To Live Well
To Live Well, Alan Noble, foreword by Justin Whitmel Early. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514002247) 2026.
Summary: Explores the classic and Christian virtues and how we may cultivate habits of the heart to flourish in a chaotic world.
We live in a chaotic world that sends us contradictory messages about the “good life.” Thus, we often feel ourselves pulled in different directions, never sure of what is good or right. Alan Noble proposes in this book that “[v]irtues are cultivated habits that align us with who God created us to be.” Virtues don’t save us. Rather, the Holy Spirit enables those in Christ to live virtuously, honoring God as He intended. In this book, Noble considers the four classic virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, and the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. He devotes a chapter to cultivating each of these “habits of the heart.”
Choosing Decisively. Prudence, as W. Jay Wood defines it is “the act of thinking truthfully about the best means to appropriate ends.” However, this does not mean there is One Right Choice. Rather we weigh tradeoffs, count costs, listen to wise counsel and then decide and rest in it.
Acting Justly. Noble explores what Christ, not the world, call us to and our right obligations. Practically, we seek to give others their due with generosity, as it is within our power while trusting Christ to make all things new.
Suffering Steadfastly. Fortitude and courage has to do with how we face suffering. The truth few will tell us is that life involves a lot of suffering. Christ helps us meet suffering with fortitude through his own example and through the knowledge of the greater good that comes to those who endure suffering. Fortitude also involves magnanimity, to act courageously with the talents God gives us.
Living Moderately. We live in an economy of excess, urging us to consume all we can. Temperance is about ordering our desires to reflect God’s will, enjoying the good in moderation and refraining from the harmful that reflects disordered desire. It means choosing not to do all we can in order to say “yes” to God.
Believing Soundly. Faith is not the lack of doubts and questions. Rather, it is to continue to hang onto the trust that God is good enough to save us in Christ and to keep obeying amid our questions. Also faith honestly takes our bitterness and anger with God to God, an act of trusting. That is, beyond the circumstances that elicit our anger we choose to hang onto the belief in God’s goodness.
Hoping Resolutely. We face challenges, even of an existential order, for which we despair of human solutions. We risk succumbing to acedia, a kind of sadness, of sloth that relinquishes hope that under God, our lives matter. But to hope resolutely is to believe in the God who is able to intervene, and who will one day, even if not in every circumstance now, make all things right.
Loving Rightly. Finally, Noble considers all the broken images of love and what it is to love rightly as those loved extravagantly by a gracious God. Love proclaims, “It is good that you exist; how wonderful you are!” Then it is desiring the good for the other as it has been revealed in Christ’s person.
In concluding, Noble reminds us of the importance of community in cultivating virtue. He also reminds us that the reality is we will have failures but that this is the endeavor of a lifetime. Pursuing virtue is not a technique but our ongoing reliance upon grace to choose the good.
Alan Noble has do something far more profound than write a how-to book for the good life. He has reminded us of the language used through the ages for habits of being that produce goodness under grace. My brief summaries hardly do justice to the depths Noble explores with each virtue. This is a book to read and re-read. It speaks from a place of wholeness into our chaotic, disjointed lives. It is a signal to us that another life is possible.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.