Disruptive Witness

Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

Alan Noble

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780830844838
• eBook ISBN: 9780830881093
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

• 2018 WORLD Magazine Book of the Year - Accessible Theology

• 2018 ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award

? Publishers Weekly starred review
We live in a distracted, secular age. These two trends define life in Western society today. We are increasingly addicted to habits—and devices—that distract and "buffer" us from substantive reflection and deep engagement with the world. And we live in what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls "a secular age"—an age in which all beliefs are equally viable and real transcendence is less and less plausible. Drawing on Taylor's work, Alan Noble describes how these realities shape our thinking and affect our daily lives. Too often Christians have acquiesced to these trends, and the result has been a church that struggles to disrupt the ingrained patterns of people's lives. But the gospel of Jesus is inherently disruptive: like a plow, it breaks up the hardened surface to expose the fertile earth below. In this book Noble lays 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. Disruptive Witness casts a new vision for the evangelical imagination, calling us away from abstraction and cliché to a more faithful embodiment of the gospel for our day.

Notes

Introduction

1James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 140. See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 37-45.

1 The Barrier of Endless Distraction

1The following three paragraphs were adapted from a 2012 column and served as the inspiration for this book. See Alan Noble, “Penetrating the Electronic Buzz of the 21st Century for Evangelism,” Christ and Pop Culture (blog), November 8, 2012, https://christandpopculture.com/citizenship-confusion-penetrating-the-electronic-buzz-of-the-21st-century-for-evangelism.

2Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005).

3These examples are my own. Mediated was written five years before the launch of Instagram.

4Emma Barnett, “Mindfulness: The Saddest Trend of 2015,” Telegraph, January 8, 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11331034/Mindfulness-the-saddest-trend-of-2015.html.

5One good place to start is Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2017).

6Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Penguin, 2015), 96-97.

7Ibid., 97-98.

8Ibid., 100.

9James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).

2 The Barrier of the Buffered Self

1Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 3.

2Ibid., 556.

3Ibid., 304.

4Ibid., 299.

5Ibid., 25.

6Ibid., 25-27.

7James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 48.

8Taylor’s understanding of the move from a premodern world of shared faith to a modern world of endlessly contested faith naturally raises the question of whether the premodern world was the better world. There are no scales by which we could weigh the relative goodness of two massive epochs of Western civilization. How does one weigh liberty and human rights against order and community? Do the abuses of the medieval church outweigh the holistic vision of life it presented people? Do the scientific advances of modernity outweigh the dehumanization of technology? To my mind, the better question is, what can we do to mitigate the ills of modernity today? There is no returning to a premodern world, only a choosing to improve this one.

9I chose the example of uncritically supporting refugees, but my point here is not political at all. The example could just as well have been about someone uncritically adopting a radical antirefugee position.

10Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 48.

11James K. A. Smith has done an excellent job identifying how incomplete this account of belief is. See his Desiring the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 63-71.

12Please note the qualifier “popular understanding of worldview...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• A Distracted, Secular Age
• The Barrier of Endless Distraction
• The Barrier of the Buffered Self
• Searching for Visions of Fullness
• Bearing a Disruptive Witness
• Disruptive Personal Habits
• Disruptive Church Practices
• Disruptive Cultural Participation
• Large and Startling Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Praise for Disruptive Witness
• About the Author