Alan Noble (1)

Jeremiads against the ways of modern society, especially from a Christian perspective, are legion. Some such critiques of our age rise above and are worthy of significant consideration and meditation. You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World (full version read, but did receive a early review edition) by Alan Noble is one such critique.

As Noble well relates, philosophical liberalism has become all ascendant, and thus individualism is the modus operandi of our culture. The show more premise of our culture, which he explores in great detail, is how “I am my own and I belong to myself”; and he dissects how such individualism is ultimately rather inhuman. None of us can fully bear the burden of ourselves, and our society only offers the simulacrum of connection and joint participation; Noble highlights how pornography well embodies the quest for the appearance of intimacy and satisfaction without any of the substance thereof, and its connections to exploitation. He argues we are all supposed to accomplish the “Responsibility of Self-Belonging” by means of various self-optimizing “techniques” which should lead to ever greater enhancement; in truth, as he relates, we fluctuate between “Affirmation,” in which we feel as if we are able to succeed and expend great energy to become our best self, and “Resignation,” in which we feel not enough and unable to meaningfully change the situation in which we find ourselves. He points out our need to cope with modern life, a form of self-medicating, which indicates what we have going on is less than healthy.

Noble takes comfort from the first question and answer from the Heidelberg Catechism: the principle that we are not our own, but we belong to Christ. Such is well rooted in 1 Corinthians 6:20, and Noble argues persuasively about the importance of entrusting ourselves to God in Christ and finding our confidence in Him, maintaining association in vulnerability with the church and in the family.

Noble does very well at expressing critique of modern society and considering a better rooted Christian alternative without resorting to nostalgia. He does not suggest everything was better in a previous era; he recognizes we are going to live in modern individualism no matter what. Noble also proves sensitive to the issues and challenges attending to abuse, and is willing to grapple with it. He is well read in Kierkegaard but also Ellul and Bauman, among others, and that all enhances his analysis.

Noble also avoids the trap of acting as if the solution is a new kind of technique or program: instead he counsels grace for ourselves and others, a recognition we will continually grapple with and often fall into coping mechanisms and other such things to live in modern society, and yet encourages perseverance in understanding oneself as belonging to Christ, accepted and validated in Him by faith, and manifesting rooted concern in relationships and place.

I would be interested in hearing the response to this work from others beyond white American men and how his analysis and exhortations would be heard by women and people of color. I can appreciate his concern about place, and I certainly agree we desperately need a better theology of place. On the other hand, I do not think he is circumspect enough in his exhortation to remain in the original location in which you find yourself. For many this might be good wisdom; yet for those called to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus, “a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown.” Apostolic witness features a peripatetic life for the one proclaiming the Gospel, and it should be commended as the sacrifice one is willing to make in order to make Jesus known.

Nevertheless, Noble is always an excellent read as a perceptive observer and everyone awash in the modern world would do well to consider this work. show less

Summary: Challenges the modern understanding of identity as autonomous self-belonging and what it means to belong to Christ.

“You are your own, and you belong to yourself.”

This statement is a basic premise of modern life. Many will see this and say, “But of course! You do you.” This sense of self-belonging, of radical autonomy is basic to our idea of human freedom. Any claims upon us denies that freedom. In this book, Alan Noble wants to contest this premise. Not only does show more self-belonging come with the dark sides of having to generate one’s own meaning and living under the tyranny of one’s desires, the truth is, we were not made for this. Rather, he will argue that we were made to belong to another and are not meant to be our own.

Noble begins by arguing that the society where each of us is our own is an inhuman society. He likens us to the animals in a zoo. When we exalt self-belonging, we treat others merely as instruments for our fulfillment. And others treat us the same way. But the panacea of autonomy turns out to be a burden of justifying oneself. Furthermore, we even determine our values. In the end, Noble argues that this is wearisome.

However, society props up the self-belonging project. Social media enables us to express and project an identity. It offers us stories through which we justify ourselves. While there are no universal values, efficiency help us us choose values, and then abandon them for new ones that prove more efficacious. In the end, though, society is failing us. Noble points to the prevalence of pornography as an indication of that failure. It is one manifestation of the depression, anxiety, and insecurity with which we live and the consumptive strategies that we use to self-medicate. In fact we all self-medicate, whether with drugs, food, shopping, or peak experiences. Consequently we witness widespread burnout, exhaustion, and fatigue.

But we are not our own. If one accepts that God made us, we understand that. But humans have rebelled against that, bearing the burden of self-ownership. In Christ, restoring our relationship with God is possible, As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20:

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” (NIV)

Noble explores what it means to belong to another, both the joy of belonging and our fear that it will be abused. The reality of belonging to Christ is belonging to one who gave his life for us. We belong to God, to a people, and to a place. We no longer need to justify ourselves. In addition, we find our meaning in God and our worth in being his unique creations.

How does this change the way we live? Noble begins with grace. We recognize God’s gifts in the midst of life’s challenges. We still exercise agency, not to create ourselves. Rather, “we can act to do good without deluding ourselves into thinking we will change the world.” We live in hope, “with palms turned upward.” We live in our cities, seeking their peace and prosperity. Christ is our comfort in life and death.

Noble reveals the dark side of our society’s assertion that we are our own. Our greatest freedom comes in belonging to another. For those who think a relationship with Christ is stultifying, Noble portrays the purposeful freedom of the Christian under grace. Likewise, for those see life’s ugly underbelly, Noble portrays belonging to Christ, not as freeing us from an ugly world, but rather taking its measure and living with hope in the darkest places.

The belief that we are our own is one inside as well as outside the church. The churches torn apart by disagreements during a life-endangering pandemic provide ample evidence of that. Sadly, we often act as a collection of private entrepreneurs checking in for weekly inspiration, rather than as a corporate body committed to one another, mission, and service together. How different we might be if we understood that we are not our own; that belonging to Christ means belonging to each other!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review. show less

Wow, I was really impressed with this book and Noble's taking on these sensitive issues. This is not a self-help book nor is it a "let go and let God" book. It is not a "name it and claim it" nor is it a "put on sack clothes and ashes it's you're fault" book. What this book is is a needed reminder that life is hard, we can go through hard times and live in hard ways, but God is God who has made promises we can trust and one of those promises is that He loves His children. This is a book show more about looking at depression, mental illness, panic attacks, or just feeling down through that lens and taking it on with the balance Noble gives it. I was so impressed with the balance here.

Noble stands on the line of truth and understanding. He will caution against over-diagnosis but then caution against turning a blind eye to issues that one needs to find help. He tells painful truths like one needs to avoid reveling in the dower nature for the attention of others while also being lovingly kind to people who stay silent to not burden people who need to seek out help from others. The overall arch is that sometimes just doing one little thing, like getting out of bed, is a goal and then you find your next, right thing to do.

Noble hangs the truth on a couple of different truths. 1) Being made in the image of God shows like our life is precious, 2) God has made promises we should believe in and one of the ways we can believe them is to show by actively doing so, and 3) we can biblically love ourselves, not in the worldly, superficial way but in the 1 Corinthians 13 way.

This is a book that I finished and ordered a physical copy to mark up and lend out to others. I would call this book one of my "reverse highlight" books in that I would have made it through it quicker if I highlighted what I DIDN'T want to pay attention to on quick glance. Noble's care and love for those struggling is evident and not just as someone who puts forward the "I am one of you too" but in the "God is a God who keeps His promises and the ultimate goal is for us keep on living for His glory". I highly recommend this book (I ordered his other two as well because of this). Final Grade - A+ show less

Summary: Drawing on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, Noble explores our longing for fullness in a distracted, secular age of "buffered selves," and the personal, communal and cultural practices Christians might pursue to disrupt our society's secular mindset.

When I first came across this title, I was expecting something different, a call to a form of Christian activism, a form of resistance against prevailing destructive and unjust structures. This book both isn't and is about that. Noble's show more analysis looks at deeper causes in the secularism that shapes the warp and woof of our lives.

Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, Noble focuses first on the endless distraction of our lives. He illustrates from his own life:

"Sufficient to the workday are the anxieties and frustrations thereof. And so, when I need a coffee or bathroom break, I’ll use my phone to skim an article or “Like” a few posts. The distraction is a much-needed relief from the stress of work, but it also is a distraction. I still can’t hear myself think. And most of the time I really don’t want to. When I feel some guilt about spending so much time being unfocused, I tell myself it’s for my own good. I deserve this break. I need this break. But there’s no break from distraction."

Such distractions are inimical to Christian witness in making us and those we engage with impervious to the contradictions in our fragmented lives, unable to engage in the extended reflection needed to wrestle with hard questions, and prone to present faith as just one more lifestyle option.

All this feeds into a perspective on self that is "buffered" rather than "porous"--where meaning and our understanding of ultimate reality comes from within rather than is open to the transcendent. Noble observes, "As Christianity has ceased to offer the vision of fullness shared by the vast majority of people in the West, in its place we find billions of micronarratives of fullness." It is critical for Christians to understand this, both because they need to abandon treating their own faith as a micronarrative and then, in engaging their neighbors, must refuse to treat faith as mere preference.

The second half of Noble's book explores how we engage in disruptive witness in a distracted world of buffered selves. He explores personal, church, and cultural practices that eventuate in disruptive witness. He begins by commending this double movement:

"This is the movement we need--a double movement in which [1] the goodness of being produces gratitude in us that [2] glorifies and acknowledges a loving, transcendent, good, and beautiful God." [enumeration added]

For this he commends the simple practices of silence, the saying of grace at meals, and the practice of sabbath, each of which open us to gratitude that acknowledges a transcendent God.

Noble is critical of high-tech, staged worship in which "our focus is directed to the stage rather than to one another." In place of this, drawing on James K. A. Smith, he calls for the retrieval of liturgical practices that draw us out of ourselves and remind us of the transcendent. He contends that our observance of the Lord's supper may be one of our most disruptive acts in reminding of the transcendent God who is also immanent, sharing our body and blood, and nourishing us with his in the bread and the cup.

He also advocates culturally disruptive practice, and observes that "intimations of the transcendent" arise in our exercise of human agency, in moral obligations, and aesthetic experiences. As a good English professor, he contends that stories are a place where we may particularly encounter these intimations, offering The Great Gatsby as an example. He concludes by advocating that disruptive witness cannot play by the rules of the secular age, but rather provide a contrast of lives limited around the transcendent that, in Flannery O'Connor's words, draw "large and startling figures."

As I concluded the book, I found myself musing as to whether this was "disruptive" enough. In discussing this with a friend, he observed that the re-centering of our lives around a transcendent God not of our own making is pretty disruptive! Moving from distraction to attentive reflection is disruptive. Refocusing worship from an event with high production values to an encounter with the transcendent God is disruptive. Moving from stroking our personal preferences to recognizing goodness for which we are grateful and turning that to an acknowledgement of the transcendent in our daily practices, and in the stories that shape us, is disruptive.

Alan Noble encourages me that disruptive witness isn't found in how hip, tech-savvy, plugged in, and "relevant" we are, which may be simply Christian versions of a distracted, buffered self. Rather, disruptive witness arises when our lives and cultural engagements are disrupted by the transcendent God in the gospel of his Son. Silence, sabbath, saying grace, participating in liturgy, and the expectation that the transcendent will show up in all of life may seem insignificant, and yet may be the most profound disruptions of all.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. show less