confidence that he's gonna bring it about.
Joshua Johnson:So then what hope do you have for your readers of to live well people who pick up this book?
Alan Noble:I would love if readers could pick this up and feel a sense of, first, that they would see, feel seen, that their sense of confusion about the modern life would be recognized, that they would feel seen, and second, that they would feel a sense of of comfort and clarity about how to move through This world. And get some some, yeah, some some clarity about how to move through this world and come come out feeling confident and encouraged and grounded in the Gospel. Ultimately,
Joshua Johnson:great. I have a couple really quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice
Unknown:would you
Alan Noble:give? Oh, 21 year old self. Health? Yeah, that's great. That's a great question. I would say, Go get professional mental health resources. That's what I would say. That's what I would say.
Joshua Johnson:Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend,
Alan Noble:I'm reading the quest for community by Robert Nesbitt, and it's published in, I think, 1953 and it's project research for my next book, and it's all about community, and it's so far, really great, really insightful,
Joshua Johnson:fantastic. Well to live well will be available anywhere books are sold. If we could learn how to take this disparate reality that we're in all these shattered glasses, and we could put them together with a clear aim and a Telos and saying, Here, there's here's some habits, here's some things that we could start to embody in the world. And you, you help us get there, we could actually live well. So hopefully people go and get this book. Is there anywhere else that you'd like to point people to? How could they connect with what you're doing,
Alan Noble:they could go to o Allan noble.com and find more information about the book or my sub stack and where I write a lot so find out more about me there.
Joshua Johnson:Excellent. Well, Alan, thank you for this conversation. Really enjoyed talking to you and diving deep into the virtues. It was great. So thank you so much.
Alan Noble:Thank you. You.
