Alan Noble

What should Christian witness look like in our contemporary society? In this timely book, Alan Noble looks at our cultural moment, characterized by technological distraction and the growth of secularism, laying out individual, ecclesial, and cultural practices that disrupt our society's deep-rooted assumptions and point beyond them to the transcendent grace and beauty of Jesus.

Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

Disruptive Witness

Hannah Swithinbank

There is a certain, Alanis Morisette level, of irony in reviewing a book about ‘speaking truth in a distracted age’ written by someone I first got to know about on twitter. However, I can say that – aside from instagramming the cover and tweeting one quotation – I read and enjoyed A Disruptive Witness by Alan Noble with a minimal level of self-inflicted distraction (the same will not be true of writing this review, I procrastinate like nothing else when writing).

The central concern of the book is to help Christians reflect on and practice a way of witness that is positively distinctive in the western cultural context (Noble is American and the book is written for a predominantly American audience – which does not make it irrelevant for UK Christians, because there are a lot of similarities within the church culture, and especially the evangelical church’s thinking about evangelism and witness).* It starts by offering a diagnosis of the culture, broadly, and how those of us who live in it perceive ourselves, noting the challenges this poses for Christian witness. The second section offers some concrete ideas for personal habits, church practices and cultural participation. The aim of these is to be ‘disruptive’ – by which Noble means not rowdy or deliberately, crudely offensive (there is a difference between offending and setting out to be offensive, I think), but provocative and unsettling. In a nice opening, he draws out the parable of the sower, focusing not on the sprouting and growth of the seed but on the action of the farmer in ploughing the field to prepare good soul – an activity that disrupts the soil. The start of effective witness, he is arguing, is to jolt people in or out of their comfortable norms, opening them up to consider what is different and desirable about the Christian faith.

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In all of this Noble is building on a strong trend in contemporary Christianity to engage with Charles Taylor’s mammoth work, A Secular Age – which I confess I have not done much more than dip into for it is very large and sitting in a pile with the other Very Large Books I wish to read. (The Essential Kirkegaard is smaller than these) – notably James’ Smith’s Cultural Liturgies series.

I’ve enjoyed and been strongly influenced by this work, and I’m solidly behind the key ideas driving Noble’s argument, most particularly:
* its embrace of witness as holistic, cutting out that pesky false word/deed dichotomy
* its embrace of embodiment: humans have bodies and this matters – the Christian faith isn’t just about intellectual understanding, assent and articulation in order to convince others of its truth.
* its embrace of aesthetics as a part of revelation and witness. BACH everyone
* its willingness to engage with the incredibly tricky question of how to communicate through modern channels without that adaption hollowing out or betraying what you actually want to express... 


Full review here: http://hannahswithinbank.com/2018/04/...

Disruptive Witness Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

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