You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

And so, while our material well-being has improved in some important ways, judged by many of the qualities that truly make life worth living (meaning, relationships, love, purpose, beauty), the modern world is sick. Perhaps we are less physically sick than in the past, but spiritual and mental sickness is still sickness.

Christians have an obligation to promote a human culture, one that reflects the goodness of creation, the uniqueness of human persons as image bearers, and Christ’s love.

In fact, if everyone in America started attending church, I doubt that any of the major issues facing our society would be resolved. We’d probably find ourselves just as unwell and just as burned out. The only real difference is that we’d have an evangelical spin to our counseling and our programs of self-improvement. For you see, Christians in America are carriers of contemporary disease too.

Like the rest of western society, the church in the West tends to be good at helping people cope with modern life, but not at undoing the disorder of modern life.

To be your own and belong to yourself means that the most fundamental truth about existence is that you are responsible for your existence and everything it entails. I am responsible for living a life of purpose, of defining my identity, of interpreting meaningful events, of choosing my values, and electing where I belong. If I belong to myself, then I am the only one who can set limits on who I am or what I can do. No one else has the right to define me, to choose my journey in life, or to assure me that I am okay. I belong to myself.

The milieu in which [man] lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world. JACQUES ELLUL, THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Modern consumption has an almost supernatural quality to it. The products we find on the shelf in the market have almost no sense of being made by someone. They appear like manna, miraculously created, sealed, and delivered for our satisfaction. When we finish using the product, we merely throw the plastic container in a bin and it disappears, like magic.

For Dante in the fourteenth century, the question was not “Who am I?” but “Who is God?”

Our society not only provides limitless options for defining our identities and expressing them, but it also facilitates the acknowledgment and affirmation that we all seek. As we discussed in the last chapter, identity is only meaningful when there are other people who can witness your identity. We have a need to be seen and affirmed; it is an inherent part of what it means to have an identity.

The fluidity of ethics in the modern world could lead to a condition called “anomie,” a lack of social norms to guide our behavior and life. And this is where I believe the power of numbers rescues a great many people from a moral aimlessness. Specifically, the modern value of “technique” gives people a way to function in society without getting lost in our own personal preferences.

This question is not worth answering, however, because if it cannot be measured, we cannot publicly debate it. You define human “dignity” one way and I define it another, but we can both follow the data that points to a measurable reduction in harm.

Identity politics is one way that society offers us a vision for political action in the absence of a common good. If we are radically our own, we can’t hope to build a political vision that encompasses the entire nation, or even a local community. But we can form collective action groups to defend our private interests.

Any abuse of sexual intimacy is a uniquely evil affront against someone’s personhood precisely because it treats that personhood as a means to an end.

The goal of our striving cannot be reached because it is self-defined. The image of our fulfilled life is forever shifting.

The presence of metrics introduces the specter of competition into any activity. And as we discover ways to measure more things with greater accuracy, metrics have expanded into every area of life.

Technology always claims to be optional even as it becomes impractical to reject.

It takes an active effort to overlook the implications of coping. Once you begin looking for examples of coping mechanisms, you quickly discover that our society is shockingly frank about how intolerable modern life is without some kind of “medication.”

The marketing and demand for medical marijuana reflects a society that finds life without drugs unbearable, or at least very unpleasant.

Life is much, much more trying than we publicly acknowledge.

“The ownership of the self has become our lifestyle; it has been sociologically integrated into our mores and is at the very heart of our intimate sovereignty.”

We are weary of trying to be our own sovereign selves. We have radical freedom to remake our identities, but it has come at a great cost: “If moral constraints have grown lighter, psychic constraints have taken their place. Emancipation and action have stretched individual responsibility beyond all borders and have made us painfully aware that we are only ourselves.”14 Elsewhere he refers to this as the “illness of responsibility.”15

If I weren’t trying to get a medical test, I might be fighting to submit the proper forms to qualify for government aid or spending hours on the phone trying to figure out medical bills. There’s always something. We experience a million such little indignities, all of which loudly proclaim that we are objects, instruments, or figures, that our humanity is far less significant than legal liability and efficiency. And so we feel overwhelmed and helpless before the machine. How could we not?

Technology expands to fill up the time it saves us. Technique increases efficiency (by definition), which allows us to perform more and more intricate techniques—which tend to use up the time that technique liberated. The easier it is to collect and manipulate data, the more data we can collect and manipulate to improve efficiency. We might cover more ground, but we don’t seem to run any less than our ancestors. And if you never stop running, does it matter where you are going?

For example, technology makes it possible for corporations to have an almost entirely speculative existence.

It’s exhausting to have to trick an automated phone answering system into connecting you to another human. It feels like a test to see if you are worthy enough to warrant actual attention. And the reason companies use automated systems is that it’s more efficient, and some customers will give up long before they get to talk to a human representative. You feel inhuman because the state and the market view you as a Case or Account Number, and you fear that no matter how hard you work to stay on top of things, there will always be some obligation you’re forgetting.

Techniques, by Jacque Ellul’s definition, value efficiency above all else. Efficiency is not a human virtue. It’s not a traditional virtue at all. It’s a metric for machines with clearly defined purposes—but not for humans.

But none of these reasons make it into Paul’s letter. Instead, he grounds sexual morality in our belonging.

Where people may have sought comfort to cope with the horrors of plagues and perpetual wars in the sixteenth century, the contemporary person struggles to cope with a loss of meaning, identity, and purpose.

The most obvious example is the way that smartphones “nudge” us to pay attention to them with sounds, vibrations, and rewarding interactions. Health insurance companies “nudge” us to eat healthier, governments “nudge” us to graduate from high school and read to our kids, and corporations “nudge” us to desire and consume products. Instead of the Roman Catholic Church’s Magisterium definitively declaring God’s revelation, we have a scientific community that interprets and declares what is fact.

Instrumentalizing human persons is one of the defining features of our contemporary anthropology. When we are all our own, we have no obligation to think of each other as anything more than tools for our personal gain. But in the counter anthropology I am recommending—the idea that we are not our own—we seem to find the same instrumentalization at work. Perhaps the counter anthropology is inhuman too? Not quite. Rather we should say that all abusive forms of authority treat people as less-than-fully-human and do not desire their good.

If you are not your own but belong to Christ, then there is nothing you can or must do to justify your life.

The only persons who would actually need to justify their existence are those who were not intentionally created by a loving God. To be alive is to have a justified life, a life of purpose.

The more you meditate on it, the more you realize that you have almost godlike powers to affect the world. Your choice to smile at a grocery store checker rather than ignore her (a simple way to love your neighbor) could have resonating effects beyond your wildest imagination.

We live before a personal God, not the mechanical god of proceduralism or efficiency. The relentless, impersonal, litigious, crushing force of progress and self-improvement is ended in Christ.

If you are not your own but belong to Christ, then the entire modern project of identity formation and expression is a sham.

There is no image for you maintain because you were made in the image of God. There is no identity for you to discover or create because your identity was never actually in question.

On the one hand we are completely dependent on ourselves to determine, create, and affirm our own identities. On the other hand, identity requires some kind of external recognition by its very nature. To have an identity, there must be another being outside of you who can see your face and say your name. The gift of your life assumes both a giver and a recipient.

Your true identity is not a publicly projected image that requires regular maintenance, upgrades, and optimization. Your identity is who you are before God, your personhood, your existence in the world.

What have we gained if we are relieved of the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging only to come under the yoke of self-denial? Freedom.

Love requires us to be still and take joy in the goodness of this moment. And if we are not our own but belong to Christ, that’s exactly what we are free to do. You don’t have to prove anything.

You are free to be present and attend to the gift in front of you whether it’s your spouse, your child, a song, a pleasant talk with a friend, or the wind in the trees. Of course, this is not efficient.

when we reject efficiency as our meta-value, we are free to delight in the contingent, broken, aging, incomplete, and yet beautiful gifts God has given us.

We live prodigally when we act according to love or goodness or beauty rather than primarily efficiency. The overflowing cup which God gives David in the twenty-third Psalm is prodigal. Strictly speaking, there is no need to fill a cup until it overflows. The expensive ointment Mary uses to anoint the feet of Jesus is prodigal. As Judas observed in John 12, a more efficient use of the ointment would have been to alleviate poverty. Our very lives are prodigal. God did not need to create us. But He did, and it was and is good.

We may think of leisure as doing whatever makes us most physically comfortable, but Christian leisure is the practice of delighting gratefully in God’s creation without regard for what is easiest, simplest, or cheapest.

Whereas we tend to feel reassured when we can justify our pleasure in terms of measurable benefits, Pieper warns, “It is impossible to attempt to engage in leisure for health’s sake. . . . Leisure cannot be achieved at all when it is sought as a means to an end.”25

If we are not our own but belong to Christ, then we are not free to belong wherever and to whomever we choose. We have limits and obligations. But we also can never be lost. No matter how uncertain, disorienting, and alienating the world may become, we can never be lost.