Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness:
Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2018. 189 pp.
Last fall I had the privilege of serving on Christianity Today's adjudication panel for the book of the year in the category of Apologetics & Evangelism. All four finalists were excellent (not perfect, but excellent) works, with different strengths. I'd like to take a couple of posts to share some of my thoughts on the four finalists:
Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World (Zondervan)
David & Marybeth Baggett, The Morals of the Story (IVP Academic)
Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness (IVP)
Joshua Chartraw & Mark Allen, Apologetics at the Cross (Zondervan)
In Disruptive Witness, Alan Noble diagnoses the distracted
materialistic condition of modern Western society, and exhorts Christians to
live as disruptive witnesses individually, corporately, and culturally. Noble’s understanding of the contemporary
context is strong, and heavily influenced by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (among others). His diagnosis does not come across as
judgmental or demeaning toward the reader, as Noble is careful to indict his
own technological distractedness along the way.
Noble is under no
illusions that he (or any of us) can exert the seismic changes that will alter
the overall trajectory of our distracted age.
Instead, he opts for the more modest goal of offering “concrete, achievable,
meaningful actions to help the church preserve its witness.” (88) His goal is
informed by an understanding of where society is and how it has gotten there,
along with his fear that many strains of contemporary Christianity have
unwittingly bought into secularism and technicism.
The structure of Disruptive Witness is solid, with a pair
of triune sections first articulating the problem, then suggesting
solutions. Each chapter is substantial
but manageable, and is unlikely to repel the average reader.
Noble’s Disruptive Witness contains some
excellent suggestions for a transformed life which are simple, practical, and
balanced. For example, he notes that the
simple act of saying grace for a meal (at home or in public) can be a testament
that we reject secularism’s notion of a closed universe (“a materialist account
of provision”). Hence, saying grace can
remind us of God’s constant provision.
If, however, saying grace becomes a means of “advertising … our faith,”
then the practice ceases to be a disruptive witness, and instead “capitulates
to the game of secularism.” (113) When suggesting means for “Disruptive
Cultural Participation,” (Chapter 6) Noble avoids the temptation of calling his
readers to be culture-makers, and instead proposes a universally-applicable
“cultural participation” in shared stories (movies, TV shows, novels, music,
etc.) in ways that “challenge the distracted, secular age.” (157) Noble’s
ensuing suggestions are concrete (e.g., hosting movie nights, discussing shows
with a co-worker) and attainable for the intentional disciple of Christ.
One major
research/content shortcoming of Disruptive
Witness is Noble’s inaccurate, inconsistent, and unnecessarily dismissive
treatment of worldview study. First,
Noble uncritically follows James K. A. Smith’s work in Desiring the Kingdom, and asserts that “traditional worldview
studies overemphasize rational, intentional, and cognitive beliefs over the way
habits shape our desires,” and ignore the impact of “liturgy, experience,
memories, and even personality.” (52) Noble does eventually allow that “some of
the best worldview thinkers are aware of these dangers,” (52) but in neither
place does Noble cite or even mention an example of worldview thinkers—he
simply quotes Smith and asserts his own judgment. Unfortunately, Noble’s treatment (following
Smith) of contemporary academic worldview studies (as exampled by Goheen and
Bartholomew’s Living at the Crossroads;
Walsh and Middleton’s The Transforming
Vision; Naugle’s Reordered Love,
Reordered Lives; and Sire’s Naming
the Elephant and The Universe Next
Door) misses the boat—these contemporary worldview thinkers acknowledge the
historical tendency to overemphasize the rational and underemphasize the
affective in worldview formation and application, and have amply adjusted course
to compensate. Noble seems sadly unaware
of the bulk of contemporary academic worldview study, as evidenced by the lack
of reference to a single ‘worldview-ish’ thinker (unless one counts Smith in
that category), and that renders his adjudication of worldview thought simply
mistaken.
Second, Noble argues that worldview thought tends to be reductionistic in nature, lumping
broad swaths of distinct individuals with different perspectives under broad
worldview categories (e.g., atheism, theism, Marxism, humanism, Islam,
postmodernism, etc.). (50) He correctly notes that such reductionism (or
categorization) tends to “misinterpret people,” (53) and misses the highly
incarnational and individualistic nature of worldviews in the modern West. But, ironically, the primary task of the
first half of Disruptive Witness is
to engage in similar generalization, categorization, and reductionism with
regards to the contemporary context. Three
examples, one from each of the first three chapters, will have to suffice: (1)
“Western society has turned [the] experience of tentative belief into a
virtue,” (42) a clear (and, I think, accurate) case of lumping the modern West
into one category. (2) “For the twenty-first-century person … the momentum of
life that so often discourages us from stopping to take our bearings is
magnified dramatically by the constant hum of portable electronic
entertainment.” (15) Many readers (myself included) will not see themselves
reflected in Noble’s characterization of “the twenty-first-century person,” but
will nonetheless be able to acknowledge that he has accurately diagnosed
(categorized) the ‘average’ under the broad umbrella. (3) The dominant mode for meaning is now a
“generic existentialist philosophy … [which] involves the belief that
‘existence precedes essence’ and that meaning is something we make and impose
on … a neutral, indifferent world.” (68) There are two reductionisms
here—first, of the 21st-century individual as an existentialist
(there are, of course, several other modes of meaning-making in the
contemporary West); second, of existentialism itself, which is, as Noble notes,
“a complex and diverse movement.” (68) So, if worldview studies are guilty of
generalization, categorization, and reductionism that can misinterpret
individuals and fail to account for the diversity (and even rational
incoherence) of their beliefs, then it appears that Noble himself is guilty of
such. Please note – my critique is not of what Noble endeavors to do. I believe his distillation of the
contemporary age to be (for the most part) accurate, and exceedingly
helpful. It is a highly-distracted age, and modern hyper-technology has gravely
exacerbated our pre-existing tendency to go through the motions of life without
deep thought or internal reflection. My
critique is, rather, that Noble inconsistently berates unnamed worldview
thinkers (and then, guilt by association, worldview study in general) for what
he himself pursues!
Thus, third, Noble’s
treatment of worldview study is unnecessarily dismissive. The attacking critique of worldview thought
on pages 50-54 turns potential allies into enemies—that is, Noble dissuades his
readers from taking worldview thinkers (and worldview study) seriously, even
though readers could greatly benefit from engaging with worldview
material. The critique of worldview
thought does not contribute to Noble’s thesis or purpose—the flow and purpose
of Part One would succeed just as well without it! And for the informed reader who has more of a
background in contemporary worldview thought, Noble’s inaccurate, inconsistent,
and unnecessarily dismissive treatment of worldview study undermines confidence
in the rest of his project.
Those critiques do not undermine the helpfulness of Noble's project overall. He has his fingers on the pulse of our society, and good suggestions for Christians seeking to reconnect to God and others rather than Siri!
