Book Review: Disruptive Witness

This book review was included in the August 2018 Meadowcroft Monthly. For an archive of all book reviews, click here.

O. Alan Noble is one of the founders of one of my favorite websites, Christ and Pop Culture. The site contains some of the finest writing on movies, TV, and politics from a Christian perspective that I have read. The site has provided great TV recommendations for Catherine and I (Bojack Horseman, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), so I was interested to see that Noble was publishing his first book, Disruptive Witness, which just came out this past month.

Noble’s idea is that we live, as one commentator has put it, in a “secular age” and one of the chief markers of our current cultural context is that we are all distracted. This makes speaking about Jesus with our neighbors difficult - we may have the chance to speak with them, and even share about the Gospel, but it is so easy for them (and us) to move right from that conversation into endless distraction (social media, Netflix).

Living in a secular age means that we are not only distracted, but that we have a different conception of self than people have had throughout much of human history. “At the heart of the secular age is the individual in their effort to create and project their identity in a chaotic and hostile world.” This means that “our focus shifts away from practicing our beliefs to signaling our beliefs to ourselves and others.” This is what we do all the time on social media!

The (partial) answer for all of this, according to Noble, is that Christians must consider practicing “disruptive” habits in the world. This basically means that we need to practice habits that challenge modern, secular assumptions. He says:

The best strategy for addressing our society’s condition is to offer a disruptive witness at every level of life. On the personal level, we need to cultivate habits of contemplation and presence that help us accept the wonder and grandeur of existence and examine our assumptions about meaning and transcendence. At the level of the church, we must abandon practices adopted from the secular marketplace that trivialize our faith, and instead return to traditional church practices that encourage contemplation and awe before a transcendent God. Finally, in our cultural participation, we can reveal the cross pressures of the secular age and create space for conversations about the kind of anxieties and delights that we repress in order to move through adulthood.

Noble moves on to suggest ways we can practically do this - cultivating habits that allow us to allude to the goodness of God in our lives. I found the book to be challenging, helpful, and an enjoyable read.